A Christmas Sermon

Matthew 1:18–2:23 (NRSV)

¹⁸ Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been engaged to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit. ¹⁹ Her husband Joseph, being a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to dismiss her quietly. ²⁰ But just when he had resolved to do this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. ²¹ She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.” ²² All this took place to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet:
²³    “Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel,” which means, “God is with us.” ²⁴ When Joseph awoke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him; he took her as his wife, ²⁵ but had no marital relations with her until she had borne a son; and he named him Jesus.

Luke 2:1–20 (NRSV)

In those days a decree went out from Emperor Augustus that all the world should be registered. ² This was the first registration and was taken while Quirinius was governor of Syria. ³ All went to their own towns to be registered. ⁴ Joseph also went from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to the city of David called Bethlehem, because he was descended from the house and family of David. ⁵ He went to be registered with Mary, to whom he was engaged and who was expecting a child. ⁶ While they were there, the time came for her to deliver her child. ⁷ And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in bands of cloth, and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn.

⁸ In that region there were shepherds living in the fields, keeping watch over their flock by night. ⁹ Then an angel of the Lord stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. ¹⁰ But the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid; for see—I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people: ¹¹ to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord. ¹² This will be a sign for you: you will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger.” ¹³ And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and saying,
¹⁴    “Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace among those whom he favors!”

¹⁵ When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, “Let us go now to Bethlehem and see this thing that has taken place, which the Lord has made known to us.” ¹⁶ So they went with haste and found Mary and Joseph, and the child lying in the manger. ¹⁷ When they saw this, they made known what had been told them about this child; ¹⁸ and all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds told them. ¹⁹ But Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart. ²⁰ The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen, as it had been told them.

John 1:1–18 (NRSV)

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. ² He was in the beginning with God. ³ All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being ⁴ in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. ⁵ The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.

⁶ There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. ⁷ He came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him. ⁸ He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light. ⁹ The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.

¹⁰ He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. ¹¹ He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. ¹² But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, ¹³ who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.

¹⁴ And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth. ¹⁵ (John testified to him and cried out, “This was he of whom I said, ‘He who comes after me ranks ahead of me because he was before me.’ ”) ¹⁶ From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. ¹⁷ The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. ¹⁸ No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known.

Merry Christmas to you all!

But – – – what exactly are we celebrating?

The birth of Jesus, of course!

But—we modern folk have come to see some problems with the traditional understanding of that birth. We have come to realize that the stories of Jesus’ conception and birth in Luke and Matthew are not historical accounts. For one thing, they do not agree with one another. They have traditionally been harmonized by cherry-picking verses from the two stories and presenting them as one story, but they are two significantly different stories. What’s more, there is no historical evidence to support either one.

What both accounts share is the concern to present Jesus as having been conceived, not by a human father, but by the Holy Spirit. This was a concern that seems not to have been shared by Jesus or the first generation of Christians, who were mostly Jews. The idea that Jesus was a divinely begotten being became attractive to the Jesus movement as it began to compete with paganism and as subsequent generations of the movement became increasingly gentile, which was decades after Jesus. Gentile converts wanted their Jesus to be a god.

Christmas was placed at the beginning of winter to displace the pagan festivals of Saturnalia and Yule, which are the sources of our most prominent Christmas traditions: decorating evergreen trees, giving gifts, burning big logs in the fireplace, walking around the community singing.

Matthew and Luke place the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem of Judea because of a prophecy in the book of Micah about a king and military leader, a prophecy that was understood in Jesus’ day to refer to the Messiah. If you narrow your view of that prophecy to just a few verses, Jesus seems to fit, but, if you look at the prophecy as a whole, the connection falls apart.

In all probability, Jesus was born in Nazareth, but the truth is that we have no specific knowledge of where Jesus was born, what time of year he was born, or anything else about the circumstances of his birth.

Am I ruining your experience of the season? Am I killing your Christmas joy?
—  My intention is quite the opposite.

I hope the general thrust of what I have just said is not new to you. It is difficult to live in these times and not become aware, if we are honest about it, that there are a lot of holes in the credibility of traditional religious belief. Many so-called Christians seem to feel duty-bound to ignore such holes, to pretend that they do not exist. That is just not healthy. Truth matters! Where can God possibly be found if not in the truth?

To be sure, the truth about Jesus is very hard to nail down, but there is just too much evidence within these birth stories individually and taken together, and also between them and the rest of the New Testament, for them to be accepted as literally true.

But that is OK! In fact, it is really good!

Matthew and Luke—or whatever the real names were of the people who wrote down these stories—were scribes of the Christian myth. They seem to have invented parts of it themselves, and they included other parts of it that had already emerged and circulated in the diverse communities of early Christianity. The truth of these stories is presented in symbolism, metaphor, and allusion to earlier scripture and tradition.

[Feel free to skip this section if you are familiar with my take on myth.]

Please bear with me for a few minutes while I digress a bit into the nature of myth.

Myths are stories, and stories are the way we humans naturally communicate. Stories arise from our social instincts, the instincts by which we have evolved to live together in groups. We are social animals. We humans simply do not survive and thrive alone. Our children need more than a dozen years of protection and nurturing before they can hope to fend for themselves, but no human of any age can thrive in true isolation. We are too weak and too slow to survive alone in the natural world. It is what we are able to do as groups that has brought us to dominate our world, and living in groups is not an easy thing. We have to decide who leads and who follows. We have to protect our young and our old. We have to keep our emotions—our competitive urges, our anger, and our desires—within limits that do not destroy our groups. All of this happens by social instinct that has evolved over many, many millions of years, going back far before there were humans or even before there were mammals.

As social animals we naturally think in terms of relationships between beings. In the practical world of tangible, touchable things, such beings are people and animals, but when we start thinking about things that are less tangible, like where the tangible things come from or why they work as they do, we imagine other beings—nature spirits, gods, demons, angels, Mother Nature—or we simply attribute human-like sensibilities and motivations to non-human things. Have you ever found yourself saying things like, “My car decided not to run this morning,” or, “My computer hates me.”? We speak in such a way because we are hard wired to make sense of other things as though they were people with whom we can have a relationship. In other words, we tend to anthropomorphize our world, to think about things in our world as if they are people. We try to understand everything using the thought processes we use in our social relationships. This is our default mode of thought. If we want to know why something is happening, our default answer is that some willful being is making it happen. Our brains are wired to think in this way.

Of course, we also have rational intelligence. Rational intelligence is able to understand things more objectively; it does not try to relate to non-human things as if they were human. Rational intelligence deduces cause-and-effect relationships from the available evidence without automatically attributing human-like intelligence to non-human things. Rational intelligence in its most basic form is common sense; rational intelligence in its more developed forms is the intelligence of philosophy and science. Compared to social intelligence, well-developed rational intelligence is a newcomer on the evolutionary scene. We are hard-wired for basic rational intelligence, and humans have been using it for a long time in our day-to-day lives, but we are not hard wired for the disciplined critical intelligence of philosophy and science. Disciplined rational intelligence must be cultivated through education and training; it is not our natural go-to for understanding life. Our natural go-to for making sense of life is our social intelligence.

So, when ancient peoples thought about deep things, they did so with their social intelligence, with stories about gods and heroes and monsters. This is what we call myth. The actors in myth are generally imaginary, so we modern folk tend to dismiss myth as untrue. But, in so doing, we miss the point of myths. Myths are not history; they do not present historical fact. Myths are about relationship; they present their truth in stories about relationship.

Myths are a collective phenomenon. They are shaped over time by many different people. They are shaped by deep forms of consciousness within individuals, deep forms of consciousness shared by all people, and maybe even by unconscious psychic connections between people. We might say that what we call God speaks through us as individuals and through the collective unconscious of our societies to form our myths. This is based partly on the insight that all forms of consciousness are manifestations of divine spirit—the one divine spirit to which we are all connected. In myths we often find very deep, very profound truth expressed in stories of relationship. Our task as modern people is to translate the truth of our myths into terms that are also understandable and valid to our rational intelligence.

So, let’s return to the stories of Jesus’ birth.

The Gospel of Matthew is concerned to present Jesus as a new Moses who fulfills messianic prophecy. That’s not so obvious in the part of the story included in the readings above, but comes into focus if we include the story of the Wise Men. Herod ordered the killing of the male babies in Bethlehem just as Pharoah ordered the killing of the male babies of the Hebrew’s. Joseph flees to Egypt with Mary and the baby Jesus, returning only after Herod has died. This recapitulates the flight of Jacob and his sons to Egypt and the eventual exodus of the Hebrew people back to the land of Canaan.

The Gospel of Luke presents the birth of Jesus as a cosmically significant event heralded by angel choirs that is revealed only to the poor and marginalized as represented by the shepherds.

Both these stories, along with other factors, worked to eventually establish the idea that Jesus was, not only God’s son, but God’s only-begotten, pre-existent, divine son, and therefore also God. This idea is fully expressed in our third reading, the opening words from the gospel of John. The gospel of John was written probably at least fifteen years after Matthew and Luke and represents a different strand in the development of early Christianity.

So, what we celebrate at Christmas is not just the birth of a Jewish messiah, but the birth of God on Earth. What’s more, because this is a myth, it is not just about Jesus; it is about everybody—all of us. This can be interpreted on two levels:

First, we are all God’s children, and God is essentially just as present in each of us as in Jesus. God is born on earth in every baby whether that baby knows it or not. Yes, this means that God was born on earth in you when you were born. That fact should be a part of every birthday celebration, and Christmas is a time for all of us to remember and celebrate that fact together.

But, you may not be so aware of God’s presence in you. That brings us to the second level, which is the birth of God in our awareness. It is our awakening to the presence of God within. Meister Eckhart—a great Christian mystic and theologian who lived in Europe 700 years ago—called this the birth of God’s Son in the soul. It is what is often called enlightenment. It is the experience of nondual consciousness or what mystics traditionally called union with the divine. It is the experience of what Jesus expresses in the Gospel of John when he says, “The Father and I are one.” (NRSV John 10:30)

Here is a mind-bending quote from one of Meister Eckhart’s sermons based on the first verse of the Gospel of John. I apologize for the patriarchal gendering:

The Father gives birth to his Son in eternity, equal to himself. “The Word was with God, and God was the Word” (Jn. 1:1). … Yet I say more: He has given birth to him in my soul. Not only is the soul with him, and he equal with it, but he is in it, and the Father gives his Son birth in the soul in the same way as he gives him birth in eternity, and not otherwise. … The Father gives birth to his Son without ceasing; and I say more: He gives me birth, me, his Son and the same Son. I say more: He gives birth not only to me, his Son, but he gives birth to me as himself and himself as me and to me as his being and nature. In the innermost source, there I spring out in the Holy Spirit, where there is one life and one being and one work. Everything God performs is one; therefore he gives me, his Son, birth without any distinction.

Edmund College and Bernard McGinn, Meister Eckhart: The Essential Sermons, Commentaries, Treatises, and Defence, The Classics of Western Spirituality. (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1981), 187-188.

Crazy, right? But it’s not. It is a lot to take in. It is perhaps shocking if you have not heard anything like it before. I am not going to try to draw out much of its meaning here, but I hope you take from it a sense of how utterly profound the experience of this birth of God’s Child in the soul can be.

This experience can come in many different ways and with varying intensity, but we cannot force it to happen. Spiritual practices that develop detachment and inner quiet seem to be very helpful. I also find that hearing or reading the sort of strange mystical theology I have quoted here can help open one to deeper levels of experience. Maybe all that puzzling language in the New Testament about Jesus being one with God and us being one with Jesus and Christ being all in all is somehow more than simply symbolic. Maybe we can learn to ever more deeply recognize the presence of God within ourselves and all things.

Christmas is a time for us to remember to prepare our inner being, our souls, to receive the Christ child, to let God’s Child be born in us, to seek to let ourselves become ever more aware of the presence of God.

Let us open the stables that are our bodies to be the place of the divine birth. 
Let us open the mangers of our hearts to receive the holy child—
and by receiving the holy child to become the holy child—
and, as the holy child, to be about the work here on Earth of our heavenly parent.

© Copyright 2022 John Speers