If Jesus Had Never Been Born... Would We Have Made It Up Anyway?
Sermon by Steve Edington
December 18, 2005
Knowing we had a very full service on tap for today, I was looking for a way to cut to the chase on the question raised in the title. One quick way would be to say "The answer to today's sermon title question is 'yes'", and then announce the closing hymn. It's an attractive and tempting way out, but I think I'll keep you here for just a bit longer yet.
I got the idea for this title and topic when I remembered a few lines from Rev. Jack Mendelshon's book Being Liberal in an Illiberal Age. The book was originally published over 40 years ago, but the title remains as contemporary as ever. Its focus is really on religious liberalism, and there's very little of a political nature in it. Towards the end of a chapter about Jesus in the liberal tradition he writes: "To me the important thing about Jesus is not that he was just human but that the human race is capable of producing him. And not just him alone, but others life him. And not only in ancient times, but now." Those were the words that came back to me as I thought of the celebration of the birth of Jesus. We know that the accounts of his birth are largely a mixture of legend and myth, although their historical setting is reasonably accurate - and we'll hear that beautifully and poetically told story once again at our Christmas Eve service come this Saturday night.
At first glance, or reading, it might seem as though Rev. Mendelsohn is dismissing the person of Jesus - and the accounts of his birth, life, and death - as something simply made up by human beings. But this is not the case. His statement is not meant as a dismissal of Jesus, but rather as a statement of hope about the human race. His point - with which I agree - is to not get so terribly hung up on what "really happened" when, but rather that one should find something very positive in the fact that humanity is capable of putting forth persons, or images of persons, who exemplify the best in humanity - both in ancient times as well as today. What Jack is saying is that he takes hope in the fact that the human beings are capable of imagining a person like Jesus, whoever he may have actually happened to be.
Neither Jack Mendelsohn, nor I, of course, are the first persons to go this route. One of our Unitarian fore-bearers of 150 years ago said pretty much the same thing in a sermon that has become part of the UU canon - or what passes for a canon amongst us. It was the Rev. Theodore Parker, and his sermon "The Permanent and the Transcient in Christianity" is the one for which he is best known.. Bruce Taylor spoke of it in the sermon he offered for us back on November 27.
Parkers' point, as those of you who were here on that Sunday may recall, was that the permanent aspects of Christianity are the eternal truths and the eternal moral imperatives and challenges that are contained within it: The truths and imperatives of love, peace, justice, and healing within humanity; along with the call to "set at liberty those who are oppressed" as Jesus put it in a sermon the New Testament ascribes to him. The transcient, according to Rev. Parker, were the temporary vehicles that conveyed or carried along, or embodied, for a time, these eternal truths and moral and ethical challenges. The person of Jesus, along with the very writings of the New Testament, were and are among those transcient vehicles that point us towards the eternal.
Parker paid a price for these views which he put forth back in the 1840s and 1850s. This was at the same time in which he was very active in the Abolitionist movement. His views, I'm sure, would scarcely raise an eyebrow among most UUs today. I'm not detecting a groundswell of disapproval here. The worst he'd probably get from UUs today would be a ho-hum. But in his day his contention that Jesus was a transcient, earthly vehicle or carrier of timeless truths was enough to get him ostracized from his Unitarian clergy colleagues. He nonetheless did gather, primarily on the strength of his personality and his eloquence, a very large congregation in the Unitarian church he served for many years in West Roxbury where he had a very successful ministry - with or without the support of the learned Unitarian clergy of the Boston area.
But there's a slight twist on Parker's idea that gets me back to the sermon theme, and to the question it poses. Those permanent and timeless truths, and moral principles Parker spoke of do us really do us little good, and serve us scarcely at all, if they only exist in the abstract; or "up there" in some ethereal realm. We need to see these truths embodied; we need to see our human ideals lived out in actual human lives if they are to be real for us. (Parker knew this himself, actually, and the person of Jesus was very real and important to him.) So, over the course of human history we have produced such persons who serve that purpose for us - those who demonstrate for us how humanity, at its very best, would look and behave. Some of these persons are identifiable historical figures; some are not; and some are a mixture of history, biography, legend, and myth. To say we make these figures up out of nothing or from nowhere is really too simplistic - that's the caveat to my sermon title; when I use the phrase "make up" I don't mean make up out of thin air. But we do produce them out of certain bits of available material.
To some of these idealized human beings we produce, we even give super or supra human qualities to the point of seeing them as really gods, or quasi-gods, in human form. In fact, in the Greco-Roman world into which Jesus was born, and within which his story came to be told, there was nothing especially unusual about union of a god and a human being (and usually - but not always - it was a male god and a female human being) producing an extraordinary individual who embodied god-like qualities. The Egyptian, Greek, and Roman god and goddesses cohabited with mortals quite frequently to produce extraordinary mortals. So, for the First Century Church to maintain that Jesus was the result of the union of God and a young woman was quite consistent really with the world-view, or the cosmology, of that time. This points to the problem Biblical literalists create for themselves. They try to shoehorn a first century mentality and cosmology (which I'm sure worked quite well in the first century) into a twenty-first century mentality and world-view. And that leaves one having to believe some rather weird things. But we'll leave all that be.
The Story of Jesus, including the accounts of his miraculous (by our standards) birth, is one a many such stories that human beings have told over the course of human history as a way to keep us believing in ourselves and in who or what we may still yet become. So let's spend just a little bit of time with that Birth Story itself, reminding ourselves as we do that mythology, as we're using the term now, is not the same as falsehood. Mythology, in its truest sense, is a timeless collection stories about who we are as human beings rather than a specific recounting of historical events.
What I see in the stories of the Birth of Jesus - as told in the Biblical Gospels of Matthew and Luke is a depiction of the fragility and vulnerability of being human on the one hand, and an assurance of the power of human possibility - positive human possibility - on the other. Think of all that is contained in the image of the infant Jesus: A homeless baby in a makeshift shelter, probably scared, maybe hungry, needing nurture and care and love. With all due respect to Martin Luther in his well-known song Away in a Manger, I question that line about "no crying he makes." I'll bet the little fellow squalled at times. On some visceral, possibly subconscious level, this image of a vulnerable, and possible frightened baby Jesus puts us in touch with our own neediness and loneliness - and with the many vulnerabilities we each and all carry around with us. We've been all been there at one time or another with our neediness and vulnerability. Maybe it helps to have a story to remind us that we've been there. Maybe that's why we've produced this one.
But the hinge upon which this same story turns is that this very same needy and vulnerable and seemingly helpless piece of humanity also just happens to possess the very qualities that can save humanity. And don't we need to know that too? When we sometimes look at ourselves, and the world in which we have to live our lives (which is the only world we've got), and wonder what possible difference can I make; what can I possibly offer that will bring some greater measure of peace, and justice and healing to a world so desperately in need of such things? And what can I do, what do I need to do, to bring some greater measure of peace and healing to and within the life I'm trying to live? It can make us feel pretty helpless when we confront questions like these.
But the other piece of the story is that this same helpless looking baby also embodies the hope and the promise and the possibility we see in every newborn. This is why Rev. Sophia Fahs - who is recognized as the mother of today's Unitarian Universalist Religious Education - could say that "every night a child is born is a holy night." The story is that this same helpless looking human being grew up to exemplify the best in human beings as he traveled through the world of his day, identifying with the lowly and the dispossessed of his day, saying that we're all cared about and loved and deserve to live in a world of peace and justice - and he proclaimed all of that in the name of the God whom he claimed as Father.
But the deeper part of Jesus' message, as our own Theodore Parker and many others came to see, lies well beyond the theological package in which it came to be wrapped. The humanistic angle on the Jesus Story is that we too possess within us the resources, the power, and the strength of the human spirit to grow up and grow beyond our own occasional feelings of helplessness and exemplify in our own lives the better, if not the best, qualities of human living. I know it takes a certain amount of faith to believe that, but it is clearly a faith worth having. This, I feel, is really why this story has been produced and why it continues to be told.
Let me offer you one more take on this story before I close. Another piece of insight I gain from the story/myth of a baby through whom God arrives, is an affirmation of the power and potentiality of human life. For all of the issues I come to have with Christian theology - and they where were enough to get me into the UU ministry - I still find it very intriguing that at the heart of Christian theology is the story of a God who arrives not as a supernatural force, but rather as a quite simple human being who spent his life trying to show other human beings how to be more positively human. Some Christians have caught onto that very well while others haven't, but that's neither here nor there at the moment.
What this God/Child metaphor suggests to me, as a religious humanist, is that all I need when it comes to finding meaning and purpose and depth and power and relatedness in my life has already been given to me. I still - even at my age - may not have opened up that whole package of possibility yet (I know I haven't), but it's still there. The story of a Child in whom God arrives as yet another traveler on our common human way is a simple and profound one all at the same time. For it reminds us that all we need for our personal and shared journey is here, and we can get up and move on. The story of a child who embodies all the qualities of the Highest also recalls some of the words of the late Joseph Campbell in his conversations with Bill Moyers in that series they did on The Power of Myth. Dr. Campbell noted: "All the gods, all the heavens, all the worlds, are within us."
That, in a nutshell, is why we have created the kinds of stories that lie at the heart of many, if not all, of the world's religious traditions. It is because we need a way of getting those gods, heavens, and worlds that are within us out where we can see them and better understand their message.
I have tried to share this morning the message I see in one of those stories. It is a message that transcends the faith in which it is rooted. It is a story that was created, or made-up, in the very best sense of the term. A story we have produced to remind us of who we are and who we may yet become.
Stephen D. Edington
December 18, 2005
