4 Advent A, December 18, 2016
Isaiah 7:10-16 Psalm 80:1-7, 16-18
Romans 1:1-7 Matthew 1:18-25
Just so you won't think my sermon is pointless, here are four points. 1-We use the past to explain the present. 2- Translation of the Bible can affect our theology. 3-As language users people have always employed genres. 4-The Gospels were spiritual manuals which encoded the mysticism of the early churches.
We often are left with the impression that the ancient prophets who are in the Hebrew Scriptures specifically predicted Jesus of Nazareth. To use the Bible to predict the future may be comforting for people who want to assert their sense of God being in control of the world but such predictions have not and cannot be proven with the exactness that some fundamentalists often imply. What is true is that history is a spiral; similar patterns of human behavior recur and so the past is used to explain what is happening now. Did Babe Ruth predict the appearance of Roger Maris, Hank Aaron or Barry Bonds? No. But do we speak of Roger Maris and Barry Bonds using Babe Ruth as the one who exemplified hitting home runs? Yes, and so the past anticipates the future and we use the past to explain the present. The early Christians preachers who read the book of Isaiah certainly understood that Jesus Christ exemplified meaning of the Isaian child who was called Immanuel. Jesus Christ was understood as God with us or God being on our side. Or God becoming completely bilingual of both divine and human life. The past anticipates the future without being explicitly predictive; such belief in exact prediction would be a violation of the conditions of freedom.
Second point. The translation of the Bible can affect how we understand theology. We have read from seventh chapter of Isaiah today which refers to a young woman bearing a child. The Hebrew word for young woman is "alma." The famous Greek translation of the Hebrew Scripture is called the Septuagint. The Septuagint translators translated the Hebrew word "alma" as "parthenos," which is the Greek word for virgin. The New Testament Greek uses "parthenos" indicating their Septuagint reading of the Hebrew Scriptures. In the history of the church's translation of the Bible the Virgin Birth theology has been reflected. The famous King James Version of the Bible translate the Hebrew word as virgin and not as "young woman." What this reveals is that sometimes the theological perspectives of the church are highlighted by the way in which a translation of language is done. But I will later show how we have sometimes diminished the mysticism of the church for literal meanings of words. Sometimes we use the literal almost like idols and we end up avoiding the mystical experience.
Third point. As language users we employ genres. As babies we are passively coded with all of the language meanings of the caretakers of our lives. As we activate our language ability, we take on language use with its glorious multivalent meaningful practices. We employ genres of language use. We know literal, common sense, empirically verifiable meanings. We know figurative, allegorical, moral, metaphorical, aesthetic and spiritual meanings. We are amazing language users, but we can make mistakes in how we think that genres are being employed.
Imagine the young boy in his Superman pajamas with a lovely cape. He has just been watching a Superman movie. So what does he do? He takes a flying leap off his upper bunk bed dressed as Superman and he discovers that gravity crashes him to injury on the floor below. The boy has confused his genres. But from this experience the boy does not have to give up his genre of magical realism nor does he have to give up the genre of scientific natural laws. The key is to learn to transact appropriately with the various language genres of life. The biblical writers were not stupid, primitive language users. And even though they existed long before modern science, they still understood naive realism and commonsense perceptual reality. They understood mystical and allegorical genre of writing. The Gospel writers wrote at a time when the Roman propaganda said that a comet attended the birth of the Caesar and that his mother had a miraculous conception in a Temple and that he was the Savior of the World who brought peace to the earth and he was called divi filius, son of god. The great fault of modern fundamentalists is to deny Bible writers the intelligence of knowing how they were writing in their own time fully cognizant of the writing genre which they deployed in their context. We need to appreciate how fluid all language users can be with genres. We need to beware of reading a genre in the wrong way.
Finally, the fourth point. The Christmas story encodes the mystagogy of the early church. What is mystagogy? It is instruction of teaching in the mystery of Christ. According to St. Paul, the mystery of the ages was this: Christ in us the hope of Glory? How is Christ born within us? We are overshadowed by power of the Holy Spirit. We are baptized by the Holy Spirit and the life of Christ is conceived and grows within us. In being overshadowed by the Holy Spirit, one's heart is made clean and virginal to bear the presence of Christ. This was the chief reality of the early church. This is the reality which the mystics of the early church encoded in the story of the Virgin Mary. Blessed Mary is the paradigm of every Christian who has had the life of Christ born in them when they have been overshadowed by the Holy Spirit. Can we appreciate how the Gospel writers were writing in the mystical genre and how it could only be pierced by the early initiates into the mystical transformation program promulgated in the early churches? Do you see how often the church throughout the ages have externalized all of this and literalized it and missed the mystical significance? Let us learn how to deploy our genres appropriately.
I would leave you with a quote from one of the most profound mystics of the Christian Church, Meister Eckhart. He wrote: What a shame it would be if Jesus was only born to the Virgin Mary in the first century and not be born in our lives today.
My prayer for us today is that we would experience the current reality of the birth of Christ. Amen.
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