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	Now The Green Blade Riseth

	Rev.  Edmund Robinson 
	Unitarian Universalist Church of Wakefield 
	March 19, 2000

One advantage that New England has over my native South Carolina is
that seasons here are much more dramatic.  Yes, fall comes in South
Carolina too, but because most of the trees are evergreens, it arrives
without all the fiery fanfare that it does here.  And by the time of
the official opening of spring at the equinox, the crocuses and tulips
in South Carolina are well on their way and the azaleas are out
everywhere.  But here in Massachusetts, spring is by no means a done
deal at the time it officially begins.  We all know that the buds on
the trees will open at their peril, that we will not put away our
parkas and sweaters just yet, that if we rush outside in t-shirts on
the first sunny day, we just might find ourselves with hypothermia
inside a few minutes.  We have seen in the last day how the powers
that be have a way of April fooling us into thinking that winter is a
thing of the past, then dumping wet gooey snow on us, just as surely
as, later in the year, the Red Sox will raise our hopes and then break
our hearts.

At this precise moment we are paused on the brink of the change of
seasons.  We know from experience that we will eventually get to
summer, but we have no way of knowing how soon.  It is the hinge time
of the year.  Or perhaps the fulcrum time, for the year is balanced
like a seesaw between light and dark, between winter and summer,
between death and life.

And it is balance that I want us to think about this morning.  I
called my sermon "now the green blade riseth," and we sung the fine
hymn that inspired this line just now.  It is a great miracle when we
see the vegetation returning to life and feel the sap of spring
coursing through our own veins, and yet is completely natural.  Spring
is a time when it possible to see the creative force of the world all
around you.

There is a strain of thought called process theology that derives from
the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, which emphasizes how nothing
really is, but rather, everything is in the process of becoming.  We
are perpetually situated on the crest of a breaking wave between the
past, which has determined the spot we find ourselves in today, and
the future which is open to us depending on what course of action we
choose.  God is often conceived in process theology as the creative
force of the universe, and I like to use this language in prayers, as
you know.

The Second law of Thermodynamics says that the universe goes from
order to disorder, that energy is being dissipated, and entropy is
always increasing.  I see life and creativity as the counter to this
trend.  Life is anti-entropic.  Life creates more order, by creating
more life.

Consider the egg.  What an orderly shape.  It is perfectly symmetrical
in every dimension but one.  And yet within this little globe, if it
were fertilized, would be all you need to make a chicken.  The chicken
is not an orderly animal, as you know if you've ever tried to catch
one.  But it is a remarkable animal and it is in one sense quite
ordinary and in another sense quite extraordinary that the complete
blueprint for a chicken is folded up in this little case.  And humans
are even more disorderly and complex than chickens, yet human eggs, or
egg cells, are even smaller - you could fit one on the end of a
sharpened pencil.  A little acorn contains all the information needed
to make a mighty oak.

So spring is the season of new life beginning, and the Vernal Equinox
is the beginning of spring.  You may know that prior to the coming of
Christianity to the British Isles, the Anglo-Saxons celebrated the
Vernal Equinox as the festival of Ostara, the Goddess of Spring.
Ostara was a goddess very popular with children who loved little
animals.  The story goes that once she came upon a bird whose feathers
were frozen to her body, so to save the bird's life, she turned it
into a rabbit.  But it was a miraculous rabbit and it laid eggs, to
the delight of all the children of the realm.  Later when Britain was
converted to Christianity, they kept the celebration of Ostara, but
they said it was in honor of Jesus' resurrection and they called it
Easter.  This is why bunnies and eggs are some of the symbols of
Easter, and why Easter is celebrated according to the Lunar calendar,
being set at the first Sunday after the first full moon after the
Vernal Equinox.

Ostara was the goddess of fertility, and in an agricultural society
there is nothing so worth celebrating, so worth praying for, as
fertility.  You want your cows to have lots of calves, your horses to
have lots of colts, your pigs to have lots of piglets.  You want your
crops to come up in abundance so there will plenty to harvest later.
And you want your people to have lots of children so there will plenty
of hands to work the farm.

Nowadays, we are not so quick to praise fertility.  Unrestrained
fertility is not necessarily a good thing.  We look at the damage we
have done to our planet by our lifestyle, and we wonder whether we
really can afford all the people we have, let alone the new ones that
are being born every minute around the world.  The amount of land
being cultivated reduces the size of the rain forests, and the raising
of cattle and livestock has a bad effect on the environment.  We can
still praise fertility, but maybe it is fertility of mind, of ideas
that we should be praising most.  Maybe the creative force of the
universe needs to operate on our consciousness more than on our
bodies.  And maybe the value we should pull out of the equinox ahead
of fertility is balance.

I have been thinking a lot about balance ever since I pledged in my
installation service to live a "simple and balanced life" and then
immediately pulled several 16 hour days at my law office.  Are your
lives like this?  Pulled this way and that, with seemingly no time to
catch your breath, scheduled to the max and convinced that there must
be a better way but unable to see it?  We yearn for balance, or at
least I do, and so I'm preaching this sermon to me, and if any of the
rest of you want to listen in, you're welcome.

Balance is a virtue inherent in the equinox.  As I said a minute ago,
this is the time when the world teeters in equipoise between the
dominance of day and the dominance of night.  The great wheel of the
year turns and proclaims the death of death, the beginnings of the
great turnaround towards new life.  The egg, symbol of the new life,
may even be balanced on its end.

Now, I have to admit, I don't know whether this egg-balancing thing is
science or folklore.  I know that one vernal equinox about ten or
twelve years ago, I successfully balanced not one but three eggs on
end at or near the time the sun was crossing the equator.  My then
wife wrote a poem about it.  I had read about this idea in the New
Yorker, which had an article describing a whole group of folks meeting
at the UN Plaza in New York City at the hour of the equinox, balancing
eggs.

What does it mean, scientifically, if you can in fact balance an egg
at the time of the equinox but no other time?  Beats me.  Maybe it's
some sort of alignment of the magnetic force fields of the earth with
those of the sun, or with the gravity field of the sun.  Geophysicists
would have to work that out.  I just somehow like to think of the egg,
traditional symbol of fertility, of spring, of Easter, in a state of
balance.

On the symbolic plane, though, it works out.  In order to have
fertility, you have to have some balance.  All animals species are
divided into two halves, male and female and most plants have male and
female parts; in each you need both the male and female in order to
make babies.  This is not, by the way, to put down alternative
child-rearing; single folks and single-sex couples can make fine
parents.  I intend here a biological observation, not a social one.

Reproduction requires more balance than simply both sexes.  It needs
certain conditions for the thing to work.  Depending on the plant or
animal, the temperature must be right, the acidity of the environment,
the chemicals in the soil, the absence of predators - all are factors
determining whether new life can come into the world and grow to
adulthood.  When nature is out of balance, the dinosaurs and many
other species up to the present day, become extinct.  As we mourn the
decline in biodiversity on our planet, we yet celebrate the miracle
that conditions were balanced enough on this planet to bring forth
life in the first place and that life is still possible for any of us.

Does the standing egg hold lessons for our lives?  When and if the egg
stands, that is a static balance.  I don't think we can or want to
achieve that kind of balance in our lives.  If I try to balance this
broomstick on my hand by standing still and keeping my hand still, I
can't do it.  It only works if I move my hand to keep it under the
broomstick.

I think the balance we try to achieve in our lives is more of a moving
balance, a dynamic balance.  Take the pendulum.  It is subject to two
forces, the force of gravity and the force of inertia.  The two forces
act on it differently at different points in its travel.  Overall the
forces balance, but at any given time, one of them may have the upper
hand.

The earth's path around the sun is like this.  We are at the point
when the day is just overcoming the night, but this is like the
pendulum at the top of its swing, when the inertia which has brought
it up there surrenders to the pull of gravity back down.  We know that
we are passing through this equinox and will go on to a spring season
which will give way, at the solstice, to summer and then on through
the rest of the cycle.

The rhythms of our lives are similar.  Achieving balance does not have
to be a matter of standing perfectly still.  It can be a deliberate
swing in the opposite direction to the way we've been going.  If we
have been working for a long period, we balance this by taking some
time off, just doing nothing in particular.  If we have been losing
sleep, we try to make it up by sleeping in for a while.  If we've been
spending a lot of time with people, we may need to go spend some time
by ourselves.  If we've been spending a lot of time alone, we might
want to get out and make some human contacts.  If we've been spending
a lot of time on the computer or on our video games, it might be time
to go try some low-tech entertainment.

By the way, one area in which I have been striving for balance is the
topics I address in sermons and the trappings of the worship service;
some science and religion, some Christian, some UU, some pagan, some
other world religions, some universal human themes.  I would like to
hear from you and to encourage open commentary on that balance and
whether it needs to be adjusted.

Now the balance of activities, whether on an individual or group
level, is a gross kind of balance, and it's a balance which we have
some control over by the choices we make as to what to do from day to
day.  I think there are subtler kinds of balance at work in the world,
however, that work independently of our wills and of our choices.  One
of these is what the Buddhists and Hindus call karma.

Karma is kind of a moral bank, where your good and bad deeds are
stored.  So if something good happens to you now, if you win the
lottery or run into some other bit of good fortune, it may be because
of something good you have already done.  If something bad happens to
you, it is because of something bad you've done.  The problem is that
people who haven't done anything particularly bad often have bad
things happen to them.  The doctrine of karma solves this problem by
using the belief in rebirth which most Buddhist and Hindus hold.  The
karma bank keeps its accounts not only for what you've done in this
life but also for whatever you did in a previous life.  So however
good you are in this life, you can still have bad things happen to you
if you deposited bad karma in a previous life.

This little cartoon sketch doesn't do anything near full justice to
the idea of karma, which I'd like to explore at length in a future
sermon.  I bring it up here as an example of a concept of balance, a
moral balance, where each good we do is balanced by a good that
happens to us and each sin by a bad thing that happens.  In a way, I
have often thought that strict Buddhists are quite akin to
Presbyterians, for this kind of strict moral accountability was woven
into the thinking of certain of my now-deceased Presbyterian relatives
on my fathers side.

working toward an ethic consistent with the late Universalists which
says that good and evil are not opposites.  Calling good and evil
opposites gives evil an equal status with good, just as calling hot
and cold opposites gives hot an equal status with cold.  This may be
all right as far as common experience goes.  We feel hot and cold as
opposite forces on our bodies.  But we know that scientifically, cold
is simply the absence of heat, and while we can get theoretically as
hot as we want, we can only get cold down to Absolute Zero.  In a
similar way, I am beginning to think of evil not as a thing in itself
but as the absence of good.  So the idea of storing up evil karma
doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

What does make sense to me is the idea from Zen and Taoism that every
quality contains its opposite.  The familiar symbol of yin and yang,
which is hanging on the wall in the stairway, expresses this.  Yin and
yang, as you probably know, stand for any pair of opposites, but
particularly for the male and female principles and for the principles
of activity or passivity.  If they were simply opposites, the circle
would just be divided in half by a straight line, one half black and
one white.  Instead, they are divided by a curving line, and each
section has a dot of the other color in its middle.  This symbolizes
that each quality has something of the other in it, and each needs the
other.

Each of us individually has a biological sexual identity, but each of
us has inside hormones of both sexes, and personality traits of both
sexes.  It is a great awakening for a guy to try to understand the
feminine forces a work in his psyche, and I imagine it is the same for
a woman.

These words from the great Taoist work, the Tao te Ching, might have
been written about the equinox:

All things bear the shade on their backs And the sun in their arms; By
the blending of breath From the sun and the shade, Equilibrium comes
to the world.

This is the work that the equinox does, at its deepest, on some of the
eternal oppositions of our world.  Spring, when death turns to life,
reminds us that life has always contained within it the seeds of
death, and that death has always contained within it the seeds of
life.  The day contains within it the seeds of night, as the night
contains within it the seeds of day.

Here again the words of the Tao te Ching:

"So a loss sometimes benefits one Or a benefit proves to be loss."

Just as joy contains within it the seeds of sorrow, and sorrow, joy.
I shared with you the other day a great feeling of triumph I had when
I preached a sermon to my colleagues at the Mass Bay District retreat
and they all loved it, several of them asking me for copies.  I felt
for the rest of the retreat that I had achieved some degree of
professional acceptance among my colleagues in this district and
mainly that felt very very good.  However, I was also aware of a
little tinge of bad feeling, and I worried over that until I realized
what it was.  In getting accepted into the club, so to speak, I had
put down another root in the Boston scene.  This meant that I was one
step further away from my old life in South Carolina, and that was a
sadness.  Another bridge had burned behind me, and this taught me that
every gain contains within it a loss.

In other words, we can try to balance our eggs, and try to live
balanced lives, we can try to take care of ourselves and eat right and
moderate our habits and floss after meals.  But the balance we try to
achieve is not as important as the balance that is there already,
working in our lives, if we have the wit and the wisdom to see it.

Amen.

[1]To te Ching, 42, "On the Sun and the Shade"