CELEBRATING THE NATIVITY

The original meaning of the word “Christmas” was the Mass celebrating the birth of Christ. From the church's point of view, a better word to express the meaning of the event we are now preparing to celebrate is “The Nativity.” Or perhaps even more simply, “The Birth of Jesus.”

Now greatly encumbered with creedal and cultural overlays, it is difficult to discover the historical event and its true meaning. A close study of the two narratives of the birth in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke show how the early Church developed those stories. They built  their stories on the Hebrew scriptures read each week in their synagogues where the first Christians worshiped. From the perspective of those early Jewish Christians, Jesus was the Messiah, the fulfilment of their scriptures.

A quick search on the Internet will reveal how contentious and confusing is the debate about the historicity of the person, Jesus of Nazareth, let alone his birth as described in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. Even the most reputable scholars disagree on how factual each narrative is. For example, N.T. Wright, former Bishop of Durham, in the Church of England, and John Shelby Spong, retired Bishop of New Jersey, in the Episcopal Church of the U.S.A. are at opposite poles on the issue.

It is noteworthy that most of the hymns and carols sung in celebrating the Nativity take a simple, literalist approach in relating the story. Among the best examples in the traditional carols Silent Night, Holy Night and The First Nowell. Indeed, many of the traditional carols are paraphrases of the birth stories.

A relatively recent outburst of hymnody in the latter half of the 20^th century has brought many new hymns to the attention of worshiping congregations. Voices United, a hymn collection published by The United Church of Canada in 1996, includes a number of late 20^th century hymns not yet thought of in the same category as traditional Christmas carols.

Some of these new hymns depart from the usual repetition of the biblical stories. Brian Wren’s Oh, How Joyfully, set to an 18^th century Sicilian melody, and Frederic Kaan’s Down to Earth, as a Dove, to a tune from the 16^th century, are two examples that express the true meaning of the nativity rather than its literal details. A third instance is Marian Collibole’s Ring a Bell for Peace, which marks the promises of our Advent liturgies – peace, joy, hope, faith – as fulfilled by the birth of Jesus.

The earliest religious song of Christmas still used today is the familiar Of the Father’s Love Begotten, sung to a 12^th century plainsong melody. Another Latin antiphon from the 9^th century O Come, O Come, Emmanuel, was translated by John Mason Neale, an Anglo-Catholic clergyman of the mid-Victorian era. Neale also translated more than sixty other hymns from the Latin and Orthodox traditions.

Today, we Christians complain that the religious celebration has been overtaken and almost obliterated by the relentless advance of secularism. Historical analysis shows that the facts should be reversed. The Christian Church captured and reversed what was originally a Roman fertility festival of renewal of life in the natural world celebrated at the winter solstice. 

In the simultaneously published edition of the Massey Lectures for 2011, entitled Winter, broadcast by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in November, Adam Gopnik presents pentetrating analysis of Christmas celebrations as primarily secular. Gopnik summarized his analysis with the briefest of conclusions: Our modern Christmas celebrations date from the Victorian romantic era of English and American family and economic life. Its chief features are not the Nativity of Jesus, but Charles Dickens' Christmas Carol and cartoonist Thomas Nast's Santa Claus. Christmas today he says is “a winter holiday meant for kids.”

A review of Gopnik’s study will be the subject of our next blog entry.

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IS CHRISTMAS OUTDATED?

Now, there’s an impertinent question. But realistically, with commercialism  now dominant in our cultural environment, that has to be asked of our Christian Advent and Christmas celebrations and worship.

Here’s what commercial preparations for Christmas are like this year where I live: Sears’ Wish Book catalogue arrived in July. Christmas decorations went up soon as Hallowe’en was over. Advertising and sales started at the same time. Black Friday madness spread to Canada the day after American Thanksgiving trying to keep Canadians at home for their Christmas shopping. And so on … and on … and on….

It isn’t as simple to fix as suggested by the once popular slogan, “Put Christ Back into Christmas.” Many who attend our Christmas Eve service doubt the whole story, but cannot bring themselves to admit it. Do their childhood  memories still haunt them?

Nor are the traditional “Christmas Pageants” sufficient to dispell the ghosts of Christmases past. Everyone expects the same drill telling the now familiar composite story: The Babe born in a manger in Bethlehem while angels sang overhead. Shepherds hastening from their pastures and three wise men arriving from the east carrying symbolic gifts.

Or was it that way? The narratives in Matthew’s and Luke’s Gospels cannot be pushed together without doing violence to both.

Of course, biblical scholars have long raised serious doubts about the whole legend of the Nativity. It is story but not history, they say. Two of the four Gospels, Mark and John, make no mention of it. In one of his letters written a decade or more before the earliest Gospel of Mark was composed, the Apostle Paul didn’t say anything except that Jesus “was born of woman” and “born under the law.” Paul knew Jesus’ brother, James, but said nothing more about his parents. He seems to have assumed that the birth was perfectly natural for any human being then or now.

Progressive views have tried to turn the Christmas story from doctrine to reality. Geza Vermes has written one of the best studies of the event in his The Nativity: History and Legend. (London, Penguin 2006). He presents the “virgin” birth as a totally human event in the life of the Mary. He suggests that she may have been a child bride who had not yet begun her menstrual cycles. So she was still a virgin in terms of Judaism of that day.

John Shelby Spong states unequivocally in his latest book, Re-Claiming The Bible In A Non-Religious World (HarperCollins and HarperOne, 2011): “While no reputable scholar today thinks of these stories as literal history, we do find some historical links in the stories that we can use for dating purposes.” He cites King Herod’s death as recorded in 4 BCE, so Jesus must have been born before that for his birth to have been historical. Contrary to his usual counsel against literalism, is that his attempt to make it history? He doesn’t mention that it was Saint Dionysius the Small who established the year 1 as Anno Domini. That wasn’t until 625 AD/CE.

For several hundred years after the Christian faith tradition began its spread from Palestine to Rome and beyond, the Church did not mark Christmas at all. It wasn’t an important feast on the Christian calendar. Now, like any other religious holiday in the present secular and multicultural age, it is becoming less and less important for most people.

The local congregation where I worship is waiting to see if the traditional three Christmas Eve service will be well attended this year. An online discussion about the beginning of Advent raised serious concerns about the discouraging downer of the scriptures read during the four Sundays of Advent before Christmas.

The question for all Christian churches is whether we change our liturgical celebrations of Advent and Christmas to match the advances of modern biblical scholarship or match the massive impact of commercialism.

And yet ….. A colleague writing the back page article in The United Church Observer for December 2011 has told us to “stop looking for theological loopholes and simply rejoice in the mind-exploding miracle of the birth of God in the very human child of Bethlehem.”

Isn’t that what Christmas is about?

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A BOOK WORTH HAVING

John Shelby Spong’s latest work Re-Claiming The Bible For A Non-Religious World, (HarperOne 2011) is an important book. It began as a series of lectures at a summer institute in South Carolina in 2006, developed into an online series of newsletters, and has now reached its published form. His intent is to give those interested in the Christian scriptures - and those dismissing it as nonsense – a clear sense of nature of the Bible as it is known to scholars who have spent their lives studying it in minute detail. In the preface, he writes, “… it will give those who engage it the sense of having completed a major university course on the Bible.”

A fellow of the Jesus Seminar, Spong adopts what can be defined as a consensus of current progressive biblical scholarship. Little of what he writes will be new to those who have maintained an active reading of current literature about how the Bible came into existence. Little will please those who cling desperately to the conservative, literal approach to scripture. He discounts the religious value of some of the less often read books of the Bible, both in the Old Testament and the New Testament.  Some of never appear in lectionaries designed for reading and preaching in worship of congregations.

Spong holds to what is now the traditional view, already some one hundred and fifty years old, of the so-called “five books of Moses” (the Hebrew Torah).  On the other hand, he breaks with the well-known theory of a document called Q, thought by many scholars to have been the common source shared by the gospels of Matthew and Luke. The Apostle Paul, he believes, gave not only one of the first but also the most influential interpretation of the meaning of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection. At the same time, he does not regard the stories of Jesus’ birth or resurrection as believable in this day and age.  His alternate views on these narratives is worthy of serious consideration.

A particularly significant part of the book presents the first three gospels as set in the context of synagogue worship for a full year. Mark’s presentation of the Jesus story runs from from Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur, a period of about six and a half months. Matthew and Luke carry the cycle forward for the remaining five and a half months to the next Rosh Hashanah.

Possibly the most valuable part of this 400-plus page work of fifty-nine chapters in twelve parts is the religious and cultural background Spong cites for each book in the Bible. He does not believe that the Bible is in any sense the “Word of God.” He frankly states that “it is a tribal story, as this book will reveal – a pre-modern story, an ever changing and ever-growing story. It came into existence, as every other book does, out of the experience of human beings seeking to make sense out of the life they are living and the things they are experiencing.”

Without falling into the trap of supercessionism, Spong’s approach to the New Testament locates many of the stories and interpretations therein as the fulfillment of the Hebrew scriptures.  He ends his final chapter reassuring his readers that, despite what some will see as his extreme views, he still believes that God was in Jesus and therefore remains for him, Christ.

The publisher, HarperCollins (HarperOne, in Canada) anticipates a wide readership, particularly in small study groups found in many progressive churches. It is priced accordingly. Anyone looking for a suitable Christmas or Hanukkah gift for a spiritually searching friend or family member could find nothing better than this.

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SACRED MEMORIES

In Canada and throughout the Commonwealth, Remembrance Day falls on November 11th each year. It marks the end of hostilities in the First and Second World Wars (1914-18 and 1939-1945) and the Korean War (1950-1953). In the USA on the same date, Veterans Day is also celebrated with appropriate ceremonies. It is day of sacred memories for the dwindling few service men and women remaining from the Great Wars of the 20^th century.

“Sacred?” Is that the right term for terrible conflicts in which so many died. Not just those who served in armies, navies and air forces, but even millions more civilians too.

A book review in the Canada’s Maclean’s Magazine cites the memories of an American veteran of the Viet Nam War as having given him “the profound belief that combat is a potentially sacred experience.” That experience incorporates four components of a mystical event: premature awareness of one’s own mortality, total focus on the present moment, valuing the lives of others more than one’s own, and feeling part of a larger community.

By no means did every veteran have such an experience. Nor is the experience limited to veterans alone. Families and descendants also shared something similar. As early as ten years of age I was aware that my paternal grandmother and my father’s sisters felt that way about Remembrance Day. When the Vimy Ridge Memorial was dedicated in 1936, my aunts travelled to France to attend the ceremony. One of my father’s elder brother’s had died in the Second Battle of Ypres in April 1915. His name is forever sculpted on the Vimy Ridge memorial along with the names of thousands who has no known grave.

Another brother had been taken prisoner in the same battle at Ypres. Though he lived into his seventies, his three and a half years in a German prison camp ruined the rest of his life. Eligible for military service, my father was exempted because he was the only remaining male able to support his parents in their old age. So too was my future father-in-law.

I was too young to serve in the military in World War II. My older brother was wounded in the Normandy campaign in 1944. Several of my classmates did serve, however, and the chap who sat behind me in class died in the Battle of the Bulge in France while serving in the US Army. Since then I have marked Remembrance Day in the churches where I was pastor. Those services were usually held on the Sunday closest to Remembrance Day. On November 11^th there is a community ceremony at the cenotaphs in each community as well as at the National War Memorial in Ottawa.

My wife frequently reminds me that civilians too also served in our nation’s war effort on the home front. During high school, she spent three summer vacations working in various roles. For two summers she was a civil servant, the third she worked as a farm labourer in the Ontario Farm Service program. Those same summers I too was a farm labourer.

While I may quibble with these being “sacred memories,” I do feel that our work was as essential to the war effort as on the battle front.

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"KARMA IS NOT AN EQUATION"

That title has been plagiarized from the October 8^th edition of the Toronto Star. It headed a column on ethics written by a friend and colleague of mine, Ken Gallinger. Most likely, the headline had been written by someone else, as is the normal practice in the newspaper business.

Be that as it may, my friend’s advice was not to equate good behaviour with

blessings while also believing that bad behavior is inevitably punished. “It’s

obviously not true,” he wrote, “that people who do good always get good. But it

is true that people who are generous, kind, faithful in their relationships –

people who love, keep promises, work hard – tend to be happier, more peaceful

and more hopeful.

“They have friendships that last. They deal with adversity with more equanimity.

 They laugh in the daylight and sleep soundly at night. They do, overall, have more
 fulfilling lives ... even when the math doesn’t work out as precisely as we might
 wish.”

Was my friend being overly optimistic? Certainly more so than I would have been. Or was he contradicting himself?
His comments reminded of another article by a well-known Canadian humourist,

Scott Feschuk, in a recent issue of Maclean’s Magazine. He made the sly comment
that “these are prosperous times for pessimists.” Feschuk was writing about the
current global economic malaise and the threat of a double dip recession. For most
people this isn’t funny at all.

By sheer coincidence on this same day, the Nobel prize for economics was awarded to two Americans, Thomas Sargent and Christopher Sims. Working separately in the 1970s and 1980s, they developed methods for answering questions such as how economic growth and inflation are affected by a temporary mandated increase in the interest rate or a tax cut. By even greater coincidence, all this happened on our Canadian Thanksgiving Day.

Was it coincidence, or what our scriptures keep reminding us: a touch of God’s

almighty hand in the history of our times?

That is a metaphorical expression, a poetic and theological way of saying what the Bible takes for granted. God's almighty hand - aka Providence - is in all human affairs. Theologians struggle to find new ways of describing the same religious experience in terms of an expanded view of human consciousness without a literalist approach to biblical metaphors of that Transcendent Reality we call God. 

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Theophanies – Then and Now.

One of Cuyler Black’s biblical cartoons, (www.inheritthemarth.com) shows Moses coming down the mountain carrying the Ten Commandment stones and grumbling to himself. “Kill joy! Out of the cloud overhead comes the Voice, “I heard that!” That’s a delightful turn of phrase about the meaning of a theophany.

 Part of the title of this note could be reversed to now and then. That’s how some even very religious people think of theophanies. It is not just occasional, but rare and bestowed on very few individuals as a special gift. That is not what the dictionary definition states. A theophany is defined as the appearance of a god to a human. Note the singular. Usually a theophany is an individual religious experience a manifestation of that spiritual reality we call “God.”

 Just how theophanies take place is quite unknown. The Bible is full of them. In particular prophets have them and so become spokespersons for God. Because of the male bias of the authors of the writings we have collected in what we call our Scriptures, we have come to think of particular men like Moses, Elijah, Isaiah, Jesus and Paul as having such experiences. That is a pity, because there is no reason why women and other men may also have theophanies. Deborah (Joshua 5), Mary, the mother of Jesus, (Luke 1:26-56); Anna (Luke 2:36-38), Lydia (Acts 16:14), Priscilla (Acts 18:1, 26) are women of the Bible known to have had similar experiences.

 Are we then to presume that every person who claims to have had a spiritual experiences of this kind have had a theophany. That would be foolish. It is not the experience per se that is evidence of a theophany, but the spiritual fruits that results from it that determines its validity.

 I recall attending an evangelistic revival in a large stadium that was normally used for football games. The preacher held forth for nearly an hour, then called for people who felt so moved to come forward in an altar call. I am not sure that that either the preacher or any of those who went forward for a special blessing and prayers would claim that any had a theophany. Yet there are plenty of examples of evangelists who desperately tried to create the circumstances for a theophany to occur - but failed.

 The truth is that we cannot manipulate God to appear or to communicate with us at will. Yet we do need to maintain our relationship with God in public worship an in private devotions.

 An article in the current issue of The United Church Observer asks, “Does God need to be thanked?” The author proceeds to give what he calls “four good reasons to argue that there is no need to offer thanks to God.” He concludes by saying, nevertheless, that if we believe in the God Jesus revealed we need to remind ourselves that we have a relationship with the God who loves us and the whole universe. We have a place in God’s whole scheme of things. “God needs our thanks to know that we care.” He quotes from the First Letter to the Thessalonians 5:18 where Paul wrote, “In everything give thank: for this is the will of God in Jesus Christ concerning you.”

 It is to people who practice their faith on a regular basis that a theophany may occur, if God so wills.

 
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CIVIC RELIGION

CIVIC RELIGION.

The late Mordecai Richler was one of Canada’s leading 20^th century novelists. From the Jewish community in Montreal, Richler fiercely opposed to the narrow French nationalism of Quebec. He was equally dismissive of what he called “sentimental, milquetoast” nationalism of English Canada. A lecture delivered on the Big Ideas program on TVO, Ontario’s educational television network, featured Charles Foran, author of a recent biography of Richler. Yet Foran had difficulty describing the kind of nationalism exhibited in Richler’s numerous novels, magazine and newspaper articles, and television commentaries.

Foran believes that Richler rejected all sense of tribalism, whatever its source. Instead he belonged to a brand of moral individuals springing from Judaism “whose duty is to question and confront” every position that does not meet the highest standards of justice. Without saying so, Foran described a man who was a prophet of his time in the midst of Canada’s struggle to remain a united country.

Canada has a long history of nationalism, particularly in relation to the United States of America. Our first prime minister, John A. Macdonald (1815-1891), was perhaps the greatest of those who could be said to be Canadian nationalists. He was determined to do everything possible to maintain the whole of Canada’s vast geography from east to west coasts as “British North America.” It was his driving motive for striking the political deals that brought about Confederation in 1867. Later he negotiated the entry of Manitoba and British Columbia in the west and Prince Edward Island in the east, as the next provinces to become part of the new “Dominion of Canada” as part of the British Empire.

Today Canada is a vast country stretching from sea to sea to sea, with a very limited population of only 33 million. Our constitutional monarchy expresses a value system that recognizes our place in the world as a nation that seeks to help others protect democracy or achieve freedom and independence. In global geopolitics we have served many times as peacekeepers or peacemakers for the United Nations.

Most everyone may be proud of their own country’s particular brand of nationalism. Some may criticize or condemn it as an extreme form of patriotism. I prefer to call it our civic religion. Each brand of civic religion has its own liturgy, beginning with a national anthem and a constitution that declares the nation’s basic values and system of government. In this country our national holidays and memorials are essential to our civic observances. Our Canada Day celebrations on July 1^st and Remembrance Day parades to the national and local cenotaphs on November 11^th also evoke the liturgies of our civic religion.

One of the more powerful instances of civic religion came  little more than a week ago in the marking of the 10^th anniversary of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. We in Canada marked the anniversary too by recalling how we had helped the many airline passengers who had been forced to land at airports far from home. We welcomed several thousand passengers from those aircraft into our homes for up to a week while they waited to be cleared to fly on to their destinations in the USA. All this was done without any cost to the passengers. We feel proud of doing more than might have been expected of us. Those simple acts of kindness were a supreme expression of our civic religion.

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