Christmas’s Message of Love 

Rev. Bruce R. Russell-Jayne

One of the neatest things about being a minister is I get to write sermons about really interesting things that are important to us.  I do have some constraints - I must remain in touch with the congregation and speak to its needs, and I must be true to both our liberal religious tradition and to my personal theology.  Some churches closely follow a liturgical calendar, in which the scriptural text for each week of the year is prescribed.  In some ways, I envy them, they don’t have to spend the time I do each summer putting together a plan for sermons for the year.  On the other hand, I am glad for the freedom UU ministers are allowed not to be so locked in to the topics we must address.  Still, it helps to have some structure in our church year; so we do cycle thru certain services each year.  We frame our church program year beginning with our Ingathering and Water Communion and end with our Memorial Service and Flower Communion.  In the middle, we celebrate holidays like Thanksgiving, Mardi Gras, and this year we’ll do a chocolate communion for Valentine’s Day.  The problem with these repeat services for ministers is coming up with something new to say each time they roll around.  I’m just really glad I don’t have to preach on the trinity each year like Episcopalian priests do.

When it comes to Christmas, one easy way out of this annual problem is for UU ministers to simply talk about one of the other holidays this time of year.  In December, in addition to the many Christmas traditions, there are Hindu, Buddhist, Pagan, Muslim, Jewish, and African American holidays - that I know of - all with their own wonderful messages.  As UUs, we honor these, not necessarily by celebrating each one - it is hard to do that appropriately, but by treating other faith traditions with respect and by learning as much as we can from them.  We approach Christianity that way, too, and we go a little further with it than any of the others.  For example, every year we have a Christmas Eve service in which we tell the story of the nativity and sing traditional Christmas Carols - with only minor UU modifications.
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“But why do UUs pay special attention to Christmas?” you may ask.  Especially those who doubt the historical accuracy of the miracle stories ask, “Why don’t we simply let Christmas go its own way and not honor a tradition we can’t accept?”  This attitude has led to many a UU sermon in which it is pointed out - as in our reading this morning - Christmas is simply one version of the winter holidays which have been celebrated for millennia by people all around the world.  Is Christmas really Christian?  Or is it a pagan holiday that is now almost totally secular with just enough religion left to support the claim “Jesus is the Reason for the Season?

At one time I was down on Christmas because I didn’t like some of the messages I heard coming from what I’ll call “Strident Christmas Defenders.”  For a couple of years, I tried just not being into Christmas any more than I had to.  I tried to ignore the parts I didn’t like, and simply enjoy the lights, but  there was no way to ignore christmas.  It comes at us from every direction - for months.   It felt really strange, like I was an outsider who many people didn’t understand or respect when it came to Christmas.  I assume Jews, Muslims and other non-Christians must deal with feelings like these.  I wasn’t successful trying to treat Christmas like “just another day.”  The first time I heard my UU minister say there were many parts of Christmas that were not Christian, that we could celebrate the season for non-Christian reasons, I was very relieved.  I could reclaim taking part in the winter holidays, and I could replace the Christian messages I didn’t like with pagan ones that were grounded in the cycle of seasons and resonated with my sense of environmentalism.   I started celebrating Solstice - even building a 12 foot diameter lighted sun as a decoration for the front of my house.  As a bonus I could open presents on Solstice a few days before Christmas!

So, why do UUs do Christmas - I mean beside the fact that you really can’t avoid it, beside the fact many of us grew up loving it and still get all nostalgic and sentimental at least once during the season, and beside the fact that it is part of our Unitarian and Universalist traditions, and Christianity is one of our UU sources of inspiration and wisdom?  For those who struggle with some of the religious ideas behind Christmas, these reasons aren’t enough.  This morning I hope to help us by relating a beautiful interpretation of the story of Jesus’s birth which may help us feel a little more warmth toward Christmas.
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Franciscan priest Richard Rohr claims the founder of his order, the tenderhearted Francis of Assisi, whom Roman Catholics call Saint Francis, was probably the person who first celebrated Christmas the way we know it today with such adoration for the birth of Jesus.  Francis is well known as a lover of animals, and he observed Christmas by simply recreating the drama of the stable with live animals and music.  Father Rohr says “Francis liked animals and nature and praised the sun, and stars like some New Ager from California.”   He loved simplicity and poverty, and he would be appalled that Christmas today focuses consumption - but that’s another sermon.

Saint Francis, the founder of an order of Roman Catholic monks, sounds a lot like our Transcendentalist forebears Ralph Waldo Emerson or Walt Whitman.  What was it that brought Francis to a state of admiration of creation and veneration for the birth of Jesus?  He found in that story all he needed to live a life of love and compassion, giving all of himself to others.  I wouldn’t mind having a little of what he had myself. 

Rohr says, “For Francis and the early Franciscans, “Incarnation was already redemption.”  Christmas to them meant God was coming into our midst.  By doing that, he was saying yes to humanity, and “all questions of inherent dignity, worthiness, and belovedness were resolved once and forever - and for everything human, material, physical, and in the whole of creation.”   Wow - doesn’t that sound humanistic?  God was saying yes to humanity and all of creation.  That’s pretty powerful stuff.  Let’s unpack the “Incarnation was already redemption” statement.  In Christian theology the Incarnation is the embodiment of God in human flesh as Jesus.  Redemption to Francis meant God’s blessing of the world and its people.  So, Francis felt God was blessing the world by the birth of Jesus, and that was pretty much all that was necessary.  God told us we were OK, and that made Francis feel pretty good.  Francis felt God’s act of coming among us meant he loved the world and we could live in harmony with creation.  For Francis, this realization was life transforming.
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Today, we would call Francis a Christian Universalist.  I’m sure our Universalist forebears appreciated Francis.  They believed God loved all people and wouldn’t require us to do anything to be saved from the hellfire and damnation being preached so widely in their time.  Our understanding of Universalism has evolved even further.  A more modern interpretation of Francis’s Universalism is that humanity is blessed to be part of an awesome and beautiful creation.
  
Our seventh UU Principle is we, “respect the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.”  We know we are connected to something much larger than ourselves; in fact we are connected in various ways to everything in the cosmos.  If you are a theist, one way to think of God is that God is the process that created everything, that God is the entire cosmos.  UUs, theist and non-theist alike, can make the connection outward to the thing that brought us into existence - call it God, nature, evolution, the universe, or the interdependent web of all existence, and that connection gives us a sense of awe and an appreciation for the complexity we see in nature and feel within ourselves.
But, how can we feel personally supported by something as large as the cosmos?  As I said in my column a few months back, the way I see it we are connected to the interdependent web - at a very personal level - through relationships with the people in our lives.  It is through relationships with our family, close friends, school and work mates, and our congregation that we directly connect to the web of all existence/God.   It is through our human relationships and our interactions with both the natural and human-made parts of our world that the interdependent web reaches back to us.  In this I find all the theological grounding I need, and I feel personally supported within the web of existence.
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How many of us are looking for a story, or anything that would help us be more loving?  Whatever our theology, we can learn from Francis to see the world around us as beautiful and life sustaining.  Francis’s humanist theology resonates with our Unitarian Universalist world view.  Humanity has emerged through evolution with awesome capabilities which we can use to make the future more wholesome for ourselves, our children and all the people of the earth.

Christmas is for children.  Through our children's eyes we have the opportunity to see the world anew.  They come into the Christmas season with anticipation, and wonder.  They are able to experience the magic of the stories.  Children bring us joy, and at Christmas or Solstice or whatever we celebrate, we hope to bring them joy - giving them presents, fun things to do, and fond memories of family gatherings and celebrations.  At Northern Hills, we teach our children about many world religions and their winter holidays, and I want us to also teach them how to be like Francis.  There is a difference between teaching them about all the religions of the world and helping them feel supported by the universe or to know God loves them.  If we provide them knowledge about religion, so they learn it’s symbols and language, but do not walk with them on a spiritual plane, we will have done them a disservice.  If they never understand spirituality like Francis did, they may grow into adults feeling religion is hollow and meaningless.

And one last point:  Franciscan Father Rohr tells how after Francis established the stable and so on as symbols of the Christmas feast, the celebration of Christmas became the big one for European Christians.  “The trouble is,” he says, “the meaning became group-defining instead of life-transforming.  As we say today, it got ‘off message.’  It was no longer God’s choice of the whole, but God’s choice of us!”   So, Francis’s Universalist interpretation got changed to one that excluded  anyone who wasn’t a Christian, or even the right kind of Christian.  Of course that still goes on today.  That’s the yucky feeling I was having back when I thought I couldn’t have Christmas because I was a UU who didn’t believe in miracle stories.  Now that I have found ways to own the Christmas message in Unitarian Universalist ways, I see we UUs can claim as much of Christmas that we want, or none at all if we choose, and we don’t have to be someone else’s kind of Christian to do it.

I believe it is part of our spiritual maturation as UUs to search for and assign meaning to all the days of our lives.  We need to come to terms with Christmas and not simply try to avoid it.  Isn’t it so much better to discover in the story of Francis how to welcome the presence of divinity in all our lives?  May his spirit go with you through the rest of this holiday season and warm your hearts.