The earth awakes again. Down into the crackling, churning earth, sliding in plates that grind out a ticking of a clock, s clock that keeps the deepest, the oldest, the forgotten time, down into that crackling, churning earth spreads the warmth that gathers now once more, like it has gathered since time that passes out of knowing.

And the children of the earth, descendants of mystery, relatives of lost ancestors, inheritors of the quietest questions, gather again around the flame of truth, the flame of wondering, the flame of faith.

And around the world at this season, the children of this earth hold on to hope. The earth’s Jewish children look back with joy at the miracle that passed over them, that the first born of their families were spared the curse, the plague of death that spread through the families of their neighbors, their oppressors.

The earth’s Christian children look once more to the hope born again when the son of God, was not spared his death at the hands of man, yet rose to deliver a message of utter, abject, and unarmed love to his family of followers.

Those who draw strength and meaning from the earth-based faiths gather to celebrate the new dawn of another spring at this time of Ostara, or at this time that goes by so many rich and wonderful names to the followers of those faiths. Throughout the world’s hearts, warmth comes once again, at this time in our year.

And here, at this time, when the beauty and splendor of the ways this time of year sheds light on the faithful hearts of the world, is where so many Unitarian Universalist hearts…skip a beat.

The miracles of this time of year are not what many Unitarian Universalists consider parts of their faiths. In fact, for some, the miracles in the faiths of the earth, the faiths of humankind, are exactly what brought us through those doors for the first time. We were looking for a faith or a way of believing that was bound more to reason and understanding, not to what we saw as wishful thinking. Right? And you’re not alone.

The earliest ancestors of the Unitarian strand of our living faith were Catholic bishops who rejected the doctrine of the trinity in Christianity. The doctrine of the Trinity is the belief that God, Christ, and the Holy Spirit are co-equal, or of like substance with one another, and are therefore all God. Bishop Arius, and a number of his followers, did not hold to this belief, so somehow his invitation to the councils of bishops that decided on the articles of the Christian faith in the 4^th Century..got lost in the mail. And yes, this is one root of our faith that flowers among us today.

But let me ask you all, and you don’t have to raise your hand, but how many of you are here, truly, because you agree with the teachings of a 4^th Century North African bishop, wildly unpopular with the “in-crowd” of early Christian thought, who you believe should have gotten a vote at the Council of Nicea?

Well, our Universalist ancestors were a little different. And anyone who has taken our Path to Engagement class here has heard me say this, but our Universalist ancestors took a look at the teaching of the Christian Testament, and what they found was the teaching that Jesus died so that all sins of humans would be forgiven, and, well, they went ahead and took that literally. And so they went about their life free from the threat of damnation and of guilt born of the wages of sin, both “original” sin, and, shall we say “improvised” sin.

So now, let me ask you all, how many of you are here because our shared faith is rooted in the message that true, universal love and forgiveness came when Jesus died for all of man’s sins?

OK, well I’m not a statistician or really much of counter, but it looks like not every one of you raised your hand for any of these options, right? Well, what the heck are we all doing here?

All games aside, we probably know the answer to that. The roots of our faith, of the way Unitarian Universalism is expressed today in our midst, is a root that reaches deeper than these histories, a root that reaches deeper for many than their family, a root that stretches deeper than even some of the world’s most ancient theologies. It is the root of freedom from which grows not one tree of life, nor one vine that bears one fruit. The root of freedom brings forth forests of different faiths, meadows of individual opinions, and complex, flourishing ecosystems of belief.

And freedom is truly revolutionary. Freedom stands as the aim, as the hope of some of the greatest hearts and minds of any generation. But it can’t exist alone, in a vacuum. For many of us would not need to visit those verdant forests of a free faith…were we not seeking a way past, through, or over something. Something that so many of us face still today: fear.

“Faith is simply the absence of fear,” some will tell us. If you spend some time listening to televangelists, or if you spend some time reading some books in the self-help aisles of your local bookstore, or more likely, if you spend some time on Amazon, you’ll find more than a few examples of this idea. Faith is simply an absence of fear. Or if you are afraid, it means you’re having a crisis of faith. Or worse, if you’re afraid, it means you are lacking faith.

And can I tell you something? That drives me nuts. It drives me absolutely nuts. I know that as a Unitarian Universalist, it is my job to hold up the truth and the strength that others find in their faiths, but when a faith tells someone who is afraid that their fear comes from a lack of faith, it gets me, well, a little ticked off. And not just because I absolutely believe that fear is something we all face, and that we each are in a daily, if not hourly battle, to find a way to balance our fears against whatever kinds of faith, belief, or hope we can find in our world. That is not the only reason. One of the main reasons I dislike this absolutist view of faith is that it’s just wrong…biblically wrong!

We stand today at the point on the wheel of time when Jesus is said to have risen from, to have conquered, death, one of humankind’s greatest fears. But two days before today, so the Christian scriptures recount…Jesus himself wished that this fate would pass him by. He feared his fate. And even knowing he had to accept that fate, he appealed to God to have it not come to pass. In one Gospel account, Jesus asks God that this trial might pass him by. Then an angel “appeared to him and gave him strength.”[1] An angel. And does it work? No. It says right there in the Gospel of Luke that after hearing the angel “In his anguish he prayed more earnestly…”.[2]

And yesterday, at that same point on the wheel of time, our Jewish brothers and sisters remembered that terrifying night when the Lord promised death to those outside God’s covenant, that night when across Egypt, the ancient Hebrew people marked their doors against the fear of death of their children, the final plague of Egypt, so that when the Lord swung low with wrath and judgment, all those who followed the Lord’s instructions were safe. The Lord would literally “pass over” the homes marked properly with the blood the Lord instructed be placed on the door. And from all around the streets of Egypt, a giant cry of pain rose up, but the faith of a people answered the fear of losing a loved one. It was the fear of death, that inspired the physical expression of the Hebrew faithful.

So you see, faith is simply not the absence of fear. If we look at these old, deep stories, faith and fear aren’t even locked in the kind of epic back and forth we imagine across this plane. No. Faith and fear are bound together, in these stories, in an even more natural, more intimate way.

The suggestion of these stories, and indeed the position many critics of religious faith take, is that fear is at the very root of religious faith. It is the fear that something or someone will stop taking care of us, in this world beset by the most horrifying tragedies, it is that fear that forms the base out of which so many branches of religious faith grow. This is the critique made perhaps most famous by Bertrand Russell, the winner of the Nobel Price for Literature, who, in decades of essays on the subject of religion, decried the faiths of the world for their dependence on fear as the root of many of the most violent ills of society.

He said in 1927 that “Religion is based primarily and mainly upon fear. It is partly the terror of the unknown and partly the wish to feel that you have a kind of elder brother who will stand by you in all your troubles and disputes. Fear is the basis of the whole thing – fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death. Fear is the parent of cruelty, and therefore it is no wonder if cruelty and religion have gone hand in hand. It is because fear is at the basis of those two things.”[3]

But today, are we not met on a very, very specific battlefield of fear? Among our six sources of wisdom in our own living tradition are the lessons and the teachings of the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures that teach how to love one another as ourselves. And aligned upon this day are the memories of two fearful occasions in the lives of the followers, the founders, of these faiths.

For the days leading up to this day, remind us of the fear of one of the most traumatic events a person can know: the untimely death of a child. For the ancient Jews, the wrath of the Lord against their enemies, their oppressors, was terrible. It was by their faith that their children were spared. And when they rose on that morning following the Lord’s passing over, how grateful, how hopeful, how joyous do you think those parents were to discover that their firstborns were actually spared? This, the day after Passover, was a day of holding the sacred, their children, as close to them as possible.

And for the earliest Christians today was the day when the human fear of death was conquered by the superhuman message of love. The message of this day to our own Universalist believers, was that love, love eternal, conquers the fear of death. And the message to our first Unitarian believers, in the 4^th century, believers in the idea that Jesus might well have been the actual son of God, but not God, those believers understood something that actually made the most sense in the world to them: that a parent losing a child, that a parent burying a child, would literally move heaven and earth, would spin the stars from their points in the universe if they could, to bring that child back again. This is the day when the earliest Unitarians remembered that love can rend the very fabric of the universe, to conquer our greatest fears.

So I’m going to ask you again, maybe a little differently. Who here believes that love just might be more powerful than fear? Then you might be a Universalist.

Who here believes that our hearts call us to do things, to try things, that we are afraid to do, that our brains might tell us are impossible? Then you might be a Unitarian.

And you might be a Unitarian Universalist, if you dig down deep into your own past, if you uncover the roots of your own actions, your own choices, your own decision to cross through those doors, and you find that the deepest, warmest, most nurturing taproot of your faith, is not fear, but love.

I spent last weekend in Washington D.C. First, what I want to say to each one of you here is, “Thank you.” It is only through the generosity of the members of this community who fund the ministerial expenses of this community that I was able to attend the March for our Lives. And my first order of business when I arrived was to extend a deeply felt “Aloha” to all the people at All Souls in DC who were gathered to make signs for the rally. Then we gathered up our signs and headed out. The streets were packed. And as we streamed into holding places, all we UUs were standing right next to the National Archives, where the Declaration of Independence, The Constitution, and the Bill of Rights are on display for all to see, the founding documents of a nation, the place where the next day I happened to be visiting at the same time as Vice President Mike Pence, and where I may or may not have tried to lead the rest of us in line waiting in a chant of “Vote Them Out.” It was that place where we UUs gathered, and sitting alongside that structure, was the screen where we could see every child who spoke to the crowd of eight hundred thousand.

And yes, there was a lot of talk about guns. There was a lot of talk about violence. There was a lot of talk about taking action to prevent the perpetuation of violence with guns. But through it all, what rang through like bells across a churchyard, was the sounding out of every victim’s name. What cracked the walls of everyone’s heart, was hearing how familiar these speakers were with the lives of those friends who had been killed. And what shook the very core of our being, was that this could ever happen again.

And so it was the next day, while visiting monuments with my friends, when it struck me, etched in stone, right there stretched across a wall of purest marble, the words I had only just begun to understand: “The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”[4]

Lo, the earth awakes again. Rising up from the churning, the cracking, the breaking earth below, stretch the plants and the first fruits of faith this day. These are not the fruits of fear, my friends. They are the offerings of love to this precious world. They are the children, the products of love between people in this world. And every piece of our humanity begs that they shall not perish from the earth.

Like our early Jewish ancestors, like the first Christians, like Unitarians, like Universalists, like just about every member of our human family we can imagine, the miracle that is new life is the miracle at the heart of so much that we know of fear. We don’t want to lose those we love.

The miracle that is new life is the miracle at the heart of so much that we know of love. We don’t want to lose those we love.

So may we all choose faith today—faith perhaps in the words, faith perhaps in the silence, faith perhaps in the actions, of the children who were passed over, of the children who survived.

And may we now see a show of hands of who will be united together to uphold and affirm the faith that these children have in the world? Wonderful.

Welcome all of you to the roots of your human faith.

Blessed be and Amen.

[1] Luke 22.43 (NRSV, throughout). The author is well aware that many manuscripts of the Lukan narrative omit this and the following verse (44) and accepts that these might be later additions by a redactor.

[2] Luke 22.44, emphasis provided.

[3] Clare Carlisle, “Is Religion Based on Fear?” The Guardian, December 2, 2013, quoting “Why I am not a Christian” by Bertrand Russell (1927).

[4] Abraham Lincoln, “The Gettysburg Address,” November 19, 1863.