All Grown Up? Part One

All Grown Up? Part One

Aiken Unitarian Unversalist Church

January 8 2012

There is a short quote from Dr Martin Luther King, Jr, in the box above the Order of Service – here is the complete quotation:

We must develop and maintain the capacity to forgive. He who is devoid of the power to forgive, is devoid of the power to love. There is some good in the worst of us and some evil in the best of us. When we discover this, we are less prone to hate our enemies.

Forgiveness is not an occasional act; it is a permanent attitude. http://www.thekingcenter.org/history/quotations

csmonitor.com

 As with so many of King’s words, they pose a very powerful challenge! Most of us are quick to forgive ourselves but hold grudges against people who commit a trespass against us of the same – or even lesser – magnitude. We don’t usually find it too difficult to jump into conflict, but it’s often the jumping out of it that is the trickier part.

However, maybe not all Unitarian Universalists know that our liberal religious tradition offers us the perfect way to get back into right relationship with each other when we have acted out, or have burnt, not built, our bridges with one another. Today we will explore the nature of conflict, how we get caught up in it before we know it, and how we can see it as a positive learning experience when we pay attention to Unitarian Universalist congregational polity.

1.    Expectations of church perfection and harmony

What do we believe about the way congregations should get along? Peter Steinke in his book Congregational Leadership in Anxious Times, says that most of us have very idealistic expectations of the church: it will always reflect and demonstrate love; if any division is acknowledged, that is admitting to being a defective organization; and in some fundamentalist theologies, conflict is sinful or of the devil.

Christian churches have an interesting role model – the early Church, which is described in the New Testament Book of Acts. And what a picture of harmony, peace, love, charity! (Steinke, p104) But this utopian community soon gives way to lies, ruptures, and theological disagreements! And of course, once the apostle Paul begins his church-planting ministry, he soon is writing letters advising, admonishing, and haranguing churches that are going off the rails and losing sight of the agape love to which Christians should aspire.

2.    What is conflict?

Gil Rendle in the book Leading Change in the Congregation reminds us that conflict is not the same as a fight! His definition is from a different perspective: “Conflict is two or more ideas in the same place at the same time” (165). Given that definition, maybe it is a miracle that we are still in business, because with UUs there are always at least two ideas in the same place at the same time! But it’s a helpful definition that normalizes the idea of conflicting ideas.

3.    How can conflict arise?

However, conflict can arise in several ways, due to the structure of our congregations and how power is seen to play a part in them (‘Finding the Optimal Level of Conflict’ by David R. Brubaker, Alban Institute 2011).

Maybe conflict comes about when there is an attempt to shift the power imbalance by those with less power, trying to take it away from those who have centralized power. Or it can erupt when responsibilities overlap because roles are poorly defined, and once they become contested, tension and conflict arise. Maybe the common ground between parties in conflict is that they all love the church and want what is best for it, and just have different ways of expressing that. But sometimes people come to church “with their own agendas, which might not benefit the congregation as a whole” (Michael Durall, The Almost Church, 47).

Whatever the cause, we know that conflict can escalate into full-blown warfare before we know it! In churches, conflict often arises from anxiety. Peter Steinke has identified ‘13 Triggers of Anxiety’ (Steinke, 15-17); you can, if you choose, check off in your mind which ones you think your church is experiencing:

1)   money – raising it, distributing it, managing/mismanaging it

2)   sex/sexuality – be here for next week’s sermon!

3)   Minister’s leadership style – either a lack of or too much of leadership

4)   Lay leadership style – is it enabling or threatening, is it hands-off or hands-on?

5)   Growth/survival – when congregations feel attendance is in decline or growth has slowed

6)   Boundaries – when people overstep their authority

7)   Trauma/transition – emotional reactions to key events like extreme weather damage to the physical structure of a church or retirement of a minister

8)   Staff conflict/resignation – emotional upset due to staff disruption

9)   Harm done to or death of a child – stirs up a sense of helplessness in a congregation where normally children are protected and nurtured

10)         Old and new – worship practices like changing from candles to stones in joys and concerns or changing the time of worship

11)         contemporary versus traditional worship – intense connections to styles of worship

12)         gap between the ideal and the real – when the church’s ideals or mission is disrupted by self-concerns of members

13)        building/construction, space, territory – modifying existing space, or when growth squeezes usable space and threatens congregational activities and meetings.

However many times we are told that anxiety is normal, just one of the most common triggers of anxiety can heighten tension…and having more than one of these at any given time will be a sure cause for conflict.

When we do have conflict erupt in our midst, it pretty much takes a pattern where first there is escalation of a disagreement, perhaps with painful exchanges that hurt people’s feelings. Conflict quickly becomes competition, and the primitive brain kicks in with an ‘us versus them’ polarity. Reason is overtaken by passion, and we fail to respond with either reason or love. The more aggressive we become, the more we are likely to lie, take advantage, or ignore rules in order to promote our own sense of righteousness. Edward de Bono says, “ Being right is not too difficult. You choose your perception, you select your information. You leave out what does not suit you, you drag in some general purpose value words, you throw in a sneer or two about the opposition, and you are a fine fellow who has made a fine speech.” (107)

The reaction to one another, more than to the issue that began the conflict, is what can disturb a congregation’s balance (106).

4.    How we survive conflict

It’s interesting to observe how people deal with conflict and how they adopt survival behaviors. Three ways of dealing with conflict complicate the confrontation of conflict: Avoidance is the chosen style of many churchgoers; when it arises in church they walk away, sometimes then leaving those who created the conflict in a greater position of strength. Accommodation or appeasing is a style that also gives control to opposing forces. This style is often the choice of church leaders because they place a premium value on tranquility and stability, a ‘don’t rock the boat’ mentality. And compromise never solves a problem but just leaves both sides with most but not all of what they wanted; this pseudo-solution can almost guarantee the reemergence of conflict at a later date.

But these are the ways we often react, because we just want to survive the conflict. If we rush to a solution then that may prevent us from getting to the deeper issue. It is a way to reduce the motivation for members to stay on the issue and push for substantive change.

Tom Owen-Towle writes in his book Growing a Beloved Community that we should fight fairly, not cruelly; for impact, not injury. He says that sometimes church members must commit to “entering the debating chambers, share their piece, listen to their tablemates, then stay put…even though their first impulse may be to disappear as quickly as possible” (69). He goes on to observe that the Navajo sometimes practice extreme togetherness during times of stress: When someone has violated a principle or person, the townspeople gather to burn the offender’s home down. Then they regroup and, alongside the violator, help to rebuild a new one (70).

The Catholic monk and theologian Thomas Merton also emphasizes the need to stay put, when he speaks of the ‘vow of stability’: “our allegiance to the common values that establish our church’s very being in the first place must always supercede our personal positions” (69).

I don’t like conflict. And it is ironic that my spiritual journey began as a result of a conflict. As a teenager I joined a Southern Baptist church and was baptized there; the young minister and his wife had recently arrived and they were doing a great job building up the youth presence in the church. I felt energized and valued in my faith…and then, the church deacons fired the minister. I could sound uncharitable and say that that is what Southern Baptists do, that they can’t seem to survive without constant conflict – but my mother, who is Southern Baptist, says that so it must be true! Anyway, I decided to leave that church and start looking; I had a bookcase full of Collier’s Harvard Classics, and they contained a selection of holy writings from the major world faiths. I went through them methodically, and quite liked the Buddhist and Hindu teachings I found there. I told one of my friends at school that I was without a church and she invited me to hers; when I walked through the door and smelled the incense, I fell in love with the Catholic church. And remained that way for three and a half decades, until I discovered that I had been a UU all along!

When my home church had a situation two years ago that resulted in the resignation of its minister, I did feel very much like running away again. When the minister left, there were two of us who as ministry associates had pastoral responsibilities for the church until our new interim minister arrived. But the vow of stability that Merton talks about held sway, and my own surrender to the common values we shared as members of the church helped to hold me to it. Why would anyone give up the spiritual connection that has been so important in their formation as a human being because of a conflict? To me, abandoning my church and my ability to worship with my beloved community was not an even trade-off.

The year after a new interim minister came to my home church, she held a reconciliation service for the congregation, and did so with trepidation. Inviting the members to engage in peacemaking was very powerful; in the open forum, only one person spoke in anger against another one present, and after that expression of pent-up anger and sorrow, the other person asked if they could meet afterwards to talk about it, and they did in fact reconcile. It was a powerful exercise of congregational polity and covenant; the minister did not wave a magic wand over the sanctuary and erase all ill will, but she – and we - created a safe space in which everyone who wished to could speak about how they were feeling, and then all of us agreed to go forward in good faith as a united congregation. Being the ‘peace’ you wish to see in the world means that you do not lose your way in the jungle of anger and hurt and blame that is created by conflict.

5.    UU polity

And unlike some churches, we have an advantage because of our UU polity. That word is key to any understanding of our formation as a faith. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Protestant dissenters in England and New England based their idea of covenant upon an understanding of the primitive Christian church from the New Testament. The covenant was a radical departure from the practices and polity of the established Church of England, because it held that each member of the congregation had a right and responsibility in matters of decision-making including shaping church policy. This is still a feature of UU covenants today. But what is more, the ancient covenant between the Hebrew god Yahweh and the Israelite people that is found in the Hebrew scriptures still is the grounding for our covenant. The scriptural cycle of right relations takes for granted the inherent aspect of human weakness in any relationship. Being free as humans to break promises and to fail to live up to our responsibilities is not seen as irreparable behavior, because the convenantal cycle is naturally one of rupture, return, repair and reform (Everett, William Johnson. Recovering the Covenant. http://www.religiononline.

org/showarticle.asp?title=1495, 4).

The obligation that binds us who join in covenant is one that resists and absorbs the inevitable stresses and strains in human relationships, and relies heavily upon trust that coexists with a common faith. Dr. Jan Garrett (Toward an Ethics of Right

Relations, http://www.wku.edu/~jan.garrett/ethics/rrelatio.htm, 5) recalls that the long‐term covenant relationship between Yahweh and Abraham and his descendents “had its ups and downs. It seemed at times to be broken beyond repair and yet was frequently renewed.” She goes on to say that, in covenantal relationships, interactions will not always go smoothly, but “one does not merely walk away when the interaction hits a rough spot” (Garrett, 6).

We have through our covenant a relationship that is entered into voluntarily through binding mutual promises; it is not self-serving, and it is not short‐termed in its scope. The covenant helps us weather difficult patches and assumes that adjustments may be necessary.

There is a growing use of a covenant of right relations in UU congregations today. As the theologian Conrad Wright comments, “Our polity is important because it defines the way in which we believe human beings should be related to one another for ecclesiastical purposes, and it may be a guide or model for human relationships of other kinds.”(Wright, Congregational Polity, 1997, 2)

6.    Covenanting back to happiness

If a church already has a covenant then why would it encourage its members to create a covenant of right relations?

The sense of continuity of a congregation is valued through the historic covenant, but the identity of the congregation of today should be shaped by revisiting and revising the covenant in order to create and sustain relationship among its members as it moves forward. The UU Church of Silver Spring, Maryland, explains its right relations covenant this way:

It answers the question ‘How do we intend to behave so that we can create a welcoming community, a safe and sacred space?’ Covenants guide us when we are working well together, but conflict is inevitable when people live and work together in community. During conflict, a covenant can also remind us of the need to work through it in ways that are consistent with our community values. (UUCSS Right Relations Covenant, www.uucss.org/relations/Covenant%20FAQs.htm, accessed April 10, 2009).

In these and many other covenants of right relations, the identity of the congregation is clearly linked to its actions and thus to values that drive those actions: openness in communication, mannered behavior, and managed conflict are

ideals, set forth in good spirit and optimism, and aspirational in the sense that, as Rebecca Parker urges, “We need to be what we want to see, and make visible an alternative to the forms of oppression, alienation and injustice alive in our time” (Rebecca Parker, “What They Dreamed Be Ours to Do,” in Herz, Walter (ed). Redeeming Time, 1999, 90).

7.    Can there be benefits of conflict?

One of the more striking and perhaps the bravest feature of a covenant of right relations is the expectation that a covenant will be broken at some point. From ancient times, the cyclic nature of failure and repair, estrangement and reconciliation, is explicit in the covenant promise.

That we as humans who live in community need to constantly balance our individual needs with those of our neighbor, is a reality that many of us today ignore at our peril.  Perhaps the reason so many UU congregations have worked to produce and enact behavioral covenants is that they see that, at least in this one segment of their lives, they can fashion a relationship with others that then gives them hope for other parts of their lives where mutuality is still an elusive concept.

 So perhaps our moment of epiphany today is the realization that conflict can be positive and beneficial, if we can stay in the moment and work through it with the help of our covenant: to quote Thich Nhat Hanh, “For things to reveal themselves to us, we need to be ready to abandon our views about them.” (Thich Nhat Hanh, Being Peace, http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/9074.Thich_Nhat_Hanh)

So, as we sang in our opening hymn, ‘Don’t be afraid of some change’! The power of our shared faith is that within it we have diversity, but also, that we value the need for harmony: Wally Armbruster reminds us: “If everyone’s singing the same note, that’s not harmony, it’s monotony. Harmony happens when people sing different notes – some that sound like discord at first suddenly start to sound great…once your ear gets used to the idea” (Durall, 166).

May it be so, blessed be, amen.

Gaye Ortiz 1/8/2012

Jesus Our Brother, Kind and Good

“Jesus Our Brother, Kind and Good”

Aiken Unitarian Universalist Church

December 25 2011

Dr Gaye Ortiz

Sophia Fahs, in her story about the birth of Jesus in Long Ago and Many Lands, writes about the confused aftermath of the visit of the Magi:

When indoor and alone with their babe, [Mary and Joseph] (the two) could talk again. Did not the strangers know that Joseph was just a poor carpenter? And that Mary was only the daughter of a village farmer? How could their baby ever be a King?

This, then, is the old, old wonder tale about the birth of Jesus. What really happened no one can now know.

We do know, however, that this child of Mary and Joseph never became a King. Nor did he ever wish to be made a King. Jesus was a poor man by choice. When he was grown, he did not even have a home he could call his own. He was a teacher who traveled from town to town, teaching people how to live and what being good and doing right ought to mean.

Most of those who lived in that long-ago time have been forgotten, but Jesus is still remembered.

[Excerpt from Sophia Fahs, “The Birth of Jesus, A Story from Palestine”; from Long Ago and Many Lands]

We all know the power of a newborn – yes, power. That might be a strange term to use for a helpless and vulnerable creature, but a baby just born is a wonder of nature, and that holds a power for many of us. Not only is it a powerful experience, but a magical moment in time when we wish the best for this new child of the universe: what will she grow up to be? Who will he look like? What a tremendous responsibility we, as parents and grandparents, realize is contained within that tiny form.

The UU minister Erik Wikstrom wrote in his blog about St Francis, who we just spoke of in relation to the Christmas crèche. Quoting from a book by Franciscan priest and poet Fr Murray Bodo, he says,

"At Christmas it was the infant Christ who was born again in human hearts, and it struck Francis that God came to earth as a baby so that we would have someone to care for.  Christmas was the dearest of feasts because it meant that God was now one of us.  Flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone, this child we could approach without fear.  We could be silly and uninhibited as we sought to make Him laugh.  We could be totally ourselves because a child accepts us just as we are and screams with delight at our little performances on his behalf.

Someone to care for, someone to try and please, someone to love.  God, a helpless babe… We come out of ourselves if we are aware, because we now have responsibilities for God.  Not only the earth to till and creation to subdue, but now God to care for."”

[Erik Wikstrom http://a-ministers-musings.blogspot.com/2011/09/laid-in-manger.html]

It seems strange to think of God as a baby, but if you are a Christian and believe in the Trinity then it is not so far-fetched to think of the season of Advent as a time of preparing to welcome a baby God into the world. Except that the Puritans, one of the groups from which we trace our Christian heritage – were not terribly fond of the idea of celebrating the birth of the Christ child at this time of year. Did you know that during the time when Puritans ruled the English Parliament, they banned Christmas? It was replaced by a day of fasting, because the Purtians saw it as a pagan festival – and of course, they were correct about its December origins as the feast of Yule – and they called it a ‘popish’ festival that had no biblical basis. If anyone cooked meat for the Christmas feast they ran the risk of their home being raided and the meat confiscated by the Army! Ordinary Christians resented this kind of treatment, to the extent that it provoked riots in Kent. 

In both England and the American colonies the Puritans attempted to ban Christmas: here, celebrating Christmas could result in a fine levied against you. Christmas was still not widely celebrated by the time the Declaration of Independence was written, and in Scotland Christmas was only recognized as a legal holiday in 1967, thanks to the dropping of objections by the Church of Scotland.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_controversy ]

But for Unitarian Universalists today – even as we happily sing about Jesus Our Brother, Kind and Good – we may be feeling uncomfortable, not with the pagan origins of the mid-winter celebrations, but with the other Christological baggage that comes along with Christmas. The claim that Jesus was divine; the claim that he was sent to become, as an adult, a sacrifice for our sins; the claim that he is in heaven with God the Father. How do we reconcile the image of the lovely baby Jesus – as the Rev Keith Goheen calls him, “The Christ child, the star child of the Light, [who] calls forth the heart's wisdom through the power of innocence” – with the Savior/Messiah of the Gospels?

Let me begin by saying that Christianity is one of the sources for our Unitarian Universalist faith; and if you were to be transported back a hundred years to sit in a very cold Unitarian church pew, say, in Boston, you might not recognize the Unitarianism as today’s with which you are familiar. For if there is one thing about our faith, as it has developed historically, it has evolved theologically – and our ideas about Jesus are no exception to that shift. What I will attempt to do this morning is to give a series of alternative perspectives on Jesus, not just from Unitarian Universalists, but from Judeo-Christian theology as well.

According to Dr Thomas D Wintle on the website uuchristian.org:

There is a group of UUs known as ‘Classical UU Christians’
who find the dogmatism of rigid orthodoxy to be unacceptable, and pure secularism to be unsatisfying; theirs is a low-keyed Christianity that focuses on the human life and ethical teachings of Jesus. They see doctrines such as the Trinity and the Atonement as unnecessary; the Bible, interpreted with reason and modern scholarship, provides the myths and symbols and stories that enable them to speak of God and to instill moral values.

Believing that theirs is “the religion of Jesus, not the religion about Jesus,” they see the Galilean as a great teacher and the exemplar of a life of love to God and love to humankind. In the words of one layperson: “Jesus is the leader you don’t adore, but can’t ignore.“

To be a Christian, they might say, is “to follow Jesus.”

It sounds as if these UU Christians have tried to tiptoe their way through the 2000-year-old minefield of Christology! ‘Following’ Jesus – which Jesus?

In answering that, we need to go back to the Unitarians in the 18^th century on both sides of the Atlantic, who were at the forefront of a sea change in how Christianity was viewed. They played a big part in the Radical Reformation, and at this time were grappling with two issues to do with authority: dissent and the established church, and the role that reason plays in revealed religion. The development of liberal religion saw the rejection of the Athanasian creed, which Unitarians rejected because it was not true to Scripture or to reason.

Then the divinity of Jesus became an issue in the early stages of liberal religion. An Irish Presbyterian minister named Thomas Emlyn produced an antitrinitarian argument that separated Jesus from God, based on evidence from Jesus’ own words in the New Testament. Emlyn argued that Jesus could not be God because Jesus appealed to a God other than himself, for example, when on the cross: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” And when raising the dead, Jesus said he could do nothing on his own. Emlyn was arrested for his blasphemy, but he was the last dissenter to be imprisoned for denying the Trinity – the tide was turning.

The next century saw the Unitarian rejection of Christian doctrine, seen as having deviated over the centuries from that of the original Gospels. Thomas Jefferson – who, although admiring of Unitarians, never became one - wrote in 1822, “Had the doctrines of Jesus been preached always as pure as they came from his lips, the whole civilized world would now have been Christian.” (David Parke, The Epic of Unitarianism, Skinner 1957, 99) In fact, most of you will know that Jefferson compiled his own Bible, called “The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth”. It leaves out any mention of the miracles surrounding the birth of Jesus – no angel Gabriel, no virgin birth, no angels or shepherds or Magi (37).

Beacon Press published it as The Jefferson Bible in 1989; in his foreword, Forrest Church wrote that by Jefferson’s reading, it was Jesus’ “unusual life on earth that truly mattered” (viii).

For one famous Unitarian author, the central ideas of 19^th century Unitarianism were the basis of his work: “ the belief that Jesus was a human being who exemplified a truly religious life; the rejection of materialism and the rejection of a God of stern judgment; the rejection of dogma; an inclusive rather than an exclusive religion, and an emphasis on doing good works” (Michael Timko, “Ebenezer Scrooge’s Conversion, UU World, Winter 2005, 80).

This Unitarian was, of course, Charles Dickens. Doug Muder, writing in a fable called “Ghosts of Unitarian Christmas” (UU World 2009, 22-5), imagines Dickens as a ghost of Unitarian Christmases Past who visits the central character, a young man named Ben, and tells him,

“When I wrote A Christmas Carol, I wasn’t really recapturing the lost spirit of Christmas. My Christmas wasn’t about the birth of one sect’s savior, it was about the brotherhood and sisterhood of all people. It was about compassion and friendship and family. Universal values.” To which Ben responds, “It was a Unitarian Christmas!”

Dickens wrote his own Life of Jesus, entitled The Life of Our Lord. It was not published while he lived because it was written especially for his children in 1849; it finally was published by his descendants a century later. Dickens concludes this work with a summary which sounds quite like something Muder’s fictional ghost would say:

Remember! - It is christianity TO DO GOOD always - even to those who do evil to us. It is christianity to love our neighbour as ourself, and to do to all men as we would have them Do to us. It is Christianity to be gentle, merciful, and forgiving, and to keep those qualities quiet in our own hearts, and never make a boast of them, or of our prayers or of our love of God, but always to shew that we love Him by humbly trying to do right in everything. If we do this, and remember the life and lessons of Our Lord Jesus Christ, and try to act up to them, we may confidently hope that God will forgive us our sins and mistakes, and enable us to live and die in Peace.

But there were other ideas at the time about who Jesus was that not only stressed, but praised, his humanity. John White Chadwick, in the 1894 book “Old and New Unitarian Belief”, defends the Jesus who is ‘only’ human, saying that using that term with any inference of contempt or disrespect is to belittle the amazing nature of humanity:

Such is man’s body, such his mind, such his affections, such his conscience, such his sense of infinite and eternal things, that within the scope of his terrestrial and immortal possibility there is room enough for all that Jesus was and did to swing with easy motion, like planets on their heavenly way. Not ‘a mere man,’ but a man, and such a man that, when we have torn veil after veil of mythological illusion and come face to face with him at length, or as nearly as may be, all our minds go out to him in gladsome recognition of his spiritual genius, and all our hearts in loving admiration of his broad humanity, his compassion for the poor and miserable, his demand for inward holiness, as well as outward homage to the moral law. (162)

In the 19^th century biblical scholarship became focused on digging into the origins of Gospel accounts of Jesus. It became clear to many scholars that Mark was the earliest Gospel to be written, and that Matthew and Luke were drawing upon a common source that became know as Q (from the German word for source, Quelle). 

There was a trend to strip away all additions to the story of Jesus and to get back to ‘primitive Christianity’. During the 1800s there were a number of Lives of Jesus – most by German authors, leading up to the publication in 1906 of one of the most famous, The Quest for the Historical Jesus, by Albert Schweitzer. In the US this trend influenced a Baptist minister, Walter Rauschenbusch, to publish The Social Principles of Jesus in 1916, which placed Jesus in the context of a social rights advocate who, if here today, would fight for workers and labor unions and even feminists. According to this perspective, the Golden Rule and the Sermon on the Mount served as the primary grounding for Jesus’ teachings.

The historical trend of the twentieth century has, among other things, identified Jesus as a teacher; the focus for the biblical scholars in the 1950s was to find the original sayings of Jesus, and the Quest for the Historical Jesus movement attempted to separate these sayings from the myth built up around Jesus. In addition, redaction criticism became another focus for scholars, who explored how the authors of the Gospels interpreted Jesus through the theology of early Christian communities, such as the Greek and Jewish Christians. In the 1960s and 70s Jesus became for scholars a wandering charismatic who preached and healed, leaving his family and home and relying on support from the rural communities he visited. Liberation theology at that time suggested a picture of Jesus as rebel and liberator. The Jesus Seminar, begun by Robert Funk in 1985, is a series of meetings, with scholars who vote on the historicity of the Gospels after analysis using the latest in New Testament scholarship. The seminar’s conclusions point to Jesus being a ‘peasant sage’ who verifiably spoke only “90 out of the 1500-odd statements attributed to him by early Christian texts” (Charlotte Allen, The Human Christ, Lion, 1998, 276). The most well-known Jesus Seminar scholar, John Dominic Crossan, sees Jesus as an advocate of egalitarian, anti-patriarchal society, who breaks bread with social outcasts (279).

Then we have the Dead Sea Scrolls discovered in the mid-20^th century, which are providing a new line of scholarship, re-situating Jesus within a Jewish context and helping to correct anti-Semitism in some Christian teachings. Jesus from this perspective follows the pattern of Hebrew prophecy, in that he taught much that fits into a Jewish ethical framework but at the same time, his appeal to divine authority is in tension with some Jewish laws and even to some extent, the Torah.

So which Jesus is laying in the manger for you? Did you ever think that it would be so complicated to consider the nature of this tiny child born in humble circumstances? Maybe the Jesus that Unitarian Universalists most identify with is none of the above…and instead, is very much like what most of us imagine each of us is, a non-conformist. Although as a congregation we are walking together in a common covenant, the influence of Ralph Waldo Emerson on our movement has made us UUs very proud to be individualistic, mold-breakers, not likely to follow along in any movement where we are herded like sheep. One of our most ardent social activist ministers from the 1950s, the Rev A. Powell Davies, wrote about the credo of the nonconformist – which sounds like a contradiction in terms!

He argued that Jesus very plainly demonstrated that

“he was a non-conformist--as he was bound to be, since he was a spiritual and ethical genius. He attacked prevailing views. He stated his own views clearly and emphatically. And the people who heard him recognized that they were hearing voices out of their own minds and memories. When he said that we should love and not hate, he said something that his hearers already recognized as a thought which they themselves had almost entertained. So with most else that he said. When he spoke, he was reinforced by insights that his hearers had rejected.

Religion has always been in need of non-conformists. And never more than now. The old ways are not meeting the new needs, and they cannot meet them. There must be fresh thinking, adventurous and yet deeply realistic thinking--which is only possible if the old patterns are challenged and the weary, unsufficing creeds of yesterday discarded. Yet, the non-conformist is greatly feared and misunderstood.” [http://www.dmuuc.org/Davies/CredoNonconformist.html#ixzz1hKMiN5MA]

Davies wrote these words in April of 1954, and in November of that same year another activist minister took up the theme of Jesus as non-conformist: Martin Luther King Jr used Romans 12 verse 2 as his proof text:

“And be not conformed to this world but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind ”

[Martin Luther King, Jr, “Transformed Nonconformist” Nov 1954 http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/primarydocuments/Vol6/Nov1954TransformedNonconformist.pdf]

This sermon came shortly after King was installed as pastor in his Montgomery church:

The spiritual strength and moral courage of Jesus amid the temptation in the wilderness is our eternal challenge. Jesus was born at a time when the majority of people thought of the Kingdom as a political kingdom and thought of the Messiah as the one who would restore this political kingdom with all of his power and pomp and riches. And all of the temptations that Satan offered Christ were temptations to fall in line with this type of material political kingdom. In other words he was urging Christ to conform to wishes of the mob. But in the midst of such a plea we can hear Christ saying in no uncertain terms “Get thee behind me Satan.”  As if to say, “I will not bow, for I have orders from an authority not of this world to build a new kind of kingdom, a kingdom that will one day rock the world, a kingdom that will shake the hinges from the gates of the Roman Empire. It will not be a kingdom political in structure and materialistic in outlook, it will be a kingdom of the spirit.

I realize that at this time this type of kingdom does not conform to the majority opinion. But I will not bow.

Who will take the attitude of Jesus and be a sincere nonconformist? Today we stand on the brink of moral and physical destruction and the great need of the hour is sincere nonconformists. Men who will stand amid a world of materialism and treat all men as brothers, men who will stand up in a world that attempts to solve its problems by war and declare that he who lives by the sword will die by the sword.

So Dr King encourages us all to be non-conformists like Jesus. Forrest Church wrote in A Chosen Faith (Beacon, 1998, 7) that “the important thing about Jesus is not his supposed miraculous birth or the claim he was resurrected from death, but rather how he lived. The power of his love, the penetrating simplicity of his teachings, and the force of his example of service on behalf of the disenfranchised and downtrodden is what is crucial. The Apostles’ Creed and other such statements of dogmatic theology entirely miss this point. They seem to suggest “if you believe in Jesus, you can live forever”, not “if you believe as Jesus, you can live well.”

We know that Jesus paid for his non-conformity with his life…so did Dr King, and so do people still all across this planet who are searching for freedom and justice. If this is the Jesus we find in the crib, a Jesus who speaks out for truth, for peace, for justice, for love, then we welcome him gladly this Christmas morning.

May it be so, Blessed Be, Amen.

Images:

Nativity http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/62/Geertgen_tot_Sint_Jans_002.jpg/180px-Geertgen_tot_Sint_Jans_002.jpg

Thomas Jefferson

http://www.thefamouspeople.com/profiles/thomas-jefferson-72.php  

Unplug the Christmas machine!

“Unplug the Christmas Machine!”

Aiken Unitarian Universalist Church

Sunday December 4, 2011

Dr Gaye Ortiz

Warning! There are a lot of people – mainly conservative Christians – intent on ‘taking back’ Christmas. The assault on the phrase ‘happy holidays’ has been one part of this campaign – remember how we’re told that Merry Christmas is the correct greeting. Another part that began a couple of years ago was when one holiday décor company began advertising the CHRISTmas tree – an artificial Christmas tree with a giant cross where the trunk should be.

Now some of us may know that the cross did not become the dominant symbol of Christianity until about the 9^th century – so the CHRISTmas tree is an interesting mix: the Christmas tree is a nice, happy symbol of decorating and gift giving – the ultimate gift of a baby being born and the star of Bethlehem and angels singing. The cross is a grim reminder of that baby’s eventual end as a betrayed prophet.

What is it that rings your bell about Christmas? Is it a bell of joy or of alarm? Do you feel an increasing dread about this time of year because you realize the enormity of gearing up for a pre-Christmas marathon of shopping, cooking, cleaning, decorating?

Figure 1. Unplug the Christmas Machine http://www.harpercollins.com/harperimages/isbn/medium/5/9780688109615.jpg 

Well this morning’s sermon is inspired by a book called ‘Unplug the Christmas Machine’, written by Jo Robinson and Jean Coppock Staeheli back in 1982 and revised in 1991. If anything, the power of the Christmas machine has increased since then; there are more commercial messages that appear “as promises that bring tears to our eyes” (10).

But back to the reminders that Jesus is the reason for the season: look at the history of Christmas, and you might come to another conclusion! If we go back to 336 A.D. we see that December 25^th to the Romans was a festival day. The end of year celebrations that honored Mithras as the God of Light, and Saturn as the harvest god, were echoed by other harvest season festivals across Europe. Europeans made special foods, decorated their homes, gave gifts, sang and danced…and continued to do so as Christians! So the reign of Constantine, who dedicated the Roman Empire to Christ, legitimized the festivities but gave them another focus, so that by 1100 A.D. Christmas was the most important religious festival in Europe. Add to that the feast of St Nicholas, who distributed gifts to children, and the month of December was a whirlwind of Advent celebration. (Taking IT Global, www.tigweb.org/youth-media/panorama/article.html?ContentID=6722&print=true)

In the early 20th century Christmas shopping became increasingly important when companies began the manufacture of Christmas ornaments, lights and Christmas cards, and correspondingly stores and shops began to hire extra employees during the season to handle the increased sales. This year’s holiday spending is estimated to rise slightly from last year by about 3%, according to a Gallup survey of November spending – each of us expects to spend $764 for gifts (www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/commentaries/Gallup-Holiday-Spending-Survey-111116.php ).

Figure 2. http://www.getreligion.org/wp-content/photos/2011/01/12-days.jpg

And now we’re to the point – as you might have seen reported this week – that it would cost us over 101 thousand dollars to buy everything mentioned in the song ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas’! The price hike from last year’s cost of $97 thousand is mainly due to the sky-high cost of the partridges and the turtle doves, both of which have seen double-digit price hikes in the past year.

(http://newsfeed.time.com/2011/11/29/the-items-in-the-twelve-days-of-christmas-will-cost-you-more-than-100000/)

There is a serious point to this – a fraction of the money Americans spend in stores just in the month of December would supply the entire world with clean water. This figure comes from Rick McKinley, a pastor from Oregon, who is one of the leaders of the Advent Conspiracy, a movement that has 1500 member churches and organizations, as well as over 45,000 fans on Facebook. The Advent Conspiracy offers an alternative to how Christians spend their Christmas shopping money – they are urged to spend, but by giving donations to organizations such as Living Water International, which digs wells in developing countries.

Now UUs might see themselves in a bit of a quandary here: we might agree that consumerism is the American Mammon and therefore a Bad Thing; but do we want to align ourselves with conservative Christians who cast ‘secular consumerism’ as the enemy? The Rev David Bumbaugh writes:

“…the commercialism of the season and the secular quality of the season are equally ancient. The Saturnalia was an aggressively secular celebration in which all the ordinary rules and expectations of society were overturned, in which traditional pieties were mocked and traditional virtues flouted. The Kalends Festival was dominated by conspicuous consumption. [] Libanius, a non-Christian philosopher of the fourth century, [] details the extravagance with which the rich and the poor alike strove to celebrate the occasion. And as early as the fourth century, Christians were denouncing the Kalends festival for its commercialism and its lack of a concern for spiritual values. Thus, our discomfort with this ancient seasonal festival is older than Christmas itself, and elements which provoke that discomfort have not changed much over the centuries.” (www.trumbore.org/sam/sermons/sac1.htm )

Well if we are really uncomfortable, we might cast our lot not with the conservative Christians but with the social activists who came up with “Buy Nothing Day,” which this year was November 25/26 – Black Friday and Saturday. The first “Buy Nothing Day” came in 1992 in Vancouver Canada, created by the anticonsumerist magazine Adbusters, to help people reflect upon the issue of over-consumption. Last summer, the longtime editor of Adbusters, Kalle Lasn, felt that the Arab spring uprising and the convulsions felt by some of the world economies might herald an opportunity to tap into the frustration simmering in the circles of the American political left.

So building on the smaller “Buy Nothing Day” campaign, he decided to create and brand a larger campaign. On July 13, he and his colleagues created a new hash tag on Twitter: #OCCUPYWALLSTREET.

Figure 3http://robj98168.blogspot.com/2011/11/buy-nothing-day.html

Since the “Buy Nothing” campaign began in 1992, people in more than 65 nations have participated each Black Friday with public protest, engaging in activities like:

• A credit card cut up: people stand in a shopping center or mall with a pair of scissors and a poster inviting shoppers to put an end to their mounting debt with just one snip. OR…
• A Zombie walk: zombies wander around the mall with a blank stare and in this reflect the faces of the shoppers, their fellow zombies – when they are asked what they are doing they explain Buy Nothing Day. OR…
• The whirl-mart, where participants push their shopping carts around in a silent conga line without putting anything in the carts.

But the biggest Buy Nothing Day activities have a philanthropic flavor: the winter coat exchanges that occur in several states have locations where coats are collected and anyone who needs a coat is welcome to take one. (Wikipedia)

So there is a growing movement from different corners in our country to get away from the over-consumption that seems to plague Christmas, but are we fighting against something that – to be honest - we consider to be as American as apple pie? To quote Dave Barry, “Once again, we come to the Holiday Season, a deeply religious time that each of us observes, in his own way, by going to the mall of his choice” (http://thinkexist.com/quotation/once_again-we_come_to_the_holiday_season-a_deeply/202544.html).  Or is chronic shopping a gender thing, genetic in women? To quote Elayne Boosler: “When women are depressed, they eat or go shopping.  Men invade another country.  It's a whole different way of thinking.” (http://thinkexist.com/quotation/when_women_are_depressed-they_eat_or_go_shopping/205590.html)

Or should we consider over-consumption to be accepted as just human nature? To quote Rebecca Parker, ‘Economically, the dominant worldview regards human beings as self-interested individuals, motivated only by their personal desire to consume” (Blessing the World, 147).

Recent research into Christmas shopping has uncovered an affinity that some shoppers have with fairy tales. They “seriously enjoy Christmas gift shopping” because they see the activity as a consumer fairy tale “in which consumers employ magical agents, donors and helpers to overcome villains and obstacles as they seek out goods and services in their quest for happy endings”. ‘Triumph over hardship’ is a major theme of fairy tales, and so the challenge of having the perfect Christmas involves some of the same types of struggles and sacrifices as can be seen in Jack and the Beanstalk or Hansel and Gretel (http://news.illinois.edu/news/03/1211xmas.html).

Researchers from the University of Illinois and the University of Texas tracked four women for 7 years as they did their Christmas shopping, and then interviewed them about their “Christmas lives”. They found that the women were not content to have a ‘tolerable’ Christmas, but instead tried to outdo themselves each year, to create a more memorable Christmas than the previous year – a ‘fairy tale Christmas’. This term to them meant a Christmas in which they seek ‘happy endings for their celebrations, like those fairy tales that end with a joyous family reunion, the acquisition of precious goods, or recognition for creativity and cleverness’ (http://news.illinois.edu/news/03/1211xmas.html).    Using the terminology of fairy tales, these shoppers, who could be cast as ‘heroines’ in their shopping experiences, had ‘helpers’ like Santa, (typically their mothers). And sometimes the ‘villains’, who interfered in different ways with the heroines’ ‘quest’ for harmonious family celebrations, were their fathers.

The key to this study seems to be what makes these shoppers happy: Ezra Klein, writing in The Prospect about Christmas consumerism, says that when he reflects at Thanksgiving on what he is thankful for, “no matter how much cool stuff I purchase…all I remember…are people” (www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=winning_the_rat_race_by_quitting_it). He goes on to quote an economist at the London School of Economics, Richard Layard, who is a professor in the emerging field of ‘happiness studies’ and is the author of Happiness: Lessons from a New Science (Penguin, 2005). Professor Layard says, “Family, colleagues, community – we are basically social animals, and most of our enjoyment comes from other people”.

This desire to be happy, funnily enough, is what drives us to want the holidays to be wonderful – because we love our family and friends so much. And this drive is manifested in an unstoppable force in our culture, what Jo Robinson and Jean Coppock Staeheli call ‘the Christmas Machine.’ According to their book Unplug the Christmas Machine:

The Christmas Machine has this power over us because it knows how to woo us; it speaks to the deepest, profoundest, and most sacred desires of the human heart. If it appeared as a monster, we would rise up and stop it. But the commercial messages of Christmas appear as promises that bring tears to our eyes.

Look at the bounty we are promised by the December magazines and the glowing Christmas commercials: Our families will be together and happy...Our children will be well-behaved and grateful...Our wives will be beautiful and nurturing...Our husbands will be kind, generous, and appreciative...We will have enough money...We will have enough time...We will have fun...We will be warm...We will be safe...We will be truly loved.

No wonder we stop, we listen, and we want to believe. The problem comes when we buy into the notion that what we long for can be procured by the buying and selling of goods...[we believe] that if we buy and receive more Christmas presents our inner lives will be fuller, and we will finally be safe in the world... (10-11)

The vulnerability that we carry within us is exploited by the Christmas machine, and we can’t help wanting to please our loved ones, especially in these types of scenarios:

The working mother who lives day in and day out with the nagging feeling that she should be doing more for her children is an easy target. When she sees an ad that tells her she can ensure her daughter’s happy memories by buying a hundred-dollar doll, she is extraordinarily open to the suggestion.

The husband whose self-esteem is fragile because he’s just been passed over for a promotion may find himself going into debt to buy diamond earrings for his wife as a testimony to his ability to provide. (Preface)

Unplug the Christmas Machine suggests that there is an elaborate, unspoken code that governs our gift giving during the holiday season. Listening to these ten hidden rules of gift-giving may be instructive and sound familiar to a lot of us:

The Ten Hidden Gift-giving Rules:

1 Give a gift to everyone you expect to get one from

2 If someone gives you a gift unexpectedly, reciprocate that year

3 When you add a name to your gift list, give that person a gift every year thereafter

4 The amount of money you spend on a gift determines how much you care about the recipient

5 Gifts exchanged between adults should be roughly equal in value

6 The presents you give to someone should be fairly consistent in value over the years

7 If you give a gift to a person in one category (e.g. a co-worker or neighbor), give a gift to everyone in that category, and these gifts should be similar in value

8 Women should give gifts to their close women friends

9 Men should not give gifts to their male friends – unless those gifts are alcoholic beverages

10 Whenever the above rules cause you any difficulty, remedy the situation by buying more gifts (92)

Some of these seem to be tongue-in-cheek, but most of us recognize how these rules can complicate our lives. It can make for an awkward social situation if we don’t play by these rules!

Figure 4http://simplyxmas.files.wordpress.com/2008/12/victorian_christmas.jpg

When we begin to examine what motivates us in our efforts to create the fairy tale Christmas, we can quickly see that unplugging our Christmas machine needs, as Baldrick, in the British comedy Blackadder, says, ‘a cunning plan’. The key to unplugging the machine is knowing what you REALLY want, according to Robinson and Staeheli. Do we want to change some of the ways we celebrate Christmas and, in particular, some of the ways we are driven to behave when buying gifts?

Unplug the Christmas Machine suggests that we take four steps toward making any change to our upcoming Christmas celebration. First, we realize that any plan we make will not be our only instrument of change; we shouldn’t feel that it is set in stone, because there may be other changes that are spontaneous, and any moment-by-moment decisions may well add to your enjoyment of the celebration.

Second, set small and specific goals. We can’t change everything at once and people need time to adjust to new ideas. Our traditions and rituals are important, and they play a special role in our lives, which are subject these days to a great deal of change and uncertainty; most people don’t want to completely transform the way they celebrate Christmas; they may only want to clear away a few things that have lost their meaning or look at how they can add more depth and meaning to established rituals (132).

 Third, planning takes time, and if you start in mid-summer you can plan some fairly detailed changes and talk to all family members about them. If however you start on the 4^th of December, you need to keep your focus on changes that can be put into action at the last minute, like adding a family walk the day after Christmas to help everyone wind down from the excitement of Christmas Day.

Fourth, you’ll have a good chance of success if you either focus on a goal that you can accomplish independently, or on one that has the likely support of everyone. Robinson and Staeheli give this example: …if you are bothered by a relative’s excessive drinking you will probably be frustrated if you define your goal this way: “I would like to encourage my father to drink less this Christmas”. A more realistic goal statement is: “I would like to add activities to our celebration that would take the emphasis off drinking”. This second goal would be more achievable for you to accomplish even without your father’s cooperation. (132) Your goals need to be realistic, have support from those people who are involved, and you should still be able to enjoy all those parts of your Christmas celebration that still have strong emotional appeal to you and others (133).

So how do you phrase your goals? Well, when Unplug the Christmas Machine  has been used as a tool for workshops, people have come up with statements like:

I want to minimize Christmas preparations

I want to feel more relaxed this holiday season

I want to simplify my gift giving

I want to spend more relaxed time with my children this Christmas

I want to give less commercial gifts

How are you going to reach goals like these? Look at your goals and think of one or two activities that will help you achieve them: what are you going to do and when should it be done? For example, if you want to simplify gift-giving, then you might contact the other family members who are usually present for gift-giving in plenty of time for changing the pattern, asking them to agree to only give gifts to the children at the upcoming Christmas celebration.

If you want to spend more relaxed time with your children – big or small – think of activities you and others have enjoyed in past holiday seasons: card playing, game playing, singing, reading aloud to each other, attending concerts, winter sports, telling stories about the family, cooking together, going for walks. Which of these would you like to do this year? Many of us realize that we often neglect many of our favorite activities at Christmas. Adding just one enjoyable tradition is sometimes all it takes to have a more rewarding celebration (96).

So maybe if we are interested in making our celebrations in the holiday season even more meaningful – or if we want to unplug the Christmas machine – then what better place to start than with the Christmas pledge? Unplug the Christmas Machine offers us this pledge:

The Christmas Pledge

Believing in the true spirit of Christmas,

I commit myself to

Remember those people who truly need my gifts

Express my love in more direct ways than gifts

Examine my holiday activities in the light of my deepest values

Be a peacemaker within my circle of family and friends

Rededicate myself to my spiritual growth. (13)

Figure 5http://www.dearskysteward.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/Man-pledge.jpg

The Christmas Pledge asks us to commit ourselves to remembering those who are in real need of gifts; the efforts of the Advent Conspiracy, which I mentioned earlier, aim to do just this, asking people to spend their money on water projects in developing countries.

The pledge asks us to commit ourselves to express our love in more direct ways than gifts – the Beatles sure had it right when they sang, ‘Money can’t buy me love’!

The pledge asks us to commit ourselves to examine our holiday activities in the light of our deepest values: we can begin to do this when we come up with a plan to make our celebrations more meaningful to ourselves and to those we love.

The pledge asks us to be peacemakers among our family and friends – we can begin to do this when we disregard the often problematic social code of gift-giving; we can spare ourselves and others distress, embarrassment, resentment and conflict.

And the pledge asks us to rededicate ourselves to spiritual growth: whatever your faith perspective leads you to feel about Christmas, it can be seen as a time of new birth – as Sophia Lyons Fahs writes: ‘…each night a child is born is a holy night, a time for singing, a time for wondering, a time for worshipping’ (“For So the Children Come,” http://www.seafarerpress.com/works/for_so_the_children_come.html ) 


The holiday season is also a time in many faith traditions of light in the midst of darkness – as with Hanukah and Solstice, and we have a ‘Blue Christmas’ service coming up on the 19th that will explore that theme further.

In closing, the Christmas pledge asks us to believe in the true spirit of Christmas – and as we sing in the Advent hymn “O Come O Come Emmanuel,” this will be with us when love, truth, light and hope come to dwell. These are the gifts of Christmas that matter most, and in the words of Richard S Gilbert: “Gifts that matter have no weight” (Rejoice Together, 81).

Blessed be, Amen, May it be so.