Christmas 2005

The Christmas season is far and away my favorite time of the year. The day after Thanksgiving I start putting up the decorations, lighting the house with more candles than usual, and breaking out the Christmas music. There is a palpable nostalgia that comes with this time of year, the heart seems lighter, and people seem more generous.

It is a time when we seem willing, as a culture, to suspend our cynicism for a short time, to believe in miracles again, to become, as Jesus said, as little children. It is a time when the Kingdom of Heaven seems very near to us indeed. Being a romantic type, it is difficult for me to keep both feet on the ground at the best of times; at Christmas, one foot on the ground seems sufficient.

But it is this one foot on the ground that can present problems for a preacher at this time of year. You have come to expect from me a certain degree of healthy suspicion towards our tradition. You count on me to point out those dogmas that owe their origins more to politics than prophesy. To suddenly leave all of that behind and wholeheartedly embrace such myths as the immaculate conception of Mary, I am well aware, is simply not going to fly.

And yet, nobody wants their bubbles burst at this time of year, either. We want to believe in Santa Clause-and we do, children, we do! But we also must cling to a shred of our intellectual integrity when we consider the more mythical aspects of our faith. At this time of year, we want to believe, but we are not willing to relinquish our unbelief, either. We are convinced that our salvation depends more on what we do for one another than the content of our abstract ideas about God, but we don't really want to be reminded of that-and few of us are as able to navigate that tricky distinction as Dickens in his Christmas Carol.

I was pondering this delimma, and wondering how I was going to pilot my own boat for this sermon as I was preparing for bed last Monday night. I prayed, as I often do, that God would give me a sign, an idea, perhaps a dream, that would convey exactly what someone in this congregation needed to hear this morning. And as I drifted off, no visions of sugarplums danced in my head, but I did have a rather wonderful dream.

I dreamed that my father and I were hitching up horses to a wagon. I assumed they were his horses and his wagon, but that wasn't clear. While we worked, he grew wistful, and began to tell me about when he was a very young man, when he and his three brothers has set off from Oklahoma on their way to California, in a wagon much like this. I hadn't heard this story before, and was amazed that my father had traveled so far by horse. I also knew nothing about his three brothers, so I asked him what had happened to them.

He told me they had all died en route. But he didn't seem too sad about it. He said that his brothers had made him a promise, that they would not pass over, would not enter the light, until it was his time to go; that they would watch over him and protect him, as much as the dead can do. And indeed, my father seemed to have a charmed life in this dream-many inexplicable things had happened to him, and he said he never felt alone or frightened, because his brothers were always with him.

I was stunned by this dream. It was one of those "strong" dreams that stick with you throughout the day, and much like my father's brothers, it has haunted me ever since.

There are many elements to it that are simply not true. My father has only one sibling, a younger sister. And while my father's people are from Oklahoma, he himself was born in California. My grandparents made this trip, but by motorcar, not by horse-and-buggy. And yet my grandfather did have three brothers, all of whom died young, but of alcoholism, that great bane of all who possess Native American blood in any quantity.

By the rules of dreamwork, it is a powerful dream indeed. All the characters in the dream represent a part of the dreamer, and I can see how the many identities I have worn in the past, like my father's brothers, are now dead, but not gone. For the lessons I learned while I was those people are still with me, still guiding me; I still benefit from the wisdom gleaned during their lives. They are the parts that have made me who I am today.

But because the dream came as an answer to prayer, I think there is a greater meaning to it, as well. In the Bible, God speaks often through dreams and visions, and I have no reason to think that God has stopped speaking. Just as there are parts of the dream that are rooted in history, and parts that are rooted in the fanciful life of the imagination, religious traditions are much the same, consisting of equal parts history and fancy, which is why they speak to us with the same kaliedescopic power as dreams themselves do.

The first echo of the dream was that Jesus himself was born after a long journey. Mary rode not in a buggy, which might have been relative comfort, but for several days on the back of a donkey. Although the distance from Nazareth to Bethlehem can be traveled today by bus in less than ninety minutes, this was a journey of several days for a man on foot leading a donkey with such fragile cargo.

In the language of the dream, that journey might have been the journey of Jesus' life, and it consisted of not only his birth, but his ministry and death as well. My father didn't say how far into the journey his brothers had died, but Jesus was just a young man, and only three years into his ministry when he was murdered. But these are just echoes, possible tangential relationships; they are not clear correlations to the dream.

The clearest correlations are the most thrilling, of course, for the dream hints that Jesus is not the only departed brother. Humanity has been granted a wealth of siblings, each of whom have passed, but have not left us alone. Choose them if you like from the West, Moses, Zoroaster, Diotema, or Mohammad. Or choose them from the East, Lao Tzu, Krishna, Sita, or Buddha. Each of them were given to us as flesh and blood siblings, great lights who have journeyed with us in the flesh, and given us great comfort. And though each of them have died, they have not passed on.

My uncles in the dream had taken a vow not to pass over until my father did. This is similar to the vow of the Buddha and of all the great Bodhisattvas of the Mahayana Buddhist tradition, who say, "I will refuse to enter into my own bliss, I will not enter Nirvana, until all beings are liberated." Jesus himself said it when he declared to the disciples, "Lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world."

And this is the promise of what we in the West call the incarnation, what our friends in the East call the avatar. In these brothers and sisters, we see that the divine is not an absentee landlord, but that the divine loves and cares about the world, and takes an active hand in its unfolding. Through them the divine has entered the life of the world as one of us. Through them we see with our own eyes how divinity has wedded itself to us, has pitched its tent alongside ours, has made common cause with this planet and its creatures.

In the language of my dream, these are our brothers who have set out on this journey in the same wagon. And even though they have died, they have not left us, but through keeping their memory alive, through the writings we have of their words and deeds, and most especially through the active participation of their spirits with the life of the world, they continue to inspire us, to lead us, to journey with us, to intercede for us, to bless us-and for their attentions, we are eternally blessed.

Just as my father and I were working to hitch up the wagon, we all have further to travel. And like my father in the dream, we are comforted by the memory of these our brothers who are dead but not gone. Like him, we continue to tell their stories, and like him, we are not sad, but encouraged, for we believe that they watch over us and protect us and are with us still.

So today, let us wish one another a Merry Christmas:

-not as a relic of a magical way of thinking that in our secret hearts we believe we have outgrown as a culture,
-not as a holy day promoted by a mindless system of belief that threatens to enslave our souls,
-not as a social obligation we do not feel but are obligated to acknowledge;

but as a celebration of the kind of divinity that considers itself blessed to be born into our family, who considers it joy to travel with us, and who loves us so much that it promises to stay with us until our own journeys are complete.

It is indeed something that we, with all of our post-modern sensibilities firmly in place, can embrace with a whole heart. We can enjoy our myths but not be enslaved by them, because we know the truths to which they point, and can affirm them without betraying our sense of integrity.

The Word we praise in our liturgy consists of the highest and truest convictions that we as a people can aspire to, and in Jesus, this Word was made flesh and walked among us. But not in Jesus exclusively; Moses also brought forth the Word in his time, as well as the Buddha and Mohommad. Over time, their lives, too, have taken on the properties of a dream, a mixture of history and fancy with one essential thing in common, they all point to the truth. Just as all dreams come in the service of the health and wholeness of the dreamer, the myths and traditions of each culture are the collective dream of that culture, and they come in the interest of the health and wholeness of all peoples in that culture.

So let us take seriously our dreams, let us relate them to one another in the morning-most specifically, this Christmas morning, which is also the first day of Hanukkah. For we have been given many dreams by many brothers who may be dead, but are not gone. Lo, they are with us always, even unto the end of the world. Let us pray:

Sing: Emmaneul, our God is with us, and if God is with us, who can stand against us, our God is with us, Emmanuel.

Amen, amen, amen.