The following is a draft of the sermon I'm giving this Saturday at our monthly English service. Your comments and criticisms would be appreciated.

Sermon for Proper 13, Lectionary Year A 

(Isaiah 55:1-5, Psalm 145:8-9,15-22, Romans 9:1-5, Matthew 14:13-21)

The Gospel reading today contains one of the most famous stories of the New Testament: the story of the loaves and fishes. The symbol of the loaves and fishes, like the mosaic on the cover of the bulletin, is one of the oldest associated with Christianity, perhaps older even than the Latin cross that most people think of when they have our faith in mind.

The reading from Isaiah also wonderfully foreshadows the loaves and fishes story. The prophet says, »Ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you that have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price.«

If you look at only those two readings, shorn of their context, and take them at face value, you’d get the impression that Christianity is really just some sort of all-you-can-eat buffet. Free food for the masses, no coupons required, offer limited where prohibited by law, no purchase necessary.

But like so often when reading the Bible, taking the texts out of context and at face value is a very bad idea, because indeed it leads to false conclusions. We need a bit of tradition to understand them. We need to take the entire Bible and use it as a foundation to understand each and every bit of it, and we need to look at it through the lens of the traditions handed down to us.

So what are the loaves and fishes all about?

There is a phrase in the story that gives us a clue. The phrase is this: »Taking the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up to heaven, and blessed and broke the loaves, and gave them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the crowds«. Does that make the hair stand up on the back of your neck? It should, because it is a strong echo of another phrase from the Gospel of Mark that we will hear shortly during the Eucharistic prayer: »For in the night in which he was betrayed, he took bread; and when he had given thanks, he brake it, and gave it to his disciples, saying, ›Take, eat, this is my Body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.‹« The parallels in the text are too strong to be a coincidence. Jesus breaks the bread, and gives it to His disciples.

Meanwhile early Christians came up with a symbol to represent Christ, one that many Christians use today – the Jesus Fish. The reason is of course that the Greek word for »fish« – ichthys – happens to also stand for the Greek words iesous christos theou huios soter, which in English simply means »Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior«. But the fish was also, like bread, a staple food in the Levant.

To really drive the point home, Jesus also says in the Gospel of John, »I am the bread of life«. When we receive the Eucharist, we are given the consecrated bread with the words, the Body of Christ, the Bread of Heaven. 

So what Jesus is doing in this story is foreshadowing the Eucharist that we celebrate today. Thus the loaves and fishes come to represent nothing less than Christ Himself, and His infinite love. There is always enough love to go around. Love is that which fills the deepest holes in our hearts. Jesus is love, the spiritual food for our selves that we need just as much as bread and fish for our stomachs.

The psalm offers yet another bit of foreshadowing: »The LORD upholds all those who fall; he lifts up those who are bowed down. The eyes of all wait upon you, O LORD, and you give them their food in due season.« God as Love is what gives us strength to go on; love is what feeds our hearts. And indeed Paul talks about how he has »great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart« – his feeling of emptiness will sound familiar to anyone searching for answers in our lives. But then »comes the Messiah, who is over all, God blessed forever« to fill that void.

It is also, I think, no coincidence that the leftover bread filled twelve baskets. The number twelve should be ringing big bells in our heads: the Apostles, who were filled with the bread of life, with the love of Christ, to go out into the darkness of the world and spread that infinite love. The Apostles are the beginning of our church, our community of love. The twelve baskets are the Church, feeding the multitude.

To go back to the Eucharist, one area of disagreement amongst us Christians is the question of what »happens« in the Eucharist, particularly in the bread and wine. Roman Catholics have their principle of transsubstantiation, that is, that the bread becomes the substantial body of Christ; we Anglicans and Old Catholics stick with a more generalized »Real Presence« of Christ; many Protestants say that  Christ is only present spiritually; still others says it’s just a memorial.

What does all of that mean? What relevance does it have?

Some of you will have noticed that people genuflect in front of the aumbry or tabernacle, where the Reserved Sacrament is kept – consecrated bread stored in case of need, such as for the sick. Is it only bread that’s in there? Why kneel before bread?

Well, the Eucharist is the ritual and quite real expression of Christ’s love. What really makes the Eucharist happen is love. It can only take place in an atmosphere of love, of unity, of sharing community and Communion. While the priest is necessary for the consecration of the bread and wine, we all participate in its transformation. By praying together with the priest, by joining together as one body, we participate in a process that fills the bread with God’s love. By the power of the Holy Spirit, by God’s power, this is made possible. God is love.

So what we have in our hands after the completion of the Eucharistic prayer is not the result of hocus-pocus. It’s not magic at all. It’s God in our hands, but in particular it is love in our hands: love of all Creation, love of one another, love of God. We keep what looks like bread in a tabernacle and kneel before it because we acknowledge the limitless power of love. Amor vincit omnia: Love conquers all.

When you take the Eucharist in your hand later on, I’d like you to look at the bread for what it really is: the fullest expression of love – and food not for your stomach, but for your heart. Amen.

Sermon for Proper 9, Lectionary Year A

(Zechariah 9:9-12, Romans 7:15-25a, Matthew 11:16-19,25-30)

Today’s Gospel has an interesting idea in it, one of the better-known sayings of Jesus as the closing line: “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light”. The image of the yoke is an interesting choice, because it contrasts a bit with another well-known statement Jesus makes elsewhere, in the Gospel of John: “Then Jesus said to the Jews who had believed in him, ‘If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples; and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free’.”

Freedom on the one hand, and yokes on the other. Is there a contradiction?

A frequent criticism I hear from non-Christians regarding the concept of Christian belief is the notion that by submitting ourselves to the restrictions and laws of our God, we make ourselves slaves. By believing in an all-powerful, all-seeing God, the parallel to a totalitarian state is made. God as Orwell’s Big Brother. All pretty threatening, worrying stuff. And indeed in some parts of the Church, the requirement to do private confession does have an aftertaste of the police state about it. So what is the meaning of freedom?

Most of us in Western countries, countries of the Enlightenment, tend to think of freedom mostly in the sense of “freedom to”. We are free to say what we want. We are free to live where we want. We are free to meet whom we want. And so on. We believe strongly in a free will and a free conscience. All those are good things.

So when someone comes along and talks about a yoke as a good thing, it’s a bit of a shock to us. If I came to you and told you to wear a harness so you’d feel freer, you’d think I was completely mad. So what is Jesus talking about here?

Well, freedom isn’t just “freedom to”. I think the best and most concise definition of basic human freedoms was made by Franklin Roosevelt in 1943, which went on to form the basis of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. These “Four Freedoms” are as follows:

1. Freedom of speech and expression
2. Freedom of religion
3. Freedom from want
4. Freedom from fear

Note that the first two are “of” freedoms or “to” freedoms — freedom to think, say and believe what you want. But the next two are “freedom from”. To achieve these “from” freedoms, a bit more cooperative effort is necessary – a society to maintain and protect these basic freedoms and to give them meaning. “Society” means some basic set of rules of the road, rules of conduct, ethical rules, things that govern how we treat each other and ourselves.

The yoke of Jesus is a metaphor for the Law, and the New Covenant that Jesus represents. It is a set of rules we voluntarily agree to in order to realize the potential freedom they bring. If we follow those rules in good faith and in good conscience, but also of our own free will, then unimagined potential in our society can be released. But there is another word in there that is easily forgotten: the burden of this yoke is light. In contrast to other belief systems or religions, the Christian message has a very simple, clear basis: love God and love one another. From these twin ideas flow everything else. The rules don’t get much simpler than that, even if we often miss the target. The burden is light because we bear it willingly and reap its rewards in this life as well as the next.

So what are we being freed from? Simply put, sin. What is sin? I think the most basic definition of sin is when we fail to fulfill those two basic commandments – we fail to love God and one another, and we fail to follow through on that love. I would go a bit further and equate love with life itself. When it says “the wages of sin is death”, this reversal of working to allow life – our life – to flourish is made clear. Life itself is holy; damaging life is not.

Paul notices this in his Epistle as he notices his own failings: “For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree that the law is good. But in fact it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me”. This failure, this listening to the wrong voices or impulses, shouldn’t make us just feel bad or disappointed. It should motivate us to try harder to bring those two basic commandments to fulfillment in ourselves and in our society. The reality that we make mistakes or don’t live up to the high standard that God’s Law implies isn’t a reason to give up. It’s a reason to keep trying. It’s a reason to work for life itself.

Thus the ironic discovery we make here is that by voluntarily obeying some very basic rules, rules of love, we liberate ourselves. We choose life. As Paul says, “Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!”

My yoke is easy, my burden is light; I am the way, the truth and the light; and the truth shall set you free. Amen.

...and in other news, the Pot vs. Kettle debate continues, with the consensus tending towards "black".

Our rector is currently on vacation, so yesterday it fell to me to plan and run the Sunday service in German. Here is a translation of the sermon I delivered. It has more or less the same starting point as the previous one because of the way the lectionary works.

Sermon for Proper 6, Lectionary Year A

(Exodus 19:2-6a, Psalm 100, Romans 5:6-11, Matthew 9:36-10:8)

In the readings in the Bible, we are confronted repeatedly with imagery that is clearly intended to illustrate the Christian message. The image that is perhaps most common is that of a journey: Abraham and Sarah leaving their homeland in what's now Iraq to go to Canaan, today's Israel; Noah and his Ark; Moses and the tribes of Israel on the way from Egypt back to the Holy Land; Mary and Joseph searching for a place to sleep, or indeed the Wise Men from the East searching for the newborn Jesus; Jesus wandering for forty days and forty nights through the wilderness.

In those times where Israel was held captive, whether in exile in Babylon or in Egypt, its people longed to go on a journey, back into their homeland, back into God's embrace.

In today's Gospel, we see this again. Jesus speaks of "lost sheep". For us today, that image isn't so pregnant as it was for people of those days, because most of us don't experience firsthand what a shepherd does. Most people, I think, have an image of the shepherd sitting there on a grassy hill watching over his flock. But shepherds rarely sit still. Mostly they are in constant motion, from one meadow to the next, and they have to pay great attention that all stay together -- for protection, for a feeling of safety. So Jesus asks the Twelve to find the lost sheep in His name and bring them back, so that all -- so that we -- can walk the same path together.

The psalm also mentions this idea: "we are His people, and the sheep of His pasture". Each of us is a sheep, and each of us sometimes gets lost or leaves the way -- we go in the wrong direction, separate ourselves from others and from the group that provides us protection and comfort. We have a word for that: sin. Sin is that which separates us from God, but also from each other.

Paul has the solution for us, but also a reminder. He notes that we human beings are not normally ready to stick out our necks for others. We don't like to sacrifice ourselves and seek first and foremost our own advantage. We do, however, have an example that leads us back together: Jesus Christ, who made the ultimate sacrifice, His own life. He did it so that we could reconcile ourselves -- so that we learn to get along; so that we learn to overcome our differences. And sometimes it's necessary that we forgive ourselves, so that we can forgive others and reconcile. When we are enemies of each other, we are enemies of God.

When we have problems with one another, it's very, very hard to admit our own error. That is a sacrifice that very few are willing to make. We lose face, or so we think. But in reality it is a thing that brings release and relief, just as it brings release and relief to admit our own sin. We say casually "nobody's perfect", but we don't take those words to heart. We can't manage to reconcile ourselves to others if we can't bring ourselves to admit our own faults clearly and openly -- and then the other is more willing to do the same.

So that we come together, whether it's in the family, at work, or indeed in ecumenism, we must all make sacrifices so that true community and reconciliation can take place. Holier-than-thou fingerpointing may feel good at first, but it doesn't really help us at all.

This is why we have to learn to accept and deal with the idea of sin. We don't like to admit error, certainly not in public. It's embarrassing. Others make fun of us. But it takes courage -- the courage to admit our faults and to work on them, to improve ourselves for the future, without harping on (or even noticing) the faults of others. Once we forgive ourselves, forgive our friends and neighbors, and reconcile ourselves to one another and with God, we can fulfill the mission given us by Christ in today's Gospel: go to the lost sheep of Israel, go and proclaim the Kingdom of God is near. For when we do this, the Kingdom comes ever nearer. Amen.

...or, how religion provides evolutionary benefits to believers -- contrary to the claims of antireligionists, who'd have you believe religion is the cause of all wars and unhappiness and what-all else that plagues the world and therefore we'd be better off without it. Or maybe not.

(For that matter, religious people tend to live longer than the non-religious -- more here and here.)

In our church's newspaper, there is a blurb (annoyingly without names or references) reporting about a 35-year-old woman in Munich who was pregnant with her first child.

Your comments would be appreciated, as this is a work in progress for Saturday's English service at our parish. Funnily enough, its development ran parallel to some of our recent discussion. ;-)

Sermon for Lent

(John 9:1-41)

As many of you know, I suffer from a host of health problems. I won’t get into all the various illnesses I have, but suffice it to say that lately I’ve had a lot of health issues to deal with. I told this to a colleague earlier this week, and his reaction was to ask if I’d been cursed or if I had walked under a ladder or something.

In today’s Gospel, we have a man who was born blind, and the disciples have a similar sort of reaction. What sort of sin did this man commit to have been born blind? Or did his parents do something so terribly wrong that God punished them by making their son blind?

So we have to ask, does God make us suffer?

The »problem of suffering« is a common idea that is used to attack the very nature of belief in God. The premise is that an omnipotent, omniscient, benevolent God would not or even could not allow suffering, therefore there is no God.

The counter to that occurs to me as a parent quite easily. My children are very young and don’t understand very much yet, so my attempts at raising them will often seem irrational to them, even cruel. Here is my daughter enjoying herself tremendously as she draws on the walls and furniture, and along comes Daddy to take away the magic marker and tell her off, spoiling her fun. Not very easy to understand for a two-year-old. So from her point of view, Daddy makes her suffer sometimes, and she is as yet unable to see the greater good – the fact that Daddy is just trying to teach her the rules of social interaction, among which is not to draw with magic markers all over Mommy’s valuable lamp.

Jesus, insightful as always, points this out. He says, the man »was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him«. So what we perceive as suffering has a larger purpose that we simple-minded short-term-thinking human beings have difficulty seeing or appreciating. We see our short-term pain – like my daughter being yelled at by Daddy – and fail to see the long-term gain. We don’t think very well in terms of long spans of time, certainly not in generations, centuries or even millennia.

To add some more depth to the story, Jesus is once again confronted by the Pharisees, the learned ones who think they know it all. As is typical for them, they can’t see the forest for the trees, so rather than praise God for the blind man’s healing, they nitpick about how Jesus supposedly broke the Sabbath. They too lack the insight to see the bigger picture. They even assume the blind man must have been »born into sin« to deserve being blind.

So Jesus points out what by now is plain to us. The Pharisees, for all their learning and intellect, may see physically, but they fail to see spiritually. They are blind – far blinder than the »blind« man ever was.

Thus the key to understanding our own suffering, and to appreciating God’s work in our lives, is to open our inward eyes and truly see what is going on around us – to see that short-term pain as a learning opportunity, as a chance to care for one another, as a chance to show compassion and sympathy, as a chance to be healed. In so doing, we open our eyes to see the true light of the world, who is ever in our midst when we need Him. Amen.

A Delaware school district has agreed to revise its policies on religion as part of a settlement with two Jewish families who had sued over the pervasiveness of Christian prayer and other religious activities in the schools.

One family said it was forced to leave its home in Georgetown because of an anti-Semitic backlash.

Sadly, further evidence that my fellow Christians can be remarkable numbskulls.

Once again, the Anglican Bishop of Durham (home of my favorite cathedral), the Rt. Rev. Tom Wright. Here +Tom discusses his ideas on the afterlife. As it happens his concept of "afterlife" is much like my own, and is also strikingly similar to physicist Frank Tipler's conjectured Omega Point.

You may have heard about the ongoing firestorm regarding the speech by and BBC interview with ++Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury and spiritual head of the Anglican Communion.

The thing is, this is a fascinating case of where both the press (feeding off the Beeb's initial report) and the blogosphere (kneejerk-reacting to the initial Beeb headlines) have got it all wrong, and are collectively creating the Himalayas out of a molehill. There are even calls for ++Rowan to resign for things he never said.

Here, for example, is an interesting comparison of the original Beeb article to a revision that appeared a mere ten minutes later:

http://www.newssniffer.co.uk/articles/95137/diff/0/1

Note how the message is subtly changed and the tone less sensationalist. But the initial article was enough to ignite a firestorm on the blogosphere long before anything even went to "press" in meatspace.

Here is another article examining the reaction and counter-reaction:

http://www.mattwardman.com/blog/2008/02/13/archbishop-rowan-firestorm-was-started-by-the-bbc/

The problem is that the wire services picked up on the initial article and parroted it mindlessly without checking their sources or going to the original interview and lecture. Which, by the way, was immediately available on ++Rowan's website:

Lecture to the Royal Courts of Justice
BBC Radio 4 interview
and for added interest:
Archbishop's reaction to the press firestorm

The thing is, what ++Rowan was saying was not that he advocated the introduction of sharia courts in Britain, or even that there should be parallel jurisdictions, and he certainly never meant that Muslims should have their own separate legal identity in Britain. Even his much-quoted word "inevitable" was shorn of its context and made to look like he wanted sharia introduced sooner rather than later.

But none of the subtlety of his attempt to start an honest, intelligent debate about religious law in a secular country came across. His reiteration of the rights of the individual and strong support of the common law were utterly ignored. Instead, verbal images of hands and heads being lopped off in English courtrooms made the rounds, nevermind that it had nothing to do with what he actually said.

What was even more astonishing was how the Times religion correspondent Ruth Gledhill -- who is widely read in Britain and Europe -- seemed to encourage it all, claiming in based on erroneous information in the Daily Telegraph that the Queen was going to dismiss him (which she can't, actually, and anyway she never criticized ++Rowan personally, but rather the ensuing brouhaha -- at least the Telegraph got that much right while getting other facts wrong) and perpetuating some of the other misquotes and distortions. But it sure attracted eyeballs to her blog, where she happily is leading the charge against him, going so far as to say "everyone knows what he said" while conveniently never, ever pointing people to his actual words (as I did above).

It gets better -- such as headlines claiming the Church of England General Synod is angry with him, but fail to mention that he got a standing ovation at his speech to the Synod (reported here).

Mind you, I'm not even arguing for or against what the Archbishop was suggesting. But it sure would be nice to debate what he said on its own merits -- and not based on the inane knee-jerk reactions to quotes taken out of context, or even outright lies.

As far as I am concerned, if I hear a news report, I don't trust anyone anymore. I don't care if it's CBS, NBC, ABC, Fox, the BBC, the Economist, the New York Times, or any other publication. Go to the source and make up your own damned mind.

Hat tip to johndiii.

We the undersigned, Christian clergy from many different traditions, believe that the timeless truths of the Bible and the discoveries of modern science may comfortably coexist. We believe that the theory of evolution is a foundational scientific truth, one that has stood up to rigorous scrutiny and upon which much of human knowledge and achievement rests. To reject this truth or to treat it as “one theory among others” is to deliberately embrace scientific ignorance and transmit such ignorance to our children. We believe that among God’s good gifts are human minds capable of critical thought and that the failure to fully employ this gift is a rejection of the will of our Creator.

Check out this PDF file (in German, but still readable enough for English speakers). It tracks the number of people who are either Protestant ("evangelisch"), Roman Catholic ("römisch-katholisch"), no affiliation/non-believing ("ohne Konfession"), Muslims ("moslemisch"), and Other ("Sonstige").

The basis of this data is the official registration of each person. In Germany, you have to declare your affiliation for tax purposes, so that your church or other group gets their share of the tax support (if they collect it). There are predefined abbreviations to use for each major religious group. For those groups that do not actually collect church tax, there is still usually a separate registration to track them.

One thing anyone will notice is that the two mainline church groups, Protestant (actually an umbrella of the main Protestant churches, but not counting "free churches" that don't receive state support, such as Baptists) and Roman Catholic, have lost huge chunks of the population over the last 50 years, going from roughly 45-50% each in 1950 to in the low 30s today. Thus on that score, those who are fearmongering about Islam taking over Europe would seem to be right, in that mainline Christianity is indeed collapsing in Germany (a bellwether for Europe), and the trend is accelerating.

Muslims went from not even being on the radar in 1950 to 3.9% of the population today. That too seems to support the fear expressed that Islam is taking over.

However, note two things. One, Islam is growing, but its growth is dwarfed by the "Konfessionslosen". Two, the study notes that the data registers "Muslims" as being such not just by tax cards, but also by origin -- so that many people who are registered as "Muslim" are not actually believers, but are culturally Muslims, such as Turks. They estimate that no more than half are actually in any Islamic groups of any kind, and the bulk of them are in a Turkish Muslim association mainly noted for its mild form of Islam. And many Turks have actually registered as being "Konfessionslos", that is, officially nonbelieving. Indeed there is even a Central Committee of Ex-Muslims (the name is a tongue-in-cheek reference to the Central Committee of Muslims and Central Committee of Jews in Germany).

Of course, before the atheists among us get too slap-happy, I should note that the "Konfessionslose" statistic is itself somewhat misleading. It primarily registers those who do not wish their tax money to go to the churches or organizations in the church tax system (though the churches that do collect church tax require their members to pay it), not what they actually believe. Thus not all those people are actually atheist or agnostic -- not even close (though that group is indeed growing dramatically). Anglicans in Germany, for example, do not pay church tax -- and thus aren't listed in the statistics, and my tax card claims I'm "Konfessionslos", even though I most certainly am not. Same goes for Baptists, Pentecostals, Mormons, and many other Christian groups not in the church tax system (while Buddhists, etc. are summed up under "Other"). Put them all together, and you get pretty significant numbers.

The other hitch with the "Konfessionslos" numbers is that many people game the system, a side effect of the church tax. There is a loophole in the law that is increasingly being exploited, where married couples with only one income earner (which is still very common in Germany) have the non-earning spouse register with the church, and the breadwinner declare himself or herself be "Konfessionslos" -- thus entitling the family to weddings, baptisms, outreach and so on, while not paying any church tax. The churches know about this and are trying to figure out ways of "fixing" the problem (such as it is), but even so, there are very many supposedly non-Christian people who are, at least notionally, Christian.

Even so, these numbers do put the phobia of a supposedly soon-to-be Islamic Europe into perspective. Not only is Islam still tiny in Germany in spite of generations of massive immigration from Turkey, what little Islam there is -- no more than 2% of the population, roughly in line with the percentage in America -- tends to be of the very mild variety. There is little chance of extremist Islam taking root.

You have been warned. Our Anglican-Shaolin priests will come and kick your unbelieving asses.

Unfortunately I never got a chance to write down my sermons from the last two months -- for All Saints' and Advent -- but here's the one I delivered at today's monthly service.

Sermon for Epiphany
(Isaiah 60:1-6; Matthew 2:1-12)

Happy birthday, Jesus!
Let’s have a big birthday bash for our Lord!
And look, there’s three Wise Men bringing presents!

Is that what’s going on in today’s Gospel? A birthday party? Or maybe a baby shower? One could be forgiven for thinking so, though one wonders just what a young couple with their first child would do with gold, incense and myrrh. The gold of course could be used to buy some diapers, but incense? Myrrh? How many people even know what myrrh is? And how do we know this baby, of all the babies ever born, is so special?

Fans of Monty Python will of course remember the Life of Brian, where the Wise Men knock on the wrong door and enter Brian’s stall, not Jesus’, and the mother is a bit perturbed by these three strange men barging in on her. She says to the wise men, »Well, what are you doing creeping around a cow shed at two o’clock in the morning? That doesn’t sound very wise to me.« They protest that they must see the babe, that they are astrologers, travelers from the East. She tells them to »Go and praise someone else’s brat«, until they inform her they have presents, so she changes her mind, and is again perturbed when she finds out what the presents are. »Gold. Frankincense. Myrrh.« She asks »What is myrrh, anyway?«, and they tell her it’s a valuable balm, which she thinks is a furry animal that might bite her baby.

Of course, the beauty in this satire is that such a scene is more or less what many people think happened. Mary and Joseph are about to settle down for the night after having dealt with the shepherds showing up unannounced when three kings barge in with oddball presents for a baby. The problem is that the scene is torn from its context and a caricature of it has been fixed in people’s minds, so the deeper meaning is lost. (For one thing, we don’t actually know how many »kings« there were, and they weren’t kings, but Magi, wise men, learned ones.)

The Old Testament reading gives us a hint as to what is really going on. It says, »Arise, shine, your light has come!« and continues with the prophecy »They shall bring gold and frankincense, and shall proclaim the praise of the LORD.« This is Isaiah speaking, the prophet of the Israelites writing at a time of great peril and desperation for Israel, when Israel was beset on all sides by invaders and is badly divided amongst itself, wondering when Israel’s bondage and oppression and wars will end. He’s speaking of the Messiah, which means the Anointed One (just as the word »Christ« does), the Messiah being the person who will break those bonds and that will bring light and peace and hope into the darkness of our world.

These things take time. Making peace in this world takes time. Just imagine, Isaiah was writing around 750 years before Christ was born. And indeed the text of a Christmas chant makes the passage of time clear:

In the beginning God created the world.
Billions of years had passed since our Sun and Earth came forth,
millions of years since life arose on this Earth and humanity came into being,
many thousands of years since tribes, peoples and cultures arose,
two thousand and fifteen years since Abraham was born,
one thousand five hundred and ten since Moses led Israel out of Egypt,
one thousand twenty-three since the anointing of King David,
in the hundred-ninety-fourth Olympiad,
in the seven hundred fifty-second year after the foundation of Rome,
in the forty-second year of the reign of Octavian Augustus,
at that time all the Earth was at peace.
It was then that Jesus Christ, eternal God and Son of the Father,
desired to come into the world and sanctify it by His coming.
He was conceived by the Holy Spirit,
and nine months after His conception
He was born in Bethlehem in Judea,
made man of the Virgin Mary.
We celebrate the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ in our own flesh.

That chant gives us another hint as to what’s going on in the Christmas season. It doesn’t sound much like a birthday party, does it? And it makes us feel pretty small compared to the vast sweep of time. Christmas isn’t about 2,000 years ago; it’s about millions and billions of years ago. And it’s about the years ahead of us, on the long road to the Kingdom of God.

The »presents« the Magi bring offer another hint. Gold is a present that was considered fit only for kings. Frankincense is a special kind of incense, a present only given to a High Priest, to be used in the Temple. And myrrh, that strange substance Brian’s mother couldn’t identify, is indeed a valuable balm – used for healing and was given to those who practiced medicine. So what the Magi were saying wasn’t »here’s a gift certificate for diapers and while we're at it a free pacifier« or even »your baby’s a Capricorn that will be prudent and wise and patient and all that«. They were hailing this baby as being the King of Kings, the High Priest, and the healing Savior who will, with time, heal all the wounds of this world. Those three gifts are a profound symbol of the meaning of Christ’s birth.

So where was Christ born? Well, in the literal sense He was born in Bethlehem in a manger, but as the Logos, the Son in the Trinity, he of course was never »born« like you and me; He always existed, even before Time itself. Christmas 2,000 years ago was just the point where He entered our world. And Christmas today is thus not an anniversary or a birthday; It’s a rebirth, a birth in ourselves, in our hearts, so that step by step, generation for generation, we fulfill the promise of peace Christ brings us. That’s the real present this Christmas. Amen.

Let's talk pizza.

You see, even one of /.'s premiere trolls "gets it".

A couple of people wrote something 'round these parts that is irritating if only because it demonstrates a major lack of knowledge about the origins of the Christmas holiday.

It is currently in vogue -- and has been for some years -- to try and dilute the religious meaning of Christmas by attacking its origins, quite often with outright falsehoods or by jumping to the wrong conclusions. The favorite story is that Christmas was somehow copied or stolen from pagans, and is therefore not even a Christian holiday itself. Evidence provided usually revolves around placing "Jesus' birthday" at the winter solstice, which so happens to have been a favorite time for holidays among European pagans.

Coincidences, however, are not evidences.

If you actually read the Bible (I know, I know, a tall thing to ask) but in particular read what the early Church thought about the symbolism behind Christmas, you would see what it really is intended to represent. The sort of symbolism I am referring to died out among most Protestants, and even among many Catholics, but was kept alive by the Orthodox.

If you remember that Jesus always was represented by light -- Jesus is in a literal sense The Enlightened One -- then things start to fall into place very quickly once you read parts of the New Testament, in particular the interaction between Jesus and John the Baptist, but also in other scenes such as the Transfiguration (see Matthew 17:1-9), where Jesus is shown to radiate light when His true nature is revealed.

Indeed, that is the origin of the symbolism of the halo (or nimbus) in iconography. Most people today think of a ring around the head -- da Vinci incorrectly thought halos in religious icons were supposed to be rings and, to show off his artistic technique, deliberately made them disc- or ringlike, softly fading into the background. But that's not what they were intended to represent. They represent the glow of light radiating out from within the person pictured, like that of a candle. Early saints were often described as literally radiating out light, their faces obscured by the brilliance of it. They, like Jesus, were enlightened from within.

In John 3:30, John the Baptist says of Jesus, "He must increase while I decrease" -- the two are representing themselves as heavenly bodies of light, with John the Baptist's light waning and the light of Jesus waxing, like phases of the moon.

The Celts also represented God and Jesus with the famous Celtic cross -- a cross with a ring around it -- which was a deliberate combination of ancient sun symbols with the Cross. Jesus is not just the Son, but the Sun: the brilliant light of enlightenment, "a light to enlighten the Gentiles", as it says in Luke 2:32.

If you ever attend a vesper service (which in the Episcopal Church's liturgy begins with the greeting "Light and peace in Jesus Christ our Lord" and is often celebrated only with candlelight), the ancient canticle Phos hilaron makes the connection quite directly:

O gracious Light,
pure brightness of the everliving Father in heaven,
O Jesus Christ, holy and blessed!
Now as we come to the setting of the sun,
and our eyes behold the vesper light,
we sing your praises, O God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
You are worthy at all times to be praised by happy voices,
O Son of God, O Giver of life,
and to be glorified through all the worlds.

So if Jesus is represented as a light in darkness, when does it make sense to celebrate His arrival on this Earth? What time of year would you choose? Obviously, the darkest, most despairing time of year, when the days are shortest and the Sun barely comes into view in northern climes. When all is dark, hope appears in the form of the "light of the world".

The liturgy of the traditional Christmas holiday made it abundantly clear. There are actually three church services to celebrate Christmas: the Vigil, beginning in the deep dark of night; then in the early hours of Christmas Day, at the rising of the sun, the celebration of His arrival; and then the main service later in the day, when the Eucharist is celebrated, commemorating His sacrifice -- the whole point of His existence in our world.

And of course there is the Advent wreath, which makes the coming of the "light of the world" spiritually present, by lighting a candle each week of Advent.

Thus the early Christians didn't care about the literal "birthday" of Jesus, because they weren't interested in Jesus the man. They were interested in the Christ, the Son of God, the Logos who existed before time and became man in the form of Jesus. Jesus didn't have a "birthday" like we do, because Jesus, as God, is eternal. The early Christians thus wanted to best reflect what they saw in the New Testament and represent it with the Christmas holiday in the best way they knew.

The other thing that people tend to forget is that Christmas, while important to us Christians, isn't even really the most important holiday. Like I said, in Christian trinitarian theology, Christ always existed and always will exist, so it makes little sense to celebrate a "birthday", and anyway Christ's "birth" isn't the event that is of great importance to us. It was His death and resurrection that matters so much more -- so Easter, in particular the entire Easter octave, is of far greater importance.

The question of course still arises: What is it you are celebrating this Christmas? If you aren't a Christian, it doesn't make sense to celebrate "Christmas" at all, not even if you want to try and play up supposed pagan ties. Perhaps you can celebrate Yule, or the solstice, or Chanukah or Diwali or Kwanzaa or whatever other holiday suits your beliefs and fancy. But why celebrate Christmas when you're not Christian -- and then try to appropriate it from those of us who do treasure its real meaning?

If you want to celebrate something this winter, may I suggest Festivus. :-P

Either way, no matter what you do, I wish you a very merry Christmas and holiday season. Even if you celebrate something other than Christmas.