Reflections from the Minister’s Study – Dec 11th, 2011

The Christmas Story: Fact vs. Fiction

Isaiah 40:1-11
Psalm 85:1–2, 8–13 (VU p. 802)
2 Peter 3:8–15a
Mark 1:1-8

Almighty God, help us to understand that no matter how much we try to put you into words, we will always fail. That no matter how much dogma we come up with, you will always prove to be bigger than the box we put you in. May our minds be open to ponder your greatness, and our hearts always open to feel the love that your Spirit gives. With Jesus as our guide for living and loving. Amen.

Scandal. Today I want to talk about scandal. Scandal is what I hoped you would think when you first read what the sermon title was for today. Maybe you were thinking, “What blasphemy am I going to hear today?” Would the whole village be talking about it by Tuesday, or isn’t she a bit on the liberal side of things?

But perhaps some of you also thought, “I have always had questions about the Christmas story. I read something about them in my intro to World Religions in University and I was always interested… but was afraid to ask.”

Well, what I am about to share in this short sermon is not just what I have to say about this issue or what many biblical scholars think, nor is just left leaning Liberal thinkers nor is it just ministers that went to Queen’. What I am about to say is not new, and it is not meant to shake your faith. Perhaps it can enrich it, give you a different way of approaching your belief. This way of reading the Bible critically is faith engaging your heart and your head. It is not new but it is rarely preached from pulpits.

Today is about sharing with you some ideas that are believed by faithful scholars the world over and its view is very much in line with generations of United Church folks. This is just a taste, but I hope that if you are interested, you will explore it further, mull it over and remember… you don’t have to believe anything that I offer today for consideration.

At the end of this short sermon, I will try and bring the pieces together in a way that make sense for what the original writers of the gospels were trying to accomplish.

So let’s begin…

Only two of the gospels have a nativity story: those being Matthew and Luke and both of them disagree on some key points. In Matthew’s Nativity, the angelic message that Mary will have a baby, known as the Annunciation, is made to Joseph while Luke’s is to Mary. Matthew offers wise men and a star and puts the baby Jesus in a house; Luke’s preferred shepherd and a manger.

It has been argued that the writer of Luke was probably a Gentile, a pagan, non-Jewish, rather than a convert to Christianity from Judaism. The writer of Luke wrote in fine Greek for other non-Jews and so used references they were familiar with. While Matthew borrowed heavily from Jewish prophets and symbols.

Another thing to keep in mind is the gospel of Matthew was written around 60 AD and Luke 70 to 80 years after the birth of Jesus.

Probably one of the biggest arguments is whether Mary was a Virgin. Whether she stayed a Virgin after the birth is a whole other topic for another sermon. Scholars point out even when the virgin birth was first written about, fellow Jews challenged Matthews’s gospel assertion that it fulfilled a prophecy in the book of Isaiah that the Messiah would be born of a virgin. Isaiah’s Hebrew actually talks of a “young girl”; Matthew was probably working from a mistranslation. The dogma surrounding the divine conception only become important and heavily argued long after the event, in the second century.

Other scholars point out that the theme of virgin births was probably borrowed from the literature of the non-Jewish world. For example not only mythic heroes like Perseus and Romulus and Remus but also real people like Plato, Alexander the Great and Augustus.

The birth of Mithra and the birth of Zoroaster, the main figures of two other large religions were also described as being divinely conceived. There is also the story that on the night the Buddha was conceived, his mother Queen Maya dreamt that a white elephant with six white tusks entered her right side. In many cultures if a person led a great life, they surely must have had an equally magnificent conception and birth story.

By Matthew’s account, Joseph and Mary are Bethlehem residents and Jesus is born at home. But his birth means that they must flee into Egypt and eventually Nazareth. In Luke, Joseph and Mary, are Nazarenes, and are on brief visit to Joseph’s ancestral home of Bethlehem because of a census. To add to the mix, in Mark’s gospel calls Nazareth Jesus’ home town. Confusing right?

The star rising in the east is a beautiful feature of the story but there is no record of such an astronomical occurrence such as this. But a star was said to have heralded the birth of Alexander the Great, Julius and Augustus Caesar and even King Herod.

What about the date of December 25th for Jesus’ day? The early Christian church did not celebrate Jesus’ birth. It wasn’t until A.D. 440 that the church officially proclaimed December 25 as the birth of Christ. This was not based on any religious evidence but on a pagan feast. Saturnalia was a tradition inherited by the Roman pagans from an earlier Babylonian priesthood. December 25 was used as a celebration of the birthday of the sun god which was at the time of the the winter solstice.

And what about the Those Three Wise Men? Well when you think about it, having Three Magi come from the East is symbolic that this new message, this Good News being born, is no longer just for one group. The good news is for everybody. It is also foreshadows other gospels stories later that have the outside ,the foreigner knowing and naming who Jesus is before his own disciples have even figured it out.

So this all comes back to: fact versus fiction, myth versus reality, truth vs. falseness.

Well, the earliest gospel which is Mark and the last written one of John don’t have birth stories and maybe they are one to something. They don’t need to know where he came from because they knew where he went and what Jesus did. The gospel writers were trying to build up the faith of those who heard the good news. They were trying to describe absolute truth in the symbols and phrases that people of the day understood.

A lot can be up for debate but I always hang on to the point that after Jesus arose from the dead something amazing transformed so many lives. His disciples went out and preached. Paul had a vision and went about setting up churches all over the middle-East. Those closest to Jesus had to make sense of what had happened to them and how they described it was in the ways that they knew, the symbols and stories they knew. By incorporating them into Jesus life they were saying, “Look, Jesus is just like Apollo, just like Zoroaster’s amazing birth. But you know what? He is even better.”

With that perspective December 25 makes sense as Jesus’ birth since it is the shortest day of the year. So having the new light of the world being born on the darkest night is a powerful symbol.

Scholars disagree on many points but what they agree on is that the gospel writers wrote the way they did to make sense of what had happened to them in light of their past history. The Israelites expected a Messiah, a leader, a King, one from the line of King David, the last King, to lead them out of bondage once again.

What showed up in the person of Jesus went far beyond anyone’s expectation or hope. In modern terms you could say that the gospels writers took the ideals and the expectations of the past and the present and super-sized them.

So as we get closer to Christmas and we see those shows on TV or articles in the paper about the events surrounding Jesus birth, you don’t have feel bad for thinking about them or worrying that they don’t match what you learned in Sunday school. You can even agree with the people who don’t celebrate Christmas because they say it is pagan, because you know what?

I think the writers of the gospels and early church leaders knew what they were doing. They knew that through the symbol of light, the truth of the Christmas moment would shine through. So celebrate Christmas and know that literalism was not what they intended, truth and love goes beyond all the words that we could ever build up around our Creator and Lord. God will always get around our little words.

Thanks be to God.