Wisdom Tree

Meg Barnhouse

December 11, 2011

The fourth in a sermon series on the seven UU Principles. We agree to affirm and promote “a free and responsible search for truth and meaning.” Some say that a search for truth is too private a focus for a person of faith, that the search needs instead to be for justice. Some say you can’t articulate the Truth anyway, and maybe there is no capital “T” Truth anyway.

Here we are at the season of holy days, when most religions originating in the northern hemisphere celebrate the return of the light. Hanukkah is the Jewish celebration of the light that burned in the temple longer than it could naturally have burned, a miracle of light in the darkness. Hinduism celebrates Diwali, the Pagans celebrate the Winter Solstice and Christianity celebrates the birth of the son at the same time that its Roman rulers were celebrating the birth of the sun. No one knows the historical truth of these stories, but we feel in our hearts that they have a different kind of truth, an inner truth that can teach us about ourselves, about how to live well, how to get along with the way the Universe seems to work, a truth of the spirit.

In the Hebrew and Christian scriptures, there are only two declarative sentences that are translated “God is….” God is love. God is light. For those of you who have an interest in how the Divine is spoken of in scriptures, I’ll go into this just for a moment more. It doesn’t merely say “the Divine is loving,” or “the Divine is like light.” It says “the Divine is love.” “The Divine is light.” That feels more cellular to me than descriptive. The Christian scriptures which talk about Rabbi Jesus as if he were a special part of the Divine call him the Word. The Greek in the NT translated this way is the Greek word logos. Logos is a concept whose many layers of meaning include not only “word,” but more on the order of “reason,” “structure,” “organizing principle.” Scholars think the author of this part of the scripture was educated in the Greek manner but was born a Jew. In the Jewish scriptures, the word is a creative force, especially the word of God. It’s how they described the creation of the skies, the oceans and the earth. In this religion, the creation wasn’t a birth from a great mother or a star, it was done by words. So when the gospel writer says “in the beginning was the word,” and implies that Rabbi Jesus and that word are the same, he is trying to communicate that he wants people to worship the reason of God, the Creative power of God, the underlying principles by which everything in the Universe is laid out. In this same gospel, the spirit of God is called the “Spirit of Truth.” I know, it’s quite unusual to hear a Unitarian minister speak about God, Rabbi Jesus, and the Spirit It’s Christmas.

In my opinion, when we talk about truth, “capital T Truth,” we are talking about something that has this kind of generative power. We find truth and it changes things. It’s not just something to which we assent by nodding our heads sagely or clapping our hands and rejoicing that we have another bit of knowledge to add to our cocktail party conversation or our discussions with friends. In the view of these scriptures, love, light, reason, and the truth of things are ways of describing the divine.

Because our fourth principle says that we agree to affirm and promote a free and responsible search for truth and meaning, I’m going to tell you something true about the Christmas story in the Gospel of Luke that you may not yet know. We’ll see how you feel about knowing it. We’ll see if it changes anything.

Did you know that a person steeped in Palestinian culture would understand the Christmas birth story very differently from the way I always have? I’m a bit chagrined to have found this out, and I’m wondering if I should keep quiet about it, because it will ruin a lovely story. You know how you hear the story of an event, a marriage, a journey and you think to yourself “That’s a great story. What really happened is more complicated, but if I say anything that will take away the sweet shape of its telling, that kicking punch line, the moving moral at the end.” The truth is still compelling to most of us, though. We want to know.

In churches all over the place the kids are dressed as shepherds, the angels have their wings on, the kids playing Mary and Joseph are ready, and this year’s baby Jesus has been chosen. The narrator tells the story about Joseph and Mary traveling from Galilee to Bethlehem for the census, and the couple goes from one inn to the next only to be told there is no room for them to stay. They end up in a stable with the animals, far from any other human contact, giving birth alone and far from home. Sermons are preached that go like this:

“Don’t be like the mean old inn-keeper who wouldn’t give Jesus a place. You make room in your life, your heart, etc. for the child.”

We do need to hear the message of making room in our lives for Spirit, and it’s a moving commentary about the comfortable and the safe people having a harder time making room for the Light than the outsiders and the lowly.

I started reading the lectures of Bible scholar Kenneth Bailey, an author and lecturer in Middle Eastern New Testament Studies. In addition to a doctorate in New Testament, he holds graduate degrees in Arabic language and literature as well as Systematic Theology. He spent forty years living and teaching New Testament in Egypt, Lebanon, Jerusalem and Cyprus. He is the author of books in English and in Arabic. He, in dialogue with Palestinian Christian Bible scholars, has illuminated the cultural context of the story behind our children’s pageants. Palestinian culture is much the same now as it was in the time of Jesus’ birth, so most Arab believers have always understood the nuances of the story.

The first thing you’ll want to know is that hospitality is the highest value of the Palestinian culture, and that has been so for thousands of years. Joseph returning to the city of his ancestors would never have stayed in a commercial inn, even if Bethlehem had been large enough to sustain one. He would have stayed with family. For a descendant of David to be turned away from staying with family in the City of David would have brought unthinkable shame on the whole town.

The word in the text translated as “inn” is the Greek word katalyma or kataluma. This is not a commercial building with rooms for travelers. When Luke meant to talk about a commercial inn, as in the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37), he used the Greek pandocheion. Kataluma is a guest space, typically one of the two rooms of a common village home.

“A simple Palestinian village home in the time of King David up until the Second World War had two rooms – one for guests, one for the family. The family room had an area, usually about four feet lower, for the family donkey, the family cow, and two or three sheep. They are brought in last thing at night and taken out and tied up in the courtyard first thing in the morning.

Dr. Kenneth Bailey; Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes: Cultural Studies in the Gospels.

“The days came for her to be delivered” the Gospel writer says. Nothing in the text says Mary was in labor as they were looking for a place. Mary would have spent the last part of her pregnancy in the home of whatever cousins they were visiting. There wasn’t room in the guest room, so the baby was laid in one of the mangers dug into the stone floor of the family room or made of wood and stood up on the family room floor, surrounded by animals, aunties. uncles and cousins.

Bailey has written a children’s Christmas pageant, if telling a more culturally accurate story is important to you. In the old story we are told to make room for strangers, to make room for the Divine. We are told the Divine is an outsider, despised and rejected from the beginning. We should be ashamed of ourselves for being selfish and uncaring.

In the version that is congruent with Palestinian culture, though, it seems the Divine comes to birth when you have finally found your people, aunts, uncles, cousins, friends, animals, warm, noisy and crowded. There is no shame for me in the story, no scolding tale of humans failing yet again, just a family doing the best it can.

The stories we tell in our families and in our faith communities shape our experience. They signal to us who we are, where we come from, what we can expect. If I tell the story that I’m unlucky, I am more likely to notice the times when things don’t work out my way. If I grew up on the story that my people get their value from being smart, when I make a mistake or forget something, or when I fail, I feel cast out of the warm circle of belonging. If I go to a church where the story is told that a father killed his son so that the father could forgive us for our sins, and that this father loves me but would send me to eternal hellfire for making a mistake, I might feel like an overly soft parent if I don’t take my children’s mistakes out of their hide.

I like the story with less shame in it, with less loneliness surrounding the light at its birth. What changes might ripple out from the new story? I’m pondering this in my heart.

Some people who write about UUism say our principles are bland, or that they encourage us to be a private church where our search for truth is in danger of making us end up in a dusty room surrounded by books and CDs of spiritual teachings, improving ourselves and searching until we die, more wise but unworn by interaction with the world. I think if we just keep coming to church that won’t be a danger. Surrounded by folks who are in pain, in need, who are feeling hollow and restless or full and overflowing, surrounded by music and joy, as we find truth it will explode in us like a big packet of seeds, and some of them will begin to grow and make demands and create new shapes in our thinking and our doing. The magi, the wise men in the story teach us some things about how to do this. If this were my dream it would mean that you don’t search for truth alone, but in company. Sometimes you travel a long way. You orient yourself by the light you see and move toward it. Be prepared for trickery from the powers that be. They do not benefit from the truth. And you prepare yourself to find the truth by bringing your gifts to give to it. You don’t show up like a rude guest, empty handed. Bring the truth presents, because the truth cannot just be consumed, but you enter into a relationship with the truth that is ongoing.

One of the messages this season is that the truth is organic, personal, not just a concept that will help you win your next argument. It might change things, make demands, stir things up, ask things of you, send you on a quest, open you and scatter you like seeds.