But quite apart from the conflict between all the material stuff and the heart of this holiday how do you feel about it religiously? After all it is the birthday, officially, of Jesus we celebrate even though we have no idea really as to when he was born. One of my more irreverent colleagues wrote a spoof on some Unitarians and their rather cynical attitude toward Christmas. Of course present company is excluded and let me stress strongly this is not my attitude. But here it is new words for the ancient tune God Bless you Merry Gentlemen: God bless you Unitarians, let nothing you dismay, remember there's no evidence that Christ was born this day. When Christ was born is just not known no matter what they say. Oh, Glad tidings of reason and fact, glad tidings of reason and fact. There was no star of Bethlehem, there was no angels song; there could have been no wise men for the journey was too long. The stories of the bible are historically wrong. Much of our Christmas custom comes from Persia and Greece. From solstice celebrations of the ancient Middle East. We know our so-called holiday is but a pagan feast.

Glad tidings indeed! Not my kind of Christmas surely but he does point out some of our ambivalence about this holiday -or holy day, so full of more mythologies than we can count or fit in, secular, religious, mixed up and too focused on getting and giving things. What do we tell our children, what do we tell ourselves? What is the meaning of Christmas for us? And which of the stories do we honor and share? Rudolf the red nosed reindeer or the Grinch who stole Christmas surely do not fit in the same category as the Jesus' birth or do they? Well for many children they probably do as the annual orgy of holiday specials march into our living rooms via the TV portal. How can a poor babe born in a stable with a few shepherds and angels in attendance possibly compete with all that electronic wizardry? Old story isn't it, long discredited by serious scholars and yet, it makes my heart sing! Why I wonder when I too studied those facts and use my reason about as well as anybody, why would I feel utterly bereft without Christmas?

Ernest Sommerfield was asked this obvious question: Why do you celebrate Christmas? You do not believe in virgin births. You do not believe that Jesus was a deity. You probably do not believe in angels?"

Well that is mostly true. I do not believe in virgin births and I do not believe Jesus was literally God. Like most Unitarians I stress his humanity rather than his divinity. But angels, well that is another story. Angels come in all sorts of disguises. Sure I believe in UU angels! One of them donated our tree. Lots of small and big angels helped decorate it. But what are angels anyhow? Angels in the Bible are often portrayed as secret messengers from God disguised as strangers in need. They come looking for a place to stay, seeking hospitality and refuge, much like Joseph and Mary in the Christmas story. And sometimes they are well received, and sometimes they are rudely turned away. But the point of angels is precisely that we do not know who they are. We entertain angels unawares! Angels are thus ultimately a test of our own humanity and compassion, proof of our generosity or lack of it.

It is true that much of Christmas is pagan and not Christian at all. The tree is the old Nordic Ygdrasil, the world tree, an ancient symbol of life triumphing over death. The decorations and the lights are its fruits, symbols of the endless varieties of the gifts of life. The holiday began as a celebration of the Persian Sun god in ancient Rome and still is a mid-winter festival in Scandinavia. We even have Yule goats made out of wheat straws, how pagan can you get?

Our foremothers and forefathers in New England realized this and the Puritans, many of whom would later become congregationalists and then Unitarians, forbade the celebrations and worked on Christmas day. It was denounced as a wanton Bacchanalian Feast and the General Court of Massachusetts passed a law ordering: anyone who is found observing, by abstinence from labor, feasting or any other way, any such day, as Christmas day shall pay for every such, five shillings, a not inconsiderable sum in those days. Ambivalence about this day is nothing new. It was by the way a Unitarian who helped to bring back general observance of Christmas, namely the creator of such beloved characters as Scrooge, Tiny Tim and all the Ghosts of Christmas Pasts and Presents, Charles Dickens, who was a British Unitarian. But though this is a mixed holiday, full of varied mythologies and varied moods too, there is no denying that in the Western world Christmas is celebrating the birth of Jesus. What shall a religious humanist do with that? Stick to the pagan symbols? What does Christmas mean to us if it is not the birth of a God? For us Jesus is not the same as God. The very word Unitarian was once derogatory and meant people who did not believe in accepted church doctrine and rejected the notion of the Trinity, the idea that God has three aspects: God the Father, God the Son and the Holy Spirit. Once you have rejected that notion Jesus becomes more human than otherwise. With our strong conviction that each and every person has the right to interpret scripture as they see and our relentless insistence upon religious freedom our views about the holy days of December are like the times, ever changing, ever evolving.

In his book Christology in American Unitarianism Prescott Wintersteen writes: Christology in Unitarian thought had more to do with the person than the atonement of Christ. Unitarians became interested in Jesus as teacher and exemplar. Over time the crux of the problem became, was Jesus then unique? This was true especially after the Transcendentalists pointed to other religions and the power of the souls' intuition to discover God. What then made Jesus unique? This did not mean that the sense of the Spirit of God was absent among Unitarians. Not that they agreed (are you surprised?) on how to find it. George William wrote that Unitarians had a variegated canvas of Christ the more so for the reason that they made him a model. In the end they found him to be a successor of the prophets. Ralph Waldo Emerson took it several steps further when he said: Christianity has dwelt with almost noxious exaggeration about the person of Jesus. The soul knows no persons. It invites every man to expand to the full circle of the universe. That sounds very contemporary doesn't it? And Theodore Parker in his sermon went as far as to suggest that: If it could be proved that Jesus had never lived and that the gospels were the fabrication of designing and artful men, still Christianity would stand firm and fear no evil. For if true, the doctrines stand by themselves. Jesus’ life is the perpetual rebuke of all time since. It condemns ancient civilization, it condemns modern civilization. ...But if you take a heathen view and make of him a God, much of the significance of his character is gone". Parker was like Jesus a rebel. The evil in his day was slavery and Parker both identified with and lived by Jesus' example as he saw it: as a rebuke of his times. If you see Jesus as human you can live as he did but if Jesus is God you cannot.

To keep Christmas, as Dickens preached it, was to show goodwill and generosity toward those who were poor, to reconcile with those from whom we are estranged, to rejoin the human race as Scrooge did in celebrating the gift of life. I find it hard to quarrel with those reasons.

Now let us look to our Universalist side. Unitarians and Universalist did not merge until the sixties so we have different histories. Jesus had a place in the Universalist avowal of faith of 1935. It read: We avow our faith in God as eternal and all- conquering love; the spiritual leadership of Jesus; the supreme worth of every human personality; the authority of truth known or to be known. And in the power of men of good will and sacrificial spirit to overcome all evil and progressively establish the Kingdom of God. Neither this nor any other statement shall be imposed as a creedal test. If this sounds vaguely familiar it is because several of these point were incorporated into our later purposes and principles. The Universalists did not fear words like faith or the spiritual leadership of Jesus. Theirs was a gentle belief and one that was hard to hold onto.

In The Faith of a Universalist Robert Miller writes: This is the heart of the Universalist Faith-purposive movement toward a better life, continual progress toward the Kingdom of God; the ultimate good outcome of things.

Think about that for a moment: do you believe in the ultimate good outcome of all things? Would your life be different if you did?

Universalists believed in what they called natural theology. It is based upon the conviction that religious truth is seen and discovered in normal, natural, human experiences, and in the events of the world of nature which we know, see, feel and touch every day... Here is where God can be found.

With which I do agree. More and more I believe that it is in our ordinary everyday lives that our faith is tested. But what is faith? You may have been told that it involves believing in miracles, or that it is what God expects of us. You may have been told that faith requires belief in the truth of doctrine or the Bible. But faith has other meanings. I challenge you to examine yours. Do you have faith? Do you trust the ultimate good outcome of things? Is that not what that ancient story of the sacred birth is about? It is to me. Call it the birth of a teacher, a rebel, a prophet or a symbol of the hope inherent in every human birth. By saying, as we have, that Jesus was human we are also saying that we can be like him. That is a very tall order for most of us. Like much of religion it holds up an ideal that is impossible to follow. Give away all that you have to the poor and come follow me! Do you do that? Can you do that? I have not and I am not sure I can. Should we follow?

Donald Jacobson a self-proclaimed humanist writes: I no longer believe in the words of most of the Christmas cantatas, carols and oratories and I find the theology on which they were based morally repulsive. But I not only like to hear them, I love to sing them.

Christmas puts me once again in contact with the ideal Jesus from my childhood. A Jesus, who was perfect love and compassion. A Jesus, who truly loved his enemies and gave his life in serving the poor and unfortunate. A Jesus who loved children and approached the world with a child like faith in what people could become. There is magic, there is power in this ideal and what it commands me to become. The sacred power of this portion of the Christmas myth is what I bow before this time of the year.

With this I agree. If we go to the heart of the story, if we see it more as poetry than a factual account, then we too can wholeheartedly celebrate the birth of a good man, the birth of hope, the eternal dream of peace on earth, toward all people: goodwill.

The child in me loves the story. The child in me would indeed feel a great loss where I not to hear it at Christmas time. In my imagination I saw so clearly the manger with the swaddled baby in the hay laid among the humble animals. There were patient oxen perhaps or stubborn donkeys and my grandmother told me that on that night the animals were given voices, so they spoke! Later I remember all the different paintings of that same scene, so eternally true, mother and child, glorified, fantasized, some landscapes with heavy snow, which they certainly did not have in Bethlehem. And the three kings or wise men are dressed in velvet and gold, traveling on camels, bringing the ancient fragrant treasures of frankincense and myrrh. I can taste, smell and see this story as I come home on a winter afternoon, with the taste of snowflakes lingering on my tongue. I am met with the smells of cinnamon, cardamom and cookies baking as a royal substitute for frankincense and myrrh. Over on my mother's piano stand our creche, the angels dressed in white netting and the sheep in woolen yam, the wise men traveling over a shiny polished mahogany tabletop toward a star that is really my grandmother's brass candlestick. But no matter, to me this was a holy place and I reverently took off my wet boots and lit the candle as I waited for my frozen feet to warm up. Christmas was coming, and joy would follow. That I knew. Darkness and fear would be banished said the hymns I sang, more than a little out of tune. A child's heart can hold so much hope! A young child's heart does not yet question nor has it to contend with reason and fact.

Now as a grown woman, a theologian, a minister, I know so many theories about this ancient story and what it may really be about. Yes, it likely never happened exactly like that. As an adult I see a paradox, a rebuttal of those who want to make of this a proof of original sin. I see a poor unwed woman, for she was only engaged to Joseph, expecting a baby of uncertain paternity, unable to find a proper place for her to give birth. And then we have the paradox of a star overhead, shepherds and angels and wise men, all making a pilgrimage to this same poor child. For me it is an affirmation of how it ought to be. That every child born should be welcomed and celebrated as our own Sophia Lyon Fahs wrote in her poem Every night a child is born is a holy night. I can think of no better way to end this sermon than with her words:

For so the children come,
And so they have been coming.
A1ways in the same way they come
born of the seed of man and woman.

No angels herald their beginnings.
No prophets predict their future courses.
No wise men see a star to show where to find the babe that will save humankind
Yet each night a child is born is a holy night,
fathers and mothers sitting by their baby's crib
feel glory in the sight of a new life beginning.

They ask: When or how will this new life end? Or will it ever end? Each night a child is born is a holy night: A time for singing, A time for wondering, A time for worshipping.