Sermon

INTRODUCTION: Some time back, in the Christianity Today Magazine, I read a wonderful article written by a professor of the classics, Greek and Latin. He related how he told the story of the Iliad to his son.

I’m sure it’s been a while since most of us encountered Homer’s epic, but in brief, the critical segment goes like this:

The battle to capture the ancient city of Troy has been raging for more than ten years. When everyone is ready to give up, Odysseus, the king of Ithaca, comes up with a scheme on how to get the Greek army inside the walls of the city of Troy. Their plan? The Greeks build an immense wooden horse and leave it outside the gate with only a few soldiers inside. Then, the Greek army marches to their ships in the harbor and sail away.

Back in Troy, the Trojans think the Greeks have given up and left the horse as a gift. So they bring it inside the walls of the city of Troy. That night, while the Trojans are sleeping, the Greek ships quietly return. The soldiers, hidden in the horse, slip out of the horse and open the city’s gates. The Greek army quietly enters Troy. The Trojans awake to find their city burning. When they try to flee, they’re massacred by the Greek army.

Now when the classics professor first tells this story to his six-year-old son, they both get under the dining room table. They imagine they are the soldiers in the wooden horse. The professor spins the story for a six-year-old, and makes it great fun for both.

Later the professor buys a children’s version of the Iliad, and reads it to his son. And as the son grows older, the dad begins to read him selected parts directly from the translated text. Eventually, the son is reading it himself. And when he goes to college, he too majors in the classics, and studies classical Greek, and even reads the Iliad in the original Greek.

Later, he makes a decision to become a classics instructor and goes to graduate school where part of the course of study is debating whether Homer actually wrote the Iliad, and was Troy a real city.

He had come a long way from his father’s re-enacting the story of the fall of Troy under the dining room table, to a scholarly debate about the authorship of the epic itself, and the data in support of their being an actual city of Troy.

I submit that recounting of events has a direct parallel to our task today: How to make Christmas holy. To me, the most important dimension of the Christmas event is the Christmas story itself, not a politically correct one for liberal religious, nor a historically critical one: but the story itself.

Which goes like this: Once upon a time in the Roman-occupied little postage-stamp-sized country of Israel, hardly as large as the state of New Jersey, there is a carpenter named Joseph. He makes his living in the oppressed and rebellious town of Nazareth, which is in the upper, northern part of Israel. His family arranges for him to marry a young woman named Mary, who from all accounts is a devout and practicing Jew. Equally important for the religious culture of the day, she is a virgin.

But before their marriage, she becomes pregnant, even though she and Joseph have never been together. Joseph, though, being a decent man, decides rather than making Mary an object of derision, he would quietly end the arrangements made. But that night, an angel appears to him, and tells him that Mary has been visited by the Holy Spirit of God and is pregnant by divine intervention.

Joseph accepts this new reality, and takes Mary as his wife. They then set up house awaiting the birth of her baby.

In the meantime, the Roman emperor, Caesar Augustus, has decreed that all of the Western world occupied by Rome should be taxed. It is also something of a census. It means that everyone has to return to their birthplace and register both for the census and to pay taxes.

Joseph was born in Bethlehem. Even though Mary’s baby is almost due, they start out on the 90-mile trip from Nazareth to the little town of Bethlehem. It’s located some five miles or so directly South of Jerusalem, which is in the center of the nation.

So with Mary on a donkey, and Joseph leading, they proceed to Bethlehem. But when they arrive, they discover there’s no place to stay: The only Inn in the little town is full.

But the innkeeper has pity on them and tells them they can stay in the stables in the back, where they at least are out of the elements.

While in the barn or stable, with the cattle and horses and goats and sheep and chickens, Mary delivers her baby, whom they name Jesus.

Meanwhile, just outside of town, some shepherds are keeping watch over their herd of sheep, and an angel appears to them and tells them to go into Bethlehem. There they will find a very special baby. Suddenly, a choir of angels appears in the sky, singing, “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.”

North of Israel, way up in Babylon, which we now know as Iraq, a group of scholars and students of the heavens, have detected a bright and shining star beaming down on Earth. They have been following its focus. They finally discover it shining on the new baby in Bethlehem. They kneel and worship the baby, and leave great gifts of gold and precious ointments.

That’s the shortened version of the Christmas story. It’s what we sing of, and the source of the season.

Now let’s talk about it: We know differently, don’t we. That’s a given. We don’t even have to broach the question. But agreeing on that also should include something else: We also know that our journey on this planet we call Earth does not yield to simple formulas or explanations. Our world is not really what we see. The new physics might as well be describing another Universe. Our solar system is a constant source of discovery…our galaxy is filled with improbabilities…and in point of fact, our Universe is one incomprehensible Mystery.

So, yes, the Christmas story is filled with angels, angelic choirs, wise men, shepherds and a virgin who is also pregnant. But – and this is what the story is about – 2,000 years ago, how else would one go about conveying the message that once there was a man whose message was so phenomenal, whose life broke every mold, and who mattered to people like no one ever had before? How do you convey how extraordinary he really was, and the immeasurable impact he had on people?

The answer is, you use the world-view and self-understanding of that time and place to tell his story. That world-view means the earth is flat, demons cause sickness, the stars are holes in the sky shining in from heaven, below the earth is a burning hell, and this Earth is the center of the Universe which God spends full-time overseeing.

Do we throw out Homer because it “didn’t happen?” Or to put it another way, do we reject the passengers because of the vehicle they are traveling in. Do we trash the contents of the suitcase, because we don’t like the suitcase? Do we throw out the baby with the bath water?

Of course we know that the birth stories of Matthew and Luke were written some 50 years after the death of Jesus. We know that the only things we can say about Jesus with a “high degree of confidence,” to use the CIA’s nomenclature, is that there once was a man named Jesus born in this period, that he was a disciple of John the Baptist, that he engaged in revolutionary rhetoric against the collusion of Jewish leaders with the Roman occupiers, and that he was put to death for that. Again, four things we know: birth, training, message, and death. All the rest is differing degrees of trying to account for the incredible impact that this young, self-styled prophet, had upon people.

Back in 1985, a group of some 200 Christian scholars created what is known as the Jesus Seminar. They developed a process for determining the degrees of authenticity of the scriptural accounts of Jesus found in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. They immediately concluded that the more recently discovered The Gospel of Thomas was more authentic than The Gospel of John, which meant they only assessed the three synoptic gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke. They then used four beads – red, pink, gray and black – to assess whether a given passage of scripture was authentic. Red meant Jesus did say or do what the passage purports. Pink would mean he probably did. Gray meant Jesus didn’t say it, but it contains the kind of ideas he had. Black means it comes from his admirers or a later tradition. The scholars examined 500 different passages.

But even more important in my opinion is that one of their most important conclusions was that Jesus was friends with, and ministered to, outsiders – the oppressed. That meant prostitutes, lepers, the seriously ill, adulterers, and the poor – they were his primary audience. He even went so far as to proclaim how valuable these outsiders were and how especially important they were to God.

Contrarily, he had the harshest of words for hypocrites, for religious-political leaders, and for the rich. In other words, he identified with outsiders and outed insiders. He spoke up for the oppressed and spoke out against the oppressors.

Then when his ever so brief life was snuffed out, those left behind, the outsiders, society’s outcasts, were devastated. They could not believe it was possible that there once was a human being who loved the poor more than the rich…that there was a religious man who cared for prostitutes and wives caught in adultery…that he could preach that love was the most important gift in all the world.

Surely, they said, he must have been born differently. Because no one else seemed willing to speak up for the widow and the orphan; no one else seemed to care for the victims of prejudice and bigotry; and no one else cared for them like Jesus.

We should always remember: the birth stories are not there first and foremost as news articles or historical documents: They are there as tribute to how important Jesus was to the life and times of the lowest of the low – the outcasts.

To me that means today that an authentic Christian will always be on the side of the outsiders. She or he will always identify with the victims of racism, homophobia, sexism, war, and nativism. More specifically, in America, that means identifying with African Americans, Hispanics, women who love women and men who love men, women who are always fighting for equality of opportunity and treatment, anti-war activists, and persons who speak Spanish and have entered the country illegally. It means being concerned for those in prison, that the rest of the world has forgotten.

If Jesus were to appear in person this Christmas, he undoubtedly would come as an African-American woman of same-sex orientation, who speaks only Spanish, and entered the country illegally. She would be desperately poor, and have a criminal record for protesting this racist, elitist, militaristic, homophobic, jingoistic country of ours.

So at this Christmas season, let us hear the story, and let us also know that it stems from a person whom most of us might be hugely uncomfortable with, and who if he were here, might very well look with scorn on some of our practices and life-styles. Nonetheless, he would always hold out hope and love for us all. And he would proclaim our worth and inestimable value to God.

This past Thursday afternoon, I joined Chris and Steve Fisher at the home of Arthur and Robin Lyman – and their two children. Art is an Emergency Room nurse at SW Regional Hospital, and Robin a stay-at-home mom.

Art has a sister, Paulette, who was living in Denton, Texas, raising her five children, and taking care of her aged and sick father, until he died last January. While doing this, Paulette had been having heavy-duty headaches, but her father’s situation was so critical she pushed her own needs aside.

After his death, she went to see a physician and discovered a malignant tumor in one of her frontal lobes, which they operated on last March 1. There was also a malignant tumor in the back of her brain, but it was deemed untreatable. As a result, she’s dying. She lives in two-month increments from test-to-test to determine how far the malignancy has spread, or if it is in stasis.

Knowing this, her brother and sister-in-law here in Ft. Myers, Art and Robin, invited her to come live with them. They bought a larger house, and were hoping to be able to sell their older one, though so far unsuccessfully.

In addition to Paulette’s own terminal prognosis, her 2½-year-old son is blind and diabetic, requiring 24-hour care, her four-year-old son is in remission from AOL leukemia, and his twin sister has spinal tethering for which she will have a 16-hour surgery Jan. 7^th. Another son has ADHD, along with bipolar disorder. The 5^th child is a 15-year-old teenage boy who is struggling to come to terms with the death of his grandfather, and the loss of his home and friends in Texas. Robin, the sister-in-law, the saint in all of this, struggles to manage the myriad medical appointments, the educational demands, food, transportation, etc.

Last Sunday, Chris Fisher asked our congregation to help. She and Steve stood at the back with a basket following the service. Yesterday, we delivered a check from All Faiths to Art, Robin, Paulette, and their seven children, in the amount of $6,200+. Thanks to Chris, to Steve, and thanks to all of you.

While there, Robin told me of another mother whose little boy had heard of what was happening. It was his birthday, and his mother had just held a birthday party for him. When he heard the story of the Lyman family, he asked his mother if he could take his new birthday presents and give them to the Lymans, which he did.

That’s what Christmas is about, on this the birthday celebration of Jesus of Nazareth.

[1] Given Sunday, December 16, 2007, at the All Faiths Unitarian Congregation, meeting at the Crestwell School, 1904 Park Meadows, Ft. Myers, FL, by the Rev. Dr. Wayne Robinson, minister.