Empire Christianity and the Birth of Christ

Christmas Eve B  December 24, 2023                                           

Isaiah 9:2-7 Psalm 96                                                                   

Titus 2:11-14  Luke 2:1-14

Lectionary Link

If we are warm, well-fed, clothed, sheltered, money a plenty, safe, protected, and able to indulge in all kinds of Christmas season excesses tonight, how are we going to appropriate an identity with the Christmas story tonight?

Perhaps we are more honestly identified with the privileged members of the Roman Empire who enjoyed the benefits provided by their being members of the Emperor's wide sprawling entourage.

No one of any status was on the look out for a lowly couple in journey who could not find proper shelter for a woman in the late stages of her pregnancy.  The Emperor-identified people were on the side of the tax collectors, who according to the story caused the journey back home to Bethlehem for the census to verify the number of potential tax payers.

For the most part, we as American Christians have been in comfortable lifestyles, like those in who were identified with the  Emperor and having influence, safety, power, and privilege.  In the history of our American Christians ancestors we know that  they forced the Christian message upon people who lived more closely with the oppressed circumstances of Mary and Joseph and baby Jesus.  Early American Christians brought the message of the love of Jesus to the people who were already in our land, and to the slaves who were forcefully brought to our land.  To these people, we brought the love of Jesus rather ironically with the hypocritical "do as Jesus did, but not as we are doing to you."  

Why would this preacher be so negative about our hypocrisy on this Christmas eve, of all nights?

To remind us about the total irony of the Christmas Story.

God's unique Son is born into a family of nobodies who were so less than ordinary that they would be unnoticed.

But what does the Christmas Story do?  It promotes a realm of understanding about this seeming ordinary birth with magical realism.  The Roman Senate does not confer upon Jesus the title god or son of a god, rather a heavenly choral senate of angels register their affirmation of the divine child through songs and a massive light show, and for whom, for a senate or court of influential people?  No, but lowly shepherds get the first scoop and first invitation to birth site.  Lowly shepherds are the nobility of heaven's kingdom.

But can people of means, power, knowledge, and privilege also have access to this special birth?  Enter the foreign magi, persons of wisdom and means; they too are included in the invitation to the site of the special birth.

But this birth of one who is called God's special child has its opposition.  Herod must uphold the Emperor's exclusive right of being humanly divine, and opponents must be eliminated.  There is open opposition to the meaning of this special birth.  Ironically, when everyone is God's child by virtue of God's image upon us, it becomes silly for people to compete over such designation.

Friends, how can we appropriate this Christmas story tonight in our time and in our lives, indeed a time when the current dangers of war has shut down Bethlehem for Christmas?  The good news of the Christmas story tonight is to receive the birth of the Christ again and again as the continuous opportunity for conversion to our better selves, yes even the selves who would see that no poor couple would be left in the cold but would be taken care of with the best possible health care.

The opportunity awaits us tonight for the birth of Christ to convert people in all kinds of situations, rich, poor, of different ethnicities, religious, social, economic, and educational conditions.  And how shall our conversion of Christ be known tonight?  By the harmonious reciprocity between ourselves.  Rather than the birth of Christ be but a reminder of our own past failures and hypocrisy in being Christ-like, we should see this Christmas Eve as opportunity to more fuller conversion in being more Christ-like with each other.  And being more Christ-like might mean some social and economic leveling where the rich find the poor as the fulfillment of their destiny to be more perfect sharers of the gifts of their lives.

Let us celebrate the birth of Christ tonight in us through the evidence of Christ-like behaviors in us that bring love, peace, and justice to fruition in our world.

Merry Birth of Christ in you tonight.  Amen.

Tending to the Crying Christ Child

Christmas Eve B  December 24, 2020                                                                          Isaiah 9:2-7 Psalm 96                                                                                               Titus 2:11-14  Luke 2:1-14

Lectionary Link

It's Christmas again!  So that means Christmas bears repeating.  But Jesus was only born once, just like us.  One birth.  We have birthdays.  And Jesus has a birthday.  He has had many birthdays observed and celebrated since he left this earth.

The birthday of Jesus has been kept alive for a long time.  Why?  Because a power of change entered the world in his life.  And we want to to go back to the place where there is the possibility for the power for change and rebirth.

At Christmas, we don't celebrate Jesus as a two thousand year old man in heaven with a white beard; we prefer Jesus the baby.  We all know that a baby is much more interesting and mysterious and holds power over us because we can't remember when we were babies.

Lest we over-romanticize babies, we need to remember that babies cry.  And tonight we probably need to know that the baby Christ Child cries.  Tonight the Christ Child is born into a world which would make him cry.  Crying about the untimely loss of so many people from the pandemic.  Crying that many people are evicted from the inn of no-vacancy and forced into homeless hovels.  Crying that tyrants of greed still lie and control most of the assets of world.

A baby cries often for what we do not know.  We as adults, can add knowledge for what is worth crying for in our lives.  The loss of lives, dear friends, and family members, loss of jobs and homes.  Loss of the freedom to gather to spark community effervescence.  The loss of the freedom to hug, kiss and shake hands.  The loss of the freedom to eat in public, to sing, and dance, and play and learn in the public ways that we once knew.

Tonight the harsh realities of our adult worlds informs and gives reason for the crying Christ child in the manger of our world tonight.

There is the truth of Charles Dickens: it is the worst of times, it is the best of times.  But in our lives now it is the worst of times which has created what is best in our lives now.  And what is best?  The best is when a mom or dad calms a crying baby.  Our best include the people who are dealing face to face with the worst: Our hospital workers, EMT workers, essential workers, fire fighters, police and Armed Forces.

And since the best of our time are those who are working sacrificially for our health and survival, we too should come to the manger of Christ, and ask, "How can I help when things seem to be the worst?  What can I do to be a minister of what is best,  what is good news, what is Gospel for the world right now?

Tonight you and I need to tend to the crying Christ Child.  This is how we bring our gold, frankincense and myrrh best gifts to Jesus tonight.  We can tend to the crying Christ Child who is dispersed throughout the collective pain of our world tonight.  We may be called to do it in health danger situations, or we may be called to do it in things, not heroic at all:  by washing our hands, wearing a mask, reaching out by phone to the lonely who are sheltering in place, shopping locally to keep a merchant alive.

We are called to create the best of time in the worst of time, and do you know we call that?  It's Gospel.  It is good news being brought to people who need it, and it comes in word and deed, love and justice.

Having been a parent of babies, I often realized that I could not always stop my babies from crying even after going through a check list of care responses.

And what do we do when the crying baby of the worst of times, continues to cry?  We stay.  We don't abandon.  We don't give up on those who suffer.  Life tells us that we cannot always solve in quick order the causes of crying, but we keep trying?

Why? because we want the child to be in the state of mind to enjoy the gifts we want to give them. 

So, on this Christmas, as we endure the crying time of the Christ Child in the conditions of hurt in our world, we hope that the crying hurt of the world will fall asleep, so that all of us can begin afresh in a new day of general health for the lives of people in our world.

I apologize for a different kind of Christmas sermon but a parent never does regret staying with a crying baby.  And that is our Christmas attitude for tonight.

Christ is born; and he is crying.  And tonight we are called to comfort the ones in whom he is crying, even when we don't have immediate soothing effect.  And the Christ in you is reaching out to the Christ in me as we let the Christ in us reach out to the crying Christ in our world tonight.

And we whisper to the crying babe in our world tonight.  Merry Christmas, we will stay with you, because Christ has stayed with us.  Amen.

Meanings of Christmas

Christmas Eve B  December 24, 2017
Isaiah 9:2-7 Psalm 96 
Titus 2:11-14  Luke 21-14(15-20)

Merry Christmas!  And thank you for being here to observe the most literal meaning of Christmas.  Christmas means the "Mass of the Christ?"  And what is this liturgy tonight?  The Mass of Christ.

The Christmas story has been told in various ways and it has attained many meanings.  For a moment we might look at some meanings of Christmas.

Meaning happens when communication can result in understanding.  For understanding to take place two parties have to understand a common vocabulary of words and common cultural references.  When a young child is read advanced physics, no communication takes place and meanings do not happen.  An audience has to be familiar with common vocabulary and cultural reference for what might be called "telling" meanings to occur.

The writers of the Gospels wrote to audiences who came from the traditions derived from Hebrew Scriptures.  But also the early readers of the Christmas story were Gentiles without benefit of a background in the Hebrew Scriptures.  The Christmas story, in order to attain effective meaning, had to be written in the vocabulary and culture references available to a diverse audience.

Members of the early churches with a background in the stories of the Hebrew Scriptures,  knew about David, Bethlehem and the city of David.  They knew what Messiah meant.  They knew about angels.  They knew the Isaian writings about a prince of peace and a maiden bearing a special child.  They knew about the Isaian writing about Emmanuel.   They knew what the name Jesus meant:  It was the same as the Hebrew Joshua, meaning  God is our Savior.

The Gentile members of the church from their cultural experience in the Roman Empire knew that Caesar Augustus had been given credit for bringing peace to the world.  In Roman propaganda, he was called the savior of the world.  There was also a miraculous conception story told about the Caesar.  There were stories about a comet in the sky at the time of his birth.  He had been elevated by the Roman Senate to be a god and that made his son a son of a god.

The writers of the Christmas stories borrowed from the language of their audience to present the meanings of the life of Jesus in an accessible way.  And their message was this:  Even though we have borrowed the language and cultural references of the Hebrew Scriptures and even though we have borrowed from the propaganda motifs of the Roman Caesar, Jesus of Nazareth takes the meanings to another level of uniqueness.

If you believe that King David was a messiah, Jesus of Nazareth by virtue of his resurrection from the dead is a totally different and unique messiah.   If you believe that the Caesar is a great ruler in the world, Jesus of Nazareth has become a Cosmic ruler of the inner world above all principalities and powers.

The Christmas story had cultural meanings for the members of the early church who were both Jews and Gentiles.  But the Christmas story also had theological and mystical meanings for the members of the early churches.

Today,we assume the general availability of most literature.  It is hard for us to conceive of the Gospel writings not being available for a general readership.  In the time when the Gospels were written they were private literature for a limited readership, namely those who gathered in the home churches for the liturgies.

As  private literature, the Gospels were a cryptic literature hiding the meanings of the spiritual practices of the church within a story.   There was a hidden and an inner meaning of the Christmas Story to be known only to the spiritual initiates of the churches.

In the mysticism and spiritual practice of the early church,  the evidence of the Risen Christ was known in  an experience called a New Birth.  St. Paul called the mystery of the ages to be the experience of Christ being born within the inner life of people.  Such a birth did not come from reading the Hebrew Scriptures; such birth did not come because of Emperor Cult of the deified Caesar.  The birth came when a person's life was overshadowed by the power of Holy Spirit.  The result of this spiritual encounter was the transformation of one's life.  Such people who experienced such spiritual births, gathered together and as they gathered, they taught others about the reality of the birth of Christ into their lives.

The mystics of the early church were people who knew that they were on a path of the transformation of their lives because of a spiritual event.  They taught and promulgated this event in the Christmas Story.

In the mysticism of the early church, Mary was the paradigm of every Christian.  The physical birth of Jesus in Mary was understood as a providential act of God.  She was over-shadowed by the Holy Spirit and knew her child to be special.  Within this story of Mary, is the spiritual and mystical story of each Christian.

Jesus was born to Mary in a miraculous birth;  the Risen Christ is born into each of us in a marvelous spiritual birth initiating the transformation of our lives because of this encounter with the Higher Power of God.

Each year we re-enact the Christmas Story and it is easy for us to stay with the cuteness of the story and make sure that we make Christmas a delight for children.  And it does us good to tend to children.  The Christmas story is about an amazing event happening for some very poor people, peasant shepherds and obscure persons like Mary and Joseph.    Christmas is good time to help our charities as they help the persons who are vulnerable.  This year, the disastrous events in nature has disrupted the quality of life through hurricanes, earthquakes, floods and fires.  And we pray and give towards people having just the basic necessities of life as a good Christmas.

Tonight we pray for more Christmas meanings in our world.  And I pray that each of us will know the mystical events in our lives which give us the assurance of being helped on the path of further excellence for ourselves and in our mission within this world.

The literal meaning of Christmas is the Mass of Christ.  And in this event, we are renewed in the event of once again realizing the Real Presence of Christ in our lives.

Merry Christmas and God bless you with mystical evidence of the birth of Christ within your life.  Amen.

Called to Be Christmas Midwives

Christmas Eve         December 24, 2014  

Is. 9:2-4,6-7          Ps.96:1-4,11-12        

Titus 2:11-14        Luke 2:1-14  

Lectionary Link

  Imagine tonight that you and I are like trees who are constituted by layers or rings of experiences.  And so tonight we are constituting our outer most layer of the occasions of our personal experience, fortunately I am speaking of the expansion of our consciousness and not of our waist lines because of all of the Christmas time sweets.

  People who study trees can look at a cross section of the successive layers of rings of a tree and measure age and they can also tell by analysis something about the weather and climactic condition which the tree faced in a certain annual cycle.

  Let us look at ourselves tonight and at the life of church as comprising successive but expanding concentric circles of something like a conical spiral.  We are ever surpassing ourselves in future and subsequent states in the sum total occasions of existence.  (This is the subtle and poetic way of saying that we age and get older.)

  To provide us a visualization of ourselves as the outer container of all previous states of our becoming, I would like to use the Russian nesting dolls also call Babushka dolls.  They are dolls within dolls

  I would like to use these Babushka dolls to illustrate a two parallel trips to the Christmas birth event in Bethlehem.  The first of the two parallel trips to Bethlehem is the corporate trip of the church in how the Christmas story came to functions within the church.  The other is the personal trip to Bethlehem which we make in our own spiritual lives.

  For the outer nesting doll, I have used a word and picture collage to represent the presence of Christ by the Holy Spirit in the Christian communities of over 1900 years.  Indeed this is quite a collage.  It includes Luther, Calvin, Cramner, Aquinas,   Baptists, Amish, St. Francis, Pope Leo the Great, Jonathan Edwards, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Mennonites, Episcopalians, Crusades, Martyrs, Monastics, Mormons, Monophysites, Martin Luther King, Jr. Shakers and Methodists, Presbyterians, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and more, because the outer container has to include all of the historical manifestations of the Christ event.

    We take the outer shell off to see what is contained beneath.  What we find beneath are some of the earliest communities of the Jesus Movement.  What we find is a Christ-centered Judaism within the various cities of the Roman Empire.  This Christ center Judaism caught on with a significant number of Gentiles.  This Christ-centered Judaism provided social identity clubs for people involved in the migration to cities as significant urbanization was taking place in the cities of the Roman Empire.  This age of the church includes people who were surprised by the very success of the message of Jesus Christ and the authentic spiritual experience which took root in people's lives to bring about moral and spiritual change.   This experience also provided such an excitement of discovery that people wanted to share this excitement with others.  This age includes the collection and distribution of  Christian writings including the collection of the writings of the apostle Paul and his disciples and other writing which later became accepted as books of the official textbook of Christianity, The New Testament.  In this phase of the church we find martyrs who died for their faith.  The conversion of the Gentiles to the Gospel led to the Emperor Constantine and the Council of Nicaea.  

  In an earlier phase of the Jesus Movement, we find persecuted minorities communities who found great hope in holding on to justice in the form of narratives about an imminent apocalyptic ending of the world with a super hero Son of Man and Messiah coming to the rescue at any time. This was the time leading up to the Roman siege of Jerusalem and the aftermath of the destruction of Jerusalem in the year 70.  The followers of Jesus were forced into exile out of Jerusalem and portions of their homeland.  Could the Christian movement survive if it lost its birthplace and homeland?  This exile proved providential for the Christian movement but it also became crucial in the separation of the followers of Jesus from the synagogue, since the success of the Jesus Movement came to reside in the Gentile converts who lived in the cities of the Roman Empire.

  The next layer is the layer of the theology of St. Paul found in his writings which are the earliest writings of the New Testament.  This time was also the era of the collection of authentic oral traditions which surrounded the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth.  St. Paul did not write a biography of Jesus of Nazareth and he did not meet him in the flesh.  St. Paul had a spiritual encounter with Christ on the road to Damascus and his life was changed.  And he preached this message of spiritual encounter with the risen Christ.  He used the great Christ events as a spiritual metaphors of personal transformation.  He said that he had been crucified with Christ and that Christ had come to live within him.  He wrote that he had been raised with Christ into heavenly places and so the ascension of Christ was also an experience of being transported to another reality which was both parallel and interactively influential with the material reality of his world.  St. Paul wrote that Christ dwelled in each believer, not by natural means but through the experience of a person becoming overshadowed or baptized by the Holy Spirit of God.

  And that brings to us the Christmas Event.  The event which would have been first chronologically, was in fact a later addition to the writings of the Christian communities.  The Christmas stories are not even included in the earliest written Gospel of Mark.  So why do we have the Christmas Stories and why do we arrive to encounter the infant Jesus in Bethlehem?  If we have the Christmas stories of Jesus, why not his early childhood and stories of his young adulthood?  The success of the Jesus Movement in incorporating new members meant that something happened which happens to all successful movements or businesses.  They become institutionalized.  Popularity and growth necessitates institutionalization and incorporation.  How does one teach the message that Christ is born within the human person by the power of the Holy Spirit?  How does one encrypt this message and encode it within a story which is only for the eyes of the ones being initiated into what was called the "mystery" of the revelation of Christ?

  So we have the Christmas Story.  It purports to come first but really it was the spiritual genre to provide the encrypted reality of "Christ within us" the hope of glory.  Blessed Mary is the paradigm of every believer.  She has the encounter with the angelic messenger from the parallel heavenly realm with the annunciation of conception and birth events which would not come by natural inducement.  Sure enough, the birth happened and there were many midwives to that birth event.  Did you know that St. Paul wrote that he "was in travail of birth" while he waited for Christ to be born within the members of his community.  The birth of Christ as a spiritual event attracted the foreign Gentile community as signified by the magi who came from afar.  The birth of Christ into a believer was not limited by socio-economic conditions; it could be witnessed and experienced by peasant shepherds and it could be witnessed and experienced by those wealthy enough to provide gold, frankincense and myrrh.  The birth of Christ within the life of a believer was not without consequences; one's life might be threatened by those who were opposed to this life change. The Christmas story includes the temporary flight to Egypt to escape death. This encodes the flight from Jerusalem for many during the time of  Roman siege.  And those who were newly born might die because of this spiritual birth of Christ within them. Martyrdom was a possibility.  This reality is encrypted in the events of the slaughter of the Holy Innocents.  The Christmas story writers used the genre of story-telling which was known by the Roman audiences.  Roman readers knew the miraculous stories of the immaculate conceptions of the divine Emperors who had comets arrive at their births and who had propaganda which proclaimed them as bringers of peace and saviors of the world.  The Emperors had the Roman senates who voted to make them divine beings and sons of gods.  In contrast, angelic hosts proclaimed Christ to be the Savior and Son of the Most High.  One could understand how such Christian literature could have been perceived as a threat to the Emperor in its composition.  This is why it was a literature read within the communities of Christ and it proclaimed this parallel kingdom of God which silently was happening at the same time as the kingdom of the Caesars.  This was a rich literature of spiritual transformation as each person came to find this supernatural birth of Christ within one’s very own being.

  And so we seek the reality of the birth of Christ again tonight, not locked up in the cute little story; rather the Christmas story is evidence of the reality which we share with all Christians, namely, Christ has been born in us.   The birth of Christ is the mystery of the life of God and the life of this parallel kingdom becoming a reality within our lives.  It is a true incarnation because it changes the flesh and blood of our being; it changes our body language to be and act differently.  Do not let anyone say to you that the spiritual birth of Christ is without material or bodily effect.  The effect is real and certain.

  What about you and I and the birth of Christ and our own layers of experience within us?  Can we with imagination take our histories apart something like the layers of nesting dolls?  How have you and I been constituted to arrive to be all of the stages and phases of our history which we now contain in ourselves?

  Are we constituted by nagging doubt about the personal relevance of God, Christ, the church, love and justice?  Are we constituted by uncertainty about grace and blessing because we have experienced or seen too much harshness and cruelty to be able to believe in the normalcy of goodness and justice?  Do we bear the wounds and the scars of our own failures and the failure of other people to be perfect or even adequate to our needs?   Are we constituted by our own American Episcopalian self-reliant success and we have the power and wealth to negotiate our own independent well-being and the well-being of our family so that we don't think we "need" others and we often show that we don’t need that troublesome body, the church, except for a few social functions?  It is ironic that the church grew among people migrating to a new identity in the Roman cities.  It is ironic that the church is still strongest with immigrating people trying to survive in a new country or place and the church is the place for networking of people who don't have the means of independent survival.

   As you and I assess our currently constituted spiritual existence tonight, I would ask us to ponder two things?  Have we lost freshness in life because we have limited ourselves to sheer intellectual and the brute factual methods of science tonight?  Have we forgot the aesthetic genres which enable us to cry, and giggle and play and access the memory of our being born as smiling, joyful babies who were that way for no reason at all?  The Christmas story invites us to access and recover our native joy tonight.

  The second thing that we need to ponder is that because we have the power and wealth to be self-reliant and independent, can we repent of this self-reliance and independence which has caused us to forsake our roles within community?  Can we repent of our self-reliance and use power and strength and wealth to become midwives for the birth of the Holy Child of Jesus into the lives of people in this world who exist in various states of vulnerability?

  The Christ child is found in the conditions of vulnerability; the story of the Christ child includes a host of midwives, Mary, Joseph, the angels, the shepherds, the magi, the star of Bethlehem and the sheep and the cows.  We are all together in the midwifery of the birth of Christ into the lives of people in our world.  The chief alternative to self-reliance is ministry which is being present to help others who cannot be so self-reliant.

  So my friends, let us find in the Christmas Story, the new experience of our native joy of birth and let it be for us tonight a renewal.  But also my friends, let us forsake our self-reliant and independent ways which our power and wealth has allowed us to attain, and let us embrace this ministry of midwifery, of being those who are present to help others find and discover the birth of Christ in their lives in this wonderful experience of joy.

  Tonight as we live in the latter days, or in our latest days, but let us return to the impossible, the event of our births.  We can do this as we project upon the story of the birth of Christ and as we behold in the eyes of infants and children this state of nascent joy.

  Merry Christmas, to all who have had the Christ born within you.  And Merry Christmas to all of us who now are called to be midwives for the birth Christ in others and who are also called to tend to those who are in the state of vulnerability.  Let us become midwives for the birth of Christ, tonight.   Amen.