“The Story of Christmas”

Reverend Vann Knight

December 12, 2004

The story of Christmas is ultimately your story.  In fact, when it was originally told, it was your story, but between the original telling and contemporary traditional understanding, the ownership of the story, the meaning of the story got displaced.

The first owner of the Christmas story was God.  The story was about God.  But the first Christian story was not about Christmas or about Jesus.  You see, the Christmas story we have in the Bible was told hundreds of years before in Egyptian religions.  In fact, almost all the stories and saying attributed to Jesus have been taken from earlier Egyptian texts.

What these early Egyptian texts pointed to was God and how God works in the world through the ideal of Christos or Christ.

The second owner of the Christmas story was Jesus.  But the problem with this is that the historical Jesus probably never heard this Christmas story as we know it.  And I think it reasonable that he would have considered such a story idolatrous.  I think it reasonable that the historical Jesus would have considered himself as having come from God, the same way all persons come from God.  I think it reasonable that the historical Jesus deeply loved God and was keenly aware of the presence of God in his life and the world and that Jesus had wholly committed himself to God, but I seriously doubt that the historical Jesus ever understood himself to be God made flesh.

The third owner of the Christmas story was the Christian Church.  By the third century, the Christian Church had declared that Jesus was divine.  This basically took place by a split vote at the Council of Nicea in 325.  Those who disagreed were declared heretics and enemies of the Roman state, of which Constantine was the emperor.  Our spiritual forebears, those who held Unitarian theology rather than Trinitarian theology, were those heretics.  For the orthodox church, the Christian story now belonged to them, and they would use it to this day to affirm that Jesus was God.  Therefore, according to them, if Jesus were God, only those who accept Jesus will be saved.

The fourth owner of the Christmas story is you.  If you want to take any religious text seriously, you cannot take it literally.  Just a show of hands.  I just want to know.  How many of you have a tradition sometime during the Christmas season of picking up your Bible and reading the Christmas story?   Let’s be honest.  Let’s see.  Who generally picks up and reads the Christmas story?   Okay.  All right.  Not a lot of us.  Okay.

So this story may seem especially foreign to us.  Here’s how it evolved, really.  These stories, similar stories were found long ago, before the Christian era, in Egyptian literature.  And those texts really did simply point to God and say that God works in the world through an ideal that is often called Christos or Christ.  It wasn’t about an actual human being.  It was about an ideal.

Later on Jesus came into being, and I don’t want to shock you all, but there is now some real difficult evidence questioning the historical Jesus.  Outside of Gospel material, there were two basic, non-Jewish, non-Christian scholars that were relied upon, and now some of their work, the authenticity of it, is being called into question.  We simply don’t know.  It is my personal sense that there probably was a simple person known as Jesus of Nazareth, and that Jesus did have a tremendous love for God and a sense of God’s presence and had committed his life to serving God fully.  And yet it is my sense that Jesus really would have considered it idolatrous to think of himself as equal to God.

But what happened within about three hundred years is that so much myth and legend had developed about Jesus, so that when the Emperor Constantine called this Council of Nicea together, one of the crucial issues was about the nature of Jesus.  And it really was a split vote about whether or not Jesus was divine, and our spiritual ancestors lost, and the orthodox position became that Jesus was divine, the incarnation of God, God in the flesh.  And from that point on, everybody that had a different view was a religious heretic and an enemy of the state.

So the Church ran with this, and this was a powerful instrument in the hands of the Church.  And it basically played into their original split from Judaism, because Christianity for 40 years had been a sect within Judaism, and it had not split from Judaism until about the year 70.  So if Jesus died when he was, say, roughly 30, 33, this little sect of Christians remained as a part of Judaism until the destruction of the Temple in 70.  At that point the tensions were just too great, and this little sect pulled out, and it had to justify its existence.  And so there was this ongoing struggle, fight, between Judaism and this little sect, and they were simply saying, We are the right religion.  We’ve replaced you guys. And this created all sorts of tensions and hard feelings and wars and killings.   But the Church maintained that exclusive claim that Jesus was God, and therefore if Jesus was God, anybody who rejected Jesus rejected God, and anybody who accepted Jesus accepted God.  This was a powerful tool that could easily be misused and manipulated.

Where I want us to come today is to understand all of that bit of history, but to come back and look at this text and just make an assumption that this text is not talking about Jesus only, and when it’s talking about Jesus, it’s talking about Jesus metaphorically, and when it’s talking about you and me, it’s talking metaphorically.  This text is not only about Jesus; it’s about you.  And the point of this text is that it points to God, and it says that God works in the world through an ideal concept of Christ and that not only Jesus but each of us is conceived from the Holy Spirit or conceived from the Divine or the Source, whatever language you want to use.

As long as you can let this story belong to somebody else, it’s not going to have any bearing on you.  As long as you can let it belong to God or to Jesus or even to the Church, it’s not going to mean anything to you.  But if you could, over the holidays, dust off the Bible and just read those stories and ask yourself, Is this my story, I would say that it is your story and mine.  And it’s simply saying what we do every week in the ritual of Nameste, that the Divine is in us and the Divine is in the person sitting next to you, the person that’s a thousand miles away, the person who blows their horn at you at the red light, the person you had the last argument with, the person you paid money to this afternoon, that this Divine presence is in us, that each of us is conceived from the Holy Spirit, from God, and that Holy Presence permeates and undergirds all of life, and that there is no interaction or exchange or relationship that is apart from that presence.

I’m going to tell you something one more time.  I don’t know how long I will live.  As far as I know, I’m perfectly healthy.  I don’t know how long I will be your minister.  I’d like to be here a long time.  But if I had been run over by the beer truck yesterday and wasn’t here this morning, I will promise you this: if you will take into your heart and mind the practice of Nameste and explore the depths of that and what it means to you and to your relationships, you will find yourself and you will find God and you will find your place.  For God is with us.