Advent 2017-1
For the past several years, when Christmas rolls around, I have dug into my old sermons for material worthy of being reprised. I don’t even care if I am reading the same stuff exactly as before—Christmas is a time of ritual, and nostalgia, and tradition—traditions where the same precious words are repeated once more, like familiar tunes that never stop singing a new song.
In The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis spoke of the rhythmic succession of Holy days of feast and fast, under the general subject of Man's need for variety in unity; he said that the return to an immemorial theme was an archetypal aspect of Human spiritual anatomy, and helped put him in touch with the divine. Indeed, the symbologies, associated with feast days, evoke a particularized mind state that is able to find the universal in the individual.
Thus, with a particularized image in mind, we begin with something from 2011:
Advent--a time of preparation. I think it has taken me this long--62 years--to come to appreciate these little seasonal reminders the church has given us, to help us remain mindful. Each season seems to carry a unique message, and all these individual seasonal messages add up to a yearly calendar that helps us keep sharp our sensitivities to things it might be easy to start taking for granted--a remindful calendar-- a remember to pay attention calendar.
The time of preparation dramatizes the ritual of birth and death that is played out every single day, and reminds us to be ready. The Christ may come at any time, but we must be ready.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:
"Advent is a season observed in many Western Christian churches as a time of expectant waiting and preparation for the celebration of the Nativity of Jesus at Christmas. The term is an anglicized version of the Latin word adventus, meaning "coming".
Advent is the beginning of the Western liturgical year and commences on Advent Sunday. The Eastern churches' equivalent of Advent is called the Nativity Fast, but it differs in both length and observances and does not begin the church year, which starts instead on September 1. At least in the Roman Catholic, Anglican, Lutheran, Moravian, Presbyterian and Methodist calendars, Advent starts on the fourth Sunday before December 25, which is the Sunday between November 27 and December 3 inclusive.
Latin adventus is the translation of the Greek word parousia, commonly used to refer to the Second Coming of Christ. For Christians, the season of Advent anticipates the coming of Christ from two different perspectives. The season offers the opportunity to share in the ancient longing for the coming of the Messiah, and to be alert for his Second Coming.”
What follows is a little list of things to remember in Advent written by Martin Luther:
HOMILY II: THE COMING OF THE KING.
FIRST SUNDAY IN ADVENT. (FROM THE GOSPEL.)
"Behold, thy King cometh unto thee, meek," Matt. xxi. 5.
"THIS is a prophecy of the Advent of Our Lord Jesus Christ, about which there are three signs. First, the dignity of Him Who is coming; secondly, the utility of His Advent; thirdly, the manner in which He came. Of the first sign we read in the Gospel, "Thy King cometh;" a merciful King; a just King; a wise King; a terrible King; an omnipotent King; an eternal King. A merciful King in sparing; a just in judging; a good in rewarding; a wise in governing; an omnipotent King in defending the good; a terrible King in punishing the evil; an eternal King in ruling eternally, and in bestowing immortality.
Of the first, Isa. xvi. 5:
"And in mercy shall the throne be established."
Of the second, Isa. xxxiv.:
"And behold, a King shall reign in justice;"
Isa. xvi. 5:
"And He shall sit upon it in truth in the tabernacle of David."
Of the third, Ps. Ixxiii. 1:
"Truly God, is good to Israel, even to such as are of a clean heart."
Of the fourth, Jer. xxiii. 5:
"I will raise unto David a righteous branch, and a King shall reign and prosper, and shall execute justice and judgment in the earth."
Of the fifth, Esth. xiii. 9:
"Lord, Lord, the King Almighty, for the whole world is in Thy power."
Of the seventh, Jer. x. 10:
" But the Lord is the true God, He is the living God and an everlasting King ;"
S. Luke i. 33:
" And of His Kingdom there shall be no end."
Of the seven, collectively, 2 Macc. i. 24:
"O Lord, Lord, God, Creator of all things,
Who art fearful, and strong, and righteous, and merciful, and the only gracious King."
Wisdom in the Creator, mercy in the pitiful, goodness in the good, justice in the just, severity in the terrible, power in the powerful, eternity in the eternal. This is the King Who cometh to thee for thy profit. Here the use of the Advent is noted, for it was seven-fold as applied to the present time: First, for the illumination of the world; second, for the spoliation of Hades; third, for the reparation of Heaven; fourth, for the destruction of sin ; fifth, for the vanquishment of the devil; sixth, for the reconciliation of man with God; seventh, for the beatification of man.
The Son of God did not want to be seen and found in heaven. Therefore he descended from heaven into this humility and came to us in our flesh, laid himself into the womb of his mother and into the manger and went on to the cross. This was the ladder that he placed on earth so that we might ascend to God on it. This is the way you must take. If you depart from this way and try to speculate about the glory of the Divine Majesty—without this ladder—you will invent marvelous matters that transcend your horizon, but you will do so at very great harm to yourself."
One irresistible aspect of Christmas is the fantastic side—the magical side. The following is from Advent in Fairyland, inspired by an offhand remark made in Wikipedia concerning Theosophy and angels:
"It is believed by Theosophists that nature spirits, elementals (gnomes, undines, sylphs, and salamanders), and fairies can be also be observed when the third eye is activated. It is maintained by Theosophists that these less evolutionarily developed beings have never been previously incarnated as humans; they are regarded as being on a separate line of spiritual evolution called the “deva evolution”; eventually, as their souls advance as they reincarnate, it is believed they will incarnate as devas."
So, according to Steiner, if you develop your third eye, you can see fairies, a kind of low-class angel. I was thinking how this fairyland is so much more visible to youngsters than it is to grown-ups; after all, what kid doesn't understand and believe in the tooth fairy, or Santa Claus? Perhaps the use of the third eye is more native to innocence than to the jaded worldly perspective. Maybe it is just this, as I heard a Waldorf teacher once declare:
"All human nerve cells, in order to properly transmit chemico-electrical signals to the muscles, and so forth, are protected by a kind of insulation material called myelin sheathing. The growth of myelin sheathing around the nerves in the brains of young people being is not competed at birth; in fact it is not completely finished until, say, the age of eight or nine."
This leaves the tender brains of children, in their formative years, exposed--unprotected from the subtle electromagnetic influences that radiate all around us, all the time, but which are invisible to our grown-up perceptual apparati. As we get older all our physical equipment becomes more and more stiff and inflexible, and we have to find other ways to move from one consciousness state to another, in particular, to pre-conscious states. Indeed, the spontaneous sensitivity of children to magical realities comes from their ability to freely cross over boundaries of different mind states. As my son Emlyn once said, when he was two: "I fly with the angels at night in my bed."
I was thinking that the magic of Christmas involves a self-willed descent into a primitive mind state in which beings who live on the borders of our reality are more apparent, more glowing with astral resonance, and more connected to the subtle terrains of super-mundane existence. Perhaps this is a good thing, as it connects us to higher worlds; but perhaps all the sugar-plum fairies and Santa's elves are just some phenomenological trash we need to get rid of.
This is of interest if we seek to "pump up the volume" (so to speak) of our holiday sensitivities by delving (a little deeper than usual) into the resonance of archetypal symbologies. Last week we talked a lot about the cycles of the sun in its yearly passage between darkness and light; we also talked about light in general, as it shines symbolically forth from candles, and Christmas tree lights, and angels, etc. We also have suggested that this time of year awakens in us ancient memories of primordial man, remembering, in us, his magical tales--we have suggested that, in the waning of the light, there is both hope for the future and a nostalgic descent into pre-conscious mind states where live the elves, and gnomes and fauns of a fairyland that long ago disappeared in the mists of time.
On such residual elf, who haunts the edges of our Christmas Mind, is Santa Claus. Santa Claus is constantly paraded before our eyes at this time of year, so many of our thoughts are unavoidably diverted to him. I though it would be fun (in the best possible sense of the word) to present something on Santa Claus, and see if he is a good guy or not.
Of course, the greatest Santa Claus movie of all time is Miracle on 34th St. That movie's invocation of faith, in a materialistic world, is a message that will bear repeating until the end of time. But it is not the classic Natalie Wood movie I wish to quote first, but a remake of Miracle on 34th St. with a little original speech inserted by John Hughes:
"Santa Claus: I'm not just a whimsical figure who wears a charming suit and affects a jolly demeanor, you know; I'm a symbol--I'm a symbol of the human ability to suppress the selfish and hateful tendencies that rule the major part of our lives. And if you can't accept anything on faith, then you're doomed to a life dominated by doubt."
Thus, even in the most popular, commercial productions in the mainstream, Santa Claus and faith are intimately linked. The question of whether you should teach your kids about Santa Claus, or not, calls into question, at a basic level, just how deeply committed you are to living a life that affirms the existence of things not seen. The Baptists insist, against all reasonable scientific proof, that the world was created in six days, and yet many of the grown-up Baptists DON'T believe in Santa Claus. Whassup wit dat? I say that these two scenarios, Creationism and Santa Claus, call forth qualities of belief that have much in common with each other. The suspension of rational constraints in favor of an impulse of the heart, an impulse of desire, and an openness to the possibilities of the miraculous, is at the root of all faithful thoughts, and is the impetus behind all faithful acts.
Now, even though our sensitivity to subtle energies and identities is heightened at Christmas time, and the magic in the air promotes the entry into altered states of consciousness, we must remember that this entry is ultimately a SELF-WILLED DESCENT into a primitive mind state—it is an act of WILL. In truth we create Christmas in ourselves as we purposefully tune our personal resonance to the frequency of the time.
In After Many a Summer, Aldous Huxley writes:
"There must also be the recollection which seeks to transform and transcend intelligence. Many are called, but few are chosen--because few even know in what salvation consists. . . . Only a few are chosen because it is only the few who choose to hear and heed the call – they choose to be chosen."
"In CHOOSING we are CHOSEN.
To bear the cross assigned to us is never easy--if it were easy they would call it something else. Suffering is how we choose, or, rather, it is the suffering that validates our choice, because only by suffering is our will tempered, is our test passed. Some sacrifice is necessary; we exchange our suffering for spiritual rewards, we give up what is given us in exchange for what was ours before the world began.
Thus the WILL to choose, and choose over and over again the virtuous path, is the key to being chosen."
Thus a discussion of Christmas magic leads us naturally to a discussion of miracles. Clearly, the most stupendous miracle of all is the virgin birth of Jesus. This is from The Miracle of the Virgin Birth:
Luke 1:46-55:
“My soul magnifies the Lord,
And my spirit rejoices in God my Savior;
Because he has regarded the lowliness of his handmaid;
For behold, henceforth all generations shall call me blessed;
Because he who is mighty has done great things for me, and holy is his name;
And his mercy is from generation to generation on those who fear him.
He has shown might with his arm,
He has scattered the proud in the conceit of their heart.
He has put down the mighty from their thrones, and has exalted the lowly. He has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent away empty.
He has given help to Israel, his servant, mindful of his mercy
Even as he spoke to our fathers, to Abraham and to his posterity forever.”
What dumbfounding idea, that a 13-year-old girl was given this message!
We will begin this sermon with some commentary by C. S. Lewis on the subject of miracles, from his book, Miracles, and then move on to the miracle of the virgin birth:
Miracles Quotes
“Miracles do not, in fact, break the laws of nature.”
“In Science we have been reading only the notes to a poem; in Christianity we find the poem itself.”
“He is not the soul of Nature, nor any part of Nature. He inhabits eternity: He dwells in a high and holy place: heaven is His throne, not his vehicle, earth is his footstool, not his vesture. One day he will dismantle both and make a new heaven and earth. He is not to be identified even with the 'divine spark' in man. He is God and not man.”
“It is a profound mistake to imagine that Christianity ever intended to dissipate the bewilderment and even the terror, the sense of our own nothingness, which come upon us when we think about the nature of things. It comes to intensify them. Without such sensations there is no religion. Many a man, brought up in the glib profession of some shallow form of Christianity, who comes through reading Astronomy to realize for the first time how majestically indifferent most reality is to man, and who perhaps abandons his religion on that account, may at that moment be having his first genuinely religious experience. . . . Christianity does not involve the belief that all things were made for man.”
“Men became scientific because they expected Law in Nature, and they expected Law in Nature because they believed in a Legislator. In most modern scientists this belief has died: it will be interesting to see how long their confidence in uniformity survives it. Two significant developments have already appeared—the hypothesis of a lawless sub-nature, and the surrender of the claim that science is true. We may be living nearer than we suppose to the end of the Scientific Age.”
“No philosophical theory which I have yet come across is a radical improvement on the words of Genesis, that 'In the beginning God made Heaven and Earth'. . . . If you compare it with the creation legends of other peoples--with all these delightful absurdities in which giants to be cut up and floods to be dried up are made to exist before creation--the depth and originality of this Hebrew folk tale will soon be apparent.”
“For this reason, the question whether miracles occur can never be answered simply by experience. Every event which might claim to be a miracle is, in the last resort, something presented to our senses, something seen, heard, touched, smelled or tasted. And our senses are not infallible. If anything extraordinary seems to have happened, we can always say that we have been the victims of an illusion. If we hold a philosophy which excludes the supernatural, this is what we always shall say. What we learn from experience depends on the kind of philosophy we bring to experience. It is therefore useless to appeal to experience before we have settled, as well as we can, the philosophical question.”
[Sidebar: In other words, if we are scanning for miracles, we will see them everywhere, right and left; if we are not scanning for miracles, will see nothing, old wine discovered in a back room, or a man arising from a coma. In Lewis' The Last Battle the myopic dwarves huddle together just inside the doors to Paradise and see nothing but eternal darkness because they believe in nothing but eternal darkness.]
“As long as one is a Naturalist, ‘Nature’ is the only word for ‘Everything.’ And Everything is not a subject about which anything very interesting can be said or (save by illusion) felt. One aspect of things strikes us and we talk of the ‘peace’ of Nature; another strikes us and we talk of her cruelty. And then, because we cannot quite repress our high instinct to worship the Self-existent, we are all at sea and our moods fluctuate and Nature means to us whatever we please as the moods select and slur. But everything becomes different when we recognize that Nature is a creature, a created thing, with its own particular tang or flavour. There is no need any longer to select and slur. It is not in her, but in Something far beyond her, that all lines meet and all contrasts are explained. It is no more baffling that the creature called Nature should be both fair and cruel than that the first man you meet in the train should be a dishonest grocer and a kind husband. For she is not the Absolute; she is one of the creatures, with her good points and her bad points and her own unmistakable flavour running through them all.”
― C.S. Lewis, Miracles
The introduction to a discussion of the virgin birth by referring to the general subject of miracles, implies that the virgin birth is just one of a number of events subsumed under the generic umbrella, "miracles." This may be true, but it may also be true that the virgin birth deserves a higher place in the miracle hall of fame than such trivialities as turning water into wine, or raising Lazarus from the dead, because the virgin birth is the foundation miracle, the FIRST miracle of Jesus, from which all future miracle succeed.
The Virgin birth has always been of interest to me because it's one of those miracles that always seems to me to be a side issue. However, the question of the divinity of Jesus is most complex and is very open to various interpretations. The problem of the uniqueness of Jesus' Virgin Conception is that virgin births are reported in many religions, not least of all Buddhism; so the question of the unique Christ consciousness necessarily being delivered unto Man through a virgin is sort of a competition, because more than one great Saint can make that claim.
One of the things I found interesting, in the research for one of my previous sermons, was what Martin Luther had to say about the virgin birth: to be sure, Jesus was a Jew, of the house of David, a house of kings--but Luther asserts that a virgin birth was necessary in order for Jesus to be untainted by the original sin of Adam, which he would necessarily have inherited from the biological blood of a human father. Therefore, the virgin birth is really a prerequisite for the personality makeup of the Perfect Man. Speaking of Abraham, Luther says, in his Sermon for the Fifth Sunday in Lent; John 8:46-59:
"Then he saw and understood that Christ, born of his seed through a pure virgin, so as not to be cursed with Adam's children but to remain blessed, should suffer for the whole world, cause this to be preached, and thus overwhelm the whole world with blessing etc. This is the day of Christ, the dispensation of the Gospel, that is the light of this day, which radiates from Christ as from the sun of righteousness, and shines and enlightens the whole world."
I know that this may sound blasphemous to some, but I must confess that I am completely open to the idea that, in the long history of mankind, there have been more than one virgin birth; just as I am absolutely sure that there have been more than one person who was able to perform miracles. Miracles come from God not from any single person or entity. The fact that Jesus is the focus of the divine personality, the divine consciousness, is very, very important; but it is not singular, and it is not absolutely unique.
The Messiah, the Anointed One, is a focus, in mundane reality, of the infinite Personality of God; but so, to certain lesser extents, are we all. That which stands out, in the case of Jesus, is that He chose to make a sacrifice so hugely magnificent, that it empowered Him to take a place for Himself midway between Man and God. The scope of His purpose defined the scope of His all-encompassing consciousness. He could not have performed His Humanitarian purpose without donning the Mantle of God's Only Begotten Son. This is the BIG MIRACLE.
The significance of the Virgin birth is not so much that it was miraculous, but that it is one of number of signs which are associated with the coming of the Messiah. We need these signs to bolster our faith, they are part of the ceremony of the miraculous--but the signs are not the source of our faith, nor are they the objects of our faith: they are merely a window dressing, which makes the whole thing prettier; in music we say, "To glorify God". The glorification of God, the tiny little miracles that reveal hints and angles of the divine consciousness to the mundane consciousness, are lovely parts of the package; but they do not change the essential fact that Jesus was chosen to perform a certain act: to perform the sacrifices and ceremonies necessary for Him to become the mediator between God and Man; a mediator which did not exist before His coming.
When we consider how ancient is this planet, and how many souls have passed through the worldly initiation, it is dumbfounding to consider that God, through Jesus, for the first time, incarnated into Human form so that all succeeding generations might have direct access to the Divine in the world, in Jesus, and in themselves. Isn't it WONDERFUL! It may be that in the dark recesses of the past, other saviors brought the good news to the inhabitants of other times unremembered, but this does not diminish the significance of Jesus' coming and His magnificent sacrifice, His great TAKING OF RESPONSIBILITY FOR ORIGINAL SIN. Regardless of any scientific theories, or New Age mumbo-jumbo, the centrality of Jesus, in the evolution of Mankind toward a higher spiritual identity, is absolute! In fact, this is just about the only thing I believe in ABSOLUTELY.
The following is a book review--a review that neatly summarizes the main points of the book, MYTH OF THE NATIVITY - The Virgin Birth Re-examined - By Andrew Welburn [ Floris Books ]
Review Author: Pearl Goodwin [Originally appeared in 'Perspectives' Vol 77 No1]
"The theme of the virgin birth has long fascinated not only theologians and scholars, but also everyone who has an open mind for the Gospel stories of Matthew and Luke. It is a fascination that arises largely out of a fundamental difficulty, particularly in our time, of imagining that Jesus of Nazareth was born outside of the basic biological principles governing conception and birth, without the participation of Joseph. So great is this problem that for many people it stands in the way of their accepting Christianity. And so steeped are we in what seem to be the unshakeable laws of nature, that it is almost impossible to imagine that a human being could be born in any way other than through the laws of nature. Only those people who can live with strong and unquestioning faith accept the possibility of the virgin birth just as it stands in the Gospel, understanding it as a miracle, beyond the laws of nature which have been in existence since God's promise to Noah after the flood.
Putting aside for a moment this whole aspect of natural law, it is clear that the virgin birth has many other layers of meaning, and it is these that Andrew Welburn addresses in his latest book. He approaches the subject with what we have come to expect from him, a wide scholarship infused with spiritual imagination. For him, what makes the birth "virgin" has got less to do with the biological side than with a stream of thought that comes out of the far past. Much of the book is taken up with showing that the Gospel stories are by no means the only such events in history. In his own words "the concept of the virgin birth was associated with a new age, the new revelation, the reappearing prophet, the world's saviour, a mystical, divine child." Virgin here means that something new has come to the earth. There is a great richness of material describing instances of this, much of it taken from more hidden, "occult" literature. To mention but one, the birth of Melchisedek, who appears only very briefly in the book of Genesis, bearing bread and wine to Abraham. He brought a glimpse of heavenly heights before the necessary but more earthly religious forms of Judaism took shape. The Melchisedek of Genesis is but one of a long line bearing that name, beginning with the son of the brother of Noah, Nir, and his wife Sopanim. The story has echoes of the birth of John the Baptist to parents that are old, and also of the Matthew story, the shock of Niv when Sopanin is found to be with child. Sopanin died out of the pain of rejection - but the child is born out of the dead body and immediately can sit up and speak. There are many such stories, taken from Egyptian, Judaic and also Gnostic sources, to mention but a few.
It is clear that this book has been written for a wider readership than those familiar with the work of Rudolf Steiner. Hopefully it will reach many people, for it takes the realm of spirit as serious and real within a scholarly context. So the work of Rudolf Steiner on this theme is mentioned only briefly and in an understated way. Steiner spoke about the fact that in the past, and sometimes even now, conception could take place in sleep, that is unconsciously and therefore purely, or virginally. In that state the heavenly star of the individual can unite with the biological counterpart.”
[Sidebar: I did not become fully conscious, until this moment, that I have always imagined the Divine impregnation as occurring during sleep. The Zeffirelli movie, Jesus of Nazareth, depicts the angel in the Anunciation as a beam of light shining through a high window. Mary listens raptly to the angel's message, and then sleeps. Kind of like the tooth fairy.]
“Natural law and spiritual law can be brought together and it is important that this should be understood. The birth of Jesus of Nazareth was not a virgin birth in the sense of there being no biological father. Jesus of Nazareth had to be a full human being, a special one certainty, but a truly human being, in order to fulfill Christ's deed of redemption. Perhaps this side needs slightly more emphasis in the book, even though Andrew Welburn comes to the same conclusion from other directions. He shows us that the Gospel story is the culmination of a great tradition stretching far back into prehistory, and that what comes as new spiritual impulse out of the heavens must always have the character of "virgin”.”
This last paragraph, with its implication that Jesus' incarnation may not have been a purely spiritual virgin birth, but, rather, had a very natural biological component, fits in with what I have said many times: that I don't need a miracle to demonstrate the miraculous. Whether you clothe the miraculous in the jargon of the New Science, or in the backward Baptist Creationist attitude doesn't matter. The miraculous is in how, through Jesus, the spirit of God seeps into every fiber of Man's essential being; just as, in the proposition that the creation of the world took place in six days, or in the case of Jesus' raising Lazarus from the dead, I do not need these miracles to be literally true for them to be spiritually true. There is no distinction in my mind between that which is physically true and that which is spiritually true; that spiritual truths lean over into the physical is part and parcel of the whole multi-dimensionality of existence. As to the the question of the literal truth of the virgin birth, I have to say, once again, I don't really care.
What I do care about is this: the coming of Jesus into the world was prepared by so many natural signs and events, that three wise men, from way out of town, were able to read the stars and find the baby in a manger, delivered to Man in what can only be described as a miraculous way. Next week we will talk about the Three Wise Men.
Let us pray: Jesus, Your ways and means are so beyond our powers of comprehension, that our boggled minds shiver to pieces before their immensity. Deliver the flavor of your miraculous birth through the signs of the season, and give us a taste of that understanding which we know will be ours, after a time, in higher places. Amen.
