| A Sermon for Advent |
When I was growing up, Christmas started every year on December 1st. That’s because December 1st brought the ritual opening of window number 1—out of 24 numbered windows—on all of the advent calendars that papered a whole wall in the living room. Grandma Thomson sent one calendar each year starting shortly after I was born and continuing until my brother, 4 years younger, graduated from high school. We had a lot of advent calendars.
Although it might not seem like it, my advent story illustrates some of the most vital Christian truths as well as how those truths are vital to Unitarian Universalists—and to all of us as human beings.
Each incident featured in the
stories of Jesus’ life is essential to the theme of these stories. That
theme—the “good news”—of each Gospel:
God has now provided,
through Jesus as God’s representative, a promise of a better future—and a way for
everyone to achieve it.
Each Gospel tells a slightly different story
partly because each different group of early Christians promoted slightly
different ideas. But all of the earliest Christians defined themselves as
members of a community who believed Jesus had been sent from God to bring about
a better era in human history.
Humans have always told
stories to help us make sense of our lives. We must live now, in the present—in
a single instant of time between past and future. As we balance here in the
now, the stories we tell about uncover connections between actions and
consequences. Stories about our past help to shape who we are—and to reveal
who we are. Tragic stories caution us to beware of our human weaknesses.
Stories of heroism inspire pride and provide examples to emulate. Which stories
we tell and how we tell them help us understand what’s most important to us.
Understanding our dreams for the future, as well as our nightmares, helps us
work toward the future we most want.
The peoples who told the
earliest stories of Jesus lived in a time and place that left them outsiders
exiled from home—and outsiders in their own land under Roman rule. In remembering
their past through stories of an extraordinary man, they at the same time
imagined a better future, a time when “the last will be first, and the first
will be last,”[i] a time
when the most vulnerable will be taken care of. Their stories imagined a more
just and equitable future, a time when everyone has a place at the table and
love is the single most important law. They didn't know what would happen
next—but they dared to HOPE it would be better. They formed their hopes into a
story that imagined the future they hoped for.
For Christians, the advent
of Jesus' birth signals the coming of that future when the primary laws are:
Love your God and Love your Neighbor. The Gospels have a name for this future:
The Kingdom of God. That phrase meant something different to the people of that
time and place than it means to us now. Here and now, we might translate this
way: Jesus’ birth represents hope for a new way of life, hope for a world where
the most important laws are to love existence and to work toward building Beloved
Community based on compassion, inclusion and justice. Unitarian Universalists
have agreed that a good way to start building this new way of life is with the
first UU Principle: we affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of
every person.
When
I hear those words, I feel the enormity of the challenge. I wonder what would
it mean to live by that principle, what actions I would need to take, and what
changes I would have to make in how I day to day now. How would I have to treat
people to honor their in-born—some might say “God-given”—dignity and worth?
That’s
a serious challenge.
The Gospel promise consists
of two parts: one is the better world to come. The other outlines the challenge
of Christianity: people have to transform themselves and their lives to create
that better world. The Gospels tell the story of one heroic person who
proclaims the coming of a better future, exemplifies the kind of life that will
lead to that better future, and ultimately sacrifices his life for that better
future.
The promise of God's
Kingdom—or, in other words, of a more compassionate, inclusive and just
world—offers hope. But there’s a cost. That better world requires our commitment
to change ourselves, to change our interactions with other people and with the
world. When we gather together as people of faith (or share our stories, our
hopes for a better world, via social media), we create a support system for
this challenging work. Here, together, we commit to personal transformation as
we work toward Beloved Community.
The story of Jesus' life
offers a vision of a better world and the kind of personal commitment required
to achieve it. The birth stories remind us of the audacious hope inherent in each new life. They remind us of the
personal courage required to face the risk inherent in the kind of transformation
we need to realize our hopes.
At the same time, Gospel
narratives of Jesus’ life are told to inspire people to make the commitment to
change. They form the basis for rituals that embody the compassion and
inclusion of the coming Kingdom. Myth and ritual help us—as Christians, as
Unitarian Universalists, as human beings—to envision and enact our hopes for a
better future, for the inclusiveness and compassion of Beloved Community. The
story of Jesus’ birth and the ritual practices that go with it fulfill a
universal human need to grapple with unknown aspects of existence, to face our
deepest fears and to find hope.
The people who first told
stories about Jesus lived in a time and place very different from now and here.
Their homeland had been defeated in war and colonized by Rome. That means they
were either subject to a foreign government in their own land or they were
exiled, driven out. They needed hope.
The need to tell stories
about universal human situations and emotions is evident throughout human history
and across cultures. Scholars use the word “myth” to describe this kind of
story.
 |
| Karen Armstrong delivers the Ware Lecture, UUA General Assembly, 2011 |
In her book, A Short History of Myth, religious
scholar Karen
Armstrong writes that we humans “have always been mythmakers.” She explains
that:
human
beings fall easily into despair, and from the very beginning we invented
stories that enabled us to place our lives in a larger setting, that revealed
an underlying pattern, and gave us a sense that, against all the depressing and
chaotic evidence to the contrary, life had meaning and value.
Evidence of the human tendency toward myth includes the cave paintings discovered in France in the 1990s. These Chauvet Cave paintings are the oldest human artwork so far discovered—created about 32,000 years ago. |
| Chauvet Cave, France: 32,000 year old painting |
We know nothing about the
people who created the paintings—except that they created these paintings. We know they were people who painted
horses and wooly mammoths; people who made handprints—people like us. Human
imagination leads us to seek meaning. Storytelling—in fact, all art—employs
imaginative means (instead of observable facts) to convey otherwise
inexpressible truths about ourselves and our human condition. Myth provides a
method to make meaning of human existence and of our individual lives and to
discover hope in the face
of despair. It is one of our most human activities.
Each Christian Gospel presents
a story of struggle and hope. Each story requires people to transform their
lives, to adopt a way of living that enacts the compassion, inclusiveness and
justice taught and exemplified by Jesus in order
to
realize The Kingdom of God. That made sense to the people who first told these
stories. But our human ability to enter into a story depends on reference to
our lived reality. Communication of mysterious abstract concepts, such as the
meanings of life and death, requires a framework that the audience recognizes.
In
the here and now of 21st Century America, people still share the
universal human fears and hopes expressed in the Gospels, but we might require slightly different
stories and rituals to express some of those fears and hopes. When people light
weekly advent candles in church, they embody their hopes in ritual. As each candle burns away and more candles are lit, we have a visual reminder that the hope promised through Jesus’ birth is fast approaching. Rituals help create community among those who practice them together. Rituals allow people to feel—in their movements, in their muscles—aspects of the story that cannot be expressed in words. Rituals imprint the core ideas in people’s minds and bodies as surely as the ancient artists imprinted their animal drawings and human handprints on the walls of Chauvet Cave.
Most of you have
participated in some kind of ritual that heightens excitement and expectations
in the weeks leading up to Christmas—picking out a Christmas tree, hanging
strings of lights, shopping on Black Friday. My family had the advent calendars
and the ritual setting up of the table-top crèche Grandpa Thomson had made. My
brothers and I carefully unwrapped the ceramic figures swaddled in ancient
tissue paper: Mary & Joseph, shepherds & wise men, some sheep, a
donkey. Baby Jesus wasn’t ceramic. My younger brother Ken had made him in
Sunday school one year. Baby Jesus was a clothespin—the old kind that’s one
piece of wood. His eyes and mouth were drawn with a marker and he was wrapped
in a swaddling cloth—a scrap of flannel glued loosely around the body of the
clothespin.
As
I was growing up, my family enacted the same rituals year after year, rituals
that heightened our anticipation and joy in the approaching holiday. As
children, our hopes focused on Christmas presents in the very near future. As
adults and as people of faith, we enlarge our hopes to include visions of a better
world—such as the Beloved Community of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., or the
Kingdom of God heralded by the birth of Jesus, or inclusive justice for all as
promoted by Black Lives Matter rallies in cities like New York, St. Louis,
Chicago, Milwaukee, Minneapolis.
 |
| United Unitarian Universalist Congregation, Waukesha, Wisconsin |
Every day—every moment—a
past moment ends and a future moment is about to begin. The rituals of advent
anticipate the birth of a new and better future. This season reminds us that something
IS definitely coming. And we don’t know what it is—and we often fear the
unknown. So we tell stories of hope for a better world to alleviate our fear of
the unknown. We imagine the future we want to see.
That’s the easy part.
The challenge is to live our
lives in ways that help create the better future we dream of. Right here, right
now—remembering the past and anticipating the future—Something is coming.
What are you waiting for?
What are
you waiting for?
And what are you going to do
about it?
Sources
Armstrong, Karen. A Short History of Myth. New York:
Canongate, 2005. Print. The Myths Ser.
Auer, J.A.C.
Fagginger, et al. “Humanist Manifesto.” 1933 and 1973. American Humanist Association. Web. 24 Nov. 2011.
Borg, Marcus J., and
John Dominic Crossan. The First Christmas:
What the Gospels Really Teach about Jesus’s Birth. 2007. New York:
HarperCollins e-books, 2009. Kindle.
Duling, Dennis C. The New Testament: History, Literature, and
Social Context. 4th ed. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth-Thomson Learning,
2003. Print.
“Emissary.” Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Syndication.
3 Jan. 1993. Television.
Funk, Robert W., Roy
W. Hoover and The Jesus Seminar. The Five Gospels: The Search for the
Authentic Words of Jesus. 1993. New York: HarperSanFrancisco-HarperCollins,
1997. Print. Scholars Vers.
Mack, Burton L. A Myth of Innocence: Mark and Christian
Origins. 1988. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1991. Print.
The New Oxford Annotated Bible with the Apocrypha: An
Ecumenical Study Bible. Ed. Michael D. Coogan, et al. New York: Oxford UP,
2010. Print. New Rev. Standard Vers.
Parker, Theodore. “A
Discourse of the Transient and Permanent in Christianity.” 19 May 1841.
Electronic Texts in American Studies. DigitalCommons@University
of Nebraska-Lincoln. Web. 24 Nov. 2011.
[i] Matthew
20:16 New Revised Standard Version (NRSV); https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+20%3A16&version=NRSV
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