Why Do Unitarian Universalists Celebrate Christmas?
Written by Gary E. Smith Saturday, 09 December 2006 17:00
As is so often the case, I sometimes find myself writing my next sermon when I am listening the week before to a sermon. This is by no means meant to be dismissive or insulting to other preachers who stand here; in fact, you have heard me say plenty that I believe the best sermons are those that allow you to be your own eloquent and insightful self.
So it was last week, with our eighth grade singers, dancers, actors, and photographers, all working with the music of Godspell and with the teachings of Jesus. To hear and see the parable of the Good Samaritan, with commentary from the balcony, with a judge’s gavel and a Girl Scout sash, with the common sense wondering of just why people would cross to the other side of the Jericho Road, I was ready for the sermon today.
“Why would Unitarian Universalists celebrate Christmas?” we are sometimes asked. “Why wouldn’t we?” I reply. It’s the perfect holiday for our theology, I think. I believe incarnation is at the heart of our theology, well, for most of us, most of the time. But let me spell out first why there is every reason I should have writer’s block about this whole topic of Jesus and Christmas.
First, this congregation, this wonderful congregation is a mixture of Jews and Christians, Buddhists and pagans, Hindus, agnostics and atheists, religious humanists and secular humanists, transcendentalists and mystics. The last minister’s orientation even included someone who only comes for the coffee hour. When I listen to your spiritual odysseys, either in these orientations or in the New U or in Spiritual Autobiography or when you tell me your story in my office, I am reminded of the diversity this room holds.
I am also struck by the religious backgrounds you carry here. I ask, “Where were you first carried to a faith community?” and “Where did you first choose to go on your own?” Many of us came out of Christian backgrounds, and I have learned that the name of Jesus, the imagery of Jesus, what that name carries for you by way of association, generally ignites some response: passionate, positive, ambivalent, negative. The name of Jesus means different things to us, out in the society in which we live, but also right here in this room now. That fact alone would be reason enough for writer’s block. Run, I say to myself, do not walk, toward stories of snowflakes and warm fires.
The second cause for my writer’s block on the subject of Jesus arises out of my childhood and a New England Congregationalism that proclaimed a blond, blue-eyed Jesus, an invisible friend, one who taught by parable and example. “Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam,” we would sing, sipping orange juice from tiny paper cups, and then I went to theological school and took courses in Christology and read chapters in books with titles like, “Ecclesiastical Kerygma, Theology, and the Orthodoxy of Nestorius” and “The Self-Emptying of the Logos as Mediation of the Distinction Between Natures.”
I still wake up in a cold sweat some days, thinking I have not passed in a paper for one of those classes; and not only inside the classroom, but outside as well. At Vanderbilt Divinity School in Nashville, Tennessee, somewhere near the buckle of the Bible Belt, I would sometimes be met in the parking lot of the university by some strangers who would demand an answer to their question, “Have you been saved?” “Saved from what?” I would answer. This was my first experience of what I would call aggressive Christianity.
By the time I went to seminary, my Congregational Church had become the United Church of Christ, a merger with the Evangelical and Reformed Church, more common in the Midwest. As a minister, I sometime use the old joke, particularly when I’m asked to pray for good weather, that I’m in Sales, not Management. When I began my ministry in Sales for the United Church of Christ, I would find myself preaching, let’s say, on the Gospel of John and what are called the “I am” statements. I am the light of the world. I am the bread of life. And so on. And then Jesus simply says, “I am,” the divine name itself. I am God.
This is when I began to think I was getting into narrow places, a creeping orthodoxy which said, I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father but by me. “Follow me,” Jesus would say, and I did follow. But in my own odyssey, I was finding the divine in new places, too. My spiritual world was beginning to open, and I was finding the truth, the holy, God even, in new corners. This journey I was on was not so much about a rejection of Jesus as it was about a widening of understanding. I realized I had never been in, nor did I ever want to enter, a place of orthodoxy, of Biblical literalism, of religious fundamentalism, of fevered evangelism.
I was in rebellion. I wanted a bigger faith. I knew either nothing or very little about Unitarian Universalism. But since I was serving a Unitarian Universalist congregation at that time, as a minister in the United Church of Christ, I began to learn of the beginnings of Unitarianism in this country: a faith which proclaimed a Pure Christianity, a need, these people said, to return to the religion OF Jesus, rather than to pursue this religion ABOUT Jesus. I headed off to a General Assembly, the annual continental gathering of Unitarian Universalists. I found my spiritual home. I was converted. I was saved in ways my parking lot hecklers could never have imagined.
Why do Unitarian Universalists celebrate Christmas, we are asked, implying that if we are not Christians in a strict sense, why would it matter? But what I value most about Christianity, what I have never left behind or tossed out, is the meaning of Jesus precisely at this season, this birth of a child. I’ve never bought the notion of Immaculate Conception. I will have more than writer’s block if I go down that road. But I have been present for my own childrens’ births, and it does not get much more human than that. I have rocked and held babies, hungry babies, fussy babies, smelly babies, angry babies, sleeping babies, and when I do, we are talking fully human here; but we are talking divine sometimes, too.
So how does Christianity present itself? The Gospel of Matthew, the first Gospel, puts the story of a birth right up front at the beginning. In the first chapter, verse eighteen, “Now the birth of Jesus took place in this way.” You are wondering what are in the first seventeen verses? Matthew puts down a genealogy. He wants to show Jesus’ roots in the Jewish story. So beginning with Abraham, Matthew begins the begats. Abraham begat Isaac who begat Jacob, and so on, and so on, and so on. Except, if you research those names, all those names taking up seventeen verses, you move out of names you might recognize and move into names that are not famous at all, names of thieves and prostitutes and ne’er do wells buried there, much like our own genealogies.
These names of Jesus’ forebears come from a very human lineage, and they are the very first words of the Christian Bible, right up front, then the story of Jesus’ birth, at a time and place that can be established in history: when that star was in that place, when this historical figure was the governor. And then the places are real, the listeners would have known them, we can find them on a map: Bethlehem, Nazareth, Jerusalem, the Sea of Galilee.
What I value most about Christianity, what I have never left behind, is that here is a faith which proclaims an incarnation, God become human, God incarnate in Jesus, and here is a meaning for Unitarian Universalists if ever there was one: this is a faith that begins with a human, this is a faith that looks you in the eye. At its best, Christianity is a hands-on faith. Extremists aside, Christianity is meant to be other-directed.
Stephen Patterson, a Biblical scholar, says that all this language of the early Christian church was “rather common. Titles like Son of God, Messiah, Lord, Savior,” he says, were given to political figures all the time. The Roman Emperor was called the Son of God, “the god of power, privilege, influence and wealth… But to confess that Jesus was the Son of God was to make a quite different claim. Christians,” Patterson says, “claimed to recognize God not in the power and might of empire, but in a subversive Jewish voice that claimed God’s reign for the destitute, uttered blessings on the hungry, and called together prostitutes, lepers, the disabled and the unclean from the margins of humanity to share at table a heavenly banquet prepared for them now. That Jewish voice,” Patterson says, “is the voice of Jesus.”
Frederick Buechner remembers being in Rome one year on Christmas Eve and going to St. Peter’s Square and waiting there in the enormous crowd for the Pope to arrive and give his Christmas blessing. And what Buechner says he remembers most about that amazing night was the sight of the Pope, then Pope Pius XII, being carried in by the Swiss Guard, in all that grandeur. Buechner says Pius XII looked like the tired old man he was, small and shriveled, stooped over, gray-skinned, but his eyes are what Buechner remembers, the intensity of his stare, out into the crowd, scanning the crowd, Buechner thought, as if he were looking for someone, someone in particular.
What I value about Christianity is that this can be a faith that looks you right in the eye, comes looking for you, eyes meeting another, hands meeting another. Take away all the chapters in my Christology text books, take away all those great councils of the Christian church which debated humanity and divinity and exiled me to a heretical hell, take all that away, and in fifteen days from now will come the birth of a baby, the birth of Jesus, the beginning of something. Take all the theological trappings away and we are celebrating at Christmas a certain holiness that began with a crying baby boy, probably not silent or calm at all.
What is true for me is that, in the peeling away of all the layers of history and pageantry and holy wars and Swiss Guards and all the rest, peeling away until we’re back to the message Jesus brought, and seeing Jesus there with those he loved, the hungry, the poor, those in prison, the weak, those who were persecuted, and we catch sight of something of the hope they must have felt. Jesus burst into this world like a flash of hope. That is why we sing this month. That is why we light candles.
This is very close to what Unitarian Universalism means to me. This is what a Unitarian Universalist does with Christmas, does at Christmas. We sing. We light candles. We hope for a better world. “If we cannot believe in God as a noun,” Buechner says, “maybe we can still believe in God as a verb.” God as a verb takes as its object the world itself, Christianity teaches us to look at one another right in the eye, as Buechner says the Pope did that Christmas Eve, looking for someone, someone in particular.
“Maybe holiness will come again,” Buechner says, “not as the Son of Man with eyes of fire and a two-edged sword in his mouth, but as a child who has maybe already been born into our world and beneath whose face the face of Jesus is at this moment starting to burn through, like the moon through the clouds.” Hope, come again as a child. This child Jesus, pointing to all our children, in Baghdad and in Beirut and in Boston, and in all the children we hold dear. Merry Christmas, we say to one another, looking each other right in the eyes.