Rev. Emily Wright-Magoon
Sermon
April 9, 2017
Listen to the sermon here:
OPENING WORDS
Every year
Everything
I have ever learned
in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side is salvation,
whose meaning none of us will ever know.
-Mary Oliver, in her poem “In Blackwater Woods”
Come into this space, where today we ponder that messy, dark, middle part of the transformative process. The death before the rebirth…the wandering before the finding…the disorientation before the clarity…May all that we bring here today be welcome.
Sermon excerpt:
We are about to enter two religious seasons: The Jewish holiday of Passover, and the Christian Holy Week. Both are stories of transformation, and both emphasize this middle period in the transformation process that is mucky, at the least, and at the most, deathly.
If we observe Easter Sunday (even in a secular way), but do not observe Good Friday, we may be trying to skip over the messy, hard parts of lives, and just celebrate the triumphant. We may be trying to have spring without winter, or joy without grief, or life without death.
