Transcending the Darkness
Here in the midst of the days of Hanukkah, shall we remember now its beginnings, this miracle of oil that burned, not for one day, but for eight. You’ve heard the story, from the Book of First Maccabees, this story of the King Antiochus who ordered the Temple of Jerusalem defiled, the Temple of the Jews, ordered a near obliteration of the Jewish faith itself. In the years before Jesus of Nazareth was born in Bethlehem, here are the people of Palestine, suffering under the rule of Syria, living in a Greek culture brought to the eastern Mediterranean in the fourth century before the Christian era by Alexander the Great, a Hellenistic culture that slowly suffocated the Jewish people, year by year, decade by decade.
Please understand that, in large part, this was a peaceful conquest, this acculturation of the Jews. “The Hellenistic culture,” one author writes, “was the most developed civilization that that part of the world had ever known. Art, sculpture, and architecture flourished, as did poetry, satire, biography, and history. Philosophy prospered; science attained peaks that were not matched for a thousand years.” This process lasted for nearly two centuries, and the old Jewish traditions became “increasingly parochial, old-fashioned, and embarrassing to well-to-do Jews. Hellenism ruled the world, and the elite everywhere joined it… The brightest and the best, the richest and the most powerful were attracted to it.”
“But there was resistance still,” we are told, “the farmers, the poorer classes, the less educated, the people who did not mix much with the Greeks.” And then, in maneuvering between kings and high priests, rival factions, political intrigue, the Jews rebelled, the government counterattacked, and the holy Temple itself was sacked. For Antiochus, the King, this escalation to violence was a nightmare. He had plans, big plans, plans on a scale of unifying the world! Yet here are the stubborn Jews who will not worship with the citizens of the empire and who harass the Jews who do. And so he ordered a purification, a series of edicts: “all Jews must cease observing the Torah… sacrifices to [pagan] gods were begun… a statue of Zeus was erected in the Temple, offerings included the sacrifice of pigs on the altar… those who practiced circumcision were condemned to death.”
In opposition, loyal Jews came to the town of Modin, the year is 167 before the Christian era, and the priest in this town is named Mattathias. Mattathias rebels: he kills the king’s agent; he pulls down the sacrilegious altar. He and his five sons flee to the hills, joined by some other Jews, a small band of militants without the strength to fight the Syrians directly. Here are the words attributed to Mattathias: “Though all the nations that live under the king’s rule obey him, and depart from their ancestral faith, yet we will live by the covenant of our ancestors.”
Mattathias soon died, succeeded by Judah, called Maccabee, and they fought in those mountains what we know now as guerilla warfare, pulling down the pagan altars, rallying more and more Jews to their cause. Those Jews who had been seduced by the Hellenistic culture soon realized that a moment of choice was at hand, that they were Jews before they were Greeks, and the Maccabean revolt was in full flower. The Syrian army was distracted elsewhere, Judah and his followers captured Jerusalem, and the Temple came back into Jewish possession and on the third anniversary of the desecration of the Temple, the newly purified space was dedicated.
How should they observe this? Moses had earlier dedicated the tabernacle for eight days… Solomon also had dedicated the Temple for eight days. It was decided that this time, too, eight days of dedication would be held. The Maccabees brought the Temple candelabrum and kindled the lights. But finding any oil that had not been defiled by the Greeks was nearly impossible. But burn it did, and the people prayed and sang: “For the miracles,” they prayed, “for the redemption, for the mighty deeds and triumphs, and for the battles which You performed, O God… You delivered the strong into the hands of the weak, the many into the hands of the few.” And with these wars far from over, the Jews decreed that these eight days of dedication should be celebrated every year.
Many of you may have known this fuller history of Hanukkah. I did not. I knew of the oil and of the miracle of its burning, but I do not know of the issues of acculturation. I did not know of Mattathias, and I knew little of Judah, called Maccabee. And so, I have taken the time this morning to go deeper into the story because I believe there is something here for us, in our day. So you have heard first the history; now, three quick points on our way to the final hymn.
The first point that occurred to me as I read the story of Hanukkah is that though it certainly is a story of religious freedom, it is more than that. It is a story of survival. It is a story of distinctiveness in the midst of assimilation. It is a heroic story of resistance to the seductiveness of assimilation, the temptation of acculturation, the invitation to make everyone and everything the same. The story of Hanukkah, this moment in actual history, celebrates differentness. The Jews resisted homogenization. They fought for religious pluralism. Rabbi Irving Greenberg says that in our day, too, “many universal cultures - Marxism and Communism, triumphalist Christianity, certain forms of liberalism and radicalism, fascism, even monolithic Americanism - have demanded that Jews dissolve and became part of humankind… The Maccabee revolution,” he says, “made clear that a universalism that denies the rights of the particular to exist is inherently totalitarian and will end up oppressing people in the name of one humanity… Only when the world admits that oneness comes out of particular existences… will it escape the inner dynamics of conformity that lead to repression and cruelty.”
On Hanukkah, the Jews urge us, they urge humankind, “to take responsibility for the varieties of human life.” This point alone could take us off into many sermons, you are thinking, but consider the current political climate in America; whatever it is, for example, that lies behind the fear of immigrants. “God bless America,” the politicians are quick to say, “let’s all be religious together,” Romney says, but in the blending of the priest and the king, this blessing tends to invoke both a God and an America that looks a lot like the politicians themselves.
On Hanukkah, a celebration of the survival of the particular in the morass of an engulfing culture, there is a message here, too, for we who are as Unitarian Universalists. In the face of all the jokes, some of which are pretty funny, question marks burning, weather vanes pointing where the wind blows, let us pray that who we are and what we stand for is something more than being all things to all people. We have purposes to who we are; we have principles upon which we stand. And we say there are many paths to the truth, but we struggle together toward that truth. We are a faith that tries to walk our talk. We come together here in our benediction, and if we are helped by the Bhagavad-Gita or the Koran or the Hebrew or Christian scriptures or the teachings of the Buddha or the writings of Henry David Thoreau or Carolyn McDade, it leads us together to going out of here in peace and returning to no person evil for evil and all the rest. Hanukkah reminds us to preserve our identity, to hold to our own values in this town of big houses and fast cars. That’s my first point. That’s what I thought of first when I read the whole story of Hanukkah and the Maccabee children.
Second, I was reminded that this miracle of Hanukkah, the miracle of the oil, came at a moment of spiritual darkness for the Jews. If you read the whole story for yourself, you will read of great cruelty and defilement. You will read of fighting and killing. You will read of political intrigue and tough decisions. You will read about a battle of survival of a whole people. The Temple, the holy Temple of Jerusalem, has now become a Temple to Zeus: it is a place of prostitution and animal sacrifice. It can’t get much darker. And out of this darkness, the Maccabeans lit the Menorah, lit one candle after another, eight days of rededication.
I am wondering now how it is that you and I can recognize the darkness when we are in it and how it is that we do not surrender to the night, how it is that we transcend the darkness and come to light a candle. I am speaking now of more than the superficiality of our easy words at this season that lump Christmas and solstice and Hanukkah all together into some amorphous December thing. I think the Hanukkah story, taken as a whole, put into a context of courage and sacrifice, points us to something profoundly spiritual at this season, takes us someplace deeper. In the context of Hanukkah, these candles in each of the windows of our meetinghouse in this season, these lights that are lit in early December and remaining on, night and day, through the season, these lights could come to remind us of the need we have, as individuals and as a religious people, of a way out of our own spiritual darkness.
When I sit with so many of you, as you try so hard to find your way from here to there, from sadness, from fear, from loneliness, from anger, from despair, I sometimes tell you that I believe in this image of a divine light within each of us, these words beyond psychology, but perhaps words of a soul, a spirit, a light that has nearly flickered out. This is spiritual darkness, and I know that many of you have been or are now in that place. Hanukkah calls out to you and to me not to surrender to the night.
And the same is true for us as a people, this community called First Parish in Concord, here in this corner of North America in the early twenty-first century. Shall we work together to transcend the darkness that is too much with us out there, the darkness of hunger and hate and pettiness and homelessness and abuse and cruelty. Shall we recognize that darkness together and not surrender to the night.
And so, if Hanukkah reminds us to preserve our identity, point number one, and if it also points us a way out of our spiritual darkness, point number two, then here is my third point, briefly stated. “For the main prophetic reading of Hanukkah, the Rabbis chose the prophesy of Zechariah, which ends [with these words], “not by might, nor by power but by My spirit, saith the Lord.” And I am thinking now of Mattathias and of Judah, called Maccabee, and of their small number, waging their war in the mountains, not by might, certainly; not by power, they had none, but by spirit, they had much.
I am thinking of you and me, we here together, this community of faith. In the face of that litany of needs out there, of the cry for justice which is heard in this land and in every continent, of the vast number of oppressed and hungry and homeless and hopeless, look around this room. We are a ragtag collection. We are not mighty. We are not particularly powerful. If we are to make a difference in this world, it will not be by might or power, though we do have some. “Not by might, nor by power, but by My spirit, saith the Lord.” This is a season to gather up all that spirit. We, too, can be instruments of miracles. Preserve your identity. Don’t surrender to the night. Not by might; not by power; but by the spirit.
From The New Union Prayer Book, this prayer for the Sabbath in Hanukkah:
Bless, O God, the Hanukkah lights, that they may shed their radiance into our homes and our lives. May they kindle within us the flame of faith and zeal, that, like the Maccabees of old, we battle bravely for Your cause. Then shall we be worthy of Your love and Your blessing, O God, our Shield and our Protector. Amen