a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Parish Church in Portland, Maine
Sunday December 23rd, 2007
I have to confess, I always cry during the final scene of Frank Capra's classic Christmas film "It's a Wonderful Life." In fact, I've done it so often now, I'm beginning to feel a little like Pavlov's Dog: Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed embrace, and tears begin to form in the corners of my eyes. It's not as if I don't know what's coming; I must have seen the movie dozens, perhaps even hundreds, of times. But it still hasn't lost its power to affect me; I still turn on the waterworks every time it airs.
For those of you who are still not familiar with the story, in the movie Jimmy Stewart plays a character named George Bailey, the good-hearted, self-sacrificing President of the Bailey Building and Loan in the sleepy little town of Bedford Falls. The only other financial institution in town is a bank owned by a greedy, unethical man named Potter, who would like nothing more than to put the Building and Loan out of business. Then one Christmas, in the excitement of season, George's absent-minded Uncle Billy misplaces an $8000 bank deposit. Potter finds it, but keeps it for himself, knowing that the Building and Loan is about to be audited. George discovers the shortfall on Christmas eve, and, anticipating scandal and ruin, contemplates suicide in the belief that his life insurance policy makes him worth more dead than alive.
So Clarence Oddbody, a rather bumbling Angel Second Class, is sent to earth to earn his wings by showing Jimmy Stewart what life would have been like in the town of "Pottersville" had George Bailey never been born. The climactic final scene, the one that always brings tears to my eyes, is when the citizens of Bedford Falls rise up in support of George, pledging their personal savings in order to make up the $8000 deficit. And maybe it is a corny story: honesty and virtue triumph over greed and opportunism, Clarence earns his wings, and everyone in Bedford Falls lives happily ever after, with the possible exception of Potter the banker. But corny or not, it still makes me cry, every time; in fact, sometimes just thinking about it is enough to start me sniffling with sentimentality.
A cynical Divinity School classmate of mine once insinuated that the real reason I always cry at the end of "It's a Wonderful Life" is because I wish that my Church Annual Budget Drives would be so serendipitously successful. I thought that rather a cheap shot, actually; there I was, all choked up, daubing my red eyes with my shirt sleeve, while my classmate sat comfortably in an overstuffed chair, swilling egg nog and impugning my sincerity. And I honestly don't know why "It's a Wonderful Life" always effects me the way it does. I often cry at the end of movies -- the first time I see them -- but I no longer weep at the end of "Terms of Endearment," and it’s all I can do now to keep from snickering out loud when Ali McGraw dies at the end of "Love Story."
But "It’s a Wonderful Life" gets me every time. So maybe it is just the corny plot. Because I want very much to believe that virtue triumphs over greed, that honesty triumphs over opportunism; that the life of one truly good-hearted, self-sacrificing individual human being really does make a difference in the world, and is appreciated by those who have benefited from that difference. And maybe I also want to become a little bit more like George Bailey myself, want to be able to look back at it all someday and say "It truly was a Wonderful Life!"
The plain fact of the matter though, is that over the years a lot of the “Joy” has started to evaporate out of Christmas for me. Oh, I'm sure the holiday will have its moments --Christmas generally surprises me that way at some point in the season-- but on the whole, to my way of thinking, the best thing about this Christmas will be December 26th, when the hassle of the holiday will finally over and there are 364 days before I have to go through it again.
My problem is not so much with the holiday itself, as it is with the expectations we set for it. Every year I start out with such good intentions, and every year it seems as though I can’t get my Christmas letter finished on time, or I'm still shopping at the very last minute, and of course I invariably end up feeling a little awkward and embarrassed about receiving presents I don't really want or need.
I generally enjoy giving gifts, but I resent trying to find something "perfect" for everyone I know; I would much rather shop thoughtfully for one or two people than worry about forgetting someone who hasn't forgotten me. I’m also not that keen on red and green; they are OK by themselves, but together they are incredibly garish colors, particularly for a necktie. Not that my personal favorites, Purple and Crimson, would look any better. But at least no one is going to be heartbroken if I decide its not the sort of thing I want to wear to church on Sunday morning.
At least I don't really fret that much any more about the "commercialization" of Christmas. Nowadays I find that sort of thing relatively easy to ignore. What I can't ignore is that nagging feeling that somehow I ought to be enjoying myself more than I am, that it's somehow all my fault if everyone around me isn't full of the holiday spirit, or that I have some sort of serious, pathological personality disorder because I'm saying "Merry Christmas" and feeling "Bah, Humbug." We do expect an awful lot out of ourselves this time of year. It's no wonder that so many of us come to feel disappointed, or even depressed, in this supposed season of Peace and Good Will.
Personally, I find far more joy in the memories of Christmas Past than I do in the anticipation of Christmas Yet to Come. Memory is thankfully a selective thing, a fact which can in itself make memory a double edged sword. Were those old fashioned Christmases really as good as we remember them to be? The more fondly we recall them, the more pressure we put upon ourselves to make this year's Christmas "the best Christmas ever" -- to out-do years of accumulated recollections in one huge orgy of holiday merriment.
Or, in some cases, to make up for them. For although it is in the nature of things to remember best the good times while gradually forgetting the bad, there are certain times that are just so terrible there's no forgetting them, no matter how hard one tries. Every one of us, I suspect, harbors memories of both kinds: the Christmas we endeavor to recreate, and the one we hope we'll never see again. And both influence our expectations of the current holiday season, the Spirit of Christmas Present.
And then, just beyond our personal holiday ghosts, lurk our cultural Christmas traditions: sleigh bells and mistletoe, stockings hung by the chimney with care, Jack Frost nipping at your nose -- things which make perfect sense if you lived here in Maine, or in rural Vermont or upstate New York a century ago, but which can be awfully confusing for a small child growing up in a condominium in Southern California. Over the Freeway and to the Beach to Grandmother's house we go? Throw another Yule log on the hibachi?
The first year I lived in Texas I received a card from my brother asking me whether I was going to decorate a cactus for Christmas. But it didn’t take me too long to appreciate the advantages of being able to draw upon Mexican Christmas traditions as well as those of Northern Europe. To my way of thinking, Piñatas filled with candy and candle-lit Luminarios lining the sidewalk beat the heck out of having to shovel a foot of snow just to get to the firewood. I love looking at pictures of a one-horse open sleigh dashing through the snow dragging a freshly-cut Christmas tree back to grandmother’s house, but it’s not really something I feel compelled to do personally.
There is, of course, a symbolic quality to tradition as well, in that tradition often points to meanings which lie beyond itself. But traditions also tend to take on meanings all their own, through repetition if nothing else, as our personal experiences intersect with it and are shaped and influenced by it. A child who has grown up with an expectation of a "White Christmas" is going to be disappointed if it doesn't snow, just as children who have always smashed a piñata won't feel as though Christmas is really Christmas unless they go home with a pocket full of candy.
But whatever traditions we chose to observe, the one thing we must never allow ourselves to forget is that this is a religious holiday we celebrate here in the shadow of the winter solstice. And the thing we celebrate is not so much the miraculous birth of a special infant some 2000 years ago, as it is the knowledge that, indeed, the life of one good-hearted, self-sacrificing, honest, virtuous, compassionate individual can make a difference, has made a difference, and still continues to make a difference, here in the here and now; and that this difference is appreciated by those of us who have benefited from it, who still believe in Peace on Earth, Goodwill to All. Call him George Bailey of Bedford Falls; call him Y'shua ben Joseph of Nazareth, the Annointed Messiah, King of Kings, the Prince of Peace, the Christ Child: call it whatever you like, It's a Wonderful Life. It's the life we celebrate at Christmas, the miracle of a new light come into the world.
A living tradition can be a bridge to our appreciation of that miracle, while empty traditions are often barriers to our ever experiencing it for ourselves. And we bring our traditions to life not through the futile attempt to resurrect the Spirit of Christmas Past, but by our openness to life in the here and now, our willingness to let honesty and virtue, good-heartedness and self-sacrifice, live within us, take vitality from our laughter, and courage from our tears.
I used to feel kind of embarrassed about always crying at the end of "It's a Wonderful Life." After all, it's not a very manly thing to do -- you'd think I was still a small child or something. Lately I find that I don't worry about that kind of thing too much, at least not among my friends. Because Christmas truly is a holiday for the child within us all. For those still young enough to believe in Santa, still naive enough to believe that the world can be saved by a child, and for all of us who want to believe in people like George Bailey, and in Clarence, an Angel Second Class, who is counting on help from the likes of us to help him earn his wings.
***
READINGS: Two Christmas poems by Ursula Askham Fanthorpe
BC : AD
This was the moment when Before
Turned into After, and the future’s
Uninvented timekeepers presented arms.
This was the moment when nothing
Happened. Only dull peace
Sprawled boringly over the earth.
This was the moment when even energetic Romans
Could find nothing better to do
Than counting heads in remote provinces.
And this was the moment
When a few farm workers and three
Members of an obscure Persian sect.
Walked haphazard by starlight straight
Into the kingdom of heaven.
What The Donkey Saw
No room in the inn, of course,
And not that much in the stable
What with the shepherds, Magi, Mary,
Joseph, the heavenly host -
Not to mention the baby
Using our manger as a cot.
You couldn’t have squeezed another cherub in
For love or money.
Still, in spite of the overcrowding,
I did my best to make them feel wanted.
I could see the baby and I
Would be going places together.
Sunday, December 23, 2007
Sunday, December 16, 2007
WHEN CHRISTMAS WAS A CRIME
a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Parish in Portland, Maine
Sunday December 16th, 2007
Early before dawn on the morning of December 26th, 1776, the Continental Army under the command of General George Washington ferried across the partially frozen Delaware river and attacked a garrison of Hessian mercenaries occupying the town of Trenton, New Jersey. Surprise was complete; most of the Germans were still sleeping off the riotous Christmas celebration they had tied on the night before. One American soldier described the battle in his diary this way: "Hessian population of Trenton at eight am: 1,408 men and 39 officers; Hessian population at nine am: zero." Over 900 of the German troops were killed or captured, at the cost of only two American lives. On the body of Colonel Ralls, the German commander, the Americans found a letter from a British loyalist warning of Washington's attack. The letter was unopened. Ralls had been a victim of his own preconceptions: no "Christian" army would launch an attack on Christmas Day!
But these were not Catholics, nor Lutherans, nor even Anglicans that the German mercenaries were up against. They were, for the most part, New England Congregationalists, inheritors of that Puritan legacy in which the celebration of Christmas was seen as a "Popish superstition," a "wanton, Bacchanalian feast," and in some jursidictions here in what was then still part of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, a criminal offense punishable by a fine of five shillings and confinement in the stocks.
These New Englanders had little care for Yule logs and Mistletoe, wassail and Carols and Christmas pudding. Their's was a tradition of "pure" Christianity, stripped of the trappings of Druidic witchcraft and Roman syncretism. When they wanted to feast, they declared a Day of Thanksgiving and ate Turkey and Cranberries. There was plenty of thanks being given on the day the captured Hessian prisoners were paraded through the streets of Philadelphia. The dwindling Patriot army had finally won an important victory, and Congress voted to allow Washington to continue his command.
Although attitudes had moderated somewhat by the time of George Washington, the underlying sentiments of 17th century Puritanism were still quite influential in Revolutionary New England. Puritan religion was based on three simple precepts: a deeply abiding sense of original sin and the total depravity of human kind; a personal awareness of the regenerative power of God's grace through His predestined election of a few unworthy souls for salvation; and a compelling notion of service and religious duty in thanks for God's gift of unconditional election. They saw themselves embarked upon an errand into the wilderness, an errand to create a "City upon a Hill," a beacon to all the world which would shine as an example of the ideal Christian community, ruled and regulated according to God's Holy Ordinances as revealed in Scripture.
They took themselves and their mission seriously, yet they were also fine scholars, who were well aware of the pagan origins of most Christmas traditions, and who believed that God would turn His back upon their community should they stray from their stern covenant into the festive merriment of the Yuletide holiday. The frivolous actions of just a few might easily bring down God's wrath upon the entire colony. Thus the magistrates were empowered to arrest and punish blasphemers, Sabbath breakers, and anyone else whose ideas or actions might endanger the stability of their perfect Christian community, including those who celebrated Christmas, whether by feasting, or abstaining from labor, or in any other way marking the occasion as something special or out of the ordinary. For the Puritans, Christmas was a day like any other day; to observe otherwise was not only to risk the wrath of God, but to place oneself in danger of criminal prosecution as well.
The Puritan attitude towards Christmas may seem a bit extreme to us today. But then, the Puritans never did have much of a reputation as a fun-loving bunch. Nowadays, while we might complain about the "commercialization" of Christmas, or the emotional stress of entertaining our friends and families, few of us give much thought to the essentially pagan origins of the holiday, nor, I suspect, would we be particularly concerned about them if we did. The evolution of an obscure 4th century Turkish Bishop, St. Nicholas, into a rotund, white bearded "jolly old elf," who dresses in red, owns a herd of flying reindeer, and lives at the North Pole raises few eyebrows; nor are we troubled by the amazing coincidence that December 25th also happens to be the birthday of the Greek God Adonis, the Egyptian God Horus, and the Iranian God Mithra, all of whom were well entrenched on the winter solstice long before a virgin gave birth to a savior in Bethlehem, and laid him in a manger wrapped in swaddling clothes.
Instead, we trim our trees and adorn our homes with holly and mistletoe much as the Celts did centuries ago; we exchange cards and brightly wrapped gifts; bake pies and cookies and cakes; we sing of miracles, of peace on earth, good will to all; and hang our stockings by the chimney with care. We tell ourselves, with a wink, that "Christmas is for Children," all the time knowing that the best parts of Christmas are really for adults, and are often completely lost upon the avaricious little monsters, who scoff at movies like "It's a Wonderful Life," write letters to "Santa" that require extra postage, ransack our closets behind our backs, and just don't seem to quite understand what the whole thing's really all about. Adults tolerate children at Christmas, I think, because we remember that we were once children ourselves. Indeed, if in any sense "Christmas is for Children," it is for the inner children who live within us still, and are now finally old enough to truly understand the message of peace, hope and innocence embodied in this season.
In my household when my kids were young, we had a tradition of only celebrating Christmas every other year. This unorthodox practice dates back to my former wife’s first divorce, and an agreement she had with her ex-husband that the kids would spend every other Christmas with him. This worked out pretty well for Margie, because she had never really been that big a “Christmas person;” she associates this time of year with a couple of very unpleasant memories: the untimely death of her mother, when Margie, was only 21, and also the death of her own second-born child from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome a few years later. So she always kind of appreciated having a built-in excuse to take it kind of easy this time of year.
But after Margie, and I were married, I think the kids both assumed that, because I was a minister, I HAD to celebrate Christmas every year. So when I announced that we would continue the tradition, at first they didn't take me seriously. But after a couple of weeks, when there wasn't any tree, and there weren't any lights, and there weren't any mysterious packages from the Mall hidden in any of our closets, they began to get a little worried. I think they'd both sorta been looking forward to really cleaning up that year, on having two Christmases, with twice the usual amount of candy, and twice the usual number of presents: a real orgy of "ripping," as they so delicately described it, with all the attendant excitement and attention. And I can understand that wish, I guess; in many ways, it's every kid's dream: a Christmas that never ends.
I don't know how many of you have ever faced this situation of sharing children with a former spouse over the holidays, but it's a fairly common thing these days, and it can be kind of tricky, both logistically and emotionally. There's a real temptation to over-react, to set yourself up in competition with the other person to see who can provide the "better" Christmas, which all too often boils down to who has the deepest pockets.
Kids know this, of course, and they play it up for all its worth: not maliciously, I think, but rather because they're not really old enough to know any better. Children have very tangible minds: they like things that they can see and touch. Money is no object with children, because they don't really understand it, although this has its advantages too; the most popular Christmas gift I ever purchased for my children was a 99 cent Nerf football, which I bought one Christmas Eve as an afterthought while browsing through the local drug store on another last-minute errand.
Yet it is this very quality we find so endearing in children which convinces me that Christmas is wasted upon them. Until one develops the capacity to appreciate the intangibles of Christmas, the holiday remains merely a celebration of consumption: shallow, superficial, and ultimately disappointing. We might as well imitate the Puritans and eliminate it all together, for it adds nothing to the quality of our lives, it simply distracts us from the things that are ultimately important.
The delighted squeal of children on Christmas morning is a transitory thing; it passes away and is soon forgotten: the adults tend to remember it far longer than the kids do. The cries of hungry children who do not have enough to eat are far more persistent, yet even when we pause long enough to hear them cry, it often seems as though there is realistically very little any one of us can hope to do in order to meet that urgent need. Perhaps, if we are conscientious, we try to do our share, and hope that with the help of others, it will be enough. But it never really is enough.
Yet it is between these two contrasting extremes that the real meaning of Christmas, the real Spirit of Christmas, can be found. It is found the story of a baby born in a stable because there was no room at the inn, born far from home, on the longest night of the year, to bring a light into the world; incarnating, if you will, the very real possibility that both greed and poverty can be transcended through the simple expedient of profound human relationship, to one another and to the divine, uniting kings and shepherds, animals and angels, in common service to a sovereign mystery, to the appearance of a new star in the sky. And perhaps it never really happened; perhaps it is nothing but a myth. But the possibility still exists, in the power of the story to help us see beyond the tangible, to reach out to the things we can not touch, and hold them firmly in our hearts all the same.
at the First Parish in Portland, Maine
Sunday December 16th, 2007
Early before dawn on the morning of December 26th, 1776, the Continental Army under the command of General George Washington ferried across the partially frozen Delaware river and attacked a garrison of Hessian mercenaries occupying the town of Trenton, New Jersey. Surprise was complete; most of the Germans were still sleeping off the riotous Christmas celebration they had tied on the night before. One American soldier described the battle in his diary this way: "Hessian population of Trenton at eight am: 1,408 men and 39 officers; Hessian population at nine am: zero." Over 900 of the German troops were killed or captured, at the cost of only two American lives. On the body of Colonel Ralls, the German commander, the Americans found a letter from a British loyalist warning of Washington's attack. The letter was unopened. Ralls had been a victim of his own preconceptions: no "Christian" army would launch an attack on Christmas Day!
But these were not Catholics, nor Lutherans, nor even Anglicans that the German mercenaries were up against. They were, for the most part, New England Congregationalists, inheritors of that Puritan legacy in which the celebration of Christmas was seen as a "Popish superstition," a "wanton, Bacchanalian feast," and in some jursidictions here in what was then still part of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, a criminal offense punishable by a fine of five shillings and confinement in the stocks.
These New Englanders had little care for Yule logs and Mistletoe, wassail and Carols and Christmas pudding. Their's was a tradition of "pure" Christianity, stripped of the trappings of Druidic witchcraft and Roman syncretism. When they wanted to feast, they declared a Day of Thanksgiving and ate Turkey and Cranberries. There was plenty of thanks being given on the day the captured Hessian prisoners were paraded through the streets of Philadelphia. The dwindling Patriot army had finally won an important victory, and Congress voted to allow Washington to continue his command.
Although attitudes had moderated somewhat by the time of George Washington, the underlying sentiments of 17th century Puritanism were still quite influential in Revolutionary New England. Puritan religion was based on three simple precepts: a deeply abiding sense of original sin and the total depravity of human kind; a personal awareness of the regenerative power of God's grace through His predestined election of a few unworthy souls for salvation; and a compelling notion of service and religious duty in thanks for God's gift of unconditional election. They saw themselves embarked upon an errand into the wilderness, an errand to create a "City upon a Hill," a beacon to all the world which would shine as an example of the ideal Christian community, ruled and regulated according to God's Holy Ordinances as revealed in Scripture.
They took themselves and their mission seriously, yet they were also fine scholars, who were well aware of the pagan origins of most Christmas traditions, and who believed that God would turn His back upon their community should they stray from their stern covenant into the festive merriment of the Yuletide holiday. The frivolous actions of just a few might easily bring down God's wrath upon the entire colony. Thus the magistrates were empowered to arrest and punish blasphemers, Sabbath breakers, and anyone else whose ideas or actions might endanger the stability of their perfect Christian community, including those who celebrated Christmas, whether by feasting, or abstaining from labor, or in any other way marking the occasion as something special or out of the ordinary. For the Puritans, Christmas was a day like any other day; to observe otherwise was not only to risk the wrath of God, but to place oneself in danger of criminal prosecution as well.
The Puritan attitude towards Christmas may seem a bit extreme to us today. But then, the Puritans never did have much of a reputation as a fun-loving bunch. Nowadays, while we might complain about the "commercialization" of Christmas, or the emotional stress of entertaining our friends and families, few of us give much thought to the essentially pagan origins of the holiday, nor, I suspect, would we be particularly concerned about them if we did. The evolution of an obscure 4th century Turkish Bishop, St. Nicholas, into a rotund, white bearded "jolly old elf," who dresses in red, owns a herd of flying reindeer, and lives at the North Pole raises few eyebrows; nor are we troubled by the amazing coincidence that December 25th also happens to be the birthday of the Greek God Adonis, the Egyptian God Horus, and the Iranian God Mithra, all of whom were well entrenched on the winter solstice long before a virgin gave birth to a savior in Bethlehem, and laid him in a manger wrapped in swaddling clothes.
Instead, we trim our trees and adorn our homes with holly and mistletoe much as the Celts did centuries ago; we exchange cards and brightly wrapped gifts; bake pies and cookies and cakes; we sing of miracles, of peace on earth, good will to all; and hang our stockings by the chimney with care. We tell ourselves, with a wink, that "Christmas is for Children," all the time knowing that the best parts of Christmas are really for adults, and are often completely lost upon the avaricious little monsters, who scoff at movies like "It's a Wonderful Life," write letters to "Santa" that require extra postage, ransack our closets behind our backs, and just don't seem to quite understand what the whole thing's really all about. Adults tolerate children at Christmas, I think, because we remember that we were once children ourselves. Indeed, if in any sense "Christmas is for Children," it is for the inner children who live within us still, and are now finally old enough to truly understand the message of peace, hope and innocence embodied in this season.
In my household when my kids were young, we had a tradition of only celebrating Christmas every other year. This unorthodox practice dates back to my former wife’s first divorce, and an agreement she had with her ex-husband that the kids would spend every other Christmas with him. This worked out pretty well for Margie, because she had never really been that big a “Christmas person;” she associates this time of year with a couple of very unpleasant memories: the untimely death of her mother, when Margie, was only 21, and also the death of her own second-born child from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome a few years later. So she always kind of appreciated having a built-in excuse to take it kind of easy this time of year.
But after Margie, and I were married, I think the kids both assumed that, because I was a minister, I HAD to celebrate Christmas every year. So when I announced that we would continue the tradition, at first they didn't take me seriously. But after a couple of weeks, when there wasn't any tree, and there weren't any lights, and there weren't any mysterious packages from the Mall hidden in any of our closets, they began to get a little worried. I think they'd both sorta been looking forward to really cleaning up that year, on having two Christmases, with twice the usual amount of candy, and twice the usual number of presents: a real orgy of "ripping," as they so delicately described it, with all the attendant excitement and attention. And I can understand that wish, I guess; in many ways, it's every kid's dream: a Christmas that never ends.
I don't know how many of you have ever faced this situation of sharing children with a former spouse over the holidays, but it's a fairly common thing these days, and it can be kind of tricky, both logistically and emotionally. There's a real temptation to over-react, to set yourself up in competition with the other person to see who can provide the "better" Christmas, which all too often boils down to who has the deepest pockets.
Kids know this, of course, and they play it up for all its worth: not maliciously, I think, but rather because they're not really old enough to know any better. Children have very tangible minds: they like things that they can see and touch. Money is no object with children, because they don't really understand it, although this has its advantages too; the most popular Christmas gift I ever purchased for my children was a 99 cent Nerf football, which I bought one Christmas Eve as an afterthought while browsing through the local drug store on another last-minute errand.
Yet it is this very quality we find so endearing in children which convinces me that Christmas is wasted upon them. Until one develops the capacity to appreciate the intangibles of Christmas, the holiday remains merely a celebration of consumption: shallow, superficial, and ultimately disappointing. We might as well imitate the Puritans and eliminate it all together, for it adds nothing to the quality of our lives, it simply distracts us from the things that are ultimately important.
The delighted squeal of children on Christmas morning is a transitory thing; it passes away and is soon forgotten: the adults tend to remember it far longer than the kids do. The cries of hungry children who do not have enough to eat are far more persistent, yet even when we pause long enough to hear them cry, it often seems as though there is realistically very little any one of us can hope to do in order to meet that urgent need. Perhaps, if we are conscientious, we try to do our share, and hope that with the help of others, it will be enough. But it never really is enough.
Yet it is between these two contrasting extremes that the real meaning of Christmas, the real Spirit of Christmas, can be found. It is found the story of a baby born in a stable because there was no room at the inn, born far from home, on the longest night of the year, to bring a light into the world; incarnating, if you will, the very real possibility that both greed and poverty can be transcended through the simple expedient of profound human relationship, to one another and to the divine, uniting kings and shepherds, animals and angels, in common service to a sovereign mystery, to the appearance of a new star in the sky. And perhaps it never really happened; perhaps it is nothing but a myth. But the possibility still exists, in the power of the story to help us see beyond the tangible, to reach out to the things we can not touch, and hold them firmly in our hearts all the same.
Sunday, December 9, 2007
THE FLAME THAT WOULDN'T DIE
a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Parish Church of Portland, Maine
Sunday December 9th, 2007
READING: 1 Maccabees 4: 34-59
***
When I was a child, growing up in a Unitarian Universalist Sunday School, I always had a lot of fun when we were given the opportunity to celebrate Hanukkah as part of our Sunday School curriculum. We lit the candles in the Menorah, we played with Dreidels, we heard the story of the lamp that burned for eight straight days, when there was only a one day supply of oil. In the predominately Catholic neighborhood where we lived, "The Feast of Lights" seemed like our Unitarian-Universalist answer to Advent — not only did it avoid a lot of problematic issues like the Virgin Birth, but it also introduced us to the whole idea of cross-cultural celebrations of the Winter Solstice: the coming of Light into the world, in the season where nights are long and darkness reigns, and it had the added advantage of eight straight days of presents. (In our house that particular tradition only lasted one year, by the way).
I always had a little trouble, though, understanding this business about the lamp that burned for eight days in the temple. After all, a one-day supply of oil is a one-day supply of oil; if the lamp burned for eight days, obviously that was an eight-day supply: someone simply must have made a mistake when they were doing the inventory. I just didn't see what all the fuss was about. Maybe there was a clever priest (or more likely, a sexton), who was somehow able to adjust the flame and stretch the supply, make the oil last longer than it should have. Or maybe they just asked around, and everybody pitched in what they had. I mean, isn’t that what people do in times of crisis?
But there was nothing particularly miraculous about that; my mom used to do that sort of thing all the time. “Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without.” You don’t have to be a native Mainer to appreciate the importance of a little old-fashioned frugality, combined with a generous helping of Yankee ingenuity. I guess I always just had a very strong humanist streak from a very early age, because it was years before I was able to understand that the flame of the Menorah was only a symbol of the real miracle. The temple had been defiled, but the faith had endured, and triumphed. This is the real miracle of the Feast of Dedication.
Let me share with you a little more of the history behind the the story of Hanukkah. In 167 BC the Selucid emperor Antiochus IV ordered the rededication of the Jewish temple in Jerusalem to the worship of Zeus. The Selucids were one of three dynasties which had emerged from the remnants of Alexander the Great's empire following his death a century and a half earlier. Based primarily in what is now Syria, the Selucids were almost constantly at war with a second post-Alexandrian dynasty, the Ptolemies, who were based in Egypt. Even in that day, there were already significant Jewish communities in both Babylonia (which was controlled by the Selucids) and Alexandria (the capital of the Ptolemies); life in the diaspora had already begun; while Judaea, the original home of the Jewish people, served as something of a strategic buffer between these two Great Powers of the ancient world, and was constantly buffeted by the ebb and flow of their political and military ambitions.
Controlled by the Ptolemies until the start of the second century BC, Judea eventually came under the hegemony of the Selucids following their decisive victory over the Ptolemies at the Battle of Banyas, which took place near the headwaters of the Jordan River. To a significant degree, this development was welcomed by many of the Jewish inhabitants of Judaea, because the Ptolemies had been great Hellenizers, which is to say they were fond of introducing Greek customs and practices into the cultures they ruled. The Jewish community in Alexandria, for example, had been deeply influenced by Greek philosophy; and it was their Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures, the Septuagint, that would eventually become a key factor in the rapid spread of Christianity among the Greek-speaking Gentiles of the Roman Empire.
Selucid rule, on the other hand, appeared to promise the practice of a more authentically Hebrew Judaism, such as existed in Babylonia. But this expectation was not to be borne out. Roman influence in the Eastern Mediterranean was growing; in order to pay for his increasingly expensive military adventures, as well as shield his empire from the threat of Rome, Antiochus IV greatly increased the level of taxation in Judaea, plundering the treasury of the temple in Jerusalem, and also cracking down on dissident Jewish groups who resented the burdens imposed by their Greek-speaking rulers, and who sought the freedom to manage their own affairs. In order to pacify the region, Antiochus IV accelerated the Hellenization of Judaea, siding with those Jews who were sympathetic to Greek ideas and culture, and doing everything within his power to eliminate the practice of Judaism as a distinctive religious faith.
This is the background of the Maccabean revolt. The Maccabees were insurgent guerrilla fighters who took to the hills in order to resist these changes. Their leader was initially a priest named Mattathias Maccabaeus, who not only refused to offer pagan sacrifice in the Jewish temple where he served, but also reportedly killed the first Jewish apostate who had attempted to do so. When Mattathias himself later died, leadership of the guerrilla army fell upon the shoulders of his oldest son, Judas Maccabaeus, who was eventually able to drive the Selucids out of the city of Jerusalem, and re-dedicate the temple there to the worship of the Hebrew God Yahweh, as we heard in the passage from the First Book of Maccabees I read earlier this morning. This is the origin of Hanukkah — the Festival of Dedication — the only major festival in Judaism not explicitly rooted in the Torah.
There are some major ironies contained within the story of Hanukkah. The Maccabean revolt was a war fought for the purpose of religious liberty — the only such revolt of its kind recorded in ancient history — yet the Maccabees themselves were hardly the religious liberals of their day. They were more akin, perhaps, to modern religious fundamentalists in their attitudes and practices; and I suppose if you were Antiochus IV, you might even have called them terrorists. Likewise, the only records of their achievements which have survived were written in Greek, most likely by members of their rival Jewish community in Alexandria. Although the Maccabees were able to defeat the Selucids at Jerusalem, their position there was anything but secure; thus, a few years later, they entered into a military alliance with the Romans — an act which was virtually to ensure the eventual subjugation of the Jewish people, and the loss of a national Jewish homeland for 2000 years. By the time of Christ, it was Rome who ruled in Judaea; in 70 AD Roman soldiers demolished the temple which Judas Maccabaeus had fought so hard to reconsecrate — only a portion of a single wall, now known as the "Wailing Wall," was left standing.
Yet the flame of the Maccabees still burns. And the ironies, tragic ironies, still continue. Deep down in my heart of hearts, I have always been something of a closet Zionist. Perhaps this stems, in part, from having had a Jewish grandfather (on my mother’s side), but whatever the source, I’ve always taken pride in the independence of the modern state of Israel, and in the contributions of Judaism in general to Western thought, culture, and civilization. The flame of the Hanukkah Menorah symbolizes the light of that contribution, as well as the persistent struggle of the Jewish people to preserve their religious faith and practice in the face of 2000 years of almost constant anti-semitic persecution and oppression. Zionism reflects the burning aspiration of Jews for a nation of their own, a place to call home.
But there is also a shadow cast by Zionism: a shadow which those of us who consider ourselves friends of Israel are sometimes reluctant to explore. Hanukkah is a celebration of Light and Hope, Joy and Compassion — in many ways it represents the very best of what religion has to offer us here in this world. Even (or perhaps especially) in the context of a “global war on terror,” there are no doubt still many Jews, many people of faith all the world over, who are deeply troubled by the Israeli government's recent history and policies regarding the Palestinians on the West Bank and in Gaza, and who continue to hope for a permanent and lasting peace based on mutual tolerance, reasonable accommodation, and sympathetic understanding. The role of Oppressor does not come naturally to the Jewish spirit; and this too, is a lingering irony of the legacy of the Maccabees, whose military victories ultimately brought ruin to their nation.
In his Hanukkah story "The Power of Light," Isaac Bashevis Singer tells of two Jewish children, David and Rebecca, hiding in the ruins of the Warsaw ghetto following its destruction by the Nazis during the Second World War. On the first night of Hanukkah, David finds some matches and a candle while foraging in the rubble, and returns to their hiding place to share his discovery. Singer writes:
...Now David pronounced the benediction over the Hanukkah candle, and Rebecca said "Amen." They had both lost their families, and they had good reason to be angry with God for sending them so many afflictions, but the light of the candle brought peace into their souls. That glimmer of light, surrounded by so many shadows, seemed to say without words: Evil has not yet taken complete dominion. A spark of hope is still left.
For some time David and Rebecca had thought about escaping from Warsaw. But how? The ghetto was watched by the Nazis day and night. Each step was dangerous. Rebecca kept delaying their departure. It would be easier in the summer, she often said, but David knew that in their predicament they had little chance of lasting until then. Somewhere in the forest there were young men and women called partisans who fought the Nazi invaders. David wanted to reach them. Now, by the light of the Hanukkah candle, Rebecca suddenly felt renewed courage. She said, "David, let's leave."
"When?" [David asked.]
"When you think it's the right time," she answered.
"The right time is now," David said. "I have a plan."
For a long time David explained the details of his plan to Rebecca. It was more than risky. The Nazis had enclosed the ghetto with barbed wire and posted guards armed with machine guns on the surrounding roofs. At night searchlights lit up all possible exits from the destroyed ghetto. But in his wanderings through the ruins, David had found an opening to a sewer which he thought might lead to the other side. David told Rebecca that their chances of remaining alive were slim. They could drown in the dirty water or freeze to death. Also, the sewers were full of hungry rats. But Rebecca agreed to take the risk; to remain in the cellar for the winter would mean certain death.
When the Hanukkah light began to sputter and flicker before going out, David and Rebecca gathered their few belongings. She packed the remaining food in a kerchief, and David took his matches and a piece of lead pipe for a weapon.
In moments of great danger people become unusually courageous. David and Rebecca were soon on their way through the ruins. They came to passages so narrow they had to crawl on hands and knees. But the food they had eaten, and the joy the Hanukkah candles had awakened in them, gave them the courage to continue. After some time David found the entrance to the sewer. Luckily, the sewage had frozen, and it seemed that the rats had left because of the extreme cold. From time to time David and Rebecca stopped to rest and to listen. After a while they crawled on, slowly and carefully. Suddenly they stopped in their tracks. From above they could hear the clanging of a trolley car. They had reached the other side of the ghetto. All they needed now was to find a way to get out of the sewer and to leave the city as quickly as possible.
Many miracles seemed to happen that Hanukkah night. Because the Nazis were afraid of enemy planes, they had ordered a complete blackout. Because of the bitter cold, there were fewer Gestapo guards. David and Rebecca managed to leave the sewer and steal out of the city without being caught. At dawn they reached a forest where they were able to rest and have a bite to eat....
After a week of hiding by day and traveling at night, David and Rebecca met up with a group of Jewish partisans hiding in the forest. It was now the final night of Hanukkah, and the children played dreidel on the stump of an oak tree while others kept watch. More and more refugees joined them, and slowly they made their way to Israel, assisted by the Haganah: an organization which worked to smuggle Jewish refugees out of Nazi-occupied Europe and into the Holy Land. They finished school, married, and found a small house with a garden in a suburb of Tel Aviv. Singer concludes his story by writing:
...I know all this because David and Rebecca told me their story on a Hanukkah evening in their house in Ramat Gan about eight years later. The Hanukkah candles were burning, and Rebecca was frying potato pancakes served with applesauce for all of us. David and I were playing dreidel with their little son, Menahem Eliezer, named after both of his grandfathers. David told me that this large wooden dreidel was the same one the partisans had played with on that Hanukkah evening in the forest in Poland. Rebecca said to me: "If it had not been for that little candle David brought to our hiding place, we wouldn't be sitting here today. That glimmer of light awakened in us a hope and strength we didn't know we possessed. We'll give the dreidel to Menahem Eliezer when he is old enough to understand what we went through and how miraculously we were saved...."
I’ve always liked to thing that this child, Menahem Eliezer, would be about my age this Hanukkah. No doubt he has long since learned the story of his parents' escape and rescue; no doubt by now he has children, and perhaps even grandchildren, of his own, with whom he has also shared the dreidal, with its four Hebrew letters: nun, gimel, he, shin -- "a great miracle happened there." And this holiday season, may we as well share in the miracle of the Flame that wouldn't die, recalling even in this season of darkness our essential connectedness to the whole of humankind, and our renewed dedication to the timeless principles which allow our faith to endure.
at the First Parish Church of Portland, Maine
Sunday December 9th, 2007
READING: 1 Maccabees 4: 34-59
***
When I was a child, growing up in a Unitarian Universalist Sunday School, I always had a lot of fun when we were given the opportunity to celebrate Hanukkah as part of our Sunday School curriculum. We lit the candles in the Menorah, we played with Dreidels, we heard the story of the lamp that burned for eight straight days, when there was only a one day supply of oil. In the predominately Catholic neighborhood where we lived, "The Feast of Lights" seemed like our Unitarian-Universalist answer to Advent — not only did it avoid a lot of problematic issues like the Virgin Birth, but it also introduced us to the whole idea of cross-cultural celebrations of the Winter Solstice: the coming of Light into the world, in the season where nights are long and darkness reigns, and it had the added advantage of eight straight days of presents. (In our house that particular tradition only lasted one year, by the way).
I always had a little trouble, though, understanding this business about the lamp that burned for eight days in the temple. After all, a one-day supply of oil is a one-day supply of oil; if the lamp burned for eight days, obviously that was an eight-day supply: someone simply must have made a mistake when they were doing the inventory. I just didn't see what all the fuss was about. Maybe there was a clever priest (or more likely, a sexton), who was somehow able to adjust the flame and stretch the supply, make the oil last longer than it should have. Or maybe they just asked around, and everybody pitched in what they had. I mean, isn’t that what people do in times of crisis?
But there was nothing particularly miraculous about that; my mom used to do that sort of thing all the time. “Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without.” You don’t have to be a native Mainer to appreciate the importance of a little old-fashioned frugality, combined with a generous helping of Yankee ingenuity. I guess I always just had a very strong humanist streak from a very early age, because it was years before I was able to understand that the flame of the Menorah was only a symbol of the real miracle. The temple had been defiled, but the faith had endured, and triumphed. This is the real miracle of the Feast of Dedication.
Let me share with you a little more of the history behind the the story of Hanukkah. In 167 BC the Selucid emperor Antiochus IV ordered the rededication of the Jewish temple in Jerusalem to the worship of Zeus. The Selucids were one of three dynasties which had emerged from the remnants of Alexander the Great's empire following his death a century and a half earlier. Based primarily in what is now Syria, the Selucids were almost constantly at war with a second post-Alexandrian dynasty, the Ptolemies, who were based in Egypt. Even in that day, there were already significant Jewish communities in both Babylonia (which was controlled by the Selucids) and Alexandria (the capital of the Ptolemies); life in the diaspora had already begun; while Judaea, the original home of the Jewish people, served as something of a strategic buffer between these two Great Powers of the ancient world, and was constantly buffeted by the ebb and flow of their political and military ambitions.
Controlled by the Ptolemies until the start of the second century BC, Judea eventually came under the hegemony of the Selucids following their decisive victory over the Ptolemies at the Battle of Banyas, which took place near the headwaters of the Jordan River. To a significant degree, this development was welcomed by many of the Jewish inhabitants of Judaea, because the Ptolemies had been great Hellenizers, which is to say they were fond of introducing Greek customs and practices into the cultures they ruled. The Jewish community in Alexandria, for example, had been deeply influenced by Greek philosophy; and it was their Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures, the Septuagint, that would eventually become a key factor in the rapid spread of Christianity among the Greek-speaking Gentiles of the Roman Empire.
Selucid rule, on the other hand, appeared to promise the practice of a more authentically Hebrew Judaism, such as existed in Babylonia. But this expectation was not to be borne out. Roman influence in the Eastern Mediterranean was growing; in order to pay for his increasingly expensive military adventures, as well as shield his empire from the threat of Rome, Antiochus IV greatly increased the level of taxation in Judaea, plundering the treasury of the temple in Jerusalem, and also cracking down on dissident Jewish groups who resented the burdens imposed by their Greek-speaking rulers, and who sought the freedom to manage their own affairs. In order to pacify the region, Antiochus IV accelerated the Hellenization of Judaea, siding with those Jews who were sympathetic to Greek ideas and culture, and doing everything within his power to eliminate the practice of Judaism as a distinctive religious faith.
This is the background of the Maccabean revolt. The Maccabees were insurgent guerrilla fighters who took to the hills in order to resist these changes. Their leader was initially a priest named Mattathias Maccabaeus, who not only refused to offer pagan sacrifice in the Jewish temple where he served, but also reportedly killed the first Jewish apostate who had attempted to do so. When Mattathias himself later died, leadership of the guerrilla army fell upon the shoulders of his oldest son, Judas Maccabaeus, who was eventually able to drive the Selucids out of the city of Jerusalem, and re-dedicate the temple there to the worship of the Hebrew God Yahweh, as we heard in the passage from the First Book of Maccabees I read earlier this morning. This is the origin of Hanukkah — the Festival of Dedication — the only major festival in Judaism not explicitly rooted in the Torah.
There are some major ironies contained within the story of Hanukkah. The Maccabean revolt was a war fought for the purpose of religious liberty — the only such revolt of its kind recorded in ancient history — yet the Maccabees themselves were hardly the religious liberals of their day. They were more akin, perhaps, to modern religious fundamentalists in their attitudes and practices; and I suppose if you were Antiochus IV, you might even have called them terrorists. Likewise, the only records of their achievements which have survived were written in Greek, most likely by members of their rival Jewish community in Alexandria. Although the Maccabees were able to defeat the Selucids at Jerusalem, their position there was anything but secure; thus, a few years later, they entered into a military alliance with the Romans — an act which was virtually to ensure the eventual subjugation of the Jewish people, and the loss of a national Jewish homeland for 2000 years. By the time of Christ, it was Rome who ruled in Judaea; in 70 AD Roman soldiers demolished the temple which Judas Maccabaeus had fought so hard to reconsecrate — only a portion of a single wall, now known as the "Wailing Wall," was left standing.
Yet the flame of the Maccabees still burns. And the ironies, tragic ironies, still continue. Deep down in my heart of hearts, I have always been something of a closet Zionist. Perhaps this stems, in part, from having had a Jewish grandfather (on my mother’s side), but whatever the source, I’ve always taken pride in the independence of the modern state of Israel, and in the contributions of Judaism in general to Western thought, culture, and civilization. The flame of the Hanukkah Menorah symbolizes the light of that contribution, as well as the persistent struggle of the Jewish people to preserve their religious faith and practice in the face of 2000 years of almost constant anti-semitic persecution and oppression. Zionism reflects the burning aspiration of Jews for a nation of their own, a place to call home.
But there is also a shadow cast by Zionism: a shadow which those of us who consider ourselves friends of Israel are sometimes reluctant to explore. Hanukkah is a celebration of Light and Hope, Joy and Compassion — in many ways it represents the very best of what religion has to offer us here in this world. Even (or perhaps especially) in the context of a “global war on terror,” there are no doubt still many Jews, many people of faith all the world over, who are deeply troubled by the Israeli government's recent history and policies regarding the Palestinians on the West Bank and in Gaza, and who continue to hope for a permanent and lasting peace based on mutual tolerance, reasonable accommodation, and sympathetic understanding. The role of Oppressor does not come naturally to the Jewish spirit; and this too, is a lingering irony of the legacy of the Maccabees, whose military victories ultimately brought ruin to their nation.
In his Hanukkah story "The Power of Light," Isaac Bashevis Singer tells of two Jewish children, David and Rebecca, hiding in the ruins of the Warsaw ghetto following its destruction by the Nazis during the Second World War. On the first night of Hanukkah, David finds some matches and a candle while foraging in the rubble, and returns to their hiding place to share his discovery. Singer writes:
...Now David pronounced the benediction over the Hanukkah candle, and Rebecca said "Amen." They had both lost their families, and they had good reason to be angry with God for sending them so many afflictions, but the light of the candle brought peace into their souls. That glimmer of light, surrounded by so many shadows, seemed to say without words: Evil has not yet taken complete dominion. A spark of hope is still left.
For some time David and Rebecca had thought about escaping from Warsaw. But how? The ghetto was watched by the Nazis day and night. Each step was dangerous. Rebecca kept delaying their departure. It would be easier in the summer, she often said, but David knew that in their predicament they had little chance of lasting until then. Somewhere in the forest there were young men and women called partisans who fought the Nazi invaders. David wanted to reach them. Now, by the light of the Hanukkah candle, Rebecca suddenly felt renewed courage. She said, "David, let's leave."
"When?" [David asked.]
"When you think it's the right time," she answered.
"The right time is now," David said. "I have a plan."
For a long time David explained the details of his plan to Rebecca. It was more than risky. The Nazis had enclosed the ghetto with barbed wire and posted guards armed with machine guns on the surrounding roofs. At night searchlights lit up all possible exits from the destroyed ghetto. But in his wanderings through the ruins, David had found an opening to a sewer which he thought might lead to the other side. David told Rebecca that their chances of remaining alive were slim. They could drown in the dirty water or freeze to death. Also, the sewers were full of hungry rats. But Rebecca agreed to take the risk; to remain in the cellar for the winter would mean certain death.
When the Hanukkah light began to sputter and flicker before going out, David and Rebecca gathered their few belongings. She packed the remaining food in a kerchief, and David took his matches and a piece of lead pipe for a weapon.
In moments of great danger people become unusually courageous. David and Rebecca were soon on their way through the ruins. They came to passages so narrow they had to crawl on hands and knees. But the food they had eaten, and the joy the Hanukkah candles had awakened in them, gave them the courage to continue. After some time David found the entrance to the sewer. Luckily, the sewage had frozen, and it seemed that the rats had left because of the extreme cold. From time to time David and Rebecca stopped to rest and to listen. After a while they crawled on, slowly and carefully. Suddenly they stopped in their tracks. From above they could hear the clanging of a trolley car. They had reached the other side of the ghetto. All they needed now was to find a way to get out of the sewer and to leave the city as quickly as possible.
Many miracles seemed to happen that Hanukkah night. Because the Nazis were afraid of enemy planes, they had ordered a complete blackout. Because of the bitter cold, there were fewer Gestapo guards. David and Rebecca managed to leave the sewer and steal out of the city without being caught. At dawn they reached a forest where they were able to rest and have a bite to eat....
After a week of hiding by day and traveling at night, David and Rebecca met up with a group of Jewish partisans hiding in the forest. It was now the final night of Hanukkah, and the children played dreidel on the stump of an oak tree while others kept watch. More and more refugees joined them, and slowly they made their way to Israel, assisted by the Haganah: an organization which worked to smuggle Jewish refugees out of Nazi-occupied Europe and into the Holy Land. They finished school, married, and found a small house with a garden in a suburb of Tel Aviv. Singer concludes his story by writing:
...I know all this because David and Rebecca told me their story on a Hanukkah evening in their house in Ramat Gan about eight years later. The Hanukkah candles were burning, and Rebecca was frying potato pancakes served with applesauce for all of us. David and I were playing dreidel with their little son, Menahem Eliezer, named after both of his grandfathers. David told me that this large wooden dreidel was the same one the partisans had played with on that Hanukkah evening in the forest in Poland. Rebecca said to me: "If it had not been for that little candle David brought to our hiding place, we wouldn't be sitting here today. That glimmer of light awakened in us a hope and strength we didn't know we possessed. We'll give the dreidel to Menahem Eliezer when he is old enough to understand what we went through and how miraculously we were saved...."
I’ve always liked to thing that this child, Menahem Eliezer, would be about my age this Hanukkah. No doubt he has long since learned the story of his parents' escape and rescue; no doubt by now he has children, and perhaps even grandchildren, of his own, with whom he has also shared the dreidal, with its four Hebrew letters: nun, gimel, he, shin -- "a great miracle happened there." And this holiday season, may we as well share in the miracle of the Flame that wouldn't die, recalling even in this season of darkness our essential connectedness to the whole of humankind, and our renewed dedication to the timeless principles which allow our faith to endure.
Sunday, December 2, 2007
HOME FOR THE HOLY DAYS
a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Parish Church in Portland, Maine
Sunday December 2nd 2007
***
READING: "Feast Days," from Tickets for a Prayer Wheel by Annie Dillard
Let me mention
one or two things about Christmas.
Of course you've all heard
that the animals talk
at midnight:
a particular elk, for instance,
kneeling at night to drink,
leaning tall to pull leaves
with his soft lips,
says, alleluia.
That the soil and fresh-water lakes
also rejoice,
as do products
such as sweaters
(nor are plastics excluded
from grace),
is less well known.
Further:
the reason
for some silly-looking fishes,
for the bizarre mating
of certain adult insects,
or the sprouting, say,
in a snow tire
of a Rocky Mountain grass,
is that the universal
loves the particular,
that freedom loves to live
and live flesh full,
intricate,
and in detail.
God empties himself
into the earth like a cloud.
God takes the substance, contours
of a man, and keeps them,
dying, rising, walking,
and still walking
wherever there is motion
***
[extemporaneous introduction]
I grew up in what I suppose one might think of as a nominally Catholic neighborhood. Most of my playmates had names like Ridley, O'Hare, Callahan; and they were never available to play on Wednesday afternoons because it conflicted with their catechism classes. The smell of macaroni and cheese wafted through the air on Friday evenings; conversations were ripe with references to nuns, confession, and who had given whom their Saint Christopher medal; and the season of Lent was serious business — there was no candy or ice cream to be found anywhere on our block, except perhaps at my house, making me a pretty popular kid for the six weeks prior to Easter.
Of course, these are just the perceptions of a twelve year old child nearly four decades ago now. But to my mind then, there were a lot of advantages to being the only Unitarian-Universalist family in a neighborhood such as this. We went to the library on Wednesday afternoons, often ate steak for Friday dinner (when my dad would return home from a week of business travel), and I never had to worry about how much of my private life I ought to reveal each week to the man dressed in black in the little box, sitting behind a screen like the Wizard of Oz.
But every year as the month of December rolled around, I began to wonder whether I might be missing out on something: the Advent wreaths, with their four purple candles and the solitary white one; the Advent calendars, with those amazing little windows — one window for each day that remained in the countdown to Christmas. I was fascinated by those windows, with their tiny paper shutters; and behind each and every shutter, something different, something special, there in the window. And each window more amazing than the previous one; and oh! — what a privilege to be the child selected to open the window for the day!
I recall one year, after much urging on my part, my parents broke down brought home an Advent calendar for our family. I could hardly wait! In fact, I didn't wait: as soon as I was alone in the house I opened all of the little shutters on the very first day, and then had to try to close them up again so my parents wouldn't notice (which of course they did). But it didn't make any difference; the magic had already gone out of the thing anyway: the anticipation, the mystery, had disappeared.
I suppose that had I actually been reared a Catholic, I would have gone to confession years ago and told the priest in the box about my little indiscretion, and that would have been the end of it. Instead, I recall this memory every Advent season, and reflect upon my youthful impatience, and the priceless gift it stole from me. As Unitarian Universalist kids we studied ALL of the winter "Holy Days" in our Sunday School classes this time of year. We learned about Hanukkah, and various other winter "festivals of light" — it really wasn't all that different from being in the public schools, only better and more fun. And yet, there was a strangeness to it all as well — a feeling, almost, of being on the outside looking in. We might overhear adults complain about the "commercialization" of Christmas, but where was the "holiness" to replace the secular holiday? We went to elaborate parties, and were thoroughly "entertained," but would we have actually offered hospitality to a pregnant woman far from home? Food and football and family obligations; shopping and snowmen and time off from school — the holiday season was defined by its possibilities for sloth, avarice and gluttony, rather than by qualities of any particular religious significance.
In the secular world, the holiday season begins Thanksgiving Day, with its parades, its traditional football rivalries, and of course, “Black Friday, and the big Mall and Department store sales which begin the countdown of "shopping days" til “Xmas.” And it ends, at last, on New Year's Day, with one final blow-out party, more parades and more football games, and a plethora of unkept promises that somehow this next year will be different than the last.
But within the traditional Christian liturgical calendar, the four weeks prior to Christmas are known as the season of Advent, and harbor a far different connotation. The word "Advent" comes from the Latin adventus and means "to" or "toward [the] Coming." Interestingly enough, it's the same Latin root as our English word "adventure," which my Webster's defines as "a bold undertaking in which hazards are to be encountered and the issue staked upon unforseen events" In the traditional Christian liturgical calendar, the four weeks of Advent are a time both of joyous anticipation for the birth of the child Christ, and also of solemn preparation for the unforseen "Second Coming" at the end of time, when all the world shall be judged.
In the Medieval Church, Advent was observed with the same strict penitence as Lent, and even today Roman Catholicism prohibits the solemnization of marriage during this period. It's this mythic tension between the physical presence of the deity here in this world, in the innocent form of an infant child; and the ultimate sovereignty of Divine Creation and Judgement, which gives this season it's peculiar ethos: We look toward the Coming of we know not what, in anticipation and fear of a transformation for which we can never be fully ready or prepared....
“God empties himself
into the earth like a cloud.
God takes the substance, contours
of a man, and keeps them,
dying, rising, walking,
and still walking
wherever there is motion...”
My very favorite holiday movie of all time is still Frank Capra's "It's a Wonderful Life," in which Jimmy Stewart plays a character by the name of George Bailey, who sacrifices his ambitions of a college education and world travel in order to remain in the tiny town of Bedford Falls and manage the Bailey Building and Loan following the untimely death of his father. You’ve all seen this movie, right? I mean, none of you have been living on another planet for the past 50 years. At the critical turning point of the story, as George is about to commit suicide by leaping from a bridge, he is given an opportunity, by a rather amusing yet inept Angel Second Class named Clarence, to see what this little town would have been like had George Bailey never been born. All the lives he had touched, all the people he had helped, all of the good that he had done, suddenly become conspicuous through their absence — and George comes to see that despite the difficulties, despite the frustration, despite the disappointment and even the dispair, he really did have a wonderful life.
Not many of us are given this kind of opportunity: to open up a little window and see the effect of our lives upon the world, the multitude of ways in which that tiny spark of the divine within us all exerts its influence for the good on those around us. A little piece of God in human form, "dying, rising, walking, and still walking wherever there is motion." No doubt we see it first more easily in others than we do within ourselves. But this is the message of the Advent season: the coming of light into the world, the coming of goodness into the world, the opening of a shuttered window, which allows us a glimpse our own potential divinity, reflected in the face of an innocent child; yet which also calls us simultaneously to accountability for that gift in the instant that it is revealed to us. Will you chose a wonderful life? Or will you hide your lamp under a bushel, prefering to curse the darkness than to light a single candle?
Many Unitarian Universalists, I find, are uncomfortable with the mythic dimensions of religious meaning. We like the tangible, the pragmatic, the rational; all this heavy-handed symbolism leaves us feeling a little uneasy in the stomach. We scoff at the notion of an infant God, a virgin birth, of angels, and astrologers who left their homes and followed a star in the sky to a distant land. We prefer to speak of the coincidence between the Christmas season and the winter solstice, or to trace the evolution of the holiday and identify its cross-cultural parallels; we want to throw open all the windows at once and shine the light of reason into every nook and cranny. All too often we seem to forget that much of the meaning is in the waiting, the preparing, the anticipation — that as we allow the story to unfold at its own speed, as we participate in it in "mythic time," other levels of meaning are revealed to us which are not readily comprehensible to the analytical mind.
We're always in such a hurry! We have shopping to do and packages to wrap, cards to write, meals to cook and cookies to bake — at times it seems as though we'll never get caught up. Yet in our haste to get everything under control the real opportunities often pass us by; or rather, are quickly left behind in the whirlwind of activity to get it all done. Jesus built furniture in Nazareth for thirty years before he did anything truly worthy of remembrance! Insight in particular is not always the product of a linear process; more often our learning tends to be circular, as we return again and again to that which initially sparked our curiosity, only to discover that we understand it a little better each time. Time is meaningless when it comes to Truth. Let the story speak to you in its own voice, in its own language, on its own terms, and eventually the message, in its own good time, will become crystal-clear.
Christmas is an invitation to participate in a miracle: a miracle of change, of growth, of renewal and transformation — but mostly a miracle of possibility and hope, the promise of a thing rather than the thing itself. It's the drama of a child born in a stable to a very special destiny, and the anticipation of that destiny by those who may never live to see its fulfillment, but who nevertheless take the time to respond to the call for preparation. Is this the child who has been born king of the Jews, the Messiah, the Christ, sleeping in a feed trough in the midst of all these animals? And this is the mother, this naive teenaged girl, who swears she's never been with a man? From unlikely origins comes the King of Kings, the Prince of Peace, to preach the Good News that we, too, are God's children, inheritors of a special destiny regardless of the circumstances of our birth or background.
The story of Advent is the story of the Adventure of Life: that "bold undertaking in which hazards are to be encountered, and the issue staked upon unforseen events." It is a lesson in learning to wait upon the unknown; a lesson in the suspense of disbelief and the confidence of hope, of patient trust in the process of living between the margins of our accidental birth and our inevitable mortality. It teaches us to open the shutters one window at a time, and fully savor the vision which we find there: a promise, a potential yet to be realized, a helpless child who will someday become a most remarkable adult, and reveal to the world an authentic glimpse of the divine....
at the First Parish Church in Portland, Maine
Sunday December 2nd 2007
***
READING: "Feast Days," from Tickets for a Prayer Wheel by Annie Dillard
Let me mention
one or two things about Christmas.
Of course you've all heard
that the animals talk
at midnight:
a particular elk, for instance,
kneeling at night to drink,
leaning tall to pull leaves
with his soft lips,
says, alleluia.
That the soil and fresh-water lakes
also rejoice,
as do products
such as sweaters
(nor are plastics excluded
from grace),
is less well known.
Further:
the reason
for some silly-looking fishes,
for the bizarre mating
of certain adult insects,
or the sprouting, say,
in a snow tire
of a Rocky Mountain grass,
is that the universal
loves the particular,
that freedom loves to live
and live flesh full,
intricate,
and in detail.
God empties himself
into the earth like a cloud.
God takes the substance, contours
of a man, and keeps them,
dying, rising, walking,
and still walking
wherever there is motion
***
[extemporaneous introduction]
I grew up in what I suppose one might think of as a nominally Catholic neighborhood. Most of my playmates had names like Ridley, O'Hare, Callahan; and they were never available to play on Wednesday afternoons because it conflicted with their catechism classes. The smell of macaroni and cheese wafted through the air on Friday evenings; conversations were ripe with references to nuns, confession, and who had given whom their Saint Christopher medal; and the season of Lent was serious business — there was no candy or ice cream to be found anywhere on our block, except perhaps at my house, making me a pretty popular kid for the six weeks prior to Easter.
Of course, these are just the perceptions of a twelve year old child nearly four decades ago now. But to my mind then, there were a lot of advantages to being the only Unitarian-Universalist family in a neighborhood such as this. We went to the library on Wednesday afternoons, often ate steak for Friday dinner (when my dad would return home from a week of business travel), and I never had to worry about how much of my private life I ought to reveal each week to the man dressed in black in the little box, sitting behind a screen like the Wizard of Oz.
But every year as the month of December rolled around, I began to wonder whether I might be missing out on something: the Advent wreaths, with their four purple candles and the solitary white one; the Advent calendars, with those amazing little windows — one window for each day that remained in the countdown to Christmas. I was fascinated by those windows, with their tiny paper shutters; and behind each and every shutter, something different, something special, there in the window. And each window more amazing than the previous one; and oh! — what a privilege to be the child selected to open the window for the day!
I recall one year, after much urging on my part, my parents broke down brought home an Advent calendar for our family. I could hardly wait! In fact, I didn't wait: as soon as I was alone in the house I opened all of the little shutters on the very first day, and then had to try to close them up again so my parents wouldn't notice (which of course they did). But it didn't make any difference; the magic had already gone out of the thing anyway: the anticipation, the mystery, had disappeared.
I suppose that had I actually been reared a Catholic, I would have gone to confession years ago and told the priest in the box about my little indiscretion, and that would have been the end of it. Instead, I recall this memory every Advent season, and reflect upon my youthful impatience, and the priceless gift it stole from me. As Unitarian Universalist kids we studied ALL of the winter "Holy Days" in our Sunday School classes this time of year. We learned about Hanukkah, and various other winter "festivals of light" — it really wasn't all that different from being in the public schools, only better and more fun. And yet, there was a strangeness to it all as well — a feeling, almost, of being on the outside looking in. We might overhear adults complain about the "commercialization" of Christmas, but where was the "holiness" to replace the secular holiday? We went to elaborate parties, and were thoroughly "entertained," but would we have actually offered hospitality to a pregnant woman far from home? Food and football and family obligations; shopping and snowmen and time off from school — the holiday season was defined by its possibilities for sloth, avarice and gluttony, rather than by qualities of any particular religious significance.
In the secular world, the holiday season begins Thanksgiving Day, with its parades, its traditional football rivalries, and of course, “Black Friday, and the big Mall and Department store sales which begin the countdown of "shopping days" til “Xmas.” And it ends, at last, on New Year's Day, with one final blow-out party, more parades and more football games, and a plethora of unkept promises that somehow this next year will be different than the last.
But within the traditional Christian liturgical calendar, the four weeks prior to Christmas are known as the season of Advent, and harbor a far different connotation. The word "Advent" comes from the Latin adventus and means "to" or "toward [the] Coming." Interestingly enough, it's the same Latin root as our English word "adventure," which my Webster's defines as "a bold undertaking in which hazards are to be encountered and the issue staked upon unforseen events" In the traditional Christian liturgical calendar, the four weeks of Advent are a time both of joyous anticipation for the birth of the child Christ, and also of solemn preparation for the unforseen "Second Coming" at the end of time, when all the world shall be judged.
In the Medieval Church, Advent was observed with the same strict penitence as Lent, and even today Roman Catholicism prohibits the solemnization of marriage during this period. It's this mythic tension between the physical presence of the deity here in this world, in the innocent form of an infant child; and the ultimate sovereignty of Divine Creation and Judgement, which gives this season it's peculiar ethos: We look toward the Coming of we know not what, in anticipation and fear of a transformation for which we can never be fully ready or prepared....
“God empties himself
into the earth like a cloud.
God takes the substance, contours
of a man, and keeps them,
dying, rising, walking,
and still walking
wherever there is motion...”
My very favorite holiday movie of all time is still Frank Capra's "It's a Wonderful Life," in which Jimmy Stewart plays a character by the name of George Bailey, who sacrifices his ambitions of a college education and world travel in order to remain in the tiny town of Bedford Falls and manage the Bailey Building and Loan following the untimely death of his father. You’ve all seen this movie, right? I mean, none of you have been living on another planet for the past 50 years. At the critical turning point of the story, as George is about to commit suicide by leaping from a bridge, he is given an opportunity, by a rather amusing yet inept Angel Second Class named Clarence, to see what this little town would have been like had George Bailey never been born. All the lives he had touched, all the people he had helped, all of the good that he had done, suddenly become conspicuous through their absence — and George comes to see that despite the difficulties, despite the frustration, despite the disappointment and even the dispair, he really did have a wonderful life.
Not many of us are given this kind of opportunity: to open up a little window and see the effect of our lives upon the world, the multitude of ways in which that tiny spark of the divine within us all exerts its influence for the good on those around us. A little piece of God in human form, "dying, rising, walking, and still walking wherever there is motion." No doubt we see it first more easily in others than we do within ourselves. But this is the message of the Advent season: the coming of light into the world, the coming of goodness into the world, the opening of a shuttered window, which allows us a glimpse our own potential divinity, reflected in the face of an innocent child; yet which also calls us simultaneously to accountability for that gift in the instant that it is revealed to us. Will you chose a wonderful life? Or will you hide your lamp under a bushel, prefering to curse the darkness than to light a single candle?
Many Unitarian Universalists, I find, are uncomfortable with the mythic dimensions of religious meaning. We like the tangible, the pragmatic, the rational; all this heavy-handed symbolism leaves us feeling a little uneasy in the stomach. We scoff at the notion of an infant God, a virgin birth, of angels, and astrologers who left their homes and followed a star in the sky to a distant land. We prefer to speak of the coincidence between the Christmas season and the winter solstice, or to trace the evolution of the holiday and identify its cross-cultural parallels; we want to throw open all the windows at once and shine the light of reason into every nook and cranny. All too often we seem to forget that much of the meaning is in the waiting, the preparing, the anticipation — that as we allow the story to unfold at its own speed, as we participate in it in "mythic time," other levels of meaning are revealed to us which are not readily comprehensible to the analytical mind.
We're always in such a hurry! We have shopping to do and packages to wrap, cards to write, meals to cook and cookies to bake — at times it seems as though we'll never get caught up. Yet in our haste to get everything under control the real opportunities often pass us by; or rather, are quickly left behind in the whirlwind of activity to get it all done. Jesus built furniture in Nazareth for thirty years before he did anything truly worthy of remembrance! Insight in particular is not always the product of a linear process; more often our learning tends to be circular, as we return again and again to that which initially sparked our curiosity, only to discover that we understand it a little better each time. Time is meaningless when it comes to Truth. Let the story speak to you in its own voice, in its own language, on its own terms, and eventually the message, in its own good time, will become crystal-clear.
Christmas is an invitation to participate in a miracle: a miracle of change, of growth, of renewal and transformation — but mostly a miracle of possibility and hope, the promise of a thing rather than the thing itself. It's the drama of a child born in a stable to a very special destiny, and the anticipation of that destiny by those who may never live to see its fulfillment, but who nevertheless take the time to respond to the call for preparation. Is this the child who has been born king of the Jews, the Messiah, the Christ, sleeping in a feed trough in the midst of all these animals? And this is the mother, this naive teenaged girl, who swears she's never been with a man? From unlikely origins comes the King of Kings, the Prince of Peace, to preach the Good News that we, too, are God's children, inheritors of a special destiny regardless of the circumstances of our birth or background.
The story of Advent is the story of the Adventure of Life: that "bold undertaking in which hazards are to be encountered, and the issue staked upon unforseen events." It is a lesson in learning to wait upon the unknown; a lesson in the suspense of disbelief and the confidence of hope, of patient trust in the process of living between the margins of our accidental birth and our inevitable mortality. It teaches us to open the shutters one window at a time, and fully savor the vision which we find there: a promise, a potential yet to be realized, a helpless child who will someday become a most remarkable adult, and reveal to the world an authentic glimpse of the divine....
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