Showing posts with label Christmas Eve. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Christmas Eve. Show all posts

Saturday, December 24, 2022

The Christmas Story: Unbelievable, Believable, and Sublime

Christmas Eve December 24, 2022
Is. 9:2-4,6-7 Ps.96:1-4,11-12
Titus 2:11-14 Luke 2:1-14

Lectionary Link

One might say that the Christmas Story is unbelievable and believable even as it message to encode the Sublime.  

How is the Christmas Story unbelievable?  It is unbelievable to us who live our lives by empirical verification.  We live by the natural laws which empirical testable evidence provides for us.  We assume that natural laws have always been operative and from this perspective we find many elements of the Christmas story unbelievable, like angel choirs appearing in the sky,  fantastic helicopter-like stars which move like a gps tracking device to guide wise men to a specific location, and not to mention a Holy Spirit conception which became a physical birth.  Yes, to the empirical mind the Christmas story is unbelievable.

How then can the Christmas Story at the same time be believable?  It is a believable story from the perspective of literary criticism.  It is an artistic and spiritual text that arose within communities which were providing community identity and the inculcation of spiritual practice within the various communities.  As literary critics we can totally believe the communicative techniques of the Christmas Story writers.  They deftly used the models of communication which were used within their contexts.  They located their message of Jesus within the salvation history story that they received from the Hebrew Scriptures tradition including mysterious and marvelous birth tradition. The kings from the East bringing gifts tradition  The flight to Egypt and return retraces the journey of Israel.  The deaths of Holy Innocents mimics the story of Pharaoh's slaughter of male offspring. These elements present Jesus as the new Moses, and the relocation from Nazareth to Bethlehem lines up with the Davidic place of birth.  The Christmas Story writers were aware of their readers who knew the traditions of the Hebrew Scriptures.

But they were also aware of their Roman Empire Gentile audience who knew the promotional messages which were published to promote the image of the Caesar.  Caesar Augustus was miraculously conceived, he had celestial phenomenon that happened at his birth, he was called prince of peace, savior of the world, and the Roman senate designated the Caesar as Augustus, as divine or a divinized human being, and the divine Caesar's offspring was called the son of a god.  

The writers of Christmas Story might even be charged with being subversive in appropriating language used exclusively for the Caesars for Jesus Christ.  As such, the churches might be regarded as a subversive underground movement within the Roman Empire.  The heavenly angels were like a higher body than the Roman Senate in declaring the divine status of Jesus.

I hope that we can appreciate from a literary critical perspective how the Christmas Stories were completely believable in how they appropriated effective contextual communication models to promote what they regarded to be their very highest value.

And this brings us to the ultimate point of the Christmas Story, the truth of the Sublime.  And what was the Sublime?  The constituting event for the early Christians was the sublime experiences of the Risen Christ, an event referred to as a New Birth, as spiritual birth, and as the realization of Christ in oneself as the hope of glory.  The point of presenting the story of the birth of Jesus was to encode the spiritual birth of the Risen Christ within the hearts of all who wanted to know this spiritual realization.

St. Paul said the mystery of the ages was "Christ in you, you hope of glory."

And this now is the continuing truth of the Christmas Story: the sublime birth of Christ in us.  To deny this truth is to deny the experience of countless millions of people for over hundreds of year.  It is empirically true that this experience has been confessed  by many people.  The empirical proof of birth of Christ within us involves the transformation of lives to live lives of peace, hope, love, kindness, and justice.

And the challenge for us today is to make the birth of Christ believable in our time?  And how can we do this?  By living lives of love, peace, joy, self-control, kindness, and justice in our life situations.  These manifestations are proof of the sublime truth of the birth of Christ.

May God help each of us to know the sublime truth of the birth of Christ today.  Amen.

Wednesday, December 25, 2019

Hidden from the Wise; Revealed to Babes


Christmas Eve         December 24, 2019     
Is. 9:2-4,6-7          Ps.96:1-4,11-12        
Titus 2:11-14        Luke 2:1-14  


   Why has Christmas taken over the world in way in which Easter never has?  Why has Christmas had more influence in the secular world and in the non-Christian world than Easter?
    Christmas is about a baby.  It is about the  wisemen bringing gifts to a baby, and what is more universal than giving gifts to children?  And you are wise if you keep the children happy with gifts, right?

    But beyond the popularity of Christmas due to the birth of the Christ child it is also about having hope in this life as we are now in it.  Easter is much about hope for the afterlife and we can wait for the afterlife, we would like to ponder hope for life as it is now.
    I think that the value of Christmas is reinforced by the child motif that is presented in the Gospel words of Jesus.  Jesus said some rather enigmatic things about infants and children.  He said, "Let the children come to me; for to such as these belong the kingdom of heaven."  Sorry adults; those are the words of Jesus.   Jesus also said that unless one became like a child, one could not understand the kingdom of God.  Sorry adults.   Jesus also said that he thanked God that these things were hid from the wise but revealed to infants because such was God's will.  Sorry adults.
    There is an Arab riddle which is based upon the belief that there are 100 names of God but human beings can only know 99 of those names.  They can never now the hundredth name of God.  So the question: Why does the camel have this silly smirk on his face?  Well, he knows the 100th name of God and he's not telling.
    Why does the baby have the angelic grin on his or her face?  She knows and is living the reality of original joy and we adults can only look on as being perpetually locked out.
    If we understand the mystery of being locked out of original joy; we understand the appeal of Christmas and the celebration of the birth of the Christ-child.
     What is the conversion experience called?  It is called a new birth.  It is called being born-again.   How much closer to childhood can one get than the experience of a new birth.
      New Birth is what the early Christian mystics called spiritual awakening.  St. Paul said the mystery of the ages of revealed:  Christ in you the hope of glory.
         I believe that the Christmas Story encodes the new birth theology of the early church.  They believed from their experience, that a person could have as an adult, a renewal into the essence of the original joy of our birth into this world.  The smiling baby can be alive and well within us.   We can have the experience of original joy within us.  We can access this original joy even as we live within all the harsh realities of our adult worlds.  This is not an escape from our adult worlds; this is the great complement to our adult worlds.  This experience of new birth, of our child-likeness, is not a childish denial, it is not the childish and inappropriate emotions of an inebriated state, it is a spiritual birth of renewal that is available to us.  And we should not cease in our quest for life experience until we have found it and its effects.
     Why do we love Christmas?  Not because all of the family pressure to please everyone by finding the perfect presents to give.  We love Christmas because we want to recover wonder and joy in our lives.  We want to know that Christ has been born in us and for us and with us.  We want to know that the divine affirms the validity of our lives.
    Tonight, the celebration of the birth of Christ invites us to joy, wonder and renewal.  And with God's gift of the Spirit, we can all find this tonight.  Let us hear the whisper of God say to us tonight, Merry Christmas, my children, Merry Christmas.  Amen.
     

Sunday, December 25, 2016

The Christmas Story in Search of another Hearing

Christmas Eve A      December 24,2016        
Isaiah 9:2-4,6-7    Psalm 96:1-4,11-12
Titus 2:11-14       Luke 2:1-14
Lectionary Link

  The Padre was eating breakfast at the local diner and next to him a lapsed church goer wanted to make small talk.  He said to the Padre, "Father, I quit going to church because every time I went to church they would read the same passage from the Bible.   And so the Padre asked him, "What Bible passage was read every time that you went to church?"  And the man replied, "The story about the birth of Christ."
  Tonight is Christmas Eve and yes, we have read the story about the birth of Christ and yes I will preach about it.  I'm not going free lance on Christmas Eve and chose another Bible story.   And if you just come to Church at Christmas, chances are the church will always have the same Bible passage.
  At our earlier service the little children did their Cecile B. DeMille's version of the Christmas Story and the answer is still the same to the question, "Where does the little two year old angel go in the Christmas Pageant?"  Wherever she wants.
  Christmas certainly is the most popular Christian holiday because we have "childified" it.  We make Christmas all about making it happy for children and even though there is R-rated material in the Christmas story, like the slaughter of the holy innocent, we give that bad event another day instead of Christmas.
  The Christmas Story does give us occasion to be child-like.  It is as though we all sit like children watching a Disney movie and just enjoy the story.
  I like that too, but you know me too well to know that I am hung up on words and upon thinking about how words function.  I'm hung up on whether words and stories make good sense.  I'm hung up on whether this ancient story has relevance to people in our world today, even as people are leaving faith traditions in droves because either the ancient stories don't seem relevant to peoples' lives or because they are not being presented as having current relevancy.
  The Christmas Story is presented in different ways in the New Testament and in the  Gospels.  In St. Paul, the Christmas Story is: Christ is born in you, the hope of Glory.  Because I am so hung up on words, my favorite Christmas Story is in the Gospel of John.  The Gospel of John has the Primordial Christmas story.  Long before Jesus was born in Bethlehem, the Gospel of John traces the origin of Christ before Bethlehem:  In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.  All things were created by the Word and the Word was made flesh and dwelled among us.
  I like this because, I think this is the main truth about life and humanity.  All human life as we know and understand it happens because we have words; because language is our destiny.  As human beings we cannot help using words or being used by them in an environment of words into which we as babes were born.
  The magnetic energy of mutual desire between human beings draw out of us words as we communicate with each other about the world in which we live.  The basic function of words is to set values.  Values are set by comparative difference.  An apple is not an orange.  They have different values and meanings and these values and meanings are what is registered in the use of words.
  Now if word is about setting values and meaning, how do the supreme values and meanings come to be established in our lives?   How is that we have come to say love is the best of everything?  How is it that we come to believe it is a supreme value to establish our society upon values of justice written the words of the law?
  When something great or unusual happens it has a way of drawing from us the words for what is best and greatest.  When we can encounter events and people who wow us with their unique character or behavior then we are drawn to use words to confess supreme greatness.  And the duration of such confessed greatness becomes the foundation events of creative advance in humanity.
  Jesus Christ was an event.  He could not be invented or contrived.  He could not be ignored.  Jesus Christ made an impression.  The impression was so profound on so many people that he was not bound within just one time period in history.  He was destined to be remembered.
  The church of people who knew about the post-resurrection appearances of Jesus Christ continued to know the deep sense of a personal presence of Christ within their lives because of God's Holy Spirit.  They were totally baffled by this staying power of the presence of Christ in their lives long after Jesus could no longer seen.
  The profound impact of the life of Jesus gave this world a new example of what was best and greatest and the early Christians were inspired to write about the greatness of Jesus in many ways.  The Christmas Stories are stories about confessing that Jesus was great from the beginning of his life even before his actual ministry, his death and resurrection proved his greatness.
     The way in which high values come to human beings in their language experience is when a person catches the attention of humanity to inform the superlative case of human values.
  2000 years ago there appeared a person in human experience; he was different from Abraham, Moses, David, Elijah, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and Alexander the Great.  He was different from Caesar Augustus.  He was different from Rabbis Hillel and Shammai.   He was so different that a significant number of people were compelled to use language in the superlative about him.  They were compelled by his example both in his life and in his afterlife of the Holy Spirit to use language to confess his greatness.  They preserved in writing their language of the confession of the greatness of Jesus Christ.  The language about Jesus Christ is the language of the human superlative.
  The New Testament writers had to look for the vocabulary from their existing cultural situations to provide the comparative language from which to speak about Jesus.
  If one is going to speak about Henry Aaron and homeruns in baseball, who do you make reference to?  You make reference to Babe Ruth.
  If one is going to speak about Tiger Woods in golf, who do you make reference to?  You make reference to Jack Nicklas.
  In every field when a new prodigy or genius or brilliant person arises, one uses the past great people to give a frame of reference.
  The writers of the New Testament had social and cultural frameworks from which they could draw upon to try to tell the surpassing greatness of Jesus Christ.
  Caesar Augustus was the Savior of the Roman World, he proclaimed to be miraculously conceived as a child of Apollo, he was the Peacemaker of the world, he was a god and the son of a god, his adoptive father/uncle Julius Caesar.  He had the ratifying propaganda from the Roman Senate declaring his divinity.
  The New Testament writers also had the witness in the writings of Hebrew Scriptures.  Along with all of the great heroes, Isaiah further said a young maiden would bear a child named Immanuel.  The prophets spoke about a messiah, a suffering servant, someone from the lineage of Jesse and David, someone from Bethlehem, someone from the house of Judah, someone who would be Wonderful Counselor, a Prince of Peace and someone who would have the Spirit of the Lord upon them.
  You and I have inherited a long list of agreed upon titles and understandings regarding Jesus Christ.  In the early decades after Jesus left this earth, his followers were still in search of a wide range of ways of speaking about Jesus.  We wrongly, assume the comparisons with all of the saying from the Hebrew Scriptures was so certain and precise.  The language was comparative and not precise; Jesus was his own person and he was more than was found in the messiah language of Hebrew Scriptures.  The Hebrew Scripture language was a fitting language of comparison so that he could be differentiated from everyone else in his surpassing greatness.
  All of the propaganda mythologies which accompanied the famous Caesar were but words of comparison and the New Testament writers consciously compared Jesus Christ with the traditions of Caesar and to the Roman Gentile audience, the confession was that Jesus Christ was much greater than a Caesar and when it came to true divinity, Jesus was the exemplar par excellence of what divinity would be like in human manifestation.  The mythologies of the Caesar were but pale in comparison.
  We have inherited the Christmas Stories as the confession of the early churches about the surpassing greatness of Jesus Christ in everyway.  When it came to Jesus Christ, a new superlative language had to be invented even while they used the fulfillment of the messiah tradition as a main model and they used the discourses regarding the greatness of the Caesars as a ways of promoting the confessed true divinity of Jesus Christ.
  The Roman senate ratified, voted upon the divinity of the Caesars.  The angels and hosts of heaven proclaimed the divinity of the Christ Child, but more important was the one by one ratification of Jesus Christ within the hearts of Christians who experienced that Christ had been born within them by the overshadowing of the Holy Spirit.
  As much as we can tout the credibility of the witness of the New Testament about the importance of Jesus Christ, there is still required a continuous ratification of the birth of Christ and the confession of his divinity.  Why?  If there is not a contemporary ratification we are left with the question of the 13th century German mystic, Meister Eckhart who asked: What good is it that Christ was born in a stable in Bethlehem over 2,000 years ago if he is not also born in me?
 And this is the question that is valid for us and will be valid in the future.  The birth of Christ, his divinity, his messiahship is not yet finished because his birth, divinity and messiahship still have a future in humanity.  You and I are a part of this continuous ratification of the birth of Christ and of his significant divinity.  Too many people just worship the past tense of the birth and divinity of Christ as it is locked up in the language of the Bible.
  Tonight you and I are asked to ratify again the birth and the divinity of Christ in our lives.  In this way the Christmas story is not simply some more cultural information for mythologists to study and classify, the Christmas story is about the renewal and transformation of our lives because we have known the birth of Christ within us.  The Christmas Story will continue to be relevant as long as people ratify it by embracing a path of continuous transformation of our lives because of knowing that God's life is found to born within us.
  Christmas is for children and it is for us who can know the child-like freshness of God's presence within us.  May God grant us all to know afresh the birth of Christ in our world and in our lives on this silent, holy night.  Amen.

Wednesday, December 25, 2013

The Christmas Story Is not yet Finished; not yet Told

Christmas Eve         December 24, 2013  
Is. 9:2-4,6-7          Ps.96:1-4,11-12        
Titus 2:11-14        Luke 2:1-14  


   As a preacher, I can often be like the little boy who gets a new toy car.  It’s not good enough to just play with the car and enjoy it.   I have to take it apart and see how it works.  And when I do, I never sure whether I can get it back together again, or at least as the same working car it once was.  In reassembly, it may look like a chariot with lots of extra unused parts or it may be a space ship with lots of added parts.
  And as we have heard the Christmas Story again this year, you might tell me to just leave it alone preacher.  Let it function for us in its lovely primary naiveté so we can get home more quickly to the egg nog.
  But you know me; I cannot let this story stand without taking it apart and examining motive and provenance of its writing and reception in its own time.  I do so because I think that an ancient story can become violated by the temporal provincialism of us modern and post-modern people so thoroughly programmed by modern science.  We can be scornful of biblical writings even while we look for our truths in Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter.  We excuse ourselves because we say it is a different kind of truth than people found in biblical times.
   The Christmas Infancy narratives are actually quite diverse in their appeals to quite an eclectic audience.  They are rather sophisticated in their mode of composition even as the writers use the rhetorical devices of their time to deal with one of the plainest facts of human history, namely, who is this Jesus Christ, and why are we still talking about him and why did he not get discarded  in the dust bin of human history.
  The Christmas Story got written down in the eight or nine decades after Jesus lived because of the reality of his staying power in the lives of a growing community of people.  These people were baffled that a person had an ability to create a trans-historical presence.  But this was the occasion to continue to create new traditions about Jesus to new audiences. 
  Why did this Jesus happen?  Why won’t he go away?  Why does he continued to appear when his physical body was gone and affect the lives of people enough in compelling ways  to cause them to tell and retell his story again and again and in different ways?
  I would like for us to give credit to the Gospel writers for knowing their language methods and their audience.  They used Gospel narratives to tell the greatness of Jesus by trying to speak about his origin.  Where did this guy come from?
  In using the standard rabbinical methods of interpretation, known as midrash, the writers used the intermingling of plain fact, with allegorical or esoteric meanings and further they particularly used a method of comparative stories to wed the life of Jesus with the lives of others whose stories of greatness had been told.  What is also notable about the rhetoric of the infancy narratives is that the writers took the comparative stories method and used comparative themes from the Roman propaganda stories which accompanied the myths of the divinized Caesars.   In a community which had separated from the synagogue in a large part because of the success of the Jesus Movement among the Gentiles, the appeals of the rhetoric had to take into account the Roman Hellenistic audience. The Gospel writers were appealing to new audiences; they expanded rabbinical methods to extra-Judaic topics even as they made the Hebrew Scriptures more widely known and read in a Roman Empire audience.
  The plain fact of Christmas is that Jesus did not go away for lots of people after he died.  He stayed and his staying presence was accounted for under the reality of the Risen Christ.  Now how and why could Jesus stay around?  What is his origin?  How can we recount and tell his greatness?
  The earliest report tells us that Jesus was adopted as God’s Son at his baptism.  Mark is the earliest written Gospel; Mark does not have the Bethlehem birth story.  Jesus is adopted as God’s Son when a heavenly voice said, “This is my beloved Son; with him I am well pleased.” Christmas pageant directors certainly cannot get any scripts out of the Gospel of Mark.  The rabbinical method was not yet fully developed and applied in Mark.
  How can we find about the origin of Jesus and who is in his family tree?  We don’t have to go to the Salt Lake City data base of genealogy; we can go to Luke and Matthews.   The genealogy of Jesus begins with Abraham in Matthew.  And it begins with God, Adam and Eve in the Gospel of Luke.  The origin of Jesus is found in genealogy.  Genealogy is a rhetoric of origins.  The genealogies of Jesus expose fully his humanity but even as there were great people in his family tree, they were also very human in their imperfections.  The presence of the human imperfections meant that elaborating stories about Mary’s Immaculate Conception had to arise in the Catholic tradition to account for his surpassing greatness and perfection.
  The Gospel writers used comparative stories to align the birth of Jesus with miraculous birth stories tradition in the Hebrew Scripture such as the stories of the births of Isaac and Samuel. The Isaac birth story include angelic messengers.   The song of  a thankful Hannah, the once barren woman who became the mother of Samuel,  became the poetic model for the song of Zachariah and for Mary’s Magnificat.  
    The story of Jesus had to be told using the spiritual journey of Israel.  The people of Israel were trapped as slaves in Egypt and were led out by their hero Moses; the baby Jesus and his parents made a flight to Egypt and returned to the homeland as a symbolic story of the identity of Jesus with Jacob and Joseph and Moses.   Pharaoh was a baby killer of Hebrew boys in Egypt but the great Moses was spared when he was adopted by an Egyptian princess.    Herod was a baby killer but the baby Jesus survived as he was presented using the template of the baby Moses survival story.
  The Gospel writers also found in the poetry of the prophets the language to speak about Jesus. They borrowed freely the words of the prophets to speak about Jesus: Emmanuel, Counselor, Prince of Peace, Almighty God and many, many more.  The Psalmist wrote about kings of the earth coming to pay homage to a king in Judah.  The story of the magi fulfilled this alignment of Jesus with the poetic themes of the Psalms.
  What is further fascinating is that the Gospel writers appealed to readers who were familiar with the Roman political rhetoric.  Caesars were declared as gods and sons of gods by the Roman Senate.  Caesars were praised for being saviors and bringing peace to the world.  Stories were told about the mother of Octavian conceiving in a temple through an encounter with a Apollo.   There were comets and astronomical signs which accompanied births of Emperors.  In the Christmas narrative the heavenly senate of angels declared the birth of a savior and prince of peace.  There was a Christmas star which accompanied and was a sign of the birth of a royal Christ child.
  The Gospels in their original contexts were exclusive for the people converted to their communities; they were not read in a wider community.  They served as liturgy and even secret teaching for their communities.  The writers were subtle enough to encode deeper meanings within the narratives.  The earliest New Testament writings are from St. Paul and he set the theology of the church which was the proclamation of the risen Christ in you by the power of the Holy Spirit.  The Christmas narrative presents Mary as a story example of everyone who has the life of the risen Christ born within them as they are over-shadowed by the power of the Holy Spirit.
  By the time John’s Gospel was written, Jesus the Christ came to be presented as the Eternal Word of God who was the word of God spoken to create the world from the very beginning.  In John’s Gospel, the origin of Jesus is as one who has no origin at all since he was from the beginning.
  And now after 2000 years the Christmas story has had so many collateral effects in so many times and cultures.  It has taken on evergreen trees and an obscure Bishop Nicholas of Myra has morphed into a Dutch Sinterclaus and a jolly grandfatherly Santa Claus of America commercial culture.
  Tonight we can say that what we learn about the Christmas Story is that it cannot be controlled, by limiting its meaning, its content appeals and its collateral cultural effects.  That may be disconcerting for people who want to be doctrinal police but it is also an affirmation that as long as there is time, there will more meanings for Christmas and more ways to tell and live the Christmas Story.
  The plain fact is Jesus was a historical person who has not gone away from the consciousness of the people of the world.  Dealing with this fact is how the Christmas story originated and why it still grows in its power to accrue new meanings today.
  The Christmas Story is large enough to encompass your life and my life and the kind of meanings which you and I need to surpass ourselves in excellence tonight.  You and I live with some of the harsh realities of our adult world.   Somewhere in our lives tonight we need rebirth and renewal.  Somewhere we need to re-capture the nascent and native state of being playfully joyful for no reason at all.   
  This Christmas Eve is as good a time as any to open ourselves up to renewal.  Being born again has become a mocking characterization of a type of Christianity but it should be seen as just good psychological practice of constant renewal into the original freshness of our births into this life.  Our memories of our original freshness are weak, obscure, even lost, which is why we need to be mystified by the Sublime Spirit to plumb our original blessed entrance into the world.  To aid our memories we have the magic of babies who have power over us because they live the state of being what we have forgotten.  We have babies and the Christ Child to bear our projections of the original blessing of our birth into this world.
  Tonight we let our projections go onto the great Child of History and the child in our history.  And this Child calls to us tonight to tend to him.  This child is found in the vulnerable in this world.  This Child is with us.  This Child is us.  And tonight we interpret the cooing of the Christ Child as a gentle whisper which says to us, “Merry Christmas.”  Amen.

Sunday, December 25, 2011

Christmas: Being Renewed in Wonder


Christmas Eve         December 24, 2011    
Is. 9:2-4,6-7          Ps.96:1-4,11-12        
Titus 2:11-14        Luke 2:1-14  


   Did you know that one of the most popular toys in the Toy Hall of Fame is the stick.  We spend lots of dollars on PlayStations, Wii’s, Xboxes, and a kid wants to play with a stick.  How high tech is a stick?  Parents can remember Christmas mornings when two and three year old children have been forced to open their expensive educational toys and what do they do?  They play with the boxes and the ribbons.  And we are aghast and humored at the same time; why can’t we just exorcise from them their native childhood and make them to be the instant prodigies that we want them to be?  We want them to achieve quickly extreme adulthood intelligence so that they can be ahead of the curve at their young age.
  Even as we want our babies to grow up, the power of the baby and of infancy and of childhood prevails and exerts its winning influence over us if we are behaving as we should as adults.
  I think that it is the power of the baby that makes the Christmas feast a feast of renewal for us at the end of the year when the natural light of the sun is shortest and when cold prevails.  At the winter solstice the sun has been reborn in our part of the world.  Our secular calendars make the Christmas feast come at the end of the year and so it is a time when we are tying up loose ends in our fiscal year.  It is the right time for a feast of renewal, and how we need a feast of renewal!  How we need a sense of all things coming together at the end of our year.
  The feast of the baby Jesus has grown and accrued so much that it has become a global celebration far away from the religious moorings of our biblical faith.  And that’s okay, since a great event will always ripple and effect life far from its intended purpose.  Great events accrue lots of different meanings and cultural responses.  And in the snowballing of all that has accrued, Christmas has grown for now about 2000 years. It is our duty as the church to dig, as it were, an archaeological shaft through all of what has accrued and imagine that we tonight can arrive at something of the original wonder; the wonder we knew as babies and young children and the wonder that still lives in babies and children today.
  The genius of the Christmas story is that it is able to bear what we project upon it in our spiritual aspirations.  A good story demands retelling over and over again because it is able to bear the projection of the audience.  And the silliest question to ask is, “Is the story true?”  If you have to ask that question, then you just don’t get it.  It’s like asking a little girl if the Disney Princess movies are true.  That is not the question to ask.
  What is true of the Christmas story is that it has the power to awaken wonder.  To be awakened to wonder is perhaps the essence of the Christian faith: To know that we are touched in a favorable way by someone greater than us and whom we cannot control with our limited understanding.
  The Gospels were written much later than the writings of St. Paul.  And since they were written later, they were crafted in such a way that the actual spiritual practices and teachings could be encoded through the metaphors of the narratives of the life of Jesus.
   Dominant metaphors in the presentation of the Gospel were motifs of birth, infancy and childhood.
The renewal of one’s life by the Holy Spirit is called the new birth.  The annunciation, conception and birth story of Jesus is the story of how the world is renewed by realizing God’s intimate presence within human experience.  The story is a personal invitation of renewal for each of us to know how God’s presence is made intimate to us.
  Infancy and childhood are also motifs of the Gospel.  Jesus said that wise adults could not understand God’s kingdom; but it was given to infants to have it revealed to them.  Jesus also said that one had to be childlike to understand and enter the kingdom of God.  Here again we find the dynamic of   wonder.  We can become so adult in the wrong ways that we limit our experience of truth; we limit our experience of wonder.  And that is where we need the power of the baby to renew us again.  We adults have been evicted from the Garden of Eden of childhood innocence for so long and in so many adult ways that we have forgotten wonder and that wonder aspect of our personality needs to be awakened afresh.  We often try to awaken it in the ways that lead to addictive behaviors, but this feast of renewal is an invitation to return to the gift and power of wonder that is as close to us as everything that is retained within us from our first coming into this world. 
  Babies, children, our pets, the beauty of Nature and the Christmas story are drawing from us the power of nascent Wonder.  It is very near and we but need to let it be evoked and arise in us.  And sometimes it has arisen and we need to be reminded of how it has arisen within us.  Ironically, it arises even in Christmas sadness; the type of sadness that we feel because we miss people and pets who have been in our lives but have died.  The experience of wonder even in this kind of sadness is the sudden realization of how much love, joy and response that these people and pets have drawn from us.  They awakened our wonder and if our wonder has been awakened, we know that we can open ourselves to new wonder in new people, pets and events in our lives.
  And so we are invited to this festival of renewal tonight; let us not find that our infant and child aspect of personality to be incompatible with our adult lives.  The wounds of hard knocks in life that often make us react with our “bah humbug” cynicism need to be healed with a fresh encounter with wonder.  And this is the Christmas truth.
  Dear friends, please let the Christ Child call us to a fresh encounter with wonder and the power of this wonder will help us to re-embroider the tapestry of all of the events of our lives to discern a new and fresh purpose of God in our lives.
  Let the warmth of Wonder arise in us tonight, as we whisper, “O Christ, be born in us!”  Amen.
  

Aphorism of the Day, March 2024

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