Sermon at the Gloucester Unitarian Universalist Church on January 6th, 2019 Still Christmas?

Charles Nazarian

This treasured Meetinghouse, now entering its third century, has witnessed much…the civil war, the 1918 flu pandemic, the great depression, the turbulent 60’s to name a few…and, probably like you, I am frequently awestruck by the serenity and aura of this Sanctuary. Going back to the first service in the Sargent home in 1774, Rev. John Murray’s hope in a loving Creator, based upon his revolutionary interpretation of the New Testament, set both the physical and spiritual foundations of this Church. 213 Christmases have come and gone since the building was completed in 1806. I don’t know about you, but I often approach the Christmas season with a profound sense of dread. This October I was outraged, when on an errand in Home Depot in Danvers I discovered as huge display of fake Christmas trees with decorations. The Thanksgiving leftovers are still fresh in the refrigerator as Muzak carols assault our ears in every store and wreaths made of recycled plastic with cold LED lights that distress my eyes. My heart sinks thinking: “here we go again!” As present-day Unitarian-Universalists we celebrate and honor the wide array of human paths that seek truth, meaning and understanding about the mystery of life…and little is more disheartening to me than seeing the single most beautiful symbol of the Christian tradition, the birth of a child intended to lead humanity into heavenly light, debased in this way. I view it as an assault on the honest quest for meaning. The diverse beliefs, questions and experience you bring here are profound. We respect and cherish that diversity here. Hosea Ballou, an early Universalist minister wrote: ‘If we agree in love, there is no disagreement that can do us any injury, but if we do not, no other agreement can do us any good.” It’s just as true today: we may disagree about many things – even about whether God exists – but if we disagree in love all will be well. We understand that life on this beautiful planet is fleeting and that in this room there is a sacred place to quietly and fervently contemplate our brief moment in time.
Because we have many perspectives based upon the search for meaning it is a delicate balance we practice, seeking to nurture each other. Speaking of time, in the Christian calendar (that is the Gregorian calendar that was adopted by Rome in 1582 under Pope Gregory XIII) the liturgical assignment of this day is called Epiphany, or 3 Kings Day, in celebration of the recognition of the infant Jesus by the Magi (representing the Gentile or non-Jewish side of humanity) as the God with us, or Immanuel. Each year we hear the story recounted in the Book of Matthew that they brought gifts of frankincense, gold and myrrh after dropping by to see wicked King Herod while following the star to Bethlehem, and afterwards went home by other paths to avoid betraying the location of the Christ child to that cruel, jealous monarch. The Gregorian calendar also placed Christmas Day on December 25th, it is said to discourage the Pagan celebrations of the Solstice, the day the sun turns to move Northwards again on the shortest day of the year, and to coopt a very popular and long-established time of celebration. It was not always so…in the older Julian Calendar, dating back to Roman times, Christmas is celebrated today, 2 weeks later, and the 3 Wise People don’t arrive on the star-illuminated Bethlehem manger scene until January 20th. Many of the older Apostolic Churches, including that of my Armenian ancestors, have stayed with the Julian calendar in defiance of Rome’s strategic re- arrangements. So for them, it’s still Christmas today. Some scientists and scholars have pointed out that the whole idea of shepherds tending their flocks by night in mid-winter is a fiction and that both humans and sheep were smart to stay indoors during the coldest time of year in Judea. They have speculated that the birth of Jesus by that standard should be celebrated in early spring! But obviously that would have royally messed up the Christian Liturgical Year, squeezing it into less than 2 months to Easter. Science and religion live uneasily in many cultures, not only our own. Reason is a gift that has made human advancement possible on so many levels but we can miss the richness and power of mythology and wonderment by sometimes being too literal. You should probably count yourselves lucky that I was not asked to give this homily last Sunday, known in the Roman Church calendar, or Lectionary, as
Circumcision Sunday! I will leave it to you imaginations what I might have done with that topic for 15 minutes… However, in all seriousness, when researching these dates I ran across a rather sad and foretelling note: it is recognized as the first time that Jesus’ blood is shed. This carries the deeper meaning of his common humanity with us. Whether or not you believe that he was the son of God placed on Earth to be the Savior of all humanity, or was simply a great teacher of cultural values that underpin Western society matters not a whit: he was a baby, he hurt, he bled, and suffered many things…just like us. So, if we have established anything thus far it is that the date of Christmas and, by extension, today as 3-Kings Day, or Epiphany, is not entirely reliable. So let’s dig deeper into meaning…what about that word “epiphany”…what does it really mean? The Cambridge Dictionary describes it this way, which feels much more personal and understandable than many others to me: “A moment when you suddenly feel that you understand, or suddenly become conscious of, something that is very important to you.” The 2 greatest takeaways here are that having an Epiphany is first and foremost about you, as expressed by Walt Whitman in our reading. Christmas is about what you experience internally or become conscious about when viewing the manger scene, remembering your own parents as a child, learning to welcome the refugee and finding a warm place in your heart for a baby. We are also mindful of Nature: the turning of the sun despite short dark days that are sometimes hard to bear, of ice, snow and bitter cold and perhaps helping the lives of birds and animals who struggle to survive outside. And second, the recognition is often sudden…it’s like seeing a shooting star in a dark sky or perhaps the Nova Star that scientists speculate could have appeared to be above Bethlehem…full of wonderment and meaning that you may not fully comprehend but somehow speaks to your innermost being. That is why we spent some time in meditation earlier, becoming mindful of the concept of light entering and bathing us as a balm: a calm steadiness in our life’s
rough seas. We can visualize the light of parents whose love for us is brought back to life in memory and perhaps feel the presence of a universal love. There is a poignant place in Chapter VI in the autobiography of John Murray that has remained with me a long time. It often returns to my consciousness as an epiphany whenever I hear people argue about this or that about what they believe or don’t. He was being grilled with questions by an irate Calvinist minister, who insisted that human beings must recognize their intrinsic sinful nature and consciously accept Jesus as a personal savior in order to avoid being damned to purgatory forever. Murray then asks, ‘what about infants?’ and confounds the irate clergyman. He undoes Calvinist doctrine by asking what if an infant dies before acknowledging Christ…is the child damned forever? What you have to know is that before leaving England, John Murray had lost his wife and infant child…and was in the darkest human despair imaginable. Most of you know the story about how his ship foundered on a New Jersey sandbar, and he was called ashore by a man named Potter who had built a chapel in the woods and after 3 days and not until Murray agreed to become his chaplain the winds shifted and he could complete his journey to New York. In that space of time was John’s Epiphany that there indeed could still be a guiding hand and that although life could be bitterly cruel and unfair, the eye of Providence was upon him. This led him to argue that a loving Creator, the Light of the World, whose greatest commandment is love, could not condemn to eternal suffering an innocent child…and by extension all of humanity was encompassed by that universal love. That message of hope sparked a revolution in the Christian tradition, caught on in Gloucester and is why this Meetinghouse was built so large. Of course, people view Christmas and who Jesus was in remarkably different ways that are often culturally, not spiritually, rooted. A few weeks ago Reverend Janet pointed out the national hypocrisy of pretending to welcome the poor, refugee infant Jesus, whose Semitic skin color would have been less than pure AngloSaxon white, into festive homes while denying the horrible things being done to refugees, infants and children with brown skin at our Southern border. Add to that the starvation and death of thousands of children in Yemen, supported with
US weaponry, because our government values oil wealth and power more than human lives. We, as a culture can often be so blind and numb to the truth. A tragi-comical event at a church in Richmond, VA many years ago is good example. Hit by lightning twice and left as a burnt out brick shell, this wealthy church eventually rebuilt (including a Fisk pipe-organ) with stained glass window featuring Jesus holding the world like an orb at the front. But the glass artist had made a coloration miscalculation that resulted in Jesus’ face looking really tanned…read “too dark.” The window was quickly sent back to the artist’s studio to have the face replaced with a more acceptable “whiter” image. Some places in Richmond have yet to experience an Epiphany about truth and race…and all too often this is true in our inner thoughts and hearts. Charles Dickens famous tale ‘A Christmas Story’ about Scrooge reminds us that this holiday should be about joy in caring for others and in remembrance. This understanding from the center of your being may come from many sources in many traditions. When it is cold, dark and Nature can be most cruel that is precise time to open our hearts and extend the welcome of our homes to each other. Sharing love does not have to be, and is often not, in a religious context. Of course, in every culture many people will insist upon answers with unyielding religious dogma and laws of conduct…but that very rigidity can become a tomb for the spirit. The Unitarian Universalist approach is not perfect, but encourages us to see each person like a thread in a vast tapestry of humanity, connected to each other. And individually we may be like a facet of a gem-stone that reflects light coming from a source of mystery. John Murray articulated this view in his famous benediction saying “you may possess a small light but let it shine.” Each of us has life journey to travel. I grew up in a small Congregational church, built by survivors of the Turkish genocide of Armenians in 1915, with a very loving and accepting minister whom I now recognize was really a UU. At my request my father took me to hear the Rev. Billy Graham at a huge rally in Boston when I was 13, was very moved by the event, and went down to sign up. My father was both pleased and somewhat bemused. He had a very practical faith. He used to say that it never hurt to believe, even though we had many discussions at family
Sunday dinners around Christmas about whether Mary was really a virgin or around Easter if Christ really rose from the dead. Frankly I lived to regret signing up with Graham’s crusade…not only did the mail never stop coming asking for donations through my teen years, but after studying anthropology in high school I decided all religions were man-made concoctions to explain the unknown. They were interesting myths created by diverse cultures as different as the Andaman Islanders were from the Roman Church…but all were equally flawed no matter how much they claimed to have a lock on the truth. This horrified my dear Mother, who held a strong Christian faith, and who was paying for my expensive private school education that including that course in Anthropology! In college I retained that analytical view but very much due to the music of J.S. Bach and especially a love for organ music, I gravitated to musical expressions of faith that filled a mystical and spiritual emotional space inside me. It was in the early 70’s and all the civil rights movements, anti-Vietnam and counterestablishment forces were in culture wars with established norms everywhere. It may have come from the pure joy of playing a Bach chorale on the organ late at night in a dark chapel but I had an Epiphany: if God is Love then all the religious power hierarchies erected in His name with their the accusations of sinfulness towards outcast peoples, all the inequalities directed at women, bloody religious wars, and all the towers of Babel erected by the powerful and mighty in the name of religion ceased to have any power. Like the opening words about worship, old concepts about the life of the spirit took on new vistas for me. I also started to search for the real words and the real meanings of Jesus and found a revolutionary imbedded in the Scriptures. Time also has a way of grinding off the sharp edges and certain verities of youth doesn’t it? When I was in my 40’s and my father was 93 and staying with me as his incredibly strong body and heart finally became frail, it was difficult time. We had a contentious as well as deeply connected relationship and we both knew his time was near. This led to us sharing many deep but previously unspoken things. One day I overheard him singing the Sunday school hymn “Jesus Loves Me, this I
know, for the Bible tells me so; I am weak but he is strong…Yes Jesus loves me.” And then he broke into laughter. He had rediscovered a joy within and he was ready. I think most of us eventually wrestle with the big, unknowable questions such as is there mysterious Creator Spirit, and could that be who set off the Big Bang with the forces of Nature and the Universe, and (for some) who could have sent the Christ child and other great teachers into the word to point the way? Despite our tragic human imperfectness …Over time I have come to believe in an indwelling God: the Divine that is and has always been that force of good within every person; that still quiet voice, even if we don’t always recognize it. Does that ring true for you? Perhaps every time we see the light of love in another person’s eyes, or even better in their actions, I think we may be witnessing God with us: the very meaning of the name Immanuel. And when we fail in some way to live up to the loving nature of that Light the pain experienced is sharp because that spirit within us knows when we are like the lost sheep and have to try again to find our way. Love is always beckoning and chastening us to overcome and to find grace. Indeed, we recognize and honor many paths…and isn’t that a wonderful thing? In that sense, every day has the potential to be like 3-Kings Day, when the powerful forces within us are humbled and in awe of Love. It is still like Christmas when by some epiphany we sense a blessed Presence, and, wherever and in whatever circumstances we experience Hope, like a child, being born.