Grieve, then Grow.

An Easter sermon for these times

hi Beloved!

Guess what: I slept till 8:43am today! (tho interrupted by a couple of nighttime phone calls…a mother’s work is never done). Now I am happily eating leftover devilled eggs and my email inbox is a wee thing this morning. So far, it’s a perfect day.

Here’s the sermon I preached at church yesterday, along with a photo of me with my two clergy colleagues before we robed up. Moment of vanity: how cute are we?!? We didn’t even plan those outfits.

I love these women so much. Kelly and Hannah are a dream to work with, and in a supererogatory (a word you should know) grace, they also pastor me in particular moments, like Hannah did just after this photo was taken when I was practically hyperventilating I was so anxious about worship (yes, even now, I still get anxious).

Of our two highest holidays, I long ago stopped worrying about preaching Christmas. The darkness of the sanctuary, the candles, the live baby if you are lucky enough to have one, all mean the preacher really only has two jobs: don’t preach longer than 10 minutes, and don’t steal the joy people are already walking in with.

Easter is different, especially in an age of creeping (leaping? cavorting? maniacally clapping its hands?) fascism. At Christmas I always preach a version of Jesus as “God with skin on.” At Easter I seem to preach a version of: Us as God with skin on, or as my colleague Rev. Ann Jefferson said at our Good Friday service: into our hands Jesus has commended His spirit. It’s a tougher sell. We are much harder to believe in than God.

Anyhoo. I’m sad about Pope Francis’s death today. He was such a good pope. So human, humble, and Christlike in many ways. And, like Jesus, he had a growth edge—he wasn’t too proud to moderate his positions when his God-given conscience urged him. I don’t know who they will get next. He can’t possibly be as caring as this one, can he? I can hear the machinations all the way from here, the palace intrigue, the jockeying for power and influence, 4D chess to match what’s happening in the highest political echelons globally.

Come to think of it — if you are sick to death of politics and intrigue and want to skip the sermon, just click here to watch some bits of church instead. I explicitly recommend navigating to minute 56:00 to watch our band sing/play Gungor’s Beautiful Things, which always wrecks me. “Can a garden come up from this ground, at all?”

And THEN don’t miss the epic Resurrection dance party at 1:29:00 or so where the entire congregation sings Easter words to Pink Pony Club **AND DANCES.** (you can’t see them on the livestream, but please imagine Jesus personally came down and put his sparkle hands on 250ish otherwise dignified and perhaps reluctant marginally people and turned them into a Chappell Roan video).

You should stop eating your leftover deviled eggs too and get up and dance and sing along. You’ll feel better. I promise. If you don’t, let me know and I will mail you the half-bag of Cadbury mini eggs I have left in my desk drawer (an essential part of my Easter sermon-writing process).

Stills from the Pink Pony Club/Great Big Love dance party worship video. Complete with rainbow cloud pool floaties, choir members wearing oversize flower hats, and our church kids with bunny ears hopping around the chancel.

Love you. Christ is risen! And you will be too…eventually, or over and over, in between all your Good Fridays.

Molly

Da Sermon:

But Mary stood weeping outside the tomb. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb, 12 and she saw two angels in white sitting where the body of Jesus had been lying, one at the head and the other at the feet. 13 They said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping?” She said to them, “They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.” 14 When she had said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not know that it was Jesus. 15 Jesus said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?” Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.” 16 Jesus said to her, “Mary!” She turned and said to him in Hebrew, “Rabbouni!” (which means Teacher). 17 Jesus said to her, “Do not touch me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’ ” 18 Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, “I have seen the Lord,” and she told them that he had said these things to her.

~

Rev. Molly Baskette ~ First Church Berkeley UCC
Easter Sunday ~ April 20, 2025
John 20:1-18
“Second Nature”

Kids, before I get started preaching…you’re also going to preach, but without talking. Head to the columns on the side…find the flower kits there, and the Legos. For the last 2 months at church we’ve been talking about “seeking the welfare of the city,” like it says in the Bible…how we can help our cities and love the people in them…today you’re going to make a garden grow up in our city…so two jobs you might choose: take the legos and build buildings and houses, a whole city…or take the bits of paper and make flowers appear on the columns, to remind us that a garden can grow ANYWHERE, including in the midst of a city. Are there a couple of adults who like to hang w kids, or need to work w their hands in order to hear a sermon better/join them?

I’ll ask you to show your creations at the end of the sermon…

A word about the flower kits which is a mini sermon of itself: when I went to Michael’s last week to buy poster board, no colors left! I thought: what is capitalism coming to! The tariffs haven’t even taken effect yet! So I asked the checkout lady, and she said there was a run on them: for protest signs! They completely wiped out the stock of poster board!

Then I thought: if you can’t beat em, join em. So you’ll see among the flower petals some that have had an earlier life as a 50501 protest sign. Nothing is wasted in God’s economy.

Ok GO kids! You make a sermon there and I’ll make one here

*pray*

I thought about cancelling Easter this year. It didn’t seem right to celebrate new life when the news is a endless carnival of death threats and death sentences and lethal policies for countless humans. It seems at best naive and at worst complicit to don our Easter finery and sing Hallelujah and eat strawberries dipped in a chocolate fountain when elsewhere in our city parents are keeping their children home from church because they fear ICE may burst through the doors of the sanctuary and take them away in chains. Not to mention: is putting Easter finery and melted chocolate together *really* a good idea?

I joke so I don’t weep. Not that weeping is bad. Weeping is welcome, especially here.

I thought about cancelling Easter, but then I realized: I don’t actually have that kind of authority. I could write an executive order, but who would obey? We’re Congregationalists! We have no boss but God. And even if you did listen to me, well: as Jesus said at Palm Sunday last week, “if the people kept silent, the very rocks would cry out.”

There is no cancelling Easter. It happened. It is still happening, everywhere. Death WAS defeated, magnificently. Evil WAS overcome, spectacularly. Sometimes we have to get out our magnifying glasses to see it, slow down, dry our eyes to peep what’s really there. But Easter is ON, baby! There, I’ve spoiled the ending for you.

The difficulty is, we’re not at the end, are we Beloved? We’re in the middle of our particular story. It’s a Groundhog Day of Good Fridays. And our evil times are surely more evil than any previous generation’s. Our ancestors might have been acceptable at evildoing, but we are EXCELLENT at it. We are DOGING this shiz!

For many categories of folks, the times have been evil for quite a while now. Others of us are just fully awakening to the systemic cruelty and sadism of those in power, and newly feeling an extreme vulnerability our neighbors have long known. We don’t know how this will end. And that makes everything feel extremely precarious. Amen?

So let’s walk back to that first Easter morning. Mary Magdalene was right where we are. She had watched her best friend die, tortured at the hands of the Roman Empire. She heard him sob from the cross and beg for release from pain; he even questioned the God he had taught all of them to trust. The Empire couldn’t kill or imprison all the activists, everyone who threatened to undermine its control, but it could make a very public example of enough of them that the rest would obey in advance.

Sound familiar?

It didn’t matter that Jesus was innocent of the charges of sedition. In fact: the more innocent, the better. The point of the Empire’s tactics was not to kill or incarcerate everyone who didn’t fall right in line; how would you even manage that? Their method was simply to sow enough fear into the field that people would keep their heads down, try to escape detection, and certainly avoid standing up for those who did fall afoul of the ruling elite.

So Mary Magdalene is not only grieving because her friend is dead. She’s grieving because the whole movement is dead. The marvelous, tender, thrilling, edgy, counterculture, humble, surprising, upside-down utopian Way that Jesus taught them, it has been murdered along with the Man. Or so she thinks.

And because she is so committed to believing what she thinks, she misses it. She misses that the man standing before her is her friend Jesus, very much alive. It’s basic neuroscience, like the Youtube videos where participants fail to notice a gorilla walking through a basketball game due to “selective attention.” Selective attention means: we see what we expect to see. Our eyes deceive us because of self-limiting beliefs.

But there’s at least a glimmer of hope. Mary sees a man near the tomb. She could have assumed he was a guard, there to protect Jesus’ body from being stolen by his disciples to start a conspiracy theory about “resurrection,” a whisper campaign to keep hope and therefore resistance alive.

She saw a man, but she didn’t see a guard. She saw – a gardener. Why? Because she must have understood herself to be in a garden. Not a cemetery. Well, that too. She was walking amongst the ancestors, and even in the midst of her grief, she saw Life all around. Their bodies were pushing up daisies, and their spirits were pushing up hope. It was a garden of possibilities.

So it was then only a little half-step to the truth: to seeing not the gardener, but the gorilla, that is, the man himself. Her rabbi, her love, her everything. As soon as he said her name, she knew the voice. And she could see things not as she believed them to be, but as they really are.

One of my early teachers, who actually died this year: Rabbi Michael Lerner, may he rise in power, said to me when I was a seminary student: realists are idolators, because they only worship what they see. I’ll amend that to: they worship what they think they see. Because there is so much we don’t see, can’t see, when blinkered by power or greed on one side, or fear and despair on the other.

Growing a garden requires a lot of believing in what you can’t yet see. There are the seeds, impossibly small and frail and easily lost. The weather, which is a mystery, even to experts. Hostile soil, pests, even other plants. You scatter seed, and you water, and wait, and watch. The first seedlings come up. How fragile they are! Those tiny pale green heads! How horrifically trample-able! And yet some of them will make it. They will grow summer-strong, and before you know it, they are 10 foot tall sunflowers or an acre of zucchini that could double as billy clubs.

One of my favorite things about gardening is when volunteers come up. Ghosts of gardens past, tomatoes or squash seeds from old fruit that fell and buried its seed deep in the ground. Then years later, these seeds for some reason decide to sprout and make whole new plants amongst the ones you put there. Volunteers! Unlooked for, who just show up and feed us!

The church I used to serve in Somerville, Massachusetts planted a garden. We did it because we loved vegetables and also because we hated mowing grass. Nobody wanted to do it. Somehow the grass was always simulataneously too tall and dying. So we tore it up, and planted strawberries and sugar snap peas and sungold tomatoes and a peach tree. We put out a janky bench from the discount store and a sign inviting passersby–because we were on a busy street–to glean from the garden. We hired a woman from the church to be our farmer with grant money we got from the company that make Triscuits, of all things. They even sent out some suits with a big check and a golden shovel to take credit. Our little garden grew in the midst of the city, and against all odds, because you know how ornery fruit trees can be, the peach prospered.

A block from that garden is a mini park, called Powderhouse Park. It had a small role in the American revolution, when the minutemen stored gunpowder in a stone tower that still stands. A century later it stored pickles. The tower is empty now, but on a humid day you can still smell the pickles. When my kids were small they loved to imagine there was a princess or a monster inside while playing imagination games around the park. I mostly used the tower as a wind buffer at our Easter Sunrise services, as I tried keep my hands warm enough to play guitar on Christ the Lord is Risen Today. Let me tell you. It is NOT as easy to believe in new life on a frigid, leafless Easter morning in Massachusetts as it is in Edenic Berkeley. Surely if Christ were to rise again in early to mid spring, it would be here. But I digress.

Three weeks ago, the powder house briefly became famous again. It was the day after Tufts graduate student Rumeysa Ozturk was abducted into an unmarked car by a group of mostly men dressed in black, flown to Louisiana and incarcerated. Her sin? Being one of 34 signatories on an open letter to her university regarding the genocide in Gaza.

Rumeysa had been on her way to break her Ramadan fast, walking down College Ave near the church. It’s a trek I imagine she had made many times, maybe even plucking a peach or a tomato from the garden on her way by, momentarily becoming a part of First Church’s beloved community.

Her kidnapping happened on an ordinary Tuesday evening. And a mere 24 hours later, wintry, desolate Powderhouse Park was overflowing. More than 1,000 people turned out, spilling over every edge, waving homemade signs and calling for Rumeysa’s release. Where there had been nothing but stony, cold ground – now was a whole garden, a riot of grief turning to growth.

Most of you have likely also heard the name Kilmar Abrego Garcia. A young man disappeared to the infamous El Salvadoran prison known as CECOT, where thousands of men sleep in bunks four stories high. They see no daylight, ever. They are slapped and shaved and starved. Not only is Kilmar innocent of any charges, he had earned the right never to have to return to El Salvador because his life was at risk there. The parallel to Jesus is a little on the nose. An innocent man made an example of by Empire to cow the rest of us into submission. But as with Jesus, it backfired. His story far from sending us scattering has lit a match under a movement.

When I started writing this sermon, Kilmar was for all intents and purposes dead and buried in that sunless tomb. We had no idea if he still alive, or if he would ever be seen again. And Kilmar himself had no idea how many people out here were fighting for him–hundreds of thousands who didn’t know his name before last week. He thought he had one mother, but now he has millions. We got the news on Thursday. He’s alive. And now he knows how much his life–and the lives of every prisoner like him–matters to all of us.

We don’t know how his story will end. But if it’s hard to believe that our president or the President of El Salvador will have a change of heart, if it’s hard to believe that those who carry out illegal orders will suddently find their conscience or their courage and turn on their mob bosses, surely we can believe in what we can already see. The thousands, the millions of humans now poking their heads above the surface of the soil, making a riotous garden. Many of them volunteers, long dormant. I was in Sacramento on April 5 and saw somebody’s Uncle Larry there with a piece of posterboard that read,

“Not usually a sign guy, but JEEZ.”

This is the risen body of Christ in a springtime world. These millions of prayers, of calls, of donations, of pounds and pounds of political pressure, of putting bodies into harm’s way to buffer the vulnerable, all coalescing to be BIGGER than the violence and evildoing that seeks to destroy us at every turn.

YOU are God embodied, the Spirit of Christ resurrected today and every day when you choose to make a stand for life. And love. And that tender way of Jesus.

I know it’s hard to poke up your little green head. It’s hard not to get buried in grief and overwhelm. There are all of the old evils that were already dogging us: worry about the earth and tech run amok and domestic terrorism not to mention all the personal pains in our lives: family troubles, money troubles, illness, depression and alllll the dark nights of the soul keeping us down.

And suddenly we have a bunch of new evils on top of the old ones! Are you kidding us, God? It’s a scorched earth campaign. As the song we are about to sing says, “Could a garden come up from this ground at all?”

But the remedy for all the ills we face, public and private, collective and individual, is the same.

Grieve, yes.

Then grow.

Keep growing. Raise your head, tender and possibly trample-able, along with a thousand other seedlings beside you.

Become an invasive species that leaves not a square inch of soil for hate because the field is too crowded with love.

Beloved, playing dead will not save us in these terror times.

My friend and teacher Harvey says that every couple of generations, humans get a signal opportunity to completely subvert the dominant paradigm, to do away with the death-dealing structures and systems and start fresh. The soil and weather conditions are exactly right for those dormant volunteers to spring up.

We are entering a time when anything, everything, good is possible. Stop seeing selectively. Believe in what’s not there yet. Grieve. Then grow.

Benediction:

The protectors of people-power taught us this phrase: “They tried to bury us. They did not know we were seeds.”

We are still not at the end of our story. We will suffer a thousand more Good Fridays before it’s over. And also: a thousand Easters. Keep grieving, and keep growing.