sermon

INTRODUCTION: In the late 70s, while attending Neighborhood Unitarian Universalist Church in Pasadena, California, I got to know a very caring and compassionate psychiatrist. He related a story to me that gave him great pleasure.

It seems that he was raised in the northern part of California, where the great trees grow. One day, when he was about 12, his father and he were out walking in the forests, when they stopped, and his father began to carve his initials on the tree. When he finished, he then carved his son’s. Afterwards, he remarked, “Someday, you can bring your son here and carve his initials.”

Many years later, the psychiatrist and his son happened to be back in the same area. The psychiatrist’s father had now passed. He was now the father, and he had his own 12-year-old son with him. He determined to try and find the exact tree on which he and his father had carved their initials so many years preceding.

They looked and looked, and when almost ready to give up, they found it. To his son, with pride and some emotion, he recalled the day that he and his own father had stood there carving their initials on that very tree.

As the psychiatrist related it, his son didn’t seem that impressed. Nonetheless, they proceeded to carve his initials as well. Still, no responsiveness on the part of his son.

But as they were walking away, he said it happened. All on his own, his 12 year old said, “Dad, when I get married and have a son, I’m going to bring him up here. And we’ll carve his initials just like you and Grandpa and I did.”

The psychiatrist said tears came down his face when he realized that his son had gotten it. That whatever special connectedness there was about that event, had in fact been passed on. And that’s what we’re about here today, to remember the past, the past of Hanukkah.

Some stories have a capacity to trigger very deep and very real emotions. Especially is that so when they tap into something very primordial, very ancient, very vestigial. The hope is that when they are passed on and retold to the present generation or future generations, they too will carry an insight much like my psychiatrist friend and his son experienced: We will have “got it.”

That’s something like the task of the Jewish community with Hanukkah, which starts this Sunday evening, and lasts for the next eight days. It recalls a time almost 2,200 years ago, when our ancestors in faith, the Jews of ancient Israel, were being harshly treated by the army of occupation, the Syrians, especially their Greek king, Antiochus Epiphanes IV.

Epiphanes was one of the successors to Alexander the Great. As you know, Alexander’s mission some 400 years before Christ had not been simply to conquer the world. Rather, he sought to bring Greek wisdom, Greek culture, Greek art, and Greek religion to the places he conquered. He was a missionary for an enlightened understanding in the primitive world he engaged, a missionary for the holiness of beauty.

And in the view of the Greeks, no people were more primitive religiously than the Jews of Israel. Their temple in Jerusalem was the site of the constant killing of animals to appease their god, Yahweh, whom they served according to an intricate set of ritual and regulations, which they labeled their Law. In their theocracy, in which government and religion were one, they had devised a very intricate system of who, what, when, where and how animals were to be killed – and all as a part of their worship.

To the enlightened mind of the Greeks, killing animals to appease the gods was the height of primitive paganism. And in the 200 years plus since Alexander had marched through Palestine, there had been a gradual accommodation by the Jews to the Greek way of doing things, and an assimilation of things Greek. Even the Torah, the document which contained all their rites and laws – which we know as Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy, the first five books of the bible – had been translated from the Hebrew into Greek, because so many Jews now only spoke and read Greek.

But there was still a substantive core of Jews, who recognized that their identity and their uniqueness were tied into their system of worship. Without it, they were no different than all the other Semitic tribes in Palestine. Instead of worshipping many gods, related to crops and weather and certain kinds of misfortune, the ancient Jews worshipped only one god. Whereas other tribes erected images of their gods, the Jews said, God has no body or form. God is everywhere. And when they came to the temple, they sacrificed their finest to this god, despite what the Greeks said about it.

And then along came Antiochus Epiphanes IV. He was not content with the gentler, more persuasive methods of his predecessors and Alexander. He determined to implement Greek ways of doing things by force. The old ways were to stop, and Greek ways were to be followed to the letter. And as a finishing and insulting touch, he had his armies march into the sacred confines of the Jewish temple in Jerusalem, into the Holy of Holies, and smear pig wastes and pig grease on the sacred altar – the most blasphemous act possible.

A rural priest named Judas Maccabee said, “Enough is enough.” And though he was only one man, he and his sons began to foment a revolution. Soon the entire nation was involved in a bloody battle with the far superior forces of Syria. Though hard to believe, Israel’s little army was victorious. The Syrians relented. And tiny Israel reclaimed its religious ways and practices.

Now that the battle was over, one of their most sacred tasks was to cleanse the temple that had been defiled. In the neglect that had occurred, all of the candles with their cruises of kosher oil had burned out and not replaced – except for one candle that was still burning. But it did not have enough oil to last more than a day, and it would take eight days to make more kosher oil. Nonetheless, they went about their tasks of purifying and cleansing the temple. And when they came back the second day, expecting the temple to be dark and dim, miraculously that one little candle was still burning. The third day, the same thing. The next day, again. The candle lasted eight days – the exact time it took to make new, kosher oil.

And that miracle – the miracle of the candle that kept on burning – combined with the incredible victory of the Maccabees over King Antiochus Epiphanes IV, became the story of Hanukkah, which we join in commemorating on this prelude to the Hanukkah season.

Our task here this morning is much like that of my psychiatrist friend in Pasadena. It is to go back and experience that time, with the hope and expectation that we will get it. That we will understand some of what was at stake in that ancient struggle.

Of course I’m aware as I retell this story to a modern audience: Don’t believe it. Didn’t happen! A one day candle supply doesn’t last eight days.

It’s like my son, Brett. When he was six or so, I took him to the circus. One of the acts featured some highly trained bears, doing some phenomenal things. I said to him, “Hey, Brett, those are pretty awesome bears, aren’t they?”

My cynical little son said, “They aren’t real. See that hair sticking up on their back. That’s the zipper for their costume.” I never did persuade him otherwise.

I remember visiting several years ago with a Presbyterian minister colleague of mine, who considered himself a liberal in a wasteland of conservatism. He was lamenting the fact that he was constantly getting into trouble with his church for not believing conservatively enough. He found it difficult to believe that the reverse could be true.

I wonder sometime if we have not yielded to a view of life and consciousness that is rooted in the materialism of the 19^th century. We have concluded there is a box into which all known phenomena fit. Cause produces effect. Logic can ultimately explain everything. And anything not explainable will one day be explained.

And as a result, we have closed the door to prayer. We have closed the door to intuition and synchronicity. We have closed the door to the extraordinary power of faith. As a result, we are so locked into one way of seeing the world, that we can’t see any other?

But what if? What if there is more to existence, to consciousness, to awareness than we have ever dreamed? What if we can dream dreams and see visions? What if we can catch falling stars and put them in our pocket? What if we have the capacity to hope when others have given up hope, to believe when others have given up believing, to have faith when others are consumed by doubt? What if little candles, with only enough oil for one day can keep on burning? Is it possible for us as persons of faith to break out of the box that believes only what we can see and touch and feel, and enter in to the world of intuition and wonder?

And when I say that, I am not proposing a Christian or Jewish consciousness. I’m not advocating Islam or a given religion. I’m saying quite the opposite, namely, that life and living do not fit into pat formulas and explanations. They do not yield to simple easy reductionisms.

We may have bought into the fallacy that everything that can be known is known. Like our ancestors in doubt, the world is flat, and there’s an edge out there. And if we proceed to far, we will fall off and be gobbled up by monsters. So don’t explore the possibilities of faith and hope and mystery. Don’t believe in tomorrow, and new days and new possibilities.

Back in 1927, a theoretical physicist named Werner Heisenberg introduced a scientific principle to the scientific community that shook up their in-the-box thinking. He propounded the “Uncertainty Principle.” In laymen’s terms, what he proposed was that we can not really know what goes on at the sub-atomic level, because the very act of viewing those sub-atomic particles changes their paths as they orbit an atom. More simply put, just looking at something changes it.

When that scientific principle is translated into philosophical principal, and from philosophical principal into religious faith, it seems to be saying to me that there is a dimension to our lives that cannot be reduced into certainty, into absolute prediction.

But I would like to suggest that it says something even deeper. That in the same way that looking at sub-atomic particles changes them, so when we as people of faith look at defeat and disappointment, they are transformed. And some wonderful things happen as a result. Suddenly, what ever one else has described as failure, we see as a learning experience. What ever one else sees as fixed in concrete, we see motion and movement. What everyone else has written off, we see continuing possibility. There is a knowing that transcends all of our knowing.

1. Don’t give up your dreams, your hopes, your wishes -- even though logically everything says you should.

I read of one study that was done in which it was shown that people who forced their facial muscles to express happiness began to be happy. In other words, people who act happy become happy. People who smile and laugh and love become smiling, laughing, loving people.

What is most valuable does not come from the laboratory. It comes from the heart. It’s courage, and faith and hope. It’s the ability to fall down and get back up – all in one step. Not one step of falling and another of getting up. No, one step: fall down and get up. Within you are components not yet put on the charts. It’s the marvelous ability to believe, to see rainbows instead of storms, sunshine instead of clouds. And it’s all within your grasp.

3. Victory in life belongs to people of faith…who tackle armies that far outnumber them…who take on tasks far too big for them…who make predictions no one else believes.

It means that we possess resources that we didn’t even know about. There is not a box, an edge, a limit to life. No! Life is always changing. Life’s possibilities are always more than. So live life to the fullest. Take risks. Bet on the possibilities of goodness and righteousness and truth.

And know that victory comes to the people of faith…which is the lesson of Hanukkah that we celebrate on this Christmas morn. Amen and blessed be.

[1] A Hanukkah sermon given December 25, 2005 at the All Faiths Unitarian Congregation, meeting in the Foulds Theater of the Alliance for the Arts, 10091 McGregor Boulevard, Ft. Myers, FL by the Rev. Dr. Wayne A. Robinson, Minister.