4 Advent A, December 18, 2016
We live in the era of the postmodern tyranny of science and historicism, by tyranny I mean that science and historicism has come to qualify as that which is most truthful to the diminished value of other modes of discourse and life practices, including religious discourse and lifestyles. And while postmodern people live with the superiority complex of the discourses of science and historicism, we cannot say that such has dispelled the cultural practices of the irrational. Horoscopes and lots of fake news and tabloid news dominate the life practices of people including how they believe and vote. A good portion the electorate still say that our president was not born in the United States and is a Muslim even while his actual Christian practice and a birth certificate and newspaper account of his birth prove the obvious. Unfortortunately, many religious people have become intimidated by the results and practices of science and feel obligated to defend biblical and religious discourse as "scientific truth" or as exact eyewitness journalistic reporting. This means that the path of appreciation for the true meanings of science and the true meanings of faith are made to be in conflict or even worse religious truth is wrongly defended to the point of being discredited and faith discourse is chided as inferior even though there is witness of the transformations of countless myriads of lives through the motivational value of spiritual discourse.
As we approach the Christmas event, we need to appreciate the discourses of Christmas which we have in the Gospels and other New Testament writers. I say discourses because there are different approaches to the birth of Christ in the New Testament and in the history of the church. One was major presentations of the birth of Christ was the assigning of a calendar date near the winter solstice as a mode of evangelism in providing a "replacement" feast day for the observed holiday on the Roman "religious" calendar.
The Lucan account is written with rhetorical inspiration so that meanings of the life of Jesus can be evoked for the Lucan readers.
The Lucan writer knows the situation in the sense of the kinds of genre that were used during the time. The writer of the Gospel Luke knew that Jesus was a Jew and so he was presented with particular significance within the tradition of Judaism. But the writer of the Gospel also knew that church and synagogue are separated; he knew that the church had become essentially Gentile congregations. The members of the Gentile congregations would not be familiar with the derivation or arising of Jesus Christ from the Judaic traditions and so the message of Luke would need to be background information for the Gentiles but at the same time be communicative to the Gentiles who lived within Roman cities and who were familiar with Roman rhetorical devices in how one communicated about great and significant people.
So one had an amalgamation of the Semitic and Roman ways and written in the lingua franca left over from the conquering of the world by Alexander the Great. The Gospel represented the convergences of cultures consistent with what was happening in the "world and global" culture promulgated by the forceful popularity of the Caesar of Rome.
The Christians of the Roman Empire were exposed to the political propaganda which surrounded the Caesar. The Caesar symbolized the essence of the "globalism" of the day and the images and titles and stories of his divine right of power were well-known. Ironically, the rather obscure Jesus of Nazareth in his posthumous resurrection afterlife was to ride the coattails of Caesarian globalism to take over the Roman Empire in quite an unpredictable way.
The ingredients of the success included the communicative methods used to inculcate the Christian values to as many people as possible throughout the cities of the Roman Empire.
How were these communicative methods used in the Gospel of Luke?
The writer of Luke was aware of the mythologies of Emperor cult. The unifying Caesar Augustus was called a Peace Maker, a Savior of the World, a son of god, and a divine being. Stories of astronomical phenomenon occurring at birth time were motifs of the birth stories. The miraculous conception of the Emperor's mother when she was sleeping would have been an available story to the writer of Luke. The Roman vocabulary of words and story themes provided the Lucan writer outlines for presenting the parallel yet surpassing of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, Savior, the Prince of Peace, so populist to be popular with shepherd, the one declared by a heavenly senate of angels, and the one who was sought out by the wise people from the ends of the earth.
At the same time the Lucan writer wedded common discourse patterns of the Roman setting with the templates provided by Hebrew Scriptures for the prediction and the eternal return of one who was in the line of David but who was greater than David.
Because of the accessibility of the Bible and all writing today, we wrongly assume that the Gospels were generally accessible to everyone in their own time. In fact, they had a very limited readership; we can assume this since there is very little contemporary "secular" references to Jesus, Christians or their literatures. One can assume the function of the Gospels to have had significant roles within the churches for liturgy and as spiritual manuals for inculcating the mystagogy of the early Christians. They were written with parables and cryptic patterns of communication because it was assumed that there was a teacher-disciple instructive model which occurred within the Christian community.
The cryptic message of the Christmas story encoded the belief that every believer was indeed in some ways like the Virgin Mary. The life of Christ could not be known by just normal human ways of knowing; a person had to have the life of Christ spiritually conceived within oneself. One was over-shadowed by the Holy Spirit to have a spiritual originating event that could not be had by any other means.
The success of so many people having this "spiritual" originating event brought about the Gospel literature even as evidence that many people had this transforming experience but the Gospel literature as a "birth of Christ within this world and within one's life" became the effective method in liturgy and spiritual practice of promulgating and inculcating the Christian values.
While at Christmas we want to regress to the childification of Christmas and live in the primary naiveté of the story itself, we need to drawn back also and appreciate the incredible inspired rhetorical program of the Gospels within the Gospel communities in maintaining their social identity but also in the "person by person" expansion of this lifestyle that eventually would rewrite Caesar globalism even to the eventuality of the Emperor Constantine "waking up and smelling the coffee" of Christian success.
The birth of Jesus Christ the Messiah happened in this way. This seems so simple and straight forward but as those who appreciate the way in which the Bible can still be seen as inspired today, we should be aware of the complete rhetorical purposes of the writer of the Lucan Christmas story.
Such may be irrelevant to lots of people; for something to be true and meaningful, it does not have to be relevant to all in the same way because the nature of freedom does not support such a coerced universal relevancy.
It is relevant and good news for us today, if we are on the path of transformation of our lives toward excellence. Indeed Christ was born of Mary, Christ was born and known as God with us and indeed we can instantiate that in our own lives if we can honestly confess that "Christ is born in me," the hope of glory. Amen.
Isaiah 7:10-16 Psalm 80:1-7, 16-18
Romans 1:1-7 Matthew 1:18-25
We live in the era of the postmodern tyranny of science and historicism, by tyranny I mean that science and historicism has come to qualify as that which is most truthful to the diminished value of other modes of discourse and life practices, including religious discourse and lifestyles. And while postmodern people live with the superiority complex of the discourses of science and historicism, we cannot say that such has dispelled the cultural practices of the irrational. Horoscopes and lots of fake news and tabloid news dominate the life practices of people including how they believe and vote. A good portion the electorate still say that our president was not born in the United States and is a Muslim even while his actual Christian practice and a birth certificate and newspaper account of his birth prove the obvious. Unfortortunately, many religious people have become intimidated by the results and practices of science and feel obligated to defend biblical and religious discourse as "scientific truth" or as exact eyewitness journalistic reporting. This means that the path of appreciation for the true meanings of science and the true meanings of faith are made to be in conflict or even worse religious truth is wrongly defended to the point of being discredited and faith discourse is chided as inferior even though there is witness of the transformations of countless myriads of lives through the motivational value of spiritual discourse.
As we approach the Christmas event, we need to appreciate the discourses of Christmas which we have in the Gospels and other New Testament writers. I say discourses because there are different approaches to the birth of Christ in the New Testament and in the history of the church. One was major presentations of the birth of Christ was the assigning of a calendar date near the winter solstice as a mode of evangelism in providing a "replacement" feast day for the observed holiday on the Roman "religious" calendar.
The Lucan account is written with rhetorical inspiration so that meanings of the life of Jesus can be evoked for the Lucan readers.
The Lucan writer knows the situation in the sense of the kinds of genre that were used during the time. The writer of the Gospel Luke knew that Jesus was a Jew and so he was presented with particular significance within the tradition of Judaism. But the writer of the Gospel also knew that church and synagogue are separated; he knew that the church had become essentially Gentile congregations. The members of the Gentile congregations would not be familiar with the derivation or arising of Jesus Christ from the Judaic traditions and so the message of Luke would need to be background information for the Gentiles but at the same time be communicative to the Gentiles who lived within Roman cities and who were familiar with Roman rhetorical devices in how one communicated about great and significant people.
So one had an amalgamation of the Semitic and Roman ways and written in the lingua franca left over from the conquering of the world by Alexander the Great. The Gospel represented the convergences of cultures consistent with what was happening in the "world and global" culture promulgated by the forceful popularity of the Caesar of Rome.
The Christians of the Roman Empire were exposed to the political propaganda which surrounded the Caesar. The Caesar symbolized the essence of the "globalism" of the day and the images and titles and stories of his divine right of power were well-known. Ironically, the rather obscure Jesus of Nazareth in his posthumous resurrection afterlife was to ride the coattails of Caesarian globalism to take over the Roman Empire in quite an unpredictable way.
The ingredients of the success included the communicative methods used to inculcate the Christian values to as many people as possible throughout the cities of the Roman Empire.
How were these communicative methods used in the Gospel of Luke?
The writer of Luke was aware of the mythologies of Emperor cult. The unifying Caesar Augustus was called a Peace Maker, a Savior of the World, a son of god, and a divine being. Stories of astronomical phenomenon occurring at birth time were motifs of the birth stories. The miraculous conception of the Emperor's mother when she was sleeping would have been an available story to the writer of Luke. The Roman vocabulary of words and story themes provided the Lucan writer outlines for presenting the parallel yet surpassing of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, Savior, the Prince of Peace, so populist to be popular with shepherd, the one declared by a heavenly senate of angels, and the one who was sought out by the wise people from the ends of the earth.
At the same time the Lucan writer wedded common discourse patterns of the Roman setting with the templates provided by Hebrew Scriptures for the prediction and the eternal return of one who was in the line of David but who was greater than David.
Because of the accessibility of the Bible and all writing today, we wrongly assume that the Gospels were generally accessible to everyone in their own time. In fact, they had a very limited readership; we can assume this since there is very little contemporary "secular" references to Jesus, Christians or their literatures. One can assume the function of the Gospels to have had significant roles within the churches for liturgy and as spiritual manuals for inculcating the mystagogy of the early Christians. They were written with parables and cryptic patterns of communication because it was assumed that there was a teacher-disciple instructive model which occurred within the Christian community.
The cryptic message of the Christmas story encoded the belief that every believer was indeed in some ways like the Virgin Mary. The life of Christ could not be known by just normal human ways of knowing; a person had to have the life of Christ spiritually conceived within oneself. One was over-shadowed by the Holy Spirit to have a spiritual originating event that could not be had by any other means.
The success of so many people having this "spiritual" originating event brought about the Gospel literature even as evidence that many people had this transforming experience but the Gospel literature as a "birth of Christ within this world and within one's life" became the effective method in liturgy and spiritual practice of promulgating and inculcating the Christian values.
While at Christmas we want to regress to the childification of Christmas and live in the primary naiveté of the story itself, we need to drawn back also and appreciate the incredible inspired rhetorical program of the Gospels within the Gospel communities in maintaining their social identity but also in the "person by person" expansion of this lifestyle that eventually would rewrite Caesar globalism even to the eventuality of the Emperor Constantine "waking up and smelling the coffee" of Christian success.
The birth of Jesus Christ the Messiah happened in this way. This seems so simple and straight forward but as those who appreciate the way in which the Bible can still be seen as inspired today, we should be aware of the complete rhetorical purposes of the writer of the Lucan Christmas story.
Such may be irrelevant to lots of people; for something to be true and meaningful, it does not have to be relevant to all in the same way because the nature of freedom does not support such a coerced universal relevancy.
It is relevant and good news for us today, if we are on the path of transformation of our lives toward excellence. Indeed Christ was born of Mary, Christ was born and known as God with us and indeed we can instantiate that in our own lives if we can honestly confess that "Christ is born in me," the hope of glory. Amen.
