The resurrection of Jesus was and is no mistake. Neither is Passover and the liberation of the Jews from Egypt. But finding resurrection, renewal, and liberation in our own lives can be more difficult. One thing we can count on is that we make mistakes. So today we explore the renewal, resurrection, and liberation to be found in making mistakes.
Whoops, Resurrection:
Finding Renewal in Making Mistakes
Rev. Joe Cleveland
April 9, 2023
Mistakes are the source of life as we know it.
I am excited for spring to be here. A group of people were in the room downstairs named after Thomas Starr King. We had just finished our meeting and we were getting up from the tables and putting things away and one of us happened to glad up and look through one of the little windows and noticed a few bright yellow flowers — some forsythia that grows on the Rock Street side of meetinghouse had started to bloom.
Flowers are one of the beautiful signs of spring returning. I got an early taste of some spring flowers when I visited my brother’s family and my mother in February just out side of San Diego. We took a day trip out to the Anza-Borrego Desert. Some of you may have heard of a phenomenon called a ‘super bloom’ that happens out in the desert sometimes? This was not that. But there were some desert flowers blooming out there. White and red and all kinds of purple. My Dad loved taking pictures of flowers. He’d get right in close with special lenses and stuff. Phlox and bellwort and trillium and shooting star and spring beauty and bluebells.
Think of your favorite flower. There are so many different kinds of flowers because of the ability to make mistakes. The physician and writer Lewis Thomas points out that if it had been up to humans, we never would have done it. The basis of all living things is the DNA molecule.
… [If] our kind of mind had been confronted with the problem of designing a similar replicating molecule, starting from scratch, we’d never have succeeded. We would have made one fatal mistake: our molecule would have been perfect. Given enough time, we would have figured out how to do this, nucleotides, enzymes, and all, to make flawless, exact copies, but it would never have occurred to us, thinking as we do, that the thing had to be able to make errors.
There there isn’t just one kind of flower, but flower after flower on and on, is due to copying errors. Replicating itself, DNA will make mistakes at least occasionally. So, thanks to mistake upon mistake and error upon error, we have flowers, dogs, and Vivaldi.
If you didn’t grow up going to Easter vigil services, you might not know that one of the bits of scripture that gets read is the very beginning: “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth …” (Genesis 1.1). Part of observing Easter is paying attention to the story of creation. This is the creation story where God is repeatedly stopping to observe that everything is good. Easter forces us to acknowledge death, which means that Easter is about understanding life and the bigger cycle of capital ‘L’ Life which is a cycle of living and dying, creation and decay—which is just the prelude to more creation. And creation and creativity happens only because mistakes are possible.
What I’m trying to come to terms with is a simple but constantly perplexing puzzle: Why doesn’t everything in the world go the way I think it should?
I am usually pretty convinced that everything should go the way I think it should and that people should understand things the way that I understand them. How I understand reality is how reality is. Don’t you agree? Or, perhaps you spend most of your time believing that things should go the way you think they should? Huh. I don’t know…
The writer and wrongologist Kathryn Schulz wants us to think about what it feels like to be wrong, to make a mistake. So, ok. How does it feel to be wrong? Uncomfortable. Embarrassing. Great. But Schulz would point out that we’re not quite answering the question. That’s not how it feels to be wrong. That’s how it feels to realize that you are in the wrong. That moment just before, what’s that like? Schulz refers to the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote cartoons. The coyote chases the bird around, and sooner or later, the road runner runs right off a cliff. And the coyote runs right after it, legs working like mad, even though their feet ain’t touching the ground anymore. Finally, the coyote realizes they’ve made a mistake, looks down, and … Here’s what it feels like to be wrong: “it feels like being right.”
This can cause some problems. When you think you’re right, “It means that you think that your beliefs just perfectly reflect reality,” says Schulz. “When you feel that way, you’ve got a problem to solve, which is, how are you going to explain all of those people who disagree with you?” Schulz says there are three ways we explain this.
First, we just assume they are ignorant. They just don’t have the information. When we see that, no, they at least have access to that information, they know it’s out there, but they still don’t see things the way I do, so—second explanation—they must just be an idiot. Or, if ignorance or idiocy doesn’t explain it then it must be—third explanation—they are evil, malevolent.
There is ignorance, idiocy, and evil in people in the world. That’s real. And, it might be best to hold on to that idea pretty loosely, because categorizing people this way? It leads to us treating people pretty badly.
And this is the second way making mistakes is something to learn from the Easter story. Those people who are wrong, evil? We don’t tend to think of them as people, really, and we think the solution is to just eliminate them. And that’s what’s going on in the Easter Passion story of Jesus. The state’s power, with the consent of the people, is brought down on Jesus, this guy who’s been challenging especially those in power to understand the world differently—understand it from the perspective of those who do not have power. But that challenged the sense of right-ness and authority and entitlement of those for whom the state is working just fine, thank you. Solution? Punish him. Get rid of him. He is not a real person like us anyway. He is less than and as long as we’re being punishing anyway, let’s just execute him. The anthropologist Rene Girard believes this is one main way that human societies create themselves: They identify a scapegoat. They say all the mistakes belong to the scapegoat and a society is formed through people uniting to point their fingers at the scapegoat and sanction violence against them.
The wrench that the Jesus crucifixion story throws in is this is built on a growing recognition in the Hebrew Bible scriptures that the scapegoats are actually innocent victims. The Easter Passion story builds on that. Throughout the Easter Passion story, again and again, it’s pointed out that Jesus is innocent. Similar to the way “and God saw that it was good” is a refrain in the creation story, ‘Jesus is innocent’ is a refrain in the Easter story. In order for this way of forming a society to really work, the scapegoat can’t turn out to be innocent person, someone who suffers just as they suffer. An innocent victim who is experiencing suffering because of them. They are making a big mistake.
Being able to make that shift means being able to say, I’ve had it wrong.
The annoying thing that’s been happening this past week is the supposedly evangelical supposed Christians trying to put the most recent former President in the Jesus role. But the refrain in that story isn’t innocence. The charges aren’t trumped up; the former President is. He is no innocent, and this is no crucifixion! The horrifying way the scapegoating is happening now is all the anti-transgender legislation. The horrifying way the scapegoating reflex is happening is the way a person reportedly leaned out of a car window as they were passing people three blocks from here on the corner of Broadway and Lake St. a week ago Friday, hollering that the conservatives are going to get rid of all the gays.
We love to feel that we have the answers. A local church sent out a mailer a couple weeks ago, enticing people to come to their Easter service today. The words in all capital letters on the mailer: HOPE. PEACE. ANSWERS.
Other people are people. Not everyone sees the world the way I do, thank goodness. The good creation grows through the capacity for error, through the humility that growth looks like you being different from me. Kathryn Schulz says,
[If] you really want to rediscover wonder, you need to step outside of that tiny, terrified space of rightness and look around at each other and look out at the vastness and complexity and mystery of the universe and be able to say, “Wow, I don’t know. Maybe I’m wrong.”
Maybe instead of the answer being what’s next, maybe it’s a question.
The oldest manuscripts of the oldest Gospel—the Gospel of Mark, the Gospel closest to Jesus in time—those manuscripts don’t end with the answer of Jesus risen again. The women heading to the tomb have realized on the way that they forgot to recruit some volunteers for rolling away the stone, so they wonder what are they going to do? They turn the corner and they see the tomb is opened, the stone has been rolled back. They go in and Jesus’s body isn’t there. Instead there’s some different guy there telling them that they should just go ahead with their plans to head for the town of Galilee because Jesus has gone on ahead. This is all a bit much, understandably, and the women flee the scene, scared and a bit freaked out, thinking they are just going to keep quiet about this and not talk to anyone. The End.
Maybe the way to live into the Easter Sunday world is not to think we know the answer to what’s going to happen, not to believe that I have it right and shut my ears to anything else. Instead, maybe there’s a blank page here. Or, maybe there’s an ink smudge or something. Maybe I’ll just draw something. And let’s just do this together and when something happens that seems to be a mistake, instead of looking to punish whoever we think did it, we just look for the possibilities of what might be the next thing we could do now. Let’s look for what could be. Lewis Thomas says:
If we were not provided with the knack of being wrong, we could never get anything useful done.
Kathryn Schulz says this:
The miracle of your mind isn’t that you can see the world as it is. It’s that you can see the world as it isn’t.
Rev. Joe says you are the result of countless copying errors on top of countless copying errors and you are beautiful, every ink smudge and seemingly out-of-proportion bit of you. Let’s live into a new day of possibility by encountering what we might have called a mistake as instead an opportunity for creativity and renewal.
So it is. So may it be.
Resources:
Lewis Thomas. “The Wonderful Mistake.” The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher. Penguin Books, 1995 (1979). Kobo ebook.
Kathryn Schulz. “On Being Wrong.” TED. March 2011. https://www.ted.com/talks/kathryn_schulz_on_being_wrong
Lewis Thomas. “To Err Is Human.” The Medusa and the Snail.
Topics: Easter, Perfectionism, Renewal, Resurrection