A Service by Barbara W. ten Hove
Paint Branch Unitarian Universalist Church, Adelphi, MD
December 11, 2005
Christmas Meditation (by John Corrado)
We need not be a blessed virgin
or even a woman to give birth to a Christ child.
The Christ (the god-become-human)
is within each of us.
Each of us, at every moment
is pregnant with life that can
give and forgive
heal and bless
bring new life into the world.
The miracle of hope made human
lies in each human heart,
flickering and fleeting with each heart beat,
waiting to be delivered by
decision and desire
to be one with all.
Every moment comes to us pregnant
with the urging of the holy
only to pass into eternity
then to remain forever
what we have made of it.
In silence
listen to your heart ––
it’s highest hungry urging.
feel the stirring;
know the channel for the transcendent
that you are.
HYMN: O, Come, O Come, Emmanuel
READING: From the Gospel of Luke, Chapter 1, verses 26-38
This hymn, O Come, O Come Emmanuel, is one of the oldest known hymns in the Christian tradition. It was written in the 9th century and proclaims the coming of Christ. The words were newly cast for our hymnal, but they still speak of the coming of something wonderful—Emmanuel, God within us—given expression through the concepts of love, truth, light and hope.
The Christmas season is a complicated time for Unitarian Universalists. Many of us believe the Christmas story to be just that—a story. Not truth in any real sense.
Yet, I think too often we look at truth only through the eyes of fact. But truth is far more than fact. Truth can be found in myths, and the Christmas story is certainly mythical. One five-year-old child said that “a myth is a story that isn’t true on the outside, only on the inside” [Amazing Grace by Kathleen Norris, p. 120]. Wise words, indeed.
So I am going to tell you a story that is likely not true on the outside, but which has much to teach us if we delve into it. The story is from the Gospel of Luke. And it’s called The Annunciation. It begins this way, according to my King James Bible.
The angel Gabriel was sent from God unto a city of Galilee named Nazareth, to a virgin espoused to a man whose name was Joseph; and the virgin’s name was Mary.
Let me stop right here. We are talking about the virgin birth, a Biblical concept our religious ancestors rejected generations ago. I know this. But this is a story, a myth, not to be taken literally. So we continue.
And the angel came unto her, and said, “Hail! thou that art highly favored, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women.”
This is the section of the story from which the title “The Annunciation” comes. For it is here that the angel Gabriel “announces” to Mary that she has been chosen among all other women for a very important job. But Mary responds the way any self-respecting woman would in such circumstances. The Bible says it this way:
And when (Mary) saw him she was troubled at his saying and cast in her mind what manner of salutation this should be.
In other words, she was confused and wondered why in the world an angel would come to her.
And the angel said unto her, “Fear not, Mary: For thou hast found favor with God. And behold, thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a son, and shalt call his name JESUS. He shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the Highest: And the Lord God shall give unto him the throne of his father David: and he shall reign over the house of Jacob forever; and of his kingdom there shall be no end.”
One wonders if angels need to breathe—this is a long speech! Not surprisingly, Mary continues to wonder at all that is happening to her. She then says,
How shall this be, seeing I know not a man?
This is one of those times when “know” means a lot more than you might think. For Mary is telling the angel that she is a virgin, and cannot be pregnant.
And the angel answered and said unto her, “The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee: therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God…For with God, nothing is impossible.”
Now at this moment, one must wonder what is going through Mary’s head. She’s just been told she’s going to get pregnant, and to do so without being married first, in her day and age, could mean banishment and even death. But she is told that she is blessed and that God is with her. Yet, she is also quite alone. Perhaps a different person might have told the angel to go away. Or like the more modern character of Scrooge, think that this apparition was simply a bit of undigested pork.
But Mary is made of strong stuff. And though the Bible jumps quickly from one moment in this story to the next, I imagine she must’ve taken some time to think this over. For when she speaks, she does so with these words:
Behold the Handmaid of the Lord: Be it unto me according to thy word.
In these two sentences, Mary makes a commitment. She will follow the path she has been offered.
And the angel departed from her.
Sermon:THE MIRACLE OF HOPE MADE HUMAN byBarbaraW.tenHove
I grew up knowing very little about the Virgin Mary. I was a good UU kid, and in that capacity I learned the Bible stories at Christmas and every year took part in the candlelight service at my church. But, I did not learn much about Mary. Except that she was Jesus’ mother.
Fast-forward a few years. In seminary, I am one of a stream of women coming into the ministry in the early 1980s. For many of us, this was the time that we came to understand ourselves as feminists. I, like many others, took courses in feminist theology, read books on feminism in politics and religion, and began to view the world through the eyes not only of my liberal faith, but also through the eyes of a woman.
This explosion of women in religion brought about many changes in theological education. One of the more interesting was the study of feminine images of God, in particular the many stories of Goddesses. I remember, in theological school, reading the Enuma Elish, one of the oldest creation stories ever written down, and discovering the ancient Goddess Tiamat, who was killed when the God Marduk cleaved her body in half turning the upper half into the sky and the lower half into the earth. This, we were taught, was a mythical representation of the beginning of the end of Goddess worship. The male Gods slay the female in story after story, bringing about the end of the Goddess and the beginning of the worship of male deities. [Encyclopedia Mythica – internet source]
But, in the 1980s, many of us worked to return female images of God to the church. Throughout my years in seminary I learned of more Goddesses—Ishtar and Demeter, Hecate and Lilith and a host of others known and mostly unknown. We sang praises to the feminine, and rejoiced in such works as The Chalice and the Blade by Riane Eisler that traced the development of religion from the earliest days when women were the model for the holy, not men. But, seldom did we speak of Mary.
Mary, ah Mary. She was another story. Mary, at least in the Christian view that I had been taught, was little more than a poor role model, a woman who was both virgin and mother, something few of us could aspire to. She was also perceived by many of us as passive, accepting her fate and serving only as a vessel for her holy cargo. Once Jesus comes into the picture, Mary mostly disappears from the scripture. And our religious forebears, the Puritan Protestants, who valued the words of the Bible far more than any other religious precept or tradition, banished Mary from sight.
But Mary did not disappear. The Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox traditions kept her alive. She became “theotokos,” the Mother of God. She became The Blessed Virgin Mary, prayed to and venerated by many people from the earliest days of Christianity. Our religious forebears could only hide her out of sight. She never truly went away.
I will talk of Mary today, for I have come to appreciate her. In particular, I am moved by the part she plays in the Christmas story, a part that is central to one aspect of Christian theology that I believe in. That theology is found in what Christians call the incarnation.
The word, “incarnation” literally means “en-flesh-ment.” Those of us who know Spanish will remember that “carne” in that language means meat or flesh. But in a spiritual sense, the incarnation is all about God becoming human.
For many Christians, the incarnation is understood to be a one-time only event. As we just were reminded in the story of the annunciation, Mary is told by the Angel Gabriel that she will give birth not to a child of Joseph, but to a child of God. Let me remind you what the Angel said:
The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee: therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God.
“The Son of God.” For most Christians, this is what makes Jesus so special. He is God’s “only begotten son” and thus is God become flesh—the incarnation.
This special quality of Jesus is often what keeps us liberal religionists away from him. We are told by some of our Christian friends that only Jesus was God’s son. And then, if we are still talking, we are told that Jesus is not only God’s son, he is God himself. For in the Christian mythology, Jesus is the only person in whom God became flesh, the only incarnation of the Holy that has ever been.
But, I am a believer in a different kind of incarnation. I believe that it is within the human spirit that the Holy dwells. In other words, we all embody the incarnation. All of us are, as Ralph Waldo Emerson the great Unitarian once said, “part and particle” with God.
If this is true or even if it is only metaphor, what might it mean? Why does it matter if the holy dwells in humanity? What difference does it make to believe in an incarnational theology?
For me, it has led me to have faith in the possibility that people, ordinary, simple people, may do great things and make the world a better place. And that brings me back to Mary, and her role in the Christmas story.
There are no descriptions of Mary, per se, in the Bible stories but we have gotten to know her through the many ways she has been depicted throughout the centuries. While there are some beautiful paintings of her garbed, for example, as a Renaissance matron, I find myself more moved by those that portray her as she more than likely was—a strong peasant woman not more than twenty. In the Bible stories, Mary is never described or depicted as anything but a regular woman of her day. She is ordinary in every sense of the word. Except, of course, she’s not. For her special role in this story makes her extraordinary. She believes that her baby will be Holy. And of course she is right. Jesus is Holy, decidedly so. But then, so are all children.
This is where I start to draw distinctions between my understanding of the incarnation and traditional Christian interpretations of it. To me, the Holy is present in all of life. And in each human soul lies a seed of divinity, ready to grow and bear fruit or wither on the vine.
Our Unitarian forebear William Channing Gannett understood this. In “Things Commonly Believed Among Us,” written in the late 19th century, Gannet wrote that Unitarians “believe in that Light which lighteth every(one) that cometh into the world, giving us power to become the (children) of God.”
We are all children of God. We all share in the great Love, which is how I define the Holy. That’s what my understanding of the incarnation points to.
And that’s what the Christmas story may be about as well. In the days of Mary and Joseph and Jesus, God was very far away. The God of the Jews, in Jesus’ day, was a judging and harsh God, who had all power. He was worshipped in the Temple in Jerusalem by priests who often filled their own pockets with the gifts brought by the faithful instead of offering them in service to their Lord.
The Gods of the Greeks and Romans of the day weren’t any better. Often little more than tyrants, the Gods and Goddesses often abused their power and seemed to make life harder rather than easier for those who worshipped them.
And in the crossroads that was Jerusalem in those ancient days, there were Deities from all over, competing for attention and demanding praise.
Into this mix was born a child. A baby. Probably, at least according to some scholars, Jesus was a bastard, born out of wedlock to his peasant mother Mary. He wasn’t rich, he wasn’t famous, he was a nobody. Even if the Christmas stories are a tiny bit true, if any kings or shepherds brought Jesus presents at his birth they were long forgotten by the time he started to preach.
But this nobody preached something extremely radical. He taught his followers to see God not as some far away tyrant but as a loving parent. Abba, the name Jesus called God, means in Hebrew, “Daddy”—not even Father, but Daddy. More than this, he told his disciples that the kingdom of God was within them. Within them. God within humanity. Jesus preached an incarnational theology; he did not simply embody it.
And Mary was a part of this. Mary was a mother who gave birth to a child. Her body brought forth life, as women’s bodies have done for eons. Yet, she was told that her baby was God’s child. And she believed this and likely taught her son to believe it, as well. And then he taught his followers that they, too, were children of God.
Yet, many of them did not believe, they did not have faith enough in themselves to trust that they, too, shared a holy-ness with their beloved teacher. And so some of them insisted that only Jesus was the Son of God, and that it was a special gift given to no other. And so, over time, the incarnation came to be understood as a one-time deal. Jesus and he alone embodied the holy. Gradually and finally this became the accepted theological position, challenged only rarely.
But it was challenged. Our theological ancestors questioned whether Jesus alone could be God’s child. Our Unitarian forebears believed that the holy could be found in all of creation. Our Universalist ancestors believed that all people are God’s children. And both strands of our tradition rejected the idea that the human body itself was unclean at best, evil at worst. Our religious ancestors understood that being human meant being made of flesh and blood. The spirit of all that is holy may dwell in us, but it is through our living bodies that it manifests itself. God does not appear as fleshless angels in the sky, except in stories. But I believe the holy does emerge when we put our bodies on the line to do what is good and right.
I was reminded of this just this week, when Jaco and I hosted the Greenbelt Interfaith Leadership Association at our home. In a circle around our living room were eight humans, ranging in age from 30ish to 60ish. There was the local Rabbi, and a woman from the small Catholic community in Greenbelt. There were two Muslim young men from Turkey, and the minister of the United Church of Christ. There was a leader of the Ba’hai community, and of course Jaco and me.
For an hour and a half that Thursday morning we came together to tell our stories and acknowledge the gifts we each bring to the table. We embodied a very real diversity of religious experience and backgrounds. In some other settings and times, we might have been enemies. But instead, we are friends. And for a moment, our ability to talk about hard and good things made the world just a little more peaceful, a little more holy. Emerging in that moment and time from within our living selves was a glimpse of the welcome table, a holy acceptance and a model of inclusivity. Yes, I know we did not save the world on Thursday. But perhaps we made it better.
It is these kinds of encounters that help me believe in the incarnation. And my understanding of the incarnation is mirrored in the words my colleague John Corrado wroter [above]. Corrado describes the wondrous possibilities that may arrive when we trust in what he calls “the miracle of hope made human.” When we believe in this miracle, we can recognize that “each of us, at every moment is pregnant with life that can give and forgive, heal and bless, [and] bring new life into the world.”
To do so is not always easy. There are so many distractions around us, so many ways we can avoid living life fully incarnated. But there are also so many amazing opportunities to dive deeply into life. I think you know what they are. Listen carefully. Share honestly. Give abundantly. Love recklessly. Walk under snow covered branches and just breathe in the beauty. Forgive a hurt. Laugh loudly. Pray quietly. Make hard choices and stick by them.
Perhaps this is why I love the story of the annunciation. Mary, the quiet, ordinary girl from Nazareth, is visited by an angel and given a chance to do something extraordinary. She makes a difficult decision that leads to suffering, yes, but also to transformation. By giving birth to a great spirit, she blessed the world with love.
Most of us will never be visited by an angel. Our chances and choices to live fully in this world come in more subtle forms. But myths, those stories that may not be true on the outside but which are often true on the inside have a lot to offer us. This season is full of such stories. But the underlying message in all of them, I believe, is this: Life is a miracle. And if we live even for a moment believing that to be true, we bless the world.
Each year when this season rolls around, I ask myself anew – what does it all mean? Why go through all this trouble to honor a myth built around the life of a man who lived and died two thousand years ago? And each year I remember. Christmas isn’t only about giving, as important as that is. It’s about living. It’s about the miracle of birth and the love of families. It’s about simple people who do extraordinary things. It’s about love, and how love transforms us and through us, our world.
I believe in miracles because I see them every day. You are a miracle. We all are. Let us give thanks that through the wonders of human living, hope enters into the human heart and gives us the courage to give birth to a better world. Amen.
Closing Words
As we go forth on this mid-winter day, may we let the stories of the season weave their magic spell around us.
May we rejoice at the presence of the Holy within all, found in moments of joy and love.
And may we have hope that the true meaning of this season will shine forth bright as a star, bringing with it blessings and transformation.