All Ye Faithful

a sermon preached by Rev. Khleber M. Van Zandt V at First Unitarian Church of Alton, Illinois, December 12, 2010

The Christmas story:  Some of us grew up with it, know it backwards and forwards, and enjoy hearing it again and again.  Some of us didn’t hear it much when we were growing up, didn’t listen when it was told, and still try to turn it off every time it comes around again.  But it does come around again, like all the cycles of life, and since we’re here together, seeking something, searching for truth and meaning, let’s see if we can learn something.

The Christmas story, of course, is an amalgam of two very separate legends, one from the gospel of Matthew and the other from the gospel of Luke.  But those legends get conflated so often that’s it’s worth talking as if they are one for a moment. 

At its simplest, the composite Christmas story is about one birth that can be touching and sweet, a birth story about love and compassion and care.  At its more complicated, though, it concerns the entirety of the human condition, and can be chock full of the evils of exclusion, shame, hatred, division, and fear.

Taken simply, there’s the traditional little family, Mary and Joseph, on a quick trip back to the ancestral homeland to participate in the census, the newborn child come into the world quite miraculously, a little tiny babe wrapped in swaddling clothes and laid in a warm manger amidst the cleanest of cattle and the best-smelling of sheep.  A star lighting the night, showing the way, keeping at bay the ominous darkness of the surrounding hills and the troubling future that waits just beyond the horizon.

At its more complicated, the story eats at those who have listened closely.  Before the saga even begins, there’s a question nagging at the man’s mind - and hence in all of ours - concerning the true parenthood of the child.  The text says the Holy Spirit came to Mary, in other words, that God is somehow the baby daddy.  “Yeah, we’ve read the story,” some of us want to say, “but come on, you can tell us - who’s the real biological papa?” 

Questions:  there’s that innkeeper who turns the family away on a cold night:  is the inn really so full, or do the young road-weary parents just look like the wrong class of people for this part of town?  You can’t be too careful these days, now or then.

Questions:  The low-rent shepherds that show up at the door to the stable:  what are they doing here?  Don’t they have work to do?  What do they want from us?  Do they look like they might want to hurt the baby?  And what’s all this about choirs of angels up in the night sky?  Does anybody really believe those cockamamie fables?

Questions:  Those three fancy foreigners who come bearing gifts:  what do you suppose they’re selling?  Are they government agents?  Are they privateers looking to get some information they can sell to the authorities?  What did they see that brought them out on a night like tonight?  How come they can see things in the stars that others cannot?

All these questions, long before we get to the really horrible part of the story, the part where Herod sends soldiers to kill all the children in and around Bethlehem.  That’s not the kind of PG movie we’d want to show our little kids - God help them, they’ll have to see and hear about such things soon enough.

 

Those are but a few of the questions that arise if you read the texts as they have come down to us today.  If you take the time to study a little deeper, though, and to read what scholars have written the past three centuries or so, other questions begin to materialize. 

There’s the question of the trip back to Bethlehem:  scholars say there would have been no reason for the family to embark on such a journey.  There is no census mentioned in any of the historical documents of the period, and even if there had been, a census would’ve counted the family and collected taxes from them right where they lived, which was most likely not in Bethlehem but in the town of Nazareth, from which Jesus is said to have come to public attention some thirty years later.

There’s the question of the historical existence of the character of Joseph, the ostensible father figure in the story.  Scholars say that in Jewish tradition, a young woman who was found to be with child without benefit of marriage would have been ostracized from the community and driven away immediately.  Further, any child whose paternity was unknown or questionable would have been a pariah as well.  There is speculation that such a child, growing up outside of the usual social safety net, might have become a wandering peasant handyman like Jesus appeared to be in his adult years.

And then there’s the question of why the birth narratives only appear in two of the canonical gospels:  neither the gospel of Mark nor the gospel of John thinks it important to talk about the supposedly miracle-laden birth of Jesus;  maybe they couldn’t verify any birth legend enough to support using it in their books.  The gospels that do include their own birth narratives - Matthew and Luke - are so vastly different in their core plot elements that it’s hard to imagine how we can make one story out of the two.  But we do.

All this brings into question the whole of the Christmas story - or, better said, the whole of the Christmas stories:  If all of this is a legend, if nobody went to Bethlehem, if there was no Joseph, if there were no choirs of angels and no wise men and no star, then why are we celebrating? 

 

I’ll tell you why I’m celebrating.  It’s not because I believe that Jesus was born in Bethlehem or that Joseph actually existed or that angels sang in the sky or that wise travelers brought gifts or that a star physically left its position in the heavens and came to rest over a stable for one night.  Because I don’t believe any of those things, at least not in a scientific, reasonable, rational sort of a way. 

My faith is not in the fact that either story ever happened the way those gospel writers say it happened, because I don’t think it did.  My faith is not in the details of the stories;  rather, my faith is in the goodness, the truth, and the beauty that is pointed to and made manifest by the Christmas story itself.  My faith is in the fact that the story is real - real in this way:  that the Christmas story continues to happen, down through the ages, time and time again, in our lives and in the lives of others.  Not that it happened long ago at one time, in one place, to one family;  but that it’s liable to happen anytime, anywhere, to anybody.  I think the Christmas story happens all the time, everywhere, to anybody who lets it.

 

All this is not to say that I think the Christmas story is a nice, sweet, Hallmark-card slice of saccharine life and that nothing bad ever happens.  It’s not hard, as I said, to find within the story itself examples of evil:  of exclusion, shame, hatred, division, and fear (murder).  Bad things happen in this narrative:  rulers behave badly;  entire social systems are broken;  children suffer, bearing the brunt of both adult lunacy and divine injustice.  Horrible things, utter darkness threatens ominously just beyond the horizon.

Bad things happen in the story;  bad things happen in real life.  There are hard things we must face and trials we must endure and periods of darkness we must live within and hopefully live through.  When I was little, the whole Christmas season seemed like a postcard, like a Thomas Kincaid painting where all the snow is pretty and all the houses are warm and all the lights glow.  Now that I’m older, Christmas too often seems like the time when the pretty snow turns into a dirty slush.  Christmas these days seems like the time when more and more people end up homeless or without heat and lights because they can’t pay their utility bills.  Christmas around here is the time when many in our own congregation live with serious illnesses.  This Christmas is the time when a neighbor and friend of many of us here was murdered in her home. 

Christmas can be a hard time for many, a dark time of confusion and fear when the world we like to think is here to support us and offer us only beauty and hope turns cold and dangerous.  And the ground collapses from beneath our feet, we go into emotional free-fall, and we don’t know how to respond.  How do you think about the fact that someone you know was murdered?  How do you say enough about how you feel about such an awful thing?  How can you possibly live through such a shattering event?

Maybe there’s something about the Christmas story that will help with these questions. 

Most of Christian theology, most of the Christian witness comes through and out of the Jewish experience and theology and witness before it.  But one piece of Christian mythology comes directly out of the ancient Greek way of seeing the world and thinking about the divine.  The Christian birth legends are about the earthly incarnation of the holy;  they’re about one way the divine is incarnated, is embodied, is placed in a body and made real and given substance. 

For Jews, God was sitting out there somewhere, far away in a distant heaven.  The Greeks thought the gods were closer and more accessible.  The Christian legends bring the Holy closer still.  They are about God being right here.  They are about the divine born as a human being, about the divine living right here on earth, about the divine walking right here among us.  And maybe that helps, because I think one of the things we’re most concerned about is having to walk through this world alone.  And the more horrible things happen, the more alone we can feel.  What these birth legends say is, “The Holy is closer than you think.  Look, listen.  A child is born.  New possibility has arrived.”

With all the things about the Christmas story that I don’t get, there is one thing that I do understand.  If the myth about Jesus being born in a one-of-a-kind miraculous fashion doesn’t speak to me, I can feel in my bones what Sophia Lyon Fahs means when she says, “Each night a child is born is a holy night”:

“Each night a child is born is a holy night, a time for singing, a time for wondering.  Each night a child is born is a holy night.” 

The miracle is not that the Christmas story happened once upon a time, long ago, at one time, in one place, to one family.  The miracle is that the Christmas story continues to happen, and will, down through the ages, time and time again, in our lives and in the lives of others.  It’s liable to happen anytime, anywhere, to anybody.  I think it happens all the time, everywhere, to anybody who lets it. 

I think the answer that comes when the world turns cold and dangerous, when the ground collapses beneath your feet, when awful things happen and you go into emotional free-fall, that answer may be found around the corner and down the hallway, in our RE classrooms, in the eyes of the children, in their way of seeing the world anew each day.  It may be found in the pew next to you, in the word of encouragement from a fellow church member, in the hug of support offered by a friend.  It may be found within your own heart, in the word or hug you offer, in the way you’re there with and for others. 

That is my faith, and maybe it’s yours:  that something new happens when we allow ourselves to be transported by the sights and sounds of the season, that something new happens when we allow ourselves to be with one another.  Whether we’re led to the Bethlehem of our dreams by a star or by the singing of angels, by the counsel of wise travelers or by the excitement of a child, Christmas happens, life springs forth, new possibility is born.

So may it be.



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