‘TIS THE SEASON...

As we usually do every Sunday morning, Margaret and I went to church today; and everything was stunning. I was going to say “splendid,” but splendid doesn’t quite describe the nine-thirty service. The narthex, nave, sanctuary, and chancel were decked out in the finest Christmas (definitely not X-mas) glory, and the music was glorious. A string quartet with organ opened the service with Handel’s Allegro (Organ Concerto #4 in F Major). The choir sang, “Oh, come, O come, Emmanuel, and ransom captive Israel. Rejoice!” The Crucifer, Judi, led the procession to the Chancel as the congregation sang Angels from the Realms of Glory. The lighting of the fourth Advent candle was accomplished perfectly by a perfect couple, Ted and Michelle, and their beautiful sons Joey, Tommy, and Zack. Stan, as he always does, chose exactly the right music. The choir sang two anthems, first David Crosby’s moving Joseph’s Carol and then O Thou that Tellest from George Frederic Handel’s Messiah. The service went from better to even better and on to even better yet. Before Pastor Jim stepped to the pulpit the congregation sang That Boy-Child of Mary. The sermon was exactly right. I was in heaven.

Please don’t misunderstand and mistake my description for sarcasm. I genuinely loved every part of the service. Everything about it was intellectually, spiritually, and aesthetically pleasing, uplifting. The experience of worship was the perfect capstone for the journal idea that I had been mulling over in my mind. The worship service was a confirmation of my citizenship in the Kingdom of Heaven.

The miracle of Christmas is not that a Greco-Roman kind of all-powerful god could perform a trick and make pregnant a young woman who had not slept with a man so she could give birth to a little boy baby... a celestial in vitro fertilization. The miracle is that a baby born to a young peasant woman in a dirt-poor Mediterranean village two thousand years ago could grow up in an ordinary family in such a way that he would develop extraordinary insights and wisdom about what it means to be human, and that he would be so profoundly wise and inspired and charismatic that his thinking and teaching would be central to the development of Western Civilization for two thousand years.

We should not be surprised that a great religion would develop out of the teachings of this extraordinary Jesus of Nazareth; and I guess we shouldn’t be surprised either that the life of such a remarkable person in the Greco-Roman world of mythical gods and goddesses would spawn preposterous myths that would actually obscure his truly miraculous accomplishments.

His insights into the dynamics of interpersonal relationships and his sense of responsibility for others, even for people outside his cultural, religious, and political world, obviously stunned everybody whose live he touched. We know he profoundly affected and upset the people who had all the power in his world because he was executed cruelly at the early age of thirty-three.

The story of his life began to get garbled almost immediately after his death, and the confusion has been compounded over the centuries. Religious movements sprang up as the people who knew Jesus talked about him and wrote about him. Disciples and apostles with their own agenda wrote their versions of Jesus’ teachings. They argued about who should be included and who should be left out of “The Kingdom," obviously missing the point of what he was saying the Kingdom of God is. They wrote about what God wants from humans, again obviously missing the point of what Jesus said about God.

The greatest miracle of all was his understanding of the nature of God and his clear teaching about who and where God is. Out of his teachings about what he knew to be true about God, Theologians invented hypothetical constructions like the Trinity. Countless hours have been spent by scholars and philosophers trying to find a good description of God in three persons, when it seems quite clear that Jesus was talking about three manifestations of God in us. He reminded us that an important component of a person is spirit, something quite apart and different from the corporeal body of flesh and blood, God the spirit within us. It seems plausible that he was saying God within us is also the Father and Mother part of us, the part that comes to us and to our generation from our parents and our other forefathers and foremothers. It’s that part of us that contains our history. Perhaps it is the spiritual DNA part of us as well as the part of us that is the result of where our ancestors have been and what they have done. And, of course, the Son part of God within us is the fresh, new-born part, the part that is truly unique and that makes our personal development different from the development of any other person on earth. It’s the part of us that “repents,” that can keep trying to get it right. It is reasonable to believe he was saying that we have the Trinity within us now, not in some celestial palace in the sweet by-and-by. Jesus made very clear that God is within us. When he said, “God and I are one,” he was also saying to us, “You and God are one.” My friend Ben has a good way of expressing it. He says, “God is the good in us.” That description of God is consistent with what Jesus taught. At Christmas time we sing about Immanuel, and again we get sidetracked with stories about the Wise Men and a stable birth and angels singing to shepherds, and we miss the point. Immanuel is “God with us.” The “God with us” can be expressed as “God in us.” Jesus said God is Love, and it makes sense to make the connection between the good in us and the love in us, the good we allow ourselves to extend to others and the love we allow to guide us in our relations with others. If we love one another, we express God in our living. We introduce God to people around us when we react to them with good will and love.

And about that “Kingdom of Heaven” which Jesus mentioned... doesn’t it make sense to think that Jesus was talking about a state of being while we are alive on this earth rather than as a static, frozen-for-eternity place somewhere out there in the Cosmos beyond earth? And the concept of hell as a condition on earth makes good sense when we see what people sometimes do to themselves while they are alive. A place of eternal torment for people who haven’t met requirements for salvation seems altogether inconsistent with the teachings of Jesus about God being love.

This is Christmas week. Gloria in excelsis Deo... Indeed. Glory to God in the highest, in the most noble, the highest parts of our lives.