Alleluia!
Unitarian Universalist Community of the Mountains
March 31, 2024
Rev. Kevin Tarsa
Sophia McKean, Worship Associate
*Due to technical difficulties, there is no video recording of this service. We have made a transcript available below.
Song for Gathering Hymn #1000 Morning Has Come by Jason Shelton
Greetings Rev. Kevin Tarsa
Land Acknowledgement
These acorns symbolize that, as residents or visitors in Nisenan land, we support the Nevada City Rancheria Nisenan Tribe in efforts to stabilize their people as well as the campaign to restore Tribal Sovereignty through Federal Recognition.
In this spirit, we share that the tribe has asked us to add to our acknowledgment encouragement to contribute toward the purchase of a historic Nisenan Village site….a profound opportunity. The first vital threshold for raising funds comes in a few days, and you may find information on CHIRPS’s website, or through the Homeland Return link on UUCM’s homepage.
Lighting of the Chalice What Gives Us Life by Venessa Rush Southern
Singing the Children on Their Way
Welcome Sophia McKean, Worship Associate
Good morning and welcome to the Unitarian Universalist Community of the Mountains! My name is Sophia McKean, and I’ll be your worship associate for today’s service. Happy Transgender Day of Visibility! Happy Easter!
I love that these two holidays lined up this year because I see a lot of resonances between the two. Rachel Crandall-Crocker, who created Transgender Day of Visibility fifteen years ago, has talked about how she created the day to prioritize joy for the trans community. For those of us that celebrate Easter, it, too, is an incredibly joyous occasion.
In Christian traditions, Easter is the celebration of the resurrection of Jesus, of his rebirth. Trans Day of Visibility is also a kind of celebration of rebirth, an affirmation of the beauty and joy and power in our trans siblings recognizing and becoming and living as who they are. That’s very UU, is it not? It’s this beautiful mirroring of God’s power of creation as it plays out in our own lives. Transness puts authorship back in our hands. So, on this second week of Spring, as flowers are blooming and buds are turning to leaves, I’m so joyful to be here celebrating the beauties of creation with you.
Come, let us worship together.
Opening Word Rev. Kevin
Typically, here, early in the service, we offer what we call Opening Words, words that introduce or take us deeper into the message or theme of the service. This morning, we have an opening word:
Alleluia!
Well, plus the words that I’m saying.
I’m curious, is this a word that you use in your life? Do you ever find yourself saying, “Alleluia!?” Anyone?
And what do you mean by “Alleluia!” when you say it?
Variation on “Yay!”
Origins of “alleluia’… Hebrew, “Hallelujuah” (hallū yāh), a joyful expression of gratitude which directs one to “praise ye Jah!” – Praise God.
There is some speculation that the word is rooted in or at least strengthened by the possibility that Hallelujah is an onomatopoeia of ululation, itself an onomatopoeia for that vocal expression of great joy that rings throughout Africa, the Middle East, and in certain Jewish communities, formed in different ways and styles and with different vowels, but along the lines of a high, strong, L-L-L-L-L . Hallelujah.
Ululation was an expression already in ancient Greece, about the same time Judaism was arising out of local Canaanite religions. It was and is an exuberantly joyful expression called out to celebrate good news.
Randall Thompson’s musical setting of that single word, Alleluia, a piece the choir is about to sing, was written for the opening of the Berkshire Music Center in 1940, to be sung by the entire student body who would have only one hour to rehearse, so Thompson said he decided it shouldn’t have too many words.
You’ll notice, as you hear it, that the joy in this music is mostly quiet, understated, even tinged with sadness for many people. Thompson explained this too. He said that at the very moment he sat down to put pencil to paper the motorcycles were speeding across Belgium and into France, as Germany invaded. He said it looked as if France and perhaps all the civilized world were about to be destroyed.
“Why any alleluia at all, then?” he asked. “Well,” he answered, “it’s because the word alleluia can be said in several different ways. It can be said as a jubilant sound of joy, celebration, rapture. Or, it can be said on bended knees.” Here, he offered, it is said on bended knees.
He goes on: “The meaning of this alleluia, written at a time of great stress and sorrow, was an attempt to put into music something of what all who were growing up in that time were feeling.”
Whether your alleluia this morning is joyful and exuberant alleluia, or a quiet or even “broken Hallelujah,” as Leonard Cohen put it, may you hear in this music and the choir’s singing, some piece of the Alleluia that stirs in you.
Music: Alleluia by Randall Thompson UUCM Choir. Toby Thomas-Rose, director
Blessing A Blessing For My Trans Siblings This Easter, a Blessing For All of Us Who Have Come Home to Ourselves by Sophia McKean
Hark! As they wept for Jesus in the cave,
Though he was not there,
So too, perhaps, has someone
Named a space your grave and mourned
Where you no longer are or maybe
Never were. What great joy,
Though they may not know –
May they some day know –
What great joy it is to become yourself,
Again and again.
As the flowers which, under the earth, were sleeping
Burst forth with such vibrancy that you almost stop,
Driving past them on the side of the highway –
The urgency of life, revealed, the
“Oh, hasn’t this always been?”
And it has, it’s always been –
Life, in full color, knows how
To return to itself, to us. May you always return
To yourself, to us, and find a home here. May
Mary be at your side, she who knows you
Though others doubt.
God spoke, and there he was.
You spoke, and there you were.
Creation, again and again, and us a
Part of it. Kicked
Out of Eden, and
Isn’t it good?
We till the earth, make
Something from nothing, feel
The sweat of it on our
Backs, closest
To God we might come. The work of it,
Uncovering–the seed up
From the soil, the rock rolled
From the tomb. And you,
There as you were always meant
To be, you,
Child of God or Spirit or Earth –
Child of anything you’d like to claim,
We’d all love to have you.
Let there be light, and a day of rest.
Let there be great rejoicing when you show us,
Once again, who you are. Let us each
See the seed of ourselves into a flower, and the flower
Into bloom, and the bloom into the
Whole chorus of the world which says, once again, “Here I am!”
May you be seen exactly
As you are – I am that I am – and
May we rejoice, together, to have you, once again, in our arms.
Meditation Sophia McKean
Joys & Sorrows Sophia McKean, Worship Associate
Song Spirit of the Wind, Carry Me
Sermon Alleluia! Rev. Kevin Tarsa
It’s Easter Sunday.
- For whom here is Easter important?
- For whom here is Easter meaningful?
- For whom here is Easter neither here nor there?
- For whom here is Easter a painful or negative holiday?
What about Easter is meaningful and important for/to you?
What makes it painful or negative?
Easter was a big deal for me growing up, heightened by lent, those 40 days of self-examination and self-sacrifice beforehand symbolizing the 40 years the Israelites “wandered” in the desert seeking “home” after finally gaining freedom from their long enslavement.
In the Catholic Church of my youth, Lent was stark and dark and deep, with the church and the priests wearing purple, lots of extra and very somber services and prayers, the Alleluia never once uttered or sung at all during lent, as it would be in every mass throughout the rest of the year.
The final week – Holy Week – brought the difficult and painful stories of Jesus’ final meal, betrayal, crucifixion, and death on Good Friday. So when Easter came, with brightness and color, aliveness, joy, exuberance and “Alleluia”, it was a huge, complete, visceral transformation inside and out, celebrating the central Christian belief: the miracle of Jesus’ resurrection…and our eventual own.
Plus, we got Easter baskets, with chocolate and other goodies, which is how one knows, as a child, that this is important.
But what is a Unitarian Universalist, and a Unitarian Universalist community with many different beliefs among us, to do with Easter?
Well, here’s the blessing and the challenge: it depends upon who you are, and who we are with each other.
Some years we celebrate the equinox and spring and the rhythms of the earth that return greenness and life to once frozen and barren looking landscapes.
Some years we look for a UU take on the Christian Easter story – as Sophia did, in part, in her beautiful blessing.
Often, we focus on what within us is wanting to be born or resurrected, or on what in us is entombed.
Some years we don’t give Easter much attention at all.
These are all, possibilities.
Since our tradition leaves the discernment of religious beliefs and truths in each person’s heart and mind, none of us can speak for all of us on such things.
As background, it may be helpful to know that both Unitarianism and Universalism began rooted in Bible-centered Christianity, but that our increasingly progressive ancestors found in the Bible itself reasons and support for questioning the Bible.
When he spelled out the scandalous perspectives of Unitarian religious liberals early in the 1800s, William Ellery Channing, for example, quoted First Thessalonians, “prove all things; hold fast that which is good” – which he presented to mean that you don’t have to hold to everything in the bible, only that which one discerned as good, which gradually allowed Unitarians to hang on to less and less of the Bible, most, eventually, not holding onto the Bible at all.
Around the same time, the Universalists, who did not believe in Hell, crafted a profession of faith claiming that Holy Scripture . . . “contain[s] A revelation of the character of God, and of the duty, interest and final destination of [human]kind.” There’s a subtle but important detail in there to notice: that they said Scripture contains A revelation, not THE revelation.
In other words, both traditions opened the door to a more open understanding of the bible and to finding wisdom and truth in other places. And then the transcendentalists among our ancestors immediately pushed the door wide open, looking to religious texts from Hindu and Buddhist and other religious traditions, to their personal experiences in nature, to their own intuition, to science – leading most in our tradition, eventually, to understand the Bible as a very human text, and Jesus as a great teacher, but not any more divine than the rest of us, and led most of our ancestors to interpret the story of Jesus’ resurrection as a story not about his physical resurrection, but about the way his ideas and message lived on in the hearts and lives of his followers.
So, as Unitarian Universalists, we could go any number of directions on an Easter morning, including not Easter. Given the moment, and the range of who we are, this year I am drawn to follow the thread of Randall Thompson’s experience of writing an Alleluia in 1940 while the sounds of motorcycles roaring down the streets are signaling to him what he thought might be the end of civilization as he knew it. As he asked, in telling his story, “Why any Alleluia at all, then?”
There is a much more famous Hallelujah, whose origin story 40 years later echoes Thompson’s:
[It goes like this, the 4th, the 5th, the minor fall, and the major lift, the baffled king composing, Hallelujah… Hallelujah. Hallelujah. Hallelujah. Hallelujah]
That sounded beautiful. We’ll need to remove that segment from the video before it goes up on YouTube, so if you are watching this later, that was a snippet of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah, which in the mid 2000s, especially after it appeared in the movie Shrek, was the theme music used at the emotional peak of almost every dramatic TV series for 3 or 4 years. And for good reason. It grabs many of us.
Leonard Cohen, a Jewish man, struggled for years to write that song. Over time he composed 80 different verses trying to get the song to its essence. Cohen once explained:
“I wanted to stand with those who clearly see God’s holy broken world for what it is and still find the courage or the heart to praise it.”
Or, if it helps you to hear it differently, “I wanted to stand with those who clearly see . . .[the] broken world for what it is and still find the courage or the heart to praise it.”
I’ve been thinking lately about how important and compelling the hard part of the Jesus story is for so many people I know and love – the pain and suffering part of the story. I know that it is compelling in part because people can identify with pain and suffering, they know it in their own lives and find comfort and affirmation in the message that they are not alone. This is no small thing, I know this from my own past experiences. But, it is not only that. It’s also about the experience of acknowledging the cold and broken Hallelujah in their own lives, acknowledging God’s holy broken world, seeing it all for what it is, AND finding encouragement and heart in the rest of the story, certainly supported through the rituals, to praise that broken world anyway.
Easter is an invitation every spring, to compose an “Hallelujah” – to remember and express gratitude and hope – no matter how broken things seem.
It’s an invitation to us too, no matter our personal theology or what some consider a lack of theology. As one of our UU hymns frames it, “This is the message Easter brings, that always, always, something sings.” The Easter invitation is to find the song in us – however many verses it takes to get there.
So…I invite us to experiment. I’m going to invite us to compose a spoken Hallelujah with and for each other, no matter how baffled – or hurting – we may be. Let’s see if through the quality of our thoughtfulness, the openness of our hearts, the depth of our listening, we can draw from each other’s lips an Hallelujah.
I’ll invite people to share out loud, here and on Zoom, but first a few moments to consider the question in silence, with courage and with heart:
- What is your “alleluia” this Easter morning. What is the gratitude or praise that rises in you, even as you see God’s holy broken world for what it is, even as you see the holy broken world for what it is?
- What alleluia do you find in you this morning?
- i.e. For you, for us, today – Why any alleluia at all?
[SHARING in room and via Zoom]
Thank you.
An important aspect of how I engage the world is non-verbal, parish ministry notwithstanding. I can often express myself more deeply and fully through music than I can through words.
I did compose an Alleluia a number of years ago, but not me alone. I based it on Pachelbel’s Canon in D, to which someone had set an “alleluia”, and I wove in a few words from UU Easter hymns. I invite us to sing it now, as another way of composing Hallelujah with and for each other, by bringing not our individual words, but our breath, our hearts, our voices, and our energy to create together, what none of us can create alone. Harmonies encouraged.
Toby will sing the verses, and all of us will join in the refrains.
I invite you to rise, in body or spirit, and to sing….no matter what anyone has ever said to you about your singing. Our no-fault singing policy is in effect – not only on Easter, but every Sunday.
Song Easter Alleluia by Kevin Tarsa, with Alleluia Chaconne (based on Canon in D by J. Pachelbel), Toby Thomas-Rose, soloist
Offering Sophia McKean, Worship Associate
25% of our offering this month will support Interfaith Food Ministry, whose mission is to reduce food insecurity in Western Nevada County – feeding the hungry, and helping to sustain good health and human dignity.
Your giving is vital to our ability to sustain the work of our community. Thank you for your generosity. See the slide for various ways to give.
Offertory instrumental of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah”
Dedication Sophia McKean
Thank you
Announcements
Closing Words
Closing Song Easter Alleluia, reprise of chorus
Community Benediction / Extinguishing of the Chalice
Carry the flame of peace and love until we meet again.
Music for Going Forth