s90-12 Harry Hope, Scrooge,&CB

"The Birth of a Nice Jewish Boy”

A sermon by Dave Weissbard

delivered at

The Unitarian Universalist Church

Rockford, Illinois

12/18/05

Thunder rumbles in the mountain passes
And lightning rattles the eaves of our houses.
Flood waters await us in our avenues.

Snow falls upon snow, falls upon snow to avalanche
Over unprotected villages.
The sky slips low and grey and threatening.

We question ourselves.
What have we done to so affront nature?
We worry God.
Are you there? Are you there really?
Does the covenant you made with us still hold?

Into this climate of fear and apprehension, Christmas enters,
Streaming lights of joy, ringing bells of hope
And singing carols of forgiveness high up in the bright air.
The world is encouraged to come away from rancor,
Come the way of friendship.

thunder ebbs to silence and lightning sleeps quietly in the corner.
Flood waters recede into memory.
Snow becomes a yielding cushion to aid us
As we make our way to higher ground.

Hope is born again in the faces of children
It rides on the shoulders of our aged as they walk into their sunsets.
Hope spreads around the earth. Brightening all things,
Even hate which crouches breeding in dark corridors.

In our joy, we think we hear a whisper.
At first it is too soft. Then only half heard.
We listen carefully as it gathers strength.
We hear a sweetness.
The word is Peace.
It is loud now. It is louder.
Louder than the explosion of bombs.

We tremble at the sound. We are thrilled by its presence.
It is what we have hungered for.
Not just the absence of war. But, true Peace.
A harmony of spirit, a comfort of courtesies.
Security for our beloveds and their beloveds.
We clap hands and welcome the Peace of Christmas.
We beckon this good season to wait a while with us.
We, Baptist and Buddhist, Methodist and Muslim, say come.
Peace.
Come and fill us and our world with your majesty.

We, the Jew and the Jainist, the Catholic and the Confucian,
Implore you, to stay a while with us.
So we may learn by your shimmering light
How to look beyond complexion and see community.
It is Christmas time, a halting of hate time.
On this platform of peace, we can create a language
To translate ourselves to ourselves and to each other.

At this Holy Instant, we celebrate the Birth of Jesus Christ
Into the great religions of the world.
We jubilate the precious advent of trust.
We shout with glorious tongues at the coming of hope.
All the earth's tribes loosen their voices
To celebrate the promise of Peace.
We, Angels and Mortal's, Believers and Non-Believers,
Look heavenward and speak the word aloud.
Peace. We look at our world and speak the word aloud.

Peace. We look at each other, then into ourselves
And we say without shyness or apology or hesitation.
Peace, My Brother.
Peace, My Sister.
Peace, My Soul.

For this your mother sweated in the cold,
For this you bled upon the bitter tree:
A yard of tinsel ribbon bought and sold;
A paper wreath; a day at home for me.
The merry bells ring out, the people kneel;
Up goes the man of God before the crowd;
With voice of honey and with eyes of steel
He drones your humble gospel to the proud.
Nobody listens. Less than the wind that blows
Are all your words to us you died to save.
O Prince of Peace! O Sharon's dewy Rose!
How mute you lie within your vaulted grave.
The stone the angel rolled away with tears
Is back upon your mouth these thousand years.

The story is told of an exceptionally virtuous nun who died. Upon arriving at the pearly gates, she was pulled out of line and ushered into the presence of St. Peter. The gate-keeper informed her that because of her virtue, she was to be granted a wish. “Everything I did, I did for the glory of the Lord,” the nun insisted. Peter was more insistent. “This is not an everyday thing here. It would be unseemly for you to refuse.” “Well then,” said the nun, “if you insist. . . . No! It would be too much!” “Please,” said the saint, his patience being tested. “Well, might I meet the Holy Mother?” “No problem,” said the saint who led the nun into a throne room with golden floors, platinum walls, and in the front, on a throne of diamond, lit by the sun, there was Mary. The nun fell on her knees and said a hundred Hail Marys. When she finished, she looked up and inquired whether she might ask a question. Mary nodded her assent. “What was it like to give birth to our Savior, Jesus Christ?” After pondering a moment, Mary said, “Vell, ve vas expectink a goil.”

The humor of that little scene is based on the fact that most people forget that according to the story, Jeshua ben Joseph was born into a Jewish family, was raised Jewish, and according to the three gospels that attempt to be biographical, Matthew, Mark & Luke, he never thought of himself as anything but a Jew.

That picture is complicated by the fact that the fourth gospel, John, takes an entirely different approach and transforms that “nice Jewish boy” into the hero of a Greek mystery cult. In John’s telling, Jesus, which was the Greek rendering of his name, was a character in a drama the essential element of which is not the life, but the death. The whole point of Jesus’ life, according to John, was to die as a ransom for the sins of humanity: a price had to be paid. John’s story alluded to the Jewish context, but John was thoroughly anti-Semitic so Jesus’ relationship to the Jewish tradition and community was distorted.

That is not to say that Matthew, Mark & Luke got it all right. While they attempted to be biographical, that is a relative term. Each of them was a religious devotee, writing about their cultic hero long after his death, and well after most in their culture had rejected him: they were fighting an uphill battle. Each of them had an agenda. Most scholars believe that Mark’s version was the first written, and the authors of both Matthew and Luke had Mark’s version in hand, but were dissatisfied that it did not do the job adequately from their perspective, so they modified it.

Given our focus this morning, it is interesting that Mark, the first written, makes no mention whatever of Jesus’ birth or childhood. It is also true that the writings of the disciple Paul, which are the most ancient records of Jesus, make no mention of his birth. Apparently neither of these sources found the birth exceptional or relevant. If most of the early followers of Jesus believed the things that Matthew and Luke added to Mark’s story, it seems strange indeed that Mark and Paul would not mention them. Mark’s story of Jesus begins with his baptism as an adult by John the Baptizer. [My Bible professor believed that this linkage with John was spurious, designed to bring the followers of John - a wholly different prophet – into the Jesus movement.]

Matthew’s gospel has a point to make: it tries hard to sell Jesus as the anticipated Jewish Messiah. It begins with his pedigree, tracing him by begats back to Abraham and importantly to King David. That lineage is traced through Joseph, who we learn is not his father, which makes all of that seem like wasted effort. Mary was found to be pregnant before marriage and the Holy Ghost appears to her fiancé and tells him everything is Kosher. Matthew has Jesus born in Bethlehem, since it was predicted that the Messiah must be born in the City of David, but he doesn’t explain why a Galilean was in Bethlehem. Matthew has the family escape into Egypt because the king was killing baby Jewish boys, just as the Pharaoh had killed baby Jewish boys in the story of Moses, and then Jesus can come back from there as Moses had come from Egypt, demonstrating the parallels and his Jewish legitimacy.

Luke’s version begins with the Angel Gabriel appearing to John the Baptist’s father to tell him to expect his wife Elisabeth to deliver a late-in-life baby. The angel then goes to Mary and tells her that she is pregnant by the holy spirit, and that, by the way, her cousin Elisabeth is also surprisingly pregnant. Mary visits Elisabeth and John jumps in Elisabeth’s womb because of the presence of the embryonic Jesus. Luke justified the birth in Bethlehem by the weirdest census ever taken (and one which is historically unrecorded) in which people went back to the place of their birth – and Joseph, being of the house of David, had to go back to Bethlehem, which is where they are when the birth happens. The genealogy does not appear in Luke until after Jesus is baptized by John the baptizer at the age of 30, and he has some different names in that genealogy than Matthew offered.

As I said earlier, Matthew, Mark and Luke all focus on the things that Jesus taught. While they have him perform miracles, as the followers of any self-respecting prophet of the time would assume their teacher had, Jesus has many human dimensions and makes no claim for his divinity.

Some people were upset with the Jesus depicted by the Mel Gibson’s “Passion of Christ” movie, because there was no mention of the life and teachings, only the sacrifice. What some people don’t understand is that there are many Christians for whom the teachings are not important – you can certainly discern that by their lives. They get their Jesus mostly from the gospel of John, which, by the way, also makes no mention of the birth stories and begins like Mark did with the baptism by John the Baptizer who attests that Jesus is the real thing. The devotees of the Gospel of John stress Jesus’ sacrifice as the whole point – he was born to die for our sins. Matthew, Mark and Luke depict the death as a terrible mistake, redeemed by the resurrection, and the disciples charged to spread Jesus’ teachings.

There is a continuum among Christians between those who stress the ethical teacher Jesus, and those who stress the sacrificial “lamb of God.” It’s a continuum, so those who stress the ethical teacher commonly have some sense of the sacrifice, and those who stress the sacrifice are aware of the ethical teachings, but emphasize them less. What many Christians have tried to do is to put the whole thing together and harmonize it into a consistent picture. It is clear that the dominant view among American Christians today stresses the Johanine, died-for-our-sins view, which is why the Mel Gibson movie made so much money, while many mainline Christians were appalled.

The truth is that we know virtually nothing about Jesus’ life. The gospels are not history, they are polemics. They were designed to persuade, to further a movement. They are a virtual Rorschach test, an ink blot in which different people see very different things, Scholars over the years have used the same basic materials to tell radically different stories of who Jesus was and what he was about.

Harold Bloom, the literary critic, in his recent book Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine, stresses the separation between Jesus Christ, the theological God and Yeshua of Nazareth, the more-or-less historical person. While Bloom uses a sharp mind to critique the gospels, he, takes as one of the few facts that Yeshua was a descendent of King David. “[A]rtisan that he was, his descent placed him foremost in the royal house of King David, whose progeny carried with them irrevocably the blessing of Yahweh.” Bloom, however, acknowledges that “of Yeshua all we can rightly say is that he is a concave mirror, where what we see are all the distortions each of us has become.” Bloom seems not to see that there is as much or little reason to believe Jesus was born of a virgin as there is to believe he was a direct descendent of King David.

In his book, Jesus: A New Vision, the Christian scholar Marcus Borg contrasts the popular image of Jesus, “the image of Jesus as a divine or semi-divine figure whose purpose was to die for the sins of the world , and whose life and death open up the possibility of eternal life” [the image that rests on John’s gospel], with the very different image of Jesus as teacher that comes from the gospels of Matthew, Mark & Luke. Borg ends up rejecting both of these for his own image of Jesus as a “person of the spirit,” which is what makes sense to him.

Returning to our present context, we know from history that the early Christian church cared little about the birth of Jesus. It was not until 350 years after Jesus’ birth that Pope Julius the First decided that Jesus’ birth should be celebrated on December 25^th, which was conveniently the day on which the Romans were celebrating the birth of Mithra, and the pagans celebrated the solstice. Almost all of the elements we associate with Christmas came from those pagan traditions.

Given that the celebrations of Christmas became rather raucous events over the years, and given their blatantly pagan roots, the Puritan reformers of Christianity utterly rejected the celebration of Christmas and made it a crime. Thus, the first colonizers of these United States brought their prohibitions of Christmas observance with them. If we want to become as pure as the Puritans, as some claim we should, Christmas must go.

A slight detour: It is fascinating that those who are most opposed to the religious tyranny of the Ayatollahs of Iran are not really objecting to their methods so much as their theology. What Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, James Dobson, and the other gurus of the religious right want is the very same kind of state the Muslim Ayatollahs have, just with Christianity instead of Islam at its core. They believe that the authority of the state should be used to propagate their religious views: their prayers, their views of Jesus, their views on abortion, their views on marriage, their views on pornography, their views on welfare, their views on capitalism – you get the idea.

These people, who share the view of Jesus as sacrificial lamb and downplay his ethics, in spite of their current cultural dominance and political power, cry oppression. They insist that their free exercise of religion is restricted when they are prohibited from forcing their views down the throats of those who do not agree with them. They want public schools to teach their values to all children, the courts to enforce their morality, public spaces to display their religious icons.

The latest ploy they have been using to raise funds and stir up their troops is their opposition to the so-called “War on Christmas.” It was actually back in 1959 that the John Birch Society published a pamphlet called “There Goes Christmas” in which it asserted that the “Reds [were seeking to] weaken the pillar of religion in our country” by taking Christ out of Christmas.

Rockford’s own Thomas Flemming of the Rockford Institute jumped on that bandwagon in the Institute’s “Chronicles” five years ago, writing:

A Christ-free Christmas, which has been the goal of the American ruling elite since before World War II, has finally, at the dawn of the new millennium, been reached. At corporate “holiday parties,” references to Christmas are declared “in poor taste,” because they might offend the 5-10 percent of the local population who are something other than self-described Christians.

: “robust Christian cultures . . terrified the androgynous Unitarians who took over American society and culture over 100 years ago.”

The defense of Christmas has been taken up with a vengeance by Fox News and particularly its Bill O’Reilly who has run a regular segment on “Christmas Under Seige.” Pat Buchanan has proclaimed “What we are witnessing here are hate crimes against Christianity.” Fox News anchor John Gibson this year published a book called “The War on Christmas: How the Liberal Plot to Ban the Sacred Christian Holiday is Worse than You Thought.”

The War on Christmas trope lets the right pretend to be playing defense when it’s really on the offensive – against the ACLU, separation of church and state, and pluralism, to name just a few targets.”

The satirical newspaper, The Onion, published a story this week headed, “Activist Judge Cancels Christmas.”

In a sudden and unexpected blow to the Americans working to protect the holiday, liberal U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Stephen Reinhardt ruled the private celebration of Christmas unconstitutional Monday.

"In accordance with my activist agenda to secularize the nation, this court finds Christmas to be unlawful," Judge Reinhardt said. "The celebration of the birth of the philosopher Jesus—be it in the form of gift-giving, the singing of carols, fanciful decorations, or general good cheer and warm feelings amongst families—is in violation of the First Amendment principles upon which this great nation was founded."

In addition to forbidding the celebration of Christmas in any form, Judge Reinhardt has made it illegal to say "Merry Christmas." Instead, he has ruled that Americans must say "Happy Holidays" or "Vacaciones Felices" if they wish to extend good tidings.

Within an hour of the judge's verdict, National Guard troops were mobilized to enforce the controversial ruling.

"Sorry, kids, no Christmas this year," Beloit, WI mall Santa Gene Ernot said as he was led away from his Santa's Village in leg irons. "Write to your congressman to put a stop to these liberal activist judges. It's up to you to save Christmas! Ho ho ho!"

Said Pvt. Stanley Cope, who tasered Ernot for his outburst: "We're fighting an unpopular war on Christmas, but what can we do? The military has no choice but to take orders from a lone activist judge."

Across America, the decision of the all-powerful liberal courts was met with shock and disappointment, as American families quietly took down their holiday decorations and canceled their plans to gather and make merry.

"They've been chipping away at Christmas rights for decades," Fox News personality John Gibson said. "Even before this ruling, you couldn't hear a Christmas song on the radio or in a department store. I hate to say it, America, but I told you so."

Gibson then went into hiding, vowing to be a vital part of the Christmas resistance that would eventually triumph and bring Christmas back to the United States and its retail stores.

The ban is not limited to the retail sector. In support of Reinhardt's ruling, Sen. Ted Kennedy, a Jew, introduced legislation that would mandate the registration of every Christian in the United States and subject their houses to random searches to ensure they are not celebrating Christmas. "Getting rid of every wreath or nativity scene is not enough," Kennedy said. "In order to ensure that Americans of every belief feel comfortable in any home or business, we must eliminate all traces of this offensive holiday. My yellow belly quakes with fear at the thought of offending any foreigners, atheists, or child molesters."

America's children are bearing the brunt of Reinhardt's marginal, activist rulings.

"Why did the bad man take away Christmas?" 5-year-old Danny Dover said. "I made a card for my mommy out of paper and glue, and now I can't give it to her."

Shortly after Dover issued his statement, police kicked down his door, removed his holiday tree, confiscated his presents, and crushed his homemade card underfoot.

A broad, bipartisan coalition of lawmakers has been working closely with the White House, banding together in the hope of somehow overruling the decision. So far, however, their efforts have been fruitless.

"Our hearts go out to the Americans this ruling affects," Sen. Chip Pickering (R-MS) said. "If it's any condolence, I wish you all a Happy Holidays, which, I'm afraid, is all I'm legally allowed to say at this time."

This would probably be funnier if there were not so many people who might believe it was true.

Back on December 4^th, Sarah Roberts of the Register Star did a good story on the alleged Christmas War and reported:

The seasonal landscape here [in Rockford] is much more tame. Area holiday event organizers say that formally, the great “Merry Christmas vs. Happy Holidays” debate has never really been an issue, and they’re happy to leave the political posturing to the Jerry Falwells and Al Frankens of the world.

In fact, shock of shocks, the Register Star printed a piece by the arch conservative Cal Thomas, with whom I have never agreed in the past, who opined:

The effort by some cable TV hosts and ministers to force commercial establishments into wishing everyone a “Merry Christmas” might be more objectionable to the One who is the reason for the season than the “Happy Holidays” mantra required by some store managers.

I have never understood why so many Christians feel the need to see and hear “Merry Christmas” proclaimed to them at stores by people who may not believe its central message. While TV personalities, junk mail letters and some of the ordained bemoan the increasing secularization of culture; perhaps some teaching might be helpful from the One in whose behalf they claim to speak.

Jesus — the real one, not the Republican-conservative-Democrat-liberal one made in the image of today’s fractured political culture — said His kingdom is not of this world. Why, then, are so many who claim to speak for Him demanding that this earthly kingdom celebrate Him and His Kingdom?

With this as a background, imagine my shock when I opened the Register Star last Monday morning to find a cartoon from the Birmingham News on the editorial page

which showed the Grinch disapproving of a lawyer from the ACLU carrying a sign calling for the end of Christmas. I immediately fired off a letter to the editor which they told me they were going to print by today – maybe later. In it I pointed out:

The ACLU has filed many cases in support of Christians’ right to the free exercise of their religion.

What we believe, which the [Christian] Ayatollahs oppose, is that no American citizens should be made to feel like outsiders in their public schools or on government property because they are not members of the religious majority. It was pious Christians who, in the early American colonies, imprisoned people for the public celebration of Christmas. The ACLU, had it existed then, would have opposed those laws.

The piece of history which the fighters for Christmas, like Fleming, seem not to understand is that it was, in fact, Universalists and Unitarians who struggled to bring back the celebration of Christmas in America. In his book, The Battle for Christmas, Stephen Nissenbaum points out:

“. . . in the early nineteenth century it was [the Universalists] that proselytized for Christmas more actively than any other.” “The Universalist community in Boston held a special Christmas Day service in 1789, even before that congregation was officially organized.”

The Unitarians were close behind . . . Unitarians were calling for the public observance of Christmas by about 1800. They did so in the full knowledge that it was not a biblically sanctioned holiday, and that December 25 was probably not the day on which Jesus was born. They wished to celebrate the holiday not because God had ordered them to do so, but because they themselves wished to . . .

The initial attempt to get Christmas widely celebrated failed, and the businesses which had been persuaded to close, opened again, and most of the churches went back to ignoring it.

Nissenbaum persuasively establishes that it was actually Santa Claus and the opportunity for commercialization that brought Christmas back into mainstream culture, not a resurgence of piety.

Why was it that the Universalists and Unitarians 200 years ago wanted to celebrate Christmas, and that we do today? It was not that they believed or we believe that Jesus was born of a virgin mystically impregnated by God. Our ancestors were, and we are, attracted not by the religion about Jesus, but what we understand to have been the religion OF Jesus – that nice Jewish boy, son of Miriam and Joseph, who grew up to become a powerful human teacher and prophet.

When we gather tonight to repeat again the old stories and sing the songs of angels speaking to virgins and shepherds and kings visiting a babe in a manger, we will not be celebrating what we believe is historical fact, but a powerful cultural myth of hope – an expression of our hope for peace and goodwill among all people.

One of the most eloquent Unitarian Universalist ministers of this generation, Victoria Safford, who was a Fusion guest several years ago, has expressed a humanistic understanding of this season in a poem she calls, “The Moment of Magic,” with which we will conclude because she leaves me speechless and in awe. She says it all:

Now is the moment of magic,
when the whole, round earth turns again toward the sun,

and here's a blessing:
the days will be longer and brighter now,
even before the winter settles in to chill us.

Now is the moment of magic,
when people beaten down and broken,
with nothing left but misery and candles and their own clear voices,
kindle tiny lights and whisper secret music,

and here's a blessing:
the dark universe is suddenly illuminated by the lights of the menorah,
suddenly ablaze with the lights of the kinara,
and the whole world is glad and loud with winter singing.

Now is the moment of magic,
when an eastern star beckons the ignorant toward an unknown goal,

and here's a blessing:
they find nothing in the end but an ordinary baby,
born at midnight, born in poverty, and the baby's cry, like bells ringing,
makes people wonder as they wander through their lives,
what human love might really look like,
sound like,
feel like.

and here's a blessing:
we already possess all the gifts we need;
we've already received our presents:
ears to hear music,
eyes to behold lights,
hands to build true peace on earth
and to hold each other tight in love.