Christmas Eve C December 24, 2021

 Christmas Eve C  December 24, 2021
Isaiah 9:2-7 Psalm 96
 Titus 2:11-14  Luke 2:1-14

Lectionary Link

 

The expansive popularity of Christmas probably has to do with what can be called “baby magic.” The Christmas story is easier to tell to children than the Holy Week story.  And if it is safe for children then it is safe for everyone.  The Christmas story gets a PG rating for movie censors.

 

What is the baby magic?   Babies are completely dependent upon us.  Is that magic?  Sleepless nights?  Changing diapers?

 

So why do we like babies, other than their newness and their cuteness?  It could be that we are drawn to baby magic when we like the very best part of ourselves.  And what the very best part that we like about ourselves?

 

Being meaningful care givers to someone who really needs our help.  In the church we call this “ministry.”  Having the gift or the ability that is strategically useful to someone else.

 

Why do we feel different about ministry to a baby?  Because a baby seems to have an innocent helplessness about her that is winsome.  We have our doubts about the reasons for adult needs, because we hold an adult more accountable for their life situation, but we don’t do that with  babies, because they cannot be held accountable for their life conditions.

 

At Christmas time, the nice thing, even in our over-commercialized season, is that people want to please other people by giving gifts.  It is very satisfying to see a child excited about receiving a gift.

 

Most all Charities rely upon Christmastime largesse in giving to help in their ministry of giving throughout the entire year.

 

There is something right about our self-esteem, if we like ourselves better as people who can and do give to people who are benefited by our giving.  And this is the goodness that the Christmas can draw from us.

 

Where does the baby magic get its power?   A baby says to all of us, “You were once my age, and you’ll never consciously remember it.  You can hold me, smile at me, smell me, but you can’t be where I am. I’m living what you can’t remember.”

 

The baby evokes from us the fact of our first birth which remains locked in our memory vaults and can only be experienced when we project our birth upon the baby.  The baby allows the occasion for an experience of our original freshness.  And we like that feeling.

 

It is not surprising that this feeling became a metaphor the mystical experience which happened to the followers of Jesus.  People came to have these experiences of original freshness, and they called it a new birth.  St. Paul called it the mystery of having Christ in us.

 

And when many people experience of the mystery of having Christ in them, they looked for ways to teach this mystery of the church in story form.  And so we have the story of Mary who became the paradigm mystic of having Christ born within her physically and mystically.   She became the model for all Christians who have known the reality of Christ being born in their lives through the overshadowing of the Holy Spirit.

 

Let us return within ourselves to the mystical awareness of the Christ-Nature rising within us and like Mary, say over and over again, “Let it be according to your word.”

 

And as we know within ourselves the awareness of the Christ-nature, let it also be known in our lives as the Spirit of generosity towards those who need what we have to offer in terms of them knowing the worth and dignity of their lives.

 

Tonight we can get through all of what has accrued to Christmas in our cultural celebrations, and we can return to the mystical fact of Christmas: Christ is born in us.  Why?  So we can know our original dignity in the image of God?  Why?  So we can recognize that dignity in others and work to live lives worthy of the full dignity which God in Christ has imparted to every human being.

 

Merry Christmas!  Merry Birth of Christ in you.   Amen.

Don't Forget the Mysticism of Christmas

Christmas Eve  C       December 24, 2018

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

Titus 2:11-14        Luke 2:1-14  

Lectionary Link

Most of us admit that Christmas is quite an imposing holiday.  It literally means the "Mass of Christ," referring to the Eucharist which celebrates the birth of Jesus.  But Christmas has grown way beyond the Mass of Christ.

It has become quite a social, cultural, entertainment and commercial phenomena unlike any other holiday.  It has become so much more than the observance of the "Mass of Christ" for the celebration of the birth of Christ.

And we might want to go all "bah humbug" on all the extra trappings which Christmas has accrued.  Or we may just want to regard it all as a great smorgasbord of religious or cultural activity from which we pick and choose for our own religious and secular observances.

One could cite the success of the evangelization of cultures by Christmas.  Even the Christmas date was a way to replace a Roman pagan festival and convert the social energy that once was expressed for the Sol Invictus event into the Christ event.  One might say that Christmas continues to evangelize; around the world the word Christ in Christmas is proclaimed, and it invites anyone with access to Wikipedia to look up Christmas and study further the origins and the meanings of Christmas.  As crass as Christmas commercialism can be, the culture of excess in gift exchange, extends beyond personal gifts exchanged to help most of the charities to be able to survive for the rest of the year.  Certainly St. John the Divine is willing to accept big Christmas gifts this year, as always.

The popularity of Christmas as a cultural and commercial phenomenon might intimidate us in the religious profession as we watch more children line up to see Santa Claus than come to the manger to see baby Jesus.  We see diminishing church attendance even as the Black Friday crowds stampede the malls.  Christmas sermons streamed and blogged get but a few hits compared to all of the Amazon.com traffic and youtube Christmas music.  So, we can be intimidated about the things which Christmas has become other than the celebration of the birth of Jesus.

I, myself, am less concerned about all that Christmas has become; I am most concerned about the mysticism of Christmas.  I am more concerned about the inner event represented in the New Testament writings about the meaning of the birth of Christ.

In a significant way, we can say Christmas began after the actual birth of a baby named Jesus.  Christmas began as the mystical teachings of St. Paul and the apostles who experienced the birth of Risen Christ within their inner lives.   Paul and the apostles were not at Bethlehem.  They did not know Jesus growing up as a boy in Nazareth.

But Christmas for Paul and the apostles began after the resurrection appearances of Jesus.  Christmas, you might say, began after Easter.  Why?  There was a spiritual phenomenon which created the Jesus Movement and this Movement became the churches of gathered people in the cities of the Roman Empire.  Many people experienced this spiritual phenomenon.  How did they talk about this mystical experience?  They said that Christ had been born in them.  And what happened to them when they had this experience?  They said that they were overshadowed by the Holy Spirit.  They said they had unspeakable joy and peace and faith and goodness and self-control.  The mystical experience of Christ being born within them also created friendship beyond birth family; it created a community of people with common interest and purpose.  Something so good had happened within them, they wanted to share it others to see if the experience could be replicated in the lives of others.  And you know what?  It did.  The recurrence of this mystical experience into the lives of many people shocked the leaders of the Jesus Movement.  They knew that the success would not diminish because they knew that another Higher Power was responsible for the mystical experience.  The Higher Power of Holy Spirit was the explanation given for making the birth of the Risen Christ occur in the lives of increasingly more and more people.

Before Bethlehem was written about, the birth of Risen Christ happened in the lives of many people.  And it kept happening and it created communities in many places.  And these communities wanted to teach the mysticism of the birth of Christ into their lives to anyone who would want to have this experience.

What did the leaders do?  They created spiritual manuals for their membership and for those who were being initiated into this interior event of the birth of Christ.  But the early churches were still very much minority communities in the Roman Empire.  They could not be public gatherings.  Home churches could not even have the same public profile that synagogues had attained in the Roman cities.  House churches had to "fly under the radar" to avoid too much public attention.  Their teachings and writings had to be private to their communities and their writings had to be cryptic, that is, they had to hide their mystical reality within an actual story.  The Christmas stories hide the elements of the mystical birth of Christ in spiritual ways that were understood by initiated members of the churches.

So how is the mysticism of the early church hid in the Christmas stories?  The Virgin Mary is the paradigm of all persons who knew the conception and birth of the Risen Christ within themselves?  It was not of human origin; one's life was overshadowed by the Holy Spirit to experience the birth of Christ.  But Mary and Joseph had physical and social reality too.  The birth of Jesus happened in Bethlehem.  For the early Christians, "Bethlehem" represented the physical location of their lives when they experienced the birth of Christ in themselves.  Paul's Bethlehem was on the road to Damascus.  Bethlehem fulfilled the ancient Scriptural reference to the city of David.  The early Christians following, Paul believed that this experience of the birth of Christ into one's life was a very providential event and was regarded to be the furtherance of universal salvation that was predicted in the writings of the Hebrew Scriptures.

So tonight, I am here to say, "I like Christmas,in fact, I love Christmas."  You and I can pick and choose from all of the Christmas trappings in our culture, but the question for me and you is this?  Has Christ been born in me?  Has Christ been born in you?  How would we know it?  Love, joy, peace, forgiveness, self-control, sacrificial giving, friendship, hope, faith, practicing justice, helping the needy and vulnerable, and patience.  You and I know the birth of Christ in us by the fruits of this birth which initiated the transformation of our lives.

Tonight, I salute you as I would the Virgin Mary; Congratulations on the birth of Christ in you by the power of the Holy Spirit.  But not just in your inner lives; you have locations like Bethlehem and Nazareth.  You and I have places to let the birth of Christ live and grow in us and make a difference in the Bethlehem and Nazareth locations of our lives.

Christmas, by all means celebrate it, but don't forget the origin of Christmas: the mystical birth of the life of Christ in us.  Merry Christmas and congratulations on the birth of Christ, in YOU!  Amen.

Why take the Mass out of Christmas?

Christmas Eve         December 24, 2015  

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

Titus 2:11-14        Luke 2:1-14  

Lectionary Link

Welcome to the most literal meaning of Christmas.  Christmas means Christ's Mass.  Mass is from the Latin word missa, which refers to the liturgy of the Holy Eucharist.  So Christmas literally means the Eucharist which the church gathers to celebrate on the Feast Day of the Holy Nativity.  And if this is the literal meaning of Christmas, we also know that much has been added to and subtracted from Christmas.

For example in many Christian Churches the Mass has been subtracted from Christmas because lots of Reformation churches gave up the Mass and what it meant for the Christians throughout the ages.  So there is no literal practice of Christmas by Christians who have given up having a Mass for the Feast of the Holy Nativity.  For many Reformation churches Christmas is the time to read the infancy narratives about Jesus since the Reformation for many meant the rejection of sacramental practices  and exclusively emphasizing the reading of Holy Scriptures.  And many of Reformed traditions have come to prefer the most plain or literal meanings of the words of the Christmas Story in Holy Scripture.  Many believe in an actual star crawling across the sky which are able to hover specifically over Bethlehem, rather than appreciating the rhetorical writing forms and genres which were used by the Gospel writers to write persuasively in their contexts.   And many of those same Reformation churches skip the Mass of Christmas, as some sort of misguided papist practice of meaningless ritualism.

Historical scholars would tell us that we have no way of confirming an actual birth date for Jesus.  The celebration of his birthdate on December 25 was a part of the evangelism of the early Church in replacing non-Christian local festivals with Christian events from the life of Jesus.  And at the winter solstice on the shortest day of the year, there needed to be continuity with the festivals of light for the begin of the return to the longer light of day.  In times when effective artificial light was lacking the power of and length of the time of darkness had a more pronounced spiritual and psychological affect upon people.  Having a strategic festival of light was good for social morale when long darkness dampened the mood, only made worse by extreme cold without modern central heating.

Christmas has added lots of secular and cultural celebrations even while subtracting the fact it is suppose to celebrate the birth of Jesus.  Christmas generally incorporates all of the host of festivities  during the last month of the calendar year.  It turns out to be the commercial event of the year which keeps lots of businesses afloat for the rest of the year.  It is a bonanza for charities to ride the waves of giving and stock up their coffers for helping people at other times in the year when the public is not in such a giving mood. 

It is ironic how many secular Christmas songs were composed by Jews and so we can sing about  White Christmases,  a reindeer with a red nose, Silver Bells, chestnuts roasting on the fire,  and about being home for Christmas. Certainly non-Christians too have been able to profit on the popularity of the Christmas season, even while they have had to secularize the music to maintain their own freedom of being loyal members of minority religions in America. Think about how many recording artists have sold albums of Christmas music?  It is amazing how much music the Christmas event has inspired in all musical styles.  Old songs are rearranged rendered in all styles and new songs are written for the Christmas season.

In kiddie culture, Saint Nicholas, Father Christmas, Kris Kringle, Baba Noel, St. Nick, or Santa Claus has seemingly replaced or over-shadowed Jesus.  A portly grandfatherly figure delivering gifts to children  plays to both children and adults who support the national past time of looking in on the delight and smiles of children, even if we go into debt to do so.

It is interesting too how Eurocentric Christmas is; the good people of Australia have not arrived at their winter solstice with the shortest day of the year.  They could have a feast of sunshine with their longest day of the year.

So here we are at the pinnacle of Christmas in a season which has received many additions and many subtractions.  And you can take the cynical route and despise it all.  You can simply pick and choose from the entire Christmas menu to your own taste.  You can say bah humbug to it all.  For me, I choose to acknowledge the person who could cause so much to accrue to the meanings of Christmas.   And I will pick and choose freely from the Christmas menu, but I will not neglect the literal meaning of Christmas, which is where we have arrived right now.

And so how is the literal Mass of Christ and the birth of Christ related?  How are this Event of Holy Eucharist and the infancy stories of Jesus related?

I would submit to you that the story of the birth of Christ and the practice of the Mass of Christ are both for the same metaphorical purpose.  And what might that be?  The purpose of the Mass of Christ and the Infancy Narrative derived from the Wisdom tradition of the church to transform the lives of people.

Why are you and I here tonight?  We are here to receive the body and blood of Christ under the bread and the wine.  And in so doing, the bread and the wine enters us and is broken down and is dissolved and it dissipates and aspects of it literally becomes us.  At some point the bread and the wine are no longer the bread and the wine, they are you and me.

And this is the central metaphor of the mystagogy of the early church.  Mystagogy is the teaching regarding the Mystery.  The mystery of the early church is that Christ is in the human person as the hope of God's glory.  The Greek word mysterion translated into Latin is the word sacrament.  The sacrament of this evening is the Eucharist, the Mass or the re-remembrance of the mystical presence of Christ having been born into our lives.  This is an event of the experience of the Higher Power, with the ability to transform our lives by giving us power to cease to do the bad things we no longer want to do; but also giving us power to engage in the new and creative directions for our lives.

With the sacrament, the metaphors are actually physical elements of bread and wine which are recreated when the creating words of Jesus are said over them.  They become  then within us the realization of the always already presence of Christ.  This is the arising the original image of God upon our lives and we are to continually practice this realized presence because if we forget the image and presence of God in Christ in our lives we can fall into acting in less than human ways, in fact some inhumane ways, or in benignly neglectful ways, or in the apathy of guilty silence in not speaking out against injustice.   If we live realizing the presence of the image of our original goodness and blessing then we in empathy treat everyone as those who bear that same image of God and are worthy to be treated with dignity.

Now while many churches have dropped the Mass from their Christmas, they can pretend to be more Christian and more literal by reading the Christmas story as being literal events in all of its recounted details.  And what they miss is the fact that the Christmas story is also the mystagogy or teaching about the mystery of Christ in us.  The Christmas story was the coded version of the practice of spiritual transformation in the early church.

The Christmas stories in the Gospel were some of the last literature to come to writing in the composition of New Testament writings.  The successful Christian churches were groups of people who met in private situations throughout the cities of the Roman Empire.  They encoded the mystagogy of their spiritual practice within the Gospel stories as a way for a Christian to be initiated into the Christian spiritual practice.  The story was to be the encoding of the mystical experience of having one's life over-shadowed by the Holy Spirit and in this over-shadowing one experienced the event of the life of God being realized or coming to birth within oneself.  Thus the cry, "Christ in you, the hope of Glory."  This event of Glory is an event of such internal self-esteem, one does not need to over-compensate in a vain search for the elusive "fifteen minutes of fame."  St. Paul wrote, "I no longer live, but Christ lives within me."  And the early church encoded this message within the Christmas story.

And so in the Christmas story, the early mystagogy, the sacramental story, is encoded in the life of the Virgin Mary.  The Virgin Mary is the paradigm of every Christian who has been initiated into the experience of having the life of Christ being born within them.

And so the Mass of Christ, Christmas, is an event of both word and sacrament.  In the words of the Christmas story, it is encoded that the life of Christ is born with us by the power of the Holy Spirit.  And in the Mass of Christ, the bread and the wine are another form of realization and practice of the fact that the life of Christ is within us.

Thank you for being here tonight for the most literal meaning of Christmas.  With all that Christmas has become in our world, there is no reason to subtract the Mass from Christmas.  Christ in us is the Hope of Glory.  Emmanuel an ancient name assigned to Jesus, means that God with us.  These truths have been renewed tonight in this holy feast and so I say to you tonight....Merry Christ...Mass.  Merry Christmas.  Amen. 

Being Drawn to Innocence

Christmas Eve     C    December 24, 2012

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

Titus 2:11-14        Luke 2:1-14  

Lectonary Link

   Good Christian friends rejoice!  Christ is born today!  Christ is born today!  In our language of hymns and poetry and in the language of the liturgy we attempt to remember important events.  On Christmas we proclaim that this world has become something completely different after the birth of Jesus into this world.  We may argue endlessly about how and why it is different and we may argue about details but it is fairly obvious that our world is different because Jesus was born. We accept the fact that our world has been completely changed because of this one person Jesus Christ and if we think about it very long we can be baffled at the impact of one person upon the entirety of human history.  How is it that such a person can be remembered and for such a long time in human history?  Most people are lost to the general corporate memory within a generation unless they make it into the history books but even great historical figures do not have the type of “staying power” like that of Jesus of Nazareth.  How many people today claim to have a personal relationship with the risen Caesar Augustus?  Not any that we know.  How many people even claim now to have a continuing personal relationship with Elvis Presley, a different sort of king?  Elvis had a few sightings in the years after his death and even though his songs live in recordings, he does not have the staying power of Jesus of Nazareth.

  Christ is born today!  How is the birth of Christ both a past and present reality?  How is it that Christ has become an omnipresent trans-historical personal presence to so many people?  One of the greatest mysteries of history is how the historical body of Jesus of Nazareth became mystified into the corporate body of Christ in such a significant and profound and expansive way.  How is it that we can say every day that “Christ is born today?”

  Christ is born today!  How do we know?  We have no specific calendar time evidence in the infancy narratives about Jesus from the Gospel.  We are given the information that it occurred during the reign of Caesar Augustus and when Quirinius was Governor of Syria but we are not given an exact date in the Gospel stories of Christmas.  The date gets assigned as part of the teaching and evangelistic liturgy that developed within the church.  The early followers of Jesus were very baffled and mystified about the continuing presence of Christ in their lives even after he apparently had taken leave of this world in his physical body?

  How could Jesus be gone from sight and touch and yet still be ready to be a potential “birthing event” within the lives of all who had the receptive attitude of the Virgin Mary.  The life of Christ is conceived in me?  Really?  Let it be to me according to your word.

  If we understand the metaphors of the New Testament we can understand the liturgy of the Christmas narrative.  The early followers of Jesus believed that Christ had risen but had returned as a mystical experience within the lives of all who had the serendipity of a new birth.  Baptismal waters were like the amniotic fluid of this new birth event.  In the liturgy of the church, a person was born by water and the Spirit.  The liturgy was a public accompaniment of this serendipitous experience of someone who felt like they had been born again.  And one was born again into a new way of seeing this world.  And the early church proclaimed that Christ was within each person as the hope of glory.  If you want fame and glory, you get it by recognition from God; what more fame does one need?

  The Christmas narrative is part of the spiritual liturgy of the early church as they celebrated the liturgy of the birth of Jesus as co-extensive with reality of the birth of Christ into the heart of those who were receptive to this new way of seeing the world.

  Why does Christmas have more public expressive power than the liturgies of Good Friday and Easter?  Christmas has profound expressive power because of the power and the mystery of the infant and child.  The liturgy of the church presents a year round cycle of learning; it is a very inter-generational cycle of learning.  If you have your choice, which would you rather choose, dealing with the joy of birth or dealing with the reality of death and the afterlife?  Good Friday and Easter deal with the reality of death and the afterlife and all things being equal, we are drawn to the birth and childhood liturgy.  We find it more universally appealing and obviously Christmas is very child friendly.

  Christmas is so powerful because it is the power of the infant.  One only has to be present to a sleeping infant or to see the smile of a baby or child to know the power of the child.  We know that there no higher blessings in life than receiving the blessing of a child.  An infant or child is not yet programmed into having ulterior motives for everything; they are not smart enough to have such motives yet and they retain what we call “innocence.”  We love the blessing of the one who is innocent and if we can make the world safe so that the innocent ones will continue to give us their blessing we feel as though this is an important adult vocation.  We can feel this brush with innocence also with our pets; we impute no ulterior motive to our pets and so when they show us their favor we feel blessed.  Dear friends, tonight is a feast of Innocence and we desperately want to have a brush with Innocence tonight and every night.

  Tonight is a liturgy of Innocence.  We want to be born again.  We want to become like the infant and babes for whom Jesus said the wisdom of the kingdom of God would be revealed.  We want to access the childlike so that we might access the original blessing of Innocence that would let us know that we live in God’s kingdom of love, hope, joy, faith and creativity.  Tonight we want to embrace Innocence and we want to be innocent without being naïve.  We want to be innocent and freed from all self-serving adult motives for doing anything in life.  We want the power of innocence to co-exist with and to permeate our fully adult lives.

  An artist or musician does not like to starve; as adults they have to earn a living but they still hope to retain the sheer joy of creativity in their calling.  A preacher has to earn a living too but in preaching, I want to access the art of inviting everyone to the sheer experience of God’s lovingly wondrous, joyful innocence.  In all of our adult vocations and relationships we live in webs of multi-faceted motivations about which we cannot be naïve; but in the midst of all our adult vocations and relationships we still want to access the holy experience of innocence.  We want to live the experience of having been brought into this world for no reason at all except for joy.  We want to re-access the smile that we had as an infant for no reason at all.  We want to re-access the native joy of innocence and we want this experience to permeate and influence our having to live with all of the adult protocols that seemingly dominate our lives.

  This original experience of innocence is still available to us tonight and it is the reality that is proclaimed in the Christmas liturgy.  Let us now take a deep breath and just breathe in the original innocence of our births that is retained in our memories forever.  And I want you to know tonight this original innocence is always, already available to us in our fully adult lives.

  This Christmas feast invites to be innocent without being naïve; we have lots of naïve religion in our world that ends in cruel judgments and actions.  The feast of Christmas is a feast of the new spiritual rebirth of the risen Christ within us.  And we can know the pure freshness of innocence in the midst of the world of tyrants like Herod and the other violent ones of our world.

  Tonight let us invite the Innocent into our lives and let us allow the power of innocence to be present in all of our adult relationships and callings in life.  And in our acceptance of the Innocent tonight, let us vow always to make this world safe for those who are vulnerable and innocent tonight.

  Merry Christmas dear friends.  Let innocence arise tonight in your hearts.  Let Christ be born in us.  Amen.