Delivered at UUP by Meredith Guest on December 28, 2008

“Imagine a story that moves the heavens to wax rhapsodic and you, like a love drunk fool to join in and mean every word of it…”

Some of this material is based upon the book The First Christmas by Marcus J. Borg and John D. Crossan

What I will attempt to do this morning is take an exegetical look at the Christmas story as found in Luke (Matthew has a very different account, which, in the interest of time, we will not try to examine.) An exegetical approach to a passage of scripture looks at, among other things, authorship, time, geography, intent and audience with a careful examination of each. I hope that by so doing we will gain a better, deeper and richer understanding of these wearily well known passages of Christian scripture and that as a result, Christmas might become more meaningful (or at least, more tolerable.) I also want to mine them for important insights into our own life and times and, if the gods are really happy with me, I hope I might inspire you. Now, any of you who have engaged in the exegesis of an ancient text will be glad and grateful to hear that I will not try to render a thorough treatment of these passages from Luke, partly for fear the sheer tedium would cause you to rise up and stone me with your hymnals or else, you would wake up several hours later drooling with cricks in your necks, as I did more times than I wish to admit in seminary. For this approach, I am relying heavily on and quoting extensively from a book by Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan modestly entitled The First Christmas.

The birth stories found in Matthew and Luke were probably composed late in the development of early Christianity, during the 80s and 90s of the first century, though they contain bits and pieces of earlier material, most notably the hymn sung by Mary as well as several other hymns. In addition to not being the earliest Christian writings, evidence suggests they were not of major importance in early Christianity. Given their lack of attention by, most notably, Paul, Mark and John, as well as the glaring differences between Matthew and Luke’s accounts, plus the numerous indisputable errors of historical facts found in them, they are almost certainly not historical accounts of the birth of Jesus. So what are they then?

To answer this question I need you to examine something we all too often share with religious fundamentalists, namely, the failure to be conscious of our presuppositions. The Enlightenment, which began in the 17th century, generated an understanding of truth as that which can be empirically verified and what can be verified in this manner are, of course, facts. According to this way of thinking, if something isn’t factual, it isn’t true. The contemporary scholar of religion, Huston Smith, calls this “fact fundamentalism.” That’s why many Christianists insist that the accounts of creation in Genesis must be taken literally, because to do otherwise would make them untrue. It is also why some people, perhaps some of you here this morning, reject the Bible, because a great deal of it isn’t factual and, therefore, by this way of thinking, cannot be true. Both are guilty of fact fundamentalism, and this view of truth and reality is so deeply ingrained in all of us, fundamentalists and skeptics alike, that it hard to recognize it for what it is: a presupposition.

Furthermore, within the modern mind, what is unquestionably real is the space-time universe of matter and energy operating within natural laws of cause and effect. We have internalized this worldview by simply growing up in the modern world; it is what we have been socialized into.

This was not (and is not) true of the non-modern mind. A story that I think illustrates this poignantly is about Ishi, the last member of one of California’s indigenous peoples. When anthropologists asked Ishi to describe life in his tribe, he proceeded to tell them a two hour story of wood duck, because to the non-modern mind of Ishi, the story of wood duck best told what life was, and, almost certainly more to the point, what it meant.

Luke and Matthew (and, for that matter, all the other authors of the Bible) did not equate fact with truth, and, therefore, were not at all concerned with our western, modernist notion of accuracy. Rather, they were interested in meaning and in the elucidation of big “T” Truth. “Facts” were important only in service of The Truth.

That’s why what are obvious “contradictions” when viewed from the presuppositions of modern thought, between Matthew and Luke’s accounts of Jesus’ birth are not contradictions at all. For each, the birth story was illustrative of who Jesus was and what his coming meant.

Think about the parable of the Good Samaritan, which I told the children. That this story is not at all historical does nothing to diminish its truth. The value of the story, its authenticity and authority are not in whether or not it actually happened, but rather in its meaning. It is a parable, a metaphor, and metaphorical language is employed when something has more-than-literal meaning. It is language that carries a surplus of meaning, supersaturated language, as it were.

The parables Jesus told were designed to illustrate the nature of God and the meaning of life, and so the early Christians likewise told parables about Jesus. And just as Jesus told subversive stories about God (that is, after all, what got him killed) his disciples told subversive stories about him. The story of his birth is just such a story.

I can just say September 11, or 9/11, and everyone here, including most, if not all, of the children over 5, can tell me the significance of that date. On that day, a handful of dedicated religious fundamentalists shaped, for good and for ill, the very identity of the most powerful nation on earth. In the time of Jesus, an event even more powerful took place. I say more powerful, because this event directly affected the lives of every person, from the oldest to the youngest, from the most powerful to the lowliest, an event that would be burned into the personal and collective memory of the tiny nation of Israel so deeply it is still remembered some 2000 years later. It was the day the Romans came. You cannot understand and appreciate Luke without recognizing the enormity of this event.

After almost a hundred years of social unrest and 20 years of interminable civil war, Octavian, the Augustus-to-be, in the year 31, BCE, defeated the forces of Antony and Cleopatra in the famous naval battle at Cape Actium thereby saving the Roman Empire and restoring peace to the Mediterranean, the Pax Romana, the Peace of Rome, which would last for over 2 centuries.

As a result of this great achievement, Caesar Augustus was said to have brought “gospel,” “good news,” to the whole world. Furthermore, his titles included Divine, Son of God, Lord, Redeemer, Liberator and Savior of the World. Do any of these titles sound familiar? To apply any of them to the newborn Jesus, as did Luke, would be either cheap comedy or high treason — and Rome was not laughing. Nor would the implications and claims implicit in the use of these royal titles have been lost on first century readers and hearers. They would have recognized immediately their seditious implications as well as the embedded questions: Who do you believe is savior of the world, Jesus or Caesar? In whom do you place your trust? To whom will you pledge your allegience? And how you answered those questions could determine whether you lived or died. Luke did not pen these words in a vacuum and as a writer, I know how carefully I choose my words — and I mostly write lies. Luke had something much more important in mind, and he would not have been cavalier in the dangerous use of these titles for Jesus.

Immediately after the battle of Actium, Octavian turned his camp into sacred ground and erected a monument upon which he inscribed a dedication to the war God, Mars, and the Sea God, Neptune, to the victory he had obtained and to the peace that had ensued. In these inscriptions, the remnants of which still remain, we see the four elements of Roman imperial theology — religion, war, victory, peace. You worship the gods, you go to war with their assistance, you are victorious with their help, and you obtain peace from their generosity. Peace comes through victory. Does that sound at all familiar? While Sarah Palin might not have known it, is this not the Bush doctrine? And in fairness, has this not been in practice the theology of the American empire since its inception?

Of course, no one has to tell us that the peace of Rome did not mean the end of war. Wars to conquer additional territory and wars to suppress insurrections continued, and from the vantage point of the conquered and oppressed, the Pax Romana looked very different. The Scotts general Calgacus as he prepared his doomed troops for battle with the legions of Rome in the later 70s or early 80s of the Christian Era said,

“Robbers of the world, now that earth fails their all-devastating hands, they probe even the sea: if their enemy have wealth, they have greed; if he be poor, they are ambitious. Alone of mankind they covet with the same passion want as much as wealth. To plunder, butcher, steal, these things they misname empire: they make a desert and they call it peace.”

An Iraqi might describe the Pax Americana in very similar terms, don’t you think?

Ideological power is the control of meaning and interpretation. Read that again, carefully. Remember the election campaign for Bush’s second term when they successfully interpreted the world to the American public as us, the U.S., against an axis of evil who had to be defeated with the help of God, and that peace could come only through victory? It is against this very theology that the birth narrative in Luke is aimed. The theology of imperialism that reigned at the time of Jesus’ birth and that still reigns in our time, that peace can come only through victory, is countered in Luke by the symphonic proclamation of the angels.

To Luke, the birth of Jesus sets forth the fundamental clash of visionary programs for our earth: the imperial vision of peace through victory and the Christian vision of peace through justice. It’s right there in the birth story.

There are many more similar comparisons, but I think you get the point. While we may have sanitized and sentimentalized the story of Jesus’ birth as told by Luke, it’s original intent was anything but sanitary and sentimental.

So what might this mean for us?

For one thing, I think it says clearly that authentic spirituality is never purely personal. It isn’t just about my own spiritual growth and development, important as that is. Authentic spirituality always does and always must have social and political applications; otherwise, it is just spiritual masturbation.

Those social and political applications (as well as the personal) are always in the service of liberation, freedom and peace through justice. And they are always characterized by good news for the poor, the oppressed and the marginalized.

Believe what you will about the Christmas story, but looked at within the historical context in which it was written, you cannot deny the power of the metaphor. The baby Jesus is Savior of the World, not Augustus Caesar, emperor of Rome. The theology of empire that trusts in military might and peace through victory is countered by peace that rides in on the wings of angels and rests over the birthplace of a Jewish baby boy named Jesus. The selection by God of a couple of faithful old fools, an unwed teenage mother and her dreamer boyfriend, a helpless, homeless infant, itinerate shepherds and wayward wise men are in stark contrast to the rule and reign of the rich, the powerful, the well educated and the well connected. What is going to change our world is just such a metaphor. It won’t be more historical examples of the bankruptcy of imperial theology. There is already a bloody surplus of those. The message of peace through victory will never be discredited and discarded through polemics, complaints and arguments alone no matter how rational and reasonable. It is going to take a metaphor, a story, a parable as imaginative, compelling and radical as Luke’s to capture the collective imagination, to arch like a bolt of lightening across fear, cynicism and mistrust to a vision of a new heaven and a new earth in which mercy and compassion reign and where heavenly hosts proclaim peace on earth, peace through justice.

I love this story. Maybe it helps to be queer in a post Prop 8 world, but I can hardly read it without weeping at the beauty and power of its message, and as the years pass and my understanding of it deepens so too does my love. Knowing it the way I do makes it possible for me to sing, Joy to the world, the Lord has come. Let earth receive her king. Let every heart prepare him room, and heaven and nature sing, and heaven and nature sing and mean every word of it.

But then, maybe that’s not true for you. If that’s the case, I have this suggestion: imagine your own story. Image a story with a rich cast of unlikely characters, with mysterious travelers from faraway lands and a bit of magic thrown in for good measure. Imagine a story that lights up the dark places within you and your world, a story of liberation, of hope, of joy, a story that is gospel, good news, to the poor, the oppressed and the marginalized living within you and in your world. Imagine a story in which peace through justice is triumphant. Imagine a story that moves the heavens to wax rhapsodic and you, like a love drunk fool to join in and mean every word of it. Imagine such a story. Luke did.

I would like to leave you with this poem and Christmas carol written in 1849 by Edmund Sears, pastor of the Unitarian Church in Weston, Massachusetts.

It came upon the midnight clear,
That glorious song of old,
From angels bending near the earth,
To touch their harps of gold:
“Peace on the earth, goodwill to men,
From heaven’s all-gracious King.”
The world in solemn stillness lay,
To hear the angels sing.