“One Egg at a Time”
Isaiah 65:17-25, Luke 24:1-12
Rev. Dr. Deborah L. Clark
April 17, 2022
Christ is risen! The tomb is empty! The cross is flowering! Hope is alive! Love is more powerful than hatred and greed, fear and even death!
I love that we make bold proclamations on Easter, punctuated by exclamation points and shouts of Alleluia. Some years these bold proclamations roll off my tongue—joyous affirmations of new life I see springing up around us. Other years the words get stuck in my throat.
This year is one of those other years. It’s the final proclamation in my series—my favorite one—that is stuck. Love is more powerful than hatred and greed, fear and even death. I don’t want it to be stuck. I want to shout it out, for it is at the heart of why I am Christian.
This year, though, the words fall flat. Look at what is happening in our world, especially in Ukraine. Look at the power of hatred and greed to destroy lives and communities. Look at our human capacity for brutality. Look at the layers upon layers of grief and hate building up with every home destroyed and every beloved life taken.
The response of people all over the world—sunflowers and fundraisers, a flood of volunteers—brings a glimmer of hope. That glimmer is clouded by our belated awareness that we have not responded with the same outrage and generosity when Syrian cities were being destroyed, when Haitians were begging for a safe place to live. Even our efforts to ease suffering reveal our narrow minds.
Our reading from the prophet Isaiah offers a glorious vision of a new heaven and a new earth, a promise that God will create Jerusalem as a joy. Not a vision of street paved with gold, just children who live without fear and elders who are honored, just houses where regular people can come home and vineyards where they can grow enough to feed their families. What a jarring contrast to what we see in Kyiv and Mariupol, in Brooklyn and Boston and even Framingham.
Isaiah’s words beg the question—how is God going to do this? Will God break in with a dramatic show of force and fix it? For me, the story of our faith—Jesus’ life, death and resurrection– answers that question. No. God will not come in force to fix us; God has come—does come—with the power of love to transform us. In the face of the persistence and intensity of the power of hate, what does it mean to trust that love is more powerful?
Maybe it’s good that my favorite proclamation doesn’t roll off my tongue easily this year. If it did, it would sound naïve—and the last thing we need from the church is naivete. I wonder if it would also sound offensive to those in the midst of the struggle–dis-counting the depth of their suffering and grief. And if my favorite words led us to minimize the power of hate, the words would be downright dangerous.
It’s good that this proclamation doesn’t roll of my tongue easily this year. And it is more important than ever to proclaim it. It is more important than ever to live this proclamation into being.
Aware that my distress comes from my safe vantage point, I began to wonder this week how Christians in Ukraine are finding hope this Easter. I looked on the internet for proclamations from Ukrainian church leaders. I’m sure they are there, but I didn’t find them. Instead of finding a Ukrainian proclamation of hope, I found a Ukrainian practice that brings hope. Pysanky—the making of Ukrainian Easter eggs.
This ancient practice has survived centuries of struggle, including the repression of religious and cultural art during Stalin’s regime. Passed down from generation to generation, it mostly happens around kitchen tables and in church halls. Pysanky pre-dates Christianity in Ukraine. It was initially a celebration of the coming of spring and an expression of hope for fertility, longevity and good fortune. When Christianity came in the 10th century, Christian symbols began to appear on the eggs. Families—especially women and girls—would make dozens and dozens of these eggs, each with intricate, highly symbolic designs, and bring them to Easter vigil to give away.
I wonder if Pysanky are being made this spring in factories in Lviv that have been converted into shelters. I wonder if people sheltering in subways in cities under siege have managed to acquire the needed supplies. I know that people all over the world, people of Ukrainian descent and people with no direct ties to Ukraine are making pysanky this year, as fundraisers, as acts of solidarity and prayer.
A recent Washington Post article featured Stephanie Cheeseman, a granddaughter of Ukrainian immigrants, who was inspired to offer Pysanky-making workshops at local churches. At each one, she tells an ancient legend, which originates with the Hutzul people of the Carpathian mountains in Western Ukraine. They believed the fate of the world depended on enough people making Pysanky. They envisioned evil as a serpent chained to a cliff. In a year when many Pysanky were made, the chains were tightened and the force of evil was restrained. If humankind didn’t bother to make the eggs, though, the chains were loosened, and evil was free to wreak havoc.
Cheeseman invites the workshop participants to understand their art as part of a larger effort to restrain the forces of evil. “I know this is just a story,” she says. “But there’s something profound there to me….We need to make as many as we can because so many people are displaced and cannot make any this year.” Cheeseman’s mother, Chris Terpak-Malin, who helps lead the workshops, adds, “Myths are myths. But I love the idea that we can keep evil at bay. If people are making eggs and their whole world is this one little, fragile egg, it’s almost existential. You realize that there is so much more to the world than you, and maybe we can influence it a little bit.”
This legend is so evocative of our world today, when it seems as though the chains holding back forces of hate and brutality have been loosened, unleashing destruction. What a bold, counter-intuitive and deeply wise proposition that ordinary people painstakingly creating easily breakable works of art can restrain the power of evil.
In the end, it’s not the metaphor I would choose. I cling to hope that forces of destruction can actually be transformed, not just restrained. Still, the legend speaks profound truth and raises profound questions. What is it about these eggs that led ancient peoples to attribute such power to making them?
I remembered that my friend and colleague Michelle Bagby-Allen had recently shown me photos of Pysanky she has created over the years. I called her on Thursday and asked her about them.
Michelle described a low-tech, highly meditative process that requires a candle, a small bowl of beeswax, a stylus pen called a kyska, and a carefully thought-out plan for which symbols you will write. You warm the tip of the kyska in the candle flame, dipp it in the beeswax and use it to write the part of the symbols you want to appear as white on the egg. Then you dip the egg in a light-colored dye—maybe yellow. When it has dried, you repeat the process, this time writing the parts of the symbols you want to appear yellow, then dying the egg in a slightly darker color. The process continues, as you write with beeswax and dye the egg over and over until your design is complete.
At this point, Michelle says, the egg looks ugly—dark, dull, with crisscrosses of beeswax. Its beauty is revealed only as you hold it up to the candle flame. When the beeswax is softened by the flame’s heat, you wipe it off to reveal brilliant colors and inspiring symbols of hope.
When the egg is completed, there are two choices. You can leave it intact. It will stink for a while, Michelle said, and then the whites will evaporate and the yolk will harden. A reminder that sometimes our efforts at change are messy and smelly before they come to fruition.
Or you can poke a hole in both ends and gently blow the insides out. Even when this is done with great care, sometimes a beautiful egg explodes in the blowing process. “You have to be okay with that,” Michelle says. She remembers the words of her first pysanky teacher: “Don’t cling too tightly to your egg.” Our efforts to create beauty remind us how fragile life truly is.
Michelle hadn’t heard the legend of the chained serpent. When I told her, she mused about how this practice helps us choose not to give power to the destructive, fear-filled parts of ourselves. The deliberate nature of the art moves us beyond our reactive instincts. The symbols remind us of the promise of new life. The ugliness of the half-completed egg challenges us to trust that inner beauty emerges in the light of God’s love. The fragile shell awakens us to beauty in our vulnerability. The communal nature of the art reminds us that we are not alone and that we must care for each other.
“It is such an art of love and hope,” Michelle said. I asked if she had made any this year; she said no. The next day, while I was on my post-Good Friday service bike ride, she texted me a photo of a pysanky she had just created. “Today’s egg,” she wrote. “Friday with hope for Sunday.” The design centers on a cross, with flowers symbolizing new life and growth. Branches emerge from the center of the cross, a prayer for long life and health. A ladder design encircles the egg, representing connection to God through prayer. Such an art of love and hope.
I don’t believe evil is a vicious creature chained to a cliff. I believe what we call evil is human brokenness and fear twisted by our desire for power and hardened until it takes on a life of its own. I don’t believe that a set number of eggs will restrain these forces of destruction. I do believe that our actions matter, that we are part of something larger than ourselves. I believe that when we slow down, we touch a sacred spirit deep within that enables us to participate in creating beauty and hope. I believe that when we acknowledge the fragile nature of life, we treat ourselves and one another with tenderness. I believe the symbols that point us to the stories of our faith give us strength to act with love and courage. I believe that when we come together, our smallest efforts become part of something greater—and that something is God’s love. I believe that love is more powerful than a chained beast or a brutal dictator, more powerful than racism and greed, more powerful than grief and despair.
My week of reading and hearing about this ancient practice of pysanky has unstuck my favorite proclamation from my throat. And so, with boldness, I proclaim:
Christ is risen. Hope is alive. Love is more powerful than hatred and greed, fear and even death.
I have proclaimed it with my voice. Let us live it, one egg at a time, creating love and beauty and hope together in whatever ways we can. Amen.