Sermon by Rev. Len DeRoche

"The Truth of Christmas"

 Call to Worship and Welcome
 To all who gather in this hall we greetings give, and welcome you
 To glad mid-winter festivities as ancient custom bids us do.
 With word and song, 
 With candle and greenery,
 With stories of long ago and fellowship of today,
 Let your hearts fill with joy as I light this center candle.

The text of the Christmas story has been a source of speculation and scholarship for almost 1900 years. Skeptics, Cynics, Liberal Christians and Fundementalists have argued its meaning. During the last one hundred and fifty years a great deal of serious scholarship have tried to unravel the mystery within these words which we have heard in an attempt to find the Truth of Christmas.  All manner of experts have contributed to what we know of Christmas.  But even the date is not certain, astronomers have speculated about novas and supernovas and comets which could have been visible from that eastern sky so many years ago.

The original dating of the Nativity by a sixth-century monk determined the birth to be in 1 AD.  Then in 1603 the German astronomer John Kepler observed that Saturn and Jupiter in the constellation Pisces were aligned in 7BC. Later the astronomer Edmund Halley predicted that his famous comet would have been visible in 12 BC. More recent astronomers from the Greenwich Observatory and the Space Science Laboratory offer the theory of a nova, which was observed by Chinese astronomers for more than 70 days in 5 BC might be mark our illusive date. The historians determined that the first ever census of the Judea did occur under Quirinius’s governorship in 6 AD, but there was no attempt to require people to move for the census. Other historians of science search ancient writings in ancient languages for evidence of astrological anomalies. 

Historians tell us that the ancient Persians were very advanced in the study of the skies and looked to the heavens for ways to predict future events. These ancient astrologers traveled the known world of their time to verify their predictions and could well be our Magi. 

Anthropologists studying other cultures have found similarities with no fewer than 12 cultures having a divine birth within their mythology. A Chinese emperor, Fu-Hsi was thought to born of a virgin as was the Algonquin Indian who became known as Hiawatha in Longfellow’s famous poem. Incan and Mayan kings and the earlier Persian God Mithra were of similar extraordinary birth. When the Christian church in the fourth century decided to celebrate the birth of Jesus, the 25th of December was chosen due to its closeness to the winter solstice and the Roman holiday of Saturnalia. It is also the birth celebration of Mithra whose worship was a close rival of Christianity in its day.

Additionally social-historic scholarship tells us that it was common for peasant women to bear their babies in mangers since it was the area between the living quarters of the family and the livestock in the other end of the single room dwellings. Shepherds were not the romanticized men of our vision but the undesirables of the society, but they were important to validate the birth as a public event as were the heavenly hosts to validate the extraordinary character of the future man, Jesus.

Those are the facts, so what is the truth of Christmas? A hundred and fifty years of good scientific analysis and still over seventy-five percent of Americans believe the Christmas story as a literal truth, as actuarial fact. In the old TV show Dragnet, knowledge of that should really date you, the main character Sergeant Friday keeps saying “Just the facts Ma’am,” as if that were the truth. Washington Lawyers and politicians keep confusing facts with truths. Leonard Mason, a Unitarian Humanist once said, ‘the dialogue of Christmas is the crosstalk between the rampant reason of my self and fractured ghosts of ancient legendry.’ The truth is that the Christmas story expresses basic human truths, Biogenetic and Biopsychological truths, truths from a corporate memory of the two million year old unconsciousness of humankind.

It tells the truth of the drama of the birth of a child as an extraordinary event and brings each of us parents back to that primordial experience. The truth is a truth that records on every human heart. Every child born takes the composite love of all past generations and translates it as a hope for the future of our species. As a Christ child every birth changes the world in ways we can only imagine. The elementary images of a baby’s innocence that has not yet been corrupted by humanity appears each year as a sacred image, as a community image. The archetypal likeness of a poor family birthing a hope of peace for humanity while the extremes of society witness the event, the animal kingdom, as well as the vagrants and the intellects of society.

These are all symbolic of the hope we all have for the future, the hope which each generation endows its parents. It is the truth of parental love that is at the moment of birth unconditional. This is a universal truth that passes cultures, governments, political borders, languages and speaks to all. This is the truth of Christmas. C. S. Lewis observed in his Tales of Naria that “imagine it being winter but never Christmas”. Humanity can not live without the hope of rebirth of a spring, without a hope of peace both personal and socital, without a Christmas.

While there are many truths of Christmas, each bleak midwinter a savior is born to conquer physical and mental illness, cause the earth to be reborn again and to allow us to forgive human frailties in ourselves and others. For each one of us there is a desert to cross, a star to follow, and a new savior within ourselves to bring to life.

In an ever evolving and never ending world. Amen.

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