Read this week’s newsletter here: The Weekly Liberal April 25

In this week’s newsletter, Rev. Jen Crow writes:

A few weeks ago, I attended the Judaism 101 workshop offered by Rabbis Latz and Lekach-Rosenberg from Shir Tikvah. In this hour together, the Rabbis chose to dive into the central story of Judaism – Passover. The story has twists and turns worthy of any high drama. There’s death and suffering, brilliant trickery for the good, an intervening God, evil, escape, and all kinds of possibility. And in the end, at its simplest, the story of Passover is about an enslaved people longing for a better life and all of the challenges they go through on the road to freedom. The story is told every year, with food and family and ritual in each individual home so that no Jew will ever forget the pain of slavery or all it took to get free.

Last weekend, as I sat enjoying delicious food and incredible hospitality at the home of a Shir Tikvah member for Passover Seder dinner, a new friend turned and asked me: What does Easter mean to Unitarian Universalists?

Now, I’ve been asked this question before, and as a Unitarian Universalist minister you might think that I feel 100% confident when questions like this come my way – but the truth is that I panic a little bit inside whenever I’m asked questions like this, and I’m guessing some of you might, too. I’ve realized that I panic in these moments not because Unitarian Universalists have no opinion about what Easter means to us (there are roughly 100,000 opinions about what Easter means to us), but because the questions ask me to share not just one rote answer – but my own.

So I start at the beginning – Unitarians and Universalists both originally saw themselves as reformers of Christianity, but over time the two traditions merged and while some Unitarian Universalists consider themselves Christian, most of us don’t. We consider Jesus to be a prophet, a teacher, a radical movement leader along the same lines as Ghandi or Martin Luther King, Jr. or Susan B. Anthony. At Easter, we tell the story of Jesus’ torture and execution by the empire state and focus on the way that his message of love and inclusion can rise up in our lives. Each year, I am grateful for the old story of betrayal even though it hurts to hear it. I’m grateful for the time to remember the deaths and losses that have happened in my own life, to touch on that despair again and hold it right next to the resurrection that I know, too. I talk about my commitment to live in the both/and – acknowledging the depth of suffering we experience and the joy and hope we can feel, and how my church helps me to do that.

This week my son is working on his “elevator speech” for his 6th grade religious education class at church. How will he describe what Unitarian Universalism means to him in 2 minutes or less? How would you?

In gratitude,
Rev. Jen