Magic

11 December 2005

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

Prayer

We spend so much time looking for magic in the wrong places. We think it must be a hard thing to get, this magic, and we go through the motions of all the incantations, prayers, lucky charms and tricks we can find, trying to trick some magic into entering our souls.

This is the season when we will be charged a lot of money for seeking magic in the wrong places. And no matter how much we spend, toys aren’t likely to deliver the kind of magic for which we really yearn.

It’s the season when we chase after the spirit called Holy, and wish we could be caught by it.

It’s an important chase, but we don’t need to bring our credit cards. For the spirit of life and love and everything really worth the chase – not only is that spirit free, but it is also inside of us, waiting to be awakened, and noticed, so that it might do its work.

This season, let us conspire with the holy spirit to transform our hearts from stone to flesh, to reawaken our gratitude for this miracle of life, and our love for those who help feather our heart’s nest.

There is a glow, and a warmth that comes from looking for magic in the right places, and it can’t be begged, borrowed, stolen or bought. But it can be brought forth, from its home in the manger of our heart, and it can bless us. That blessing, that warmth, that connection, that feeling – that’s the magic that’s really worth seeking.

These holidays, let us seek for the magic of the season, but let us seek it in all the right places.

Amen.

SERMON: Magic

I began thinking about the idea of magic when I was talking with a colleague who is doing an interim ministry at an unhappy church. “I’m getting ready for the Christmas services,” she said, “but I don’t feel the magic.” Christmas is such a magical holiday that without that magic, it isn’t really Christmas.

I’ve been reading a book about magic, a book called Not in Kansas Anymore (Christine Wicker). The author used to be a religion writer for the Dallas Morning News, and brings a lot of skepticism to this subject of magic. But she spent a couple years looking for it among some very colorful people. She spent time with witches, vampires, werewolves and elves, and a host of others in all the costumes you could imagine, and some you couldn’t imagine.

This wasn’t about party tricks, or producing a quarter from behind someone’s ear. It’s what the communities she studied call “High magic.” It’s about transforming yourself. Magic is a search for a power of life by people who are missing it and want it. Magic is the effort to create a feeling that we’re somehow connected to larger powers, and that connection can bring us a feeling of being more alive.

Of the groups she studied, the most fascinating to me were the psychic vampires, because I’ve known a few. They told her they could drain energy from others just by being around them, and she said she sometimes felt drained after they left. These psychic vampires divided the world into two kinds of people: vampires and victims. Those who steal life, and those from whom they steal it.

While all these alternative magic-seekers are usually people for whom traditional religion can’t give them this power or satisfy this need, you don’t need religion to explain where they would get this view of our world as those who take and those who are taken from. They could get it from our economy, which serves the wealthiest at the expense of the poorest. Or they could see it in our imperialism: the notion that since we have the military might, we have the right to invade and rob any country with assets or strategic location we desire. Both our economy and our foreign policy operate a lot like vampires and victims: those with brute power feed on the life energy of those whose powers are more vulnerable, more easily stolen from them.

It’s about trying to take, steal, or buy something from others that can give us a kind of life feeling we don’t have. The whole notion is wrong: that we can steal or buy a worthwhile life. And once you think a quality life can be stolen or bought, we’re at the mercy of the advertising agencies who have made a multi-billion-dollar art of convincing us that their product can give us the magic we need.

So I’ve been thinking about the Christmas season in terms of magic this week. As some of you have heard, it’s the same week in which a bunch of evangelical Christian megachurches announced that they’ll be closed on Sunday the 25th of December. That tiresome crank, Jerry Falwell, has denounced them, as he has denounced the White House for sending “Holiday Greetings” cards, insisting that Christmas is a completely Christian holiday.

But Christmas isn’t a Christian holiday. As even a conservative New York Times op-ed writer reported yesterday (John Tierney, 10 December 2005), it is a winter solstice festival, and has been so for thousands of years. In the ancient calendar, the day we call December 25th was the date of the winter solstice. As such, it was automatically the birth day of all solar deities, including the Roman god Mithras. December 25th wasn’t adopted as Jesus’ birthday until the fourth century, the same time that Sunday was adopted as the Christian holy day. But Sunday is the day of the Sun: the holy day of solar deities. So nothing about this season, or Sunday, has anything to do with the man Jesus.

Christmas isn’t even a religious holiday; it’s a merchants’ holiday, the day they finally close their stores after the Christmas selling orgy that produces about a third of their annual sales. The truth is, Christmas is a secular holiday. If you doubt this, just look at the gifts that are given. Bibles make up an infinitesimally small percentage of Christmas gifts. What we buy has nothing to do with religion. But what we are trying to buy is magic: the magic of the season. And how odd, that we are told that we must buy it!

Here at church, I’ve been getting spammed with e-mails telling me what the hottest toys of this season are, presuming I might want to run out and buy them so I can feel the magic. It’s a confusing array. And somehow, each manufacturer has their own idea of the season’s hottest toy. I’ve read that the season’s hottest toy is the Microsoft X-Box 360, selling for $399. The company says they expect to sell over three million of them. They’re hot.

But there are so many hottest toys of the year! One e-mail says the hottest toy is the Remote control Hovercraft; another says no, it’s the Remote Control UFO that’s the hottest toy of the year. Then there’s the Twinkle Twirl Dance Studio with Twinkle Twirl Pony and Accessories. That’s hot. There’s the Ninja Turtles Sewer Lair Play Set, which is more than I want to know about that. Or the Barbie Swan Lake Unicorn, with Princess Barbie and Prince Ken. That doesn’t do a lot for me, but I’ll bet some of you have daughters who hope they get one. There’s even the Room Moodz 6″ Rotating Disco Ball Light for $14.99. I hope disco balls aren’t making a comeback!

The magic of the Christmas season is for sale in stores, through catalogs and online, delivered to your door to transform your Christmas into the magical sort of thing you think you want. These gifts are promising to make your holiday season, to connect it with that larger power that you don’t have. It’s the power of being really cool, excited, keeping up with or staying ahead of your friends. You know, you can’t buy just any Sewer Lair Play Set. It won’t be the right brand. It won’t have the kind of magic that only the Ninja Turtles Sewer Lair Play Set has. And you can’t just go down to the Dollar Store and buy some scruffy old unicorn. It won’t have the magic of the Barbie Swan Lake Unicorn, with Princess Barbie and Prince Ken. Just ask your kids. We’re not buying toys; we’re buying holiday magic. And we’ll spend an average of $700 to $1,000 buying it because we aren’t being told that we have the magic within us. This reminds me a lot of those psychic vampires. And think about all these hot toys, and what we do with them. We use them alone. We go off alone, absorbed in our X-Box 360, or the Twinkle Twirl Dance Studio or those sewer turtles. This magic we’re spending so much money for takes us away from contact with almost all the real human beings around us.

But you know this can’t be right. Even saying it out loud sounds silly. We’ve been convinced that holiday magic is something we have to buy, that we don’t have it and can’t call it forth on our own; we have to buy it. And it’s a strange and transient kind of magic, at that. Because the magic of this year’s hottest toys won’t even last a year. Next year these toys won’t have the magic any more. It never ends. Can real magic expire in just a year? Can it be as easy as charging it on a credit card? Is that really what we’re after? I know psychic vampires have to hunt continually for new life to steal, but is that the best we can do?

This is where I want to bring in a different way of looking at the magic we’re looking for. It’s a lens borrowed from Christianity, though one we seldom think about. It’s what the choir sang about this morning. They sang selections from Vivaldi’s Magnificat. Some of you will know where that word “Magnificat” comes from, and some of you won’t. It comes from the Gospel of Luke, Chapter 1 verse 46, from the Christian myth of the birth of Jesus. This gospel was written about eight years after the man Jesus was born, half a century after he died, so it’s imaginative religious storytelling, not history. We really don’t know a thing about just where or when the man Jesus was born. Still, it’s a lovely story. Mary’s friend Elizabeth tells her that her baby will be the Messiah. For centuries, Jewish women hoped, at least at some level, that their baby might be the long-awaited Messiah, and Mary has just been told, in this story written more than eighty years after Jesus’ birth, that her baby will be the one. That’s when she said the line that has launched a thousand concerts: “My soul magnifies the Lord.” That’s what the Latin word “magnificat” means: magnifies. My soul magnifies the Lord. Mary was saying “I carry within me magic of the highest order, the magic of God himself, placed in my womb to be born into the world. My soul magnifies the Lord!”

Sure, this is wrapped in that archaic language of a first-century myth; but you have a feeling for what it means. It’s about real magic! Not bought, not something that will wear thin by next season, but a gift of life, a visitation of all that is most holy, growing right there inside of your body. Every mother knows the feeling; every father can relate to it. Today, we get a set of plastic Barbie and Ken dolls, or some sewer turtles. And what does that magnify? The power of advertising to convince us that we want things we don’t really need? Is that what our souls magnify at Christmastime today? The power and the glory of advertisers taking advantage of our gullibility by tapping into our yearning for some high magic?

Mary’s magic was free. And really, in Jewish teachings, all people are the sons and daughters of God, who was their heavenly Father. It was magic, and it was free. Today, we get Barbie and Ken, and we buy them because we’ve been taught that we don’t have the magic in us any more. It’s a lie, but as long as we believe it, it’s true.

Think back this week on your very favorite, your most magical, Christmases, and see what made them so magical. I can remember some from my childhood. And I can’t remember a single present that I got at any of those best Christmases. It was other things: the feeling of our family being together, being happy, the wonderful smells of pine needles, and of cookies and bread baking, the magic of Santa Claus. We put out milk and cookies for Santa every Christmas Eve, and knew for a fact that there was a Santa because every Christmas morning, they were gone. Our father helped us choose the right kind of cookies; he seemed to know just what Santa liked. Then there was that warm glow of the multi-colored tree lights, and the glow in all the windows up and down the street. It was all magic. Nothing Christian about it, but it was magic. And what did our souls magnify? I think it was as simple as the joy of being together, being in a safe place where love lived and we lived, and where we mingled with love and called the place Home. I don’t mean I didn’t often hope for certain presents, but I can’t remember what any of them were.

What about you? When you think back on your best holidays, what did your soul magnify? What spirit were you channeling? What kind of powers or gods were you serving? I’ll bet they were happy ones, warm ones that cherished you and cherished those around you. Your soul magnified the power of love, and gratitude, and that magnification transformed the holidays into something special, something magical. But it was home-grown magic that accomplished the miracle: not store-bought magic.

We pay a fortune for gifts each year, gifts that will be out of fashion within a few months, because we have forgotten that the real magic of the season is all around us. But the center of this season is all about what we are magnifying with our souls. If Mary had said “My soul magnifies the fads of the season,” nobody would have cared. If she had rejoiced in stealing life from God, who was her newest victim, nobody would even have written it down, because you can’t get it more wrong than that.

Our souls are going to magnify something this season. Maybe just Microsoft’s profits and the stock portfolios of those who own a lot of Microsoft stock. Maybe just the fads of the season, new hot toys that start losing their heat within weeks. And in some ways, we spend all the money because, like psychic vampires, we think we’re missing something that can only be taken or bought from others. It never ends, because it’s looking for magic in all the wrong places.

I hope we can magnify more important things this holiday season. Like the warmth of a mutual relationship with another live human being. Like learning that it isn’t the love we buy or steal that saves us; it’s the love we share. This is the season of infinite dreams, when we dream even of finding, and magnifying, things like love, life, tenderness, compassion, the Holy Spirit – the spirit of the God of Love. Let our souls magnify all that is truly holy and life-giving this season. The very best magic is free; it’s still the only enduring miracle of this or any other season.