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.
