First Unitarian Universalist Church of New Orleans
Easter Sunday, April 4, 2010
With eggs as one of the oldest and most enduring symbols of Easter, it is no surprise that a chicken stars as the hero of our story this morning about “Petook the Rooster.” Representing rebirth in spring, eggs predate both the Jewish celebration of Passover (where a boiled egg is prominent on the Seder plate) and the Christian festival of Easter (whose name is derived from the Pagan goddess Eostre). So it’s logical that a chicken would appear in an Easter story – but why a rooster?
You probably already know that there’s no such thing as a “chicken” in nature. The farmyard birds we know as chickens are thought to descend from a wild bird once native to Asia. Scientists speculate that this bird was first tamed and kept by people about 5,000 years ago. Through wars and trades, chickens then migrated from India and Asia to Persia (now Iran), from there to Greece and Rome, and from Rome to Europe. The oldest known picture of domesticated chickens, looking a lot like the rooster on the front of our Order of Service, is found on pottery dating from the 7th century Before the Common Era (BCE). So for about 5,000 years now, everyone living near a farm has been woken up at the crack of dawn by the LOUD crow of a rooster, so “cockcrow” has become another word for sunrise.
Because of this, Pagan religions use the rooster as a symbol for the sun god. And since each sunrise and new day is a new beginning, roosters also became symbols of creation, of starting anew. There are even pictures in some places of ancient gods having a rooster’s head.
Just as over time many other Pagan symbols were adopted into Christianity, so did the rooster. With Jesus being thought the Son (s-o-n) God, it was natural for the rooster to be associated with him as the rooster had been earlier with Sun (s-u-n) Gods. In Medieval art, Christian images of the cock abound. In addition to the Holy Week story of Peter’s 3-time denial “before the cock crowed”, other stories grew up about roosters’ crowing being the first to announce both Jesus’s birth and his resurrection.
The connection between Jesus and roosters was so strong in the Middle Ages that the earliest morning church services were called in Latin gallicanti, literally, "cock singing." (Galli in Greek and gallus in Latin are the scientific names for the genus of chickens, derived from the word for the castrated priests of an old Pagan goddess – which may refer to the fact that most barnyard roosters are castrated so that we might have chicken eggs for breakfast.)
Those early morning services often had special hymns that equated the Risen Christ with the voice of a rooster, as in this Medieval song:
The bird, the messenger of dawn,
Sings out the light is near,
And Christ, the rouser of our minds,
Now calls us back to life.
He shouts: “Take up your beds,
You sick, you sleepy, lazy ones;
And chastely, rightly, soberly,
Keep watch, for I am near.”
Roosters and chicken eggs are part of spring, and part of Easter – and they are also part of Passover and the Pagan spring holy days. Easter, like Christmas, is an intersection of the oldest Pagan religions, Judaism, and Christianity, what one UU minister has called “the crosstalk between the rampant reason of my self and the fractured ghosts of ancient legendry.” That crosstalk, that inner discussion of the way we feel when the seasons change, when spring finally comes after a long cold winter; the ancient, unremembered Pagan myths and stories and symbols, and the cultural overlays of the Jewish and Christian traditions is fascinating, enlightening, and enriching – when we care to listen.
When the rooster lets loose and greets the rise of the sun with his cry, everything and everyone within earshot is awakened. The old stories of the rooster say that not only does he wake us up, but he brings hope and courage to the faint of heart. Living as we do in a time of figurative darkness, with wars and recession, people divided by belief and race and class and gender, and fears of both natural disaster and terrorist attack, we too need to hear the loud crow of the messenger of new beginnings, the bringer of hope and light.
It is springtime, and the rooster crows, “Wake up!” Deep inside, we hear that cry and we respond. We respond to the ancient pull of the sun, and we wake up. Let this Springtime reawaken our hearts, our compassion, our connection to others. Let the call of the rooster call us to right relationship. Let us wake up to the truth that we need each other, and that we need to be of service to each other. We know these things already – we only have to wake up and live it.
WORDS FOR UU COMMUNION
One way to explain a symbol is to say it is something that helps us to see something else in a fresh way; a symbols “wakes us up” to something we’ve looked at all the time, without really seeing. The symbol of a rooster helps us realize that waking up might be more than just not being asleep.
Communion is another symbol – we eat all the time, don’t we? Two or three meals, more or less, every day, like clockwork. Even for food-conscious New Orleanians, we don’t always see how food connects us to the earth and to each other, to the unseen people who worked hard to get the food to grow, to bring it to market, to get it to our table. We can forget that food connects us to each other, and forget that millions of people in the world do not get enough food to eat. When we share a communion ritual, we wake up to the sacred possibilities in food.
Jesus shared a special last meal with his closest friends before he died, and his words and actions at that table woke his disciples up, made them see themselves and Jesus in a new light. As they ate and drank, Jesus told them, “Every time you eat this bread and drink this cup, remember me.”
We will now share communion in the tradition of our Unitarian and Universalist ancestors. It is an “open table” communion, meaning everyone who wishes to participate can do so – there is no limit by age or belief or membership. In sharing this cup and this bread, we remember Jesus of Nazareth whose words and deeds woke people up and changed the world, and we remember all the brave women and men throughout history who have woken us up, called us to responsibility, and changed the world with their love and courage.
To share in our communion, please form a double line down the center aisle. Lydia and Steven and I will serve the first people in line, saying to them, “Wake up!” After those 2 people have gotten their bread and dipped it into the grape juice, we will go to the back of the line to wait our turn, and the 2 people we served will serve the next people in line, saying again, “Wake up!” And then they will serve the next ones, and so on. In this way, we will all serve each other, and remind each other to awaken and pay attention.
