The Morning of the Night Before

December 24, 2006

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PRAYER

Let us prepare a manger in our hearts, where we can welcome the birth of the sacred this Christmas.

Let us not worry about building a place to hold all the presents we anticipate tomorrow. Holidays become holy days when we become aware of the gifts we already have; we’re not always sure how that’s supposed to happen. So let us make a space where we are open to life’s miracles, the ones happening within and among us.

They’re free, the best gifts: like the ability to accept ourselves as a cherished part of our world, or the fact that just being loved by people whose love we didn’t earn is a gift beyond measure. And the gift of life itself, the fact that we so often complain about not having enough and so seldom give thanks for the fact that we are here at all . These are the gifts that transform holidays into holy days. There is no room for them at the Inn. They can only be born in simple and honest places that make room for them. These gifts need a manger.

And so let us prepare a manger in our hearts. For something sacred wants to be born, and it needs our help. Let us prepare a manger in our hearts.

Amen.

SERMON

This is the morning of the Night Before Christmas. Tonight, at our two Christmas Eve services, we will tell the traditional Christmas story, with some comments to relate it to our lives here and now, and lots of singing of traditional Christmas songs.

This morning, I want to put that old story in historical and human context by showing it as a variation on a much older story, one probably going back into our pre-history. For the story we tell about Jesus is a variation on a theme we have told countless times, in almost every human society in all times and places.

Some of these stories had been told for thousands of years before Jesus even came along. They were famous stories, and a lot of them were stories about special babies born on December 25th , because in the ancient calendar, the day we call December 25th was four days earlier, the date of the winter solstice, when the sun is “reborn,” days start getting longer, and the light in the sky starts coming back.

But we need to learn how to read religious stories, because they’re not meant to be read in a straightforward way. So I want to borrow an insight from a very odd place. Over twenty years ago, I read a what I thought was a profound essay in Esquire magazine by William Broyles called “Why Men Love War” (Esquire, November 1984) Broyles had been a soldier in Vietnam as I also had been, and in this essay he made the astonishing statement that no true war stories had ever been written. It wasn’t, he said, that those who write about war mean to lie. It’s that they are trying to write something that is true not to the mere facts of their war, but to the deep and powerful associations it generated within them. And mere words, mere facts, can’t do this without being shaped into an almost mythic story. That’s still one of the most important and enlightening things I’ve ever read about either war or religion.

All of our most important stories, our favorite stories, are in some sense not true, are in some sense mythic. This includes all of our favorite novels, popular television shows, movies, video games or fairy tales. They’re all imaginative stories made up to express and evoke some very deep needs and hopes within us. That’s what gives them their power. In this sense, the animated television show “South Park” is no more unreal than “All in the Family,” “Rambo,” “The Matrix,” “Star Wars,” or all the world’s most fantastic-sounding religious stories.

They’re trying to serve something more important than mere facts; they’re myths. What’s a myth? It’s a story in whose images and terms we want to live for a while – sometimes minutes, sometimes years. It’s why action movies, love stories or fantasies like “Lord of the Rings’ and the Harry Potter stories attract a million times more people to them than documentaries and The History Channel do. We live in stories. Without a good story to live in, we hardly know who we are.

We live in stories a lot like hermit crabs live in their borrowed homes. These are animals without their own protective covering, who will find abandoned shells of other animals, or even tin cans on the floor of the sea, and live in them for protection. The little animals are really quite vulnerable, no matter how secure they may look in someone else’s shell or soup can.

And without a good myth to live in, we feel vulnerable, too. The stories we choose are almost always on themes that have been with us for as long as we”ve been humans. They give us a role, a picture of the world, always at least partly imaginative, and we need that. That’s what a myth is: a story that never happened but always feels true to some parts of our human condition. So it’s almost impossible to create a brand-new story that isn’t just a variation on some much, much older story.

Prometheus was the story of someone who gave “fire” – often interpreted metaphorically as creativity, an imagination letting us transcend mechanical fate. How many variations on this story can you think of? Atlas was the god with the life-consuming, boring job of holding up the sky for others. How many people still spend their lives doing this?

And to take just two more, Artemis and Demeter remind me of a book by Arianna Huffington on The Gods of Greece . She was raised in France, but her culture was Greek, and she learned the ancient Olympic gods as symbols and projections of dynamics and allegiances that are, as the Greeks recognized, timeless parts of the human condition. As a brilliant and ambitious woman with two daughters, she wrote that her adult life has often seemed like her balancing act between the conflicting demands of Demeter – the archetypal Mother – and Artemis, that defiant, bold spirit of an assertive woman. (Artemis was the patron goddess of the “Women’s Movement” of the 1970s, embodied by, among others, Gloria Steinem.)

Those who have read much by Joseph Campbell, Carl Jung, Thomas Moore, James Hillman or a host of other mythologists and depth psychologists will recognize this sort of thinking. It is saying that all the great religious myths, including all the myths about Jesus, are absolutely ancient, far older than Jesus, Christianity or Judaism, and that if we understand them well, they are actually stories about the human condition, about us, about our anxieties and yearnings.

We don’t have to put this in stories; we just like stories. But some of this can be put into pretty straightforward philosophical language for those who aren’t as fond of stories. Listen to these words the philosopher Aristotle wrote about us, more than 2300 years ago:

“There is a life which is higher than the measure of humanity; [we] will live it not by virtue of [our] humanity, but by virtue of something in [us] that is divine, – [will] live according to the highest thing that is in [us], for small though it be, in power and worth it is above [all] the rest.” (Ethics, X, 7, 7)

We want to believe this, but questions arise: like, how did this divine thing get inside us? Where did it come from? Most of our poets and mythmakers have said these things must come from gods. We don’t see gods in the world we live in, but sometimes, those rare people who we see as heroes or saviors – so many ancient writers described them as somehow coming from that place where gods come from. In ancient Greece, this is what a hero was: someone with a human as one parent and a god for the other. Human, but also a child of God. That’s how storytellers say what Aristotle said about that something in us that is divine.

And there are thousands of these stories about the birth of someone sacred, about heroes or saviors with one parent from earth, the other from above the sky in the heavens. Stories of “sons of God” are in almost every culture. You can find them in Native American stories from long before they had any contact with Europeans. They are in all cultures, people living within very similar stories, like hermit crabs that look for similar shells or tin cans.

So in ancient Greece, Zeus, Father of the gods, visited the young woman Semele in the form of a thunderstorm; and she gave birth to the great savior Dionysus.

Zeus, again, visited the young woman Danae in a shower of gold; and the child was Perseus, one of Greece’s greatest mythic heroes.

In Hinduism, the god Krishna, the favorite god of most Hindus, was born of Devaki, the human woman, and the great god Vishnu.

The Egyptians had their stories of Isis and Osiris, and the miraculous conception of their son Horus, and the many drawings and statues of Isis holding baby Horus on her lap were the models for the later drawings and statues of Mary holding the baby Jesus. Most people knew these stories weren’t true in a historical or factual sense, but were meant in that deeper sense that is so hard to put into words.

So when ancient people from all over the world tell stories about their favorite heroes and saviors, something deep inside of them seems to want to tell the story as the birth of a special human whose father was a god. They’re not lying, any more than those who write moving stories about the experience of war are lying. They’re trying to tell a truth that seems beyond the reach of mere facts, that seems to live only in that place within our imaginations where miracles can still happen.

Many of you have seen “The Nutcracker,” and you know it was written in the same way. People who see it know it isn’t really about dancing mice in the middle of the night. It’s about dancing spirits in the middle of the winter. When we read some of the world’s great myths, we could wonder whether there really were all these special births all over the world. Were they reported in the media of the day? Did historians mention them? Did anybody interview them? Did they leave writings, maybe memoirs? But we know better. These things never happened in historical time, public time. Instead, we wonder why it seems so natural to tell stories like this, and why they seem to make such comforting homes, such welcoming myths, for us to live in.

Dionysus, Krishna, Horus, Hercules and most others were mythic inventions, not real people. But we can even find stories of historical people who were said to be born in this miraculous way with God as their father, and there are a lot of those stories, not just the one about the man Jesus. The most interesting thing about these stories is that the special births weren’t awarded to these people until after they had died! It was a kind of posthumous recognition that here, something spectacular had dwelled in the heart of a person.

There was even a famous example of this that happened during Jesus’ life. In August of the year 14, the Roman emperor Caesar Augustus died – considered by many to have been the greatest of the Caesars – the month of August was named for him. And one month later, in September, the Roman Senate conferred on Caesar Augustus a virgin birth. This may give geneticists trouble, but not mythologists. For how can you tell whether this really was one of those people who lived by something in them that was divine, until you”ve seen how they lived?

The best pagan writers during the early centuries of Christianity were not at all surprised or upset by the Christian myth of Jesus’ “virgin birth” – they had lots of those, and understand the imaginative, literary genre. What they objected to was that Jesus was awarded a virgin birth. He didn’t achieve anything notable in history – certainly compared with rulers like Caesar Augustus; he didn’t deserve to be awarded a virgin birth! And of course during his life (if he lived), nobody said things like, “Well, there’s that Jesus. You know his mother was a virgin and his father was old Yahweh from up above the sky?” Virgin births, like resurrections, aren’t historical events. They’re imaginative, mythological events, trying to make a qualitative comment on the style of living and being we think this person exhibited – the degree to which that “highest thing in us,” that “divine thing” shaped and defined their behaviors.

Almost every other part of the story of Jesus was also used hundreds of years earlier in the stories of other heroes, saviors and gods. Three wise men are said to have visited the births of these miraculous babies hundreds of years earlier. There are hieroglyphs depicting the birth of a son of God with three wise men bringing gifts from ancient Egypt, over 1600 years before the Jesus stories were written.

Some scholars have said all this is from astronomy and astrology, and the three wise men or three kings represent the three stars in the belt of the constellation Orion in the sky, just as Jesus’ twelve disciples or Mithras’s twelve companions or the twelve labors of Hercules or the twelve tribes of Israel represent the twelve signs of the Zodiac. Twelve was a symbolic and mythic number in the ancient world; a way of saying this story isn’t just a local thing, that it refers to the whole universe.

Also in the Jesus story is the awful story about how Herod had hundreds or thousands of innocent babies slaughtered when he heard that Jesus would be born. No historians from the time record this, because it didn’t happen in real time. It happened in mythic time, and had happened many times before. It was in the myths of Sargon, Nimrod, Moses, Jason, and Krishna as well as Jesus. Innocents are also slain in the stories of Oedipus, Perseus, Romulus and Remus, and Zeus.

What this seems to be about is that someone has predicted that the birth of a certain child or mythic character will be destructive of the current corrupt regime, so all possible contenders are slaughtered. It’s another way of saying that the presence of that divine thing Aristotle talked about is a threat to everything on earth that is brutal or dishonest.

These are very old stories, and they don’t come from history, but from some of own deepest anxieties, fears, and hopes.

We are a funny species. We are these strange animals who know we’re here and know we’ll die and feel that somehow it matters who we are and how we should live. We don’t worry much about this with dogs, squirrels, whales or even with chimpanzees, with whom we share almost 99% of our DNA. We think it’s just about us. A good religion scholar (Peter Berger) once defined religion as the effort to conceive of the entire universe as being humanly significant. That’s an incredible statement, but it seems to be true.

The stories we write show our anxieties and yearnings. It’s as if we are saying, “Please God, don’t let us be like everything else on earth. Our life must have meaning, even cosmic meaning. The universe must somehow be humanly significant. Can’t we have a special star, a special god who cares most of all for us, and a special savior who lets us feel chosen? Can’t we?”

And these dreams seem to surface at this time of year more than at any other time. We have woven stories around the winter solstice for perhaps ten thousand years, have woven our webs of hope, wanting to make the return of the light into a metaphor for our the return of light in own lives. We must have hope return; we will have hope return, and some of our best-loved stories are on this theme. It is the great human yearning of the last 10,000 years or more, wearing a thousand faces.

There have been well over a hundred deities born on the day we call December 25th , probably over a thousand. It is, by definition, the “birthday” of all solar deities. It’s the time the sun returns, the light returns, days start getting longer, and something deep within us hopes and believes that somehow it might be “on earth as it is in the heavens,” that that light, that divine spark, might be born again in us, as well.

Jesus didn’t start out as a solar deity. In the first three centuries, he had no recognized birthday, and early Church Fathers used to write with pride about having no “holy day” in their religion, like those pagans who named days after their gods. But in the fourth century, as part of the accommodation to Constantine – who seems to have been a Mithraist rather than a Christian, all the way up to his deathbed – Christianity, while gaining the protection of the state, adopted Mithras’ birthday (December 25th ) and the holy day of Mithraism – the same holy day any solar cult would have: Sunday. The halos drawn around Jesus’ head by later painters preserve this ancient symbol of solar deities.

The purpose of writing so many stories about the winter solstice, the rebirth of the “sun of God” or “son of God,” isn’t to tell the astronomical truth about the sun and the earth. It’s about trying to tell stories that feel true at that deeper level where we yearn for more light, both in our world and in ourselves. And at this level, the literalism of Christianity – that unfortunate notion that all these mythic stories were only about a historical person, one man, rather than archetypal stories about the possibilities inherent in all of us – has been a profound enemy of honest or useful religion for two thousand years.

Stories about “virgin births,” birth of the sun/son of God, rising above lower temptations, and being “resurrected” in the sense of being “reborn” into a life serving that divine thing Aristotle noted, are all and always symbolic and mythic, not historical. They are about that divine spark, the power of that kind of light. We can see this is the Jewish story of Hanukah, too. A flame burns eight nights without fuel: impossible! Can that spark of the divine be kept alive in our world, in us, even when the nights are longest and darkest? Can our faith keep it alive?

It’s funny, and telling, that in all these stories we seem to keep a distance from them, as though we were handling fragile, sacred things and didn’t want to get too close. So we don’t tell it as though it were something in us being reborn, as though it were us in whom this divine presence entered the world. No, we say “I have this friend, this savior, in whom something truly divine lives, in whom lives a light that could bring a little light into the whole world. It’s a miraculous story, a birth of the sacred right in the middle of ordinary old life. I’m sure it’s not about me. I’m not that special. Still, I have this friend, this savior: Dionysus, Apollo, Mithras, Jesus, or a hundred others. And this friend of mine, this savior of mine, is a son of God, and just telling the stories about him makes me feel more special, more safe, even more sacred. It’s how I find that divine light that’s supposed to be in me.”

There was a wonderful op-ed piece in the New York Times yesterday (12-23-06), written by a woman here in Austin named Jacqueline Woolley, who is a professor of psychology at the University of Texas. She talked about how both children and adults decide what to believe, in large part by how seriously it is presented to us.

So she and her group invented imaginary things they called “surnits,” and presented them to children as parts of different kinds of stories:

To some of the children, we put surnits in a fantastical context: “Ghosts try to catch surnits when they fly around at night.” To others, we characterized them in scientific terms: “Doctors use surnits to help them in the hospital.”

The 4- to 6-year-olds who heard the medical description were much more likely to think surnits were real than children who were told they had something to do with ghosts. The children demonstrated that they do not indiscriminately believe everything they’re told, but use some pretty high-level tools to distinguish between fantasy and reality. (Jacqueline Woolley, “So you believe in Surnits?” in NY Times 23 December 2006 op-ed page.)

So why do children believe in Santa Claus? She suggests it’s because “The adults they count on to provide reliable information about the world introduce them to Santa. Then his existence is affirmed by friends, books, TV and movies.” And of course you can see him in every shopping mall.

And this is why we believe in religious myths and stories: they are presented in a serious attitude; people we trust take them seriously, and ministers are hired to treat them as sober facts. So they feel like safe stories to take seriously, to move into, in our hermit-crab mode.

But also like hermit crabs, as we grow bigger intellectually and spiritually, we need bigger stories in which to live, in which to let our imaginations soar and our souls grow. Many of you find yourselves in this church precisely because you need more room to grow, need fewer constraints on your mind and your spirit. So you come, often, to ask and to hear pesky questions, and you”ve heard a few pesky things this morning.

But we also need some answers. We’re also looking for new stories to live in, or new ways to live in old stories. And among those old stories, the ones associated with Christmas, our winter solstice stories, are still good stories if we can find our way into them, even if for just a few hours or weeks.

Because good Christmas stories are more than a hermit crab’s seashells or tin cans. They are like mangers , in which the tenderest of dreams and yearnings can be born. Let us prepare a manger in our hearts. For something sacred wants to be born. It is the rebirth of hope, light, love, and the reminder that all the sacred stories we hear are trying to remind us that:

“There is a life which is higher than the measure of humanity; [we] will live it not by virtue of our humanity, but by virtue of something in us that is divine, – [will] live according to the highest thing that is in [us], for small though it be, in power and worth it is above [all] the rest.”

It is the time of winter solstice, the return of the light in the heavens and the light – we pray – in our hearts and lives as well. And so let us prepare a manger in our hearts. For something sacred wants to be born, and it needs our help. Merry Christmas, good people.