In time of silver rain
The earth puts forth new life again,
Green grasses grow
And flowers lift their heads,
And over all the plain
The wonder spreads
Of life, Of life, Of life.

In time of silver rain
The butterflies lift silken wings
To catch a rainbow cry
And trees put forth
New leaves to sing
In joy beneath the sky.
When spring
And life
Are new.

The Story of Norbert Capek

Here is the story of the Flower Communion. It all began with a very brave and very loving man. His name was Dr. Norbert Capek. He was born 129 years ago, in June, in Bohemia, which is now Czechoslovakia.

Norbert was the only son of a tailor, a man who sewed shirts and dresses and suits for people. He joined a youth group as a teenager and did a great many things to help other people. He went to the university and studied to be a minister, and when he was only 25 he was ordained a Baptist minister. Soon he was chosen to be the head of all the Baptist churches in the area.

Now, Dr. Capek was a very liberal thinker. He felt he could not continue in the ministry and be true to his own thoughts. So he left the ministry and became a journalist. He wrote articles about the impending First World War that got him in trouble with the government, and he fled to the United States.

He learned about Unitarianism and even received a doctor of divinity degree from Meadville Theological School. Then he returned to Czechoslovakia and, with the help of American and British Unitarians, started Unitarian groups and schools. People came to his churches because they wanted to think for themselves religiously. They had left the Catholic, Orthodox and Jewish religions and didn't want anything that reminded them of their religious past. Capek's first church wasn't even called a church, it was called The Liberal Religious Fellowship.

However, Dr. Capek knew that people needed some ritual with mystery and power to bind them together. He thought and thought what that might be. It was early spring in Prague, Czechoslovakia, and as Dr. Capek walked along the cobblestone streets, he saw the bare trees just beginning to push out tiny green shoots. He sighed. It had been a long winter and he needed a new symbol for his own faith, a symbol he could share with his congregation. Other churches had a ceremony of communion, a sharing of wine and bread, that gave comfort to their members. What could he offer his people?

As he walked along, he said to himself, "We need a living communion." He began thinking that soon the gardens, yards and roads would be full of green trees and flowering bushes. The park would be alive with color -- purple, pink, yellow, red and white.

"That's it!" he shouted. "That's it! A living communion of flowers!" The other people in the park where he was walking laughed at him for talking to himself. But he was too busy with his plans to notice. "Each person will be asked to bring a flower," he said. "They will place them in baskets in the church, then each person will take one and give it to someone else. Each flower will be given and taken and given again. The church becomes alive with gifts of each individual, who then receives and gives again. Lovely! A living communion, a flower communion."

And that is how the tradition of the flower communion began. The Unitarians of Czechoslovakia were delighted with their very own ritual of communion.

But Norbert Capek's happiness did not last very long. With the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia, Dr. Capek was arrested for treason and put in a concentration camp. There he was a minister to hundreds of people and an inspiration because of his courage in the face of torture and starvation. In 1942, he was killed in Dachau.

We remember this creative and loving and courageous man each year with our Flower Communion. And by giving and receiving flowers, we remind ourselves of our responsibility to care for other people.

Welcoming the Flowers
(A guided meditation on the beauty and uniqueness of your own flower.)

Pick up your twig, or branch, or flower. It may be the one you brought here this morning; or it may be one you received at the door. The bounty of nature knows no limitations; we are each recipients of beauty.

Hold it carefully; look at its color and shape. Feel its texture -- is it smooth, soft, rough; does it tickle when you rub it on your cheek or behind your ear? Smell it, listen to it -- does it have a message for you?

During the musical interlude, study your flower so that if there were 100 of the same variety, you could pick out your own from among the others.

Musical Interlude

Ingathering of the Flowers

Two weeks ago, we placed symbols of our sadness and regret in a great cauldron. Today, out of that same cauldron of our despair, we will now create a bouquet of hope with our flowers. As you are ready, come to the center of this holy space and place your flower in the waiting cauldron.

Those who wish to participate in a simple chant and dance, come and remain standing near the front of the church.

"The Egg" by Grayson Alexander

The egg. Where life begins. An oval, a continuous, unending shape. An orbit. An oval holds a planet in the embracing gravity of a star. Our star is a life-giving sphere. We orbit at just the right distance to allow us to be here. Other planets orbit our star and other stars, but too close or too far for Life. As far as we know, we are special. We have only each other.
And the Sun. And the cycle of the seasons. In our orbit, we in this church, on this continent, face a little closer to the Sun now. It is Spring. The sun is bright -- yellow, orange, red. The grass grows green. The flowers bloom blue and pink. All is reborn. Our hopes are reborn.
We have each other and our reborn hopes. Let us share the dancing colors of spring and the hopes and blessings of a sweet new year.

Dance/Chant

"Flowers of hope joining
Dances of light singing"

(Dancers pass out chocolate Easter eggs.)

Homily

We are here gathered on Easter morning, the highest holy day in the Christian calendar.

Many years ago, I attended my aunt's Episcopal church and heard the minister talk about how the old religions had just gone around in circles and that Christianity had come along and humankind took off in a straight line of progress. That statement stayed with me and has puzzled me for years. What could he have meant by that? Has Western civilization really been going in a straight line for the last 2,000 years?

The Christian calendar built upon Jewish roots, which built upon pagan roots. We can go back to the ancient Egyptian myth in which Geb, the Earth, the Great Gander, and Nut, the Sky Goddess, produced the mighty egg from which the universe was born. The season is replete with resurrection myths: Tammuz and Ishtar, Demeter and Persephone, Isis and Osiris. The Jewish Passover was originally a festival of the beginning of the barley season in Palestine upon which was overlaid the story of the escape from slavery in Egypt. Even the name Easter, taken from the Anglo-Saxon goddess of spring, Eostre or Ostara, isn't universal; many languages other than English took the name from the Jewish Passover and call this season Paques or Pessach.

Our culture emerges from the Judeo-Christian tradition, so let us tell the story this morning. A couple of thousand years ago, no one really knows when, the Passover feast was near. The Jewish teacher, Jesus, came to Jerusalem with his disciples, his followers, to celebrate Passover. He had been teaching for about three years and his message had been about love, about justice, about making sense of the Jewish laws, not just following them slavishly. He taught how people should treat each other with stories, like the Good Samaritan. He seemed to be able to perform miracles to heal people who were sick or dying. He gave the Sermon on the Mount in which he exalted the poor in spirit and the peacemakers. And he taught that if someone hit you on one cheek, you should turn the other toward him and let him hit you on that cheek also. He taught forgiveness instead of revenge. The people loved him. They welcomed him into Jerusalem, spreading palms on the road before him. They thought he was their savior, that he would be king and would make their lives better.

The Jewish officials, however, were afraid that Jesus was coming to make trouble, to take over the government. They feared that the Jewish people thought he was the long-awaited Messiah and would follow him and not them. The religious government, which was called the Sanhedrin, made a deal with Judas, one of Jesus' followers, that for 30 pieces of silver, he would turn Jesus over to them.

Jesus celebrated a Seder at sunset on the first night of Passover with his 12 disciples. (For us that would have been this past Wednesday night.) He washed their feet, showing he was their servant, not their master. Christians call the next day Maundy Thursday, for on that day, Judas betrayed Jesus to the Sanhedrin.

The next day, called Good Friday, the Sanhedrin charged Jesus with blasphemy and treason and took him to the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, to have him sentenced to death. That afternoon, Jesus was taken out to a hillside and crucified. When he was dead, his body was removed to a tomb to await burial. The tomb was guarded on Saturday, the Sabbath, when no one was allowed to work.

The next morning, two women went to take out his body to prepare it for burial, and to their astonishment, the body wasn't there. They were very afraid and went to tell their friends. Later, Jesus appeared to them and others. They believed he had risen from the dead.

Why do we celebrate Easter?

We do not believe much in miracles; our minds tell us that there is often an explanation, if we can just discover what it is.

We know that the Bible accounts of Jesus' life came long after he had lived and that much of the story of his birth and death and resurrection were myths created to express how important people thought he was.

I believe something must have happened, something that moved people deeply, that caused almost 2,000 years of a religion, the institution of Christianity. I cannot know what it was.

What we do celebrate is that Jesus was a great teacher who taught people how to live. The famous Unitarian minister Theodore Parker exploded miracles as the reason for believing in Jesus, saying, "To me that is all mythology, yet I welcome the day which brings men to a consciousness of that great soul. It was his character that made men believe he wrought miracles. It is this which makes his memory so precious to the world."

We celebrate a great psychological truth in the resurrection. When someone we love dies, their spirit lives on in the lives of the people they have touched. We are inspired -- their spirit is within us -- when we remember a beloved parent, grandparent, teacher or friend.

We celebrate that when life seems too hard to bear, that when death and destruction are abroad in the land, as in Kosovo right now, that the message of forgiveness is needed and that the spark of life can keep hope alive.

We celebrate death as a necessary part of life. We know that in each seed, in each egg, in each apparently dead branch there is the spirit of life that will burst forth at the right moment. Even when one individual life is ended, the mysterious process of life will go on. It is no accident that in the Northern Hemisphere, Easter comes in the spring.

I have come to the conclusion, after many years of thought, that the circle image is more meaningful to me than the straight line of that minister long ago. Here we sit in a circle; we have danced in a circle; we have filled the circular cauldron of our regrets and despair with the flowers of hope.

We celebrate the universality of the rites of spring, of rebirth, as human beings have over time and space. And we have come full circle from pagan times, when humans worshiped the natural world around them, to the present, when people are beginning to realize in a powerful way that this world is all we have: that this little sphere we call Earth is holy ground. We reverence the life force and recommit ourselves to the preservation of life.

Alleluia! Life is risen again!

Benediction

Infinite Spirit of Life, we ask thy blessing on these flowers, messengers of fellowship and love and hope. May they remind us to cherish our diversity. May they symbolize the fleeting, fragile and miraculous gift of the cycle of life itself. May we give and receive them knowing that whatever we can do, great or small, the efforts of all of us are needed to make this world whole. Blessed be.

The sermon in a Unitarian Universalist setting is never the last word on any subject, but rather an invitation to further dialog.

You may want to read other visitors' comments on Carol S. Haag's "Easter Flower Communion" .

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