What Child Is This?
A Sermon by Rev. Nadine Swahnberg, written for 
Columbine UU Church, delivered December 24, 2000

    The story has been told now for almost two thousand years. Two of the four evangelists of what we call the New Testament seem to think it is the proper beginning to the story of Jesus, and on the whole, they have overpowered the other two in convincing the churches of the last sixty generations---counting three to a century--to follow their interpretation.  

    What child is this?  For those of you who have reached some kind of closure on this question--comfortable or uncomfortable--I invite you to unbutton your mind anew for a moment to let the question play.

    Mark thought the Gospel story ought to begin with the baptism of Jesus, and that is how he tells it. No birth story there. John has a cosmic myth about somebody called the Logos, the "Word," who was "with with God and was God"-- being incarnated into history via a virgin.  John may have given many of us the official spindoctor treatment on the birth stories in the other two Gospels. If you buy into them at all, he implies, the birth stories revolve around trying to show Jesus was God.

    But relax your mind again. The birth stories themselves in Luke and Matthew seem not to come with all the theological paraphernalia of Incarnation.  They seem to come from other sources, other myths perhaps.  The desire to explain Jesus takes us back, in Matthew and Luke,  not outside history but inside history to a high probability that Jesus, at one time, was a baby.

    Jewish religion rarely ventured onto other planes than the earthly when trying to tell about the significance of uncanny events.  The events that Matthew and Luke add are the shepherds, the angels, the Virginhood of the Virgin and the excluded, poor, Jews who were his supposed father and genetic mother, and the the taxridden Roman-occupied town in which this baby was born.

    Before the story evolved into the triple decker universe of John, before the Trinitarian theology, the story was about tracing back as far as the eye could see or the heart could know to the beginning of Jesus.  And what they found at that point was a baby--the smallest, most vulnerable, most apparently insignificant representative of humankind.

    Pagan myths about the rebirth of the sun in the womb of the Goddess, of Attis, of Mithras, no doubt figured in the thought climate of the middle east as the Evangelists wrote.  Do they go that route? Not really. The story remains primarily on the human plane with a baby whose human credentials are at least half intact.

    Into the story whose climax is this birth, Luke adds shepherds who respond to angelic messengers, and Matthew adds kings or wise men, people from the lowest and highest strata of society. Interestingly, the version that has both Magi and shepherds simultaneously worshipping exists nowhere except in the syncretistic imagination of the Church!   Both these additions act on the reader to tell us what to feel--to add emotions of wonder and awe.

Now I have done my literary analysis and each of us is left with the question of the significance of it all.

    The Hindus have a word, Darshan, which describes what you do when you go to see anyone or anything that is full of divinity such that it jumps out at you. It could be a certain ritual held at a temple, or very often it is just a holy person or someone who is regarded as being an avatar of the Divine.  Or it could be just a relic or object. Some Darshans are "set up" and others just occur spontaneously.  Diana Eck, professor of comparative religion at Harvard, has a book called Darshan:  Seeing the Divine in India, in which she talks  about her experiences with this.  I like this word because I think it explains what we are being asked to do about the baby Jesus. The experience of Darshanning is. I think, a more primordial and basic human one than any kind of a belief system. I am going to use this word because I think it avoids some of the problems we bump up against of we start using Western words like worship or adore.  Matthew, Mark, Luke and John don't agree about the theology or about who was there or what happened any more than a random cross-section of UUs. So I ask you to imagine, as in the Donkey's Dream,  that folks really Darshanned there.

That shepherds and Magi Darshanned.

    That angels, who spend their celestial time Darshanning and thus are connoisseurs of Darshanning, definitely and mightly Darshanned at the birth of Jesus.

    When a child is born to us ordinary human beings, there is the fundamental experience of wonder that seizes our hearts. However difficult the labor, however troubled the pregnancy, whatever we may have expected, the tiny baby lying in our arms is beyond our powers to create and calls forth a Darshanning, and a wondering love.  Its beauty, its perfection or imperfection, but most of all its human potential, seem to call this forth.

    Sometimes we UUs seem to demand of ourselves that we be morally transformed into better people without explaining how that happens.  I think the answer, as far as I can tell, is that Darshanning happens and when it happens, we--without particularly trying---become better. I believe that there are many experiences and stories that can bring us face to face with the Divine.  Sheila's  wonderful story this morning was, to me, about Darshanning the divine at the Cherelyn Nursing Home, which was for her a life- altering event.

So let me conclude with my two statements of Faith/Imagination which are my answer to the question I posed to you :

    The Baby who was supposedly born when Jesus was supposedly born was a baby who, if you can imagine you had been there, would have caused immense and deep Darshanning.

AND

If you had Darshanned at the Birth of Jesus, --as the Donkey in our story did---you would be quite an amazingly different being for it. 

And so my invitation and wish for you at this Christmas tide is syncretistic, as our faith is syncretistic:

    May lots of things cause you to Darshan this Christmastide.  May depth and grace and splendor leap out at you from children's faces, from elder faces, ------from candle light, from the trees, from menorahs, from the snow, from the dark. And may you know and store all the wonder and significance of this story of A Child. As we light the candles, may you experience the Darshanning of each other's shining faces.  Blessed Be and Amen.

Columbine Unitarian Universalist Church
6724 South Webster Street
Littleton, Colorado 80128
303-972-1716

Sunday Services At 10:00 AM