"The Reason for the Season"
The Unitarian Universalist Church
Rockford, IL
David R. Weissbard
December 21, 1997
We are told by some relatively conservative Christians that we must renounce the commercialism that has become so much a part of our celebrations of Christmas and remember that Jesus is "The Reason for the Season."
A partial analogy to this would be if I were to decide that in order to really celebrate my daughter Hilary's birth, we should move its observance to December 25th and refer to it Hilary's Day. If the world were to come to appreciate the exceptional gift she is to humanity, and others were also to call December 25th Hilary's Day, then a thousand years from now, her followers might suggest to others that, in truth, Hilary is "The Reason for the Season." It would make great rhetoric, but it would hardly be historically true - Hilary could never be the "Reason for the Season"- at best, she could become the "Manifestation of the Season."
The flaw in the analogy, and they always have flaws, is that, to the best of our knowledge, no one has any idea when Jesus was born. No one really sat down and decided to tell a lie by "moving" the celebration of his birth. Well, that's almost true. Actually, there were conflicting theories and the Eastern Christians were celebrating it in January before it was "moved" to December 25th, but we are getting ahead of ourselves.
The season, the celebration, clearly existed
before the birth of Jesus was attached to it. According to some, that is
the work of the devil, trying to confuse us, but we know that something like
two thousand years before the appearance of Jesus of Nazareth, the people
of Mesopotamia had a festival at the time of the winter solstice in which,
for twelve days, there was merriment, the burning of bright fires and yule
logs, the giving of presents, carolers went home to home singing, and there
was an ancient version of the Macy's Parade.
It was their religious understanding that this world came into being when the great god Marduk defeated the monsters of chaos in battle and brought order into being. But that order was not perfect - each year, at the same time, it begins to run down and chaos begins to assert itself once again and order is put in jeopardy. Marduk must once again go into battle against chaos. The people engages in a religious festival which was designed to support and encourage Marduk in his struggle.
The festival of Sanacaea was one of purification and renewal of strength. During its twelve nights, the King would go to the temple and remove all signs of his office and confess his wrong doings during the year past. A criminal awaiting execution was commonly dressed as the king, was paid homage and indulged (with several last suppers) and then sacrificed. The real king was then restored to his rightful place for an additional year. In a more limited context, masters and slaves in the home would change places.
It is interesting that many years later in
Greece, the same plot and many of the same observances emerged in Greece
as the festival of Kronos. Kronos and the Titans represented the forces of
chaos which were defeated by the chief god, Zeus, who brought order to the
world.
In Rome, subsequently, the role of Zeus was played by Jupiter and Sanacaea became the festival of Saturnalia. During the eight days of Saturnalia (from December 17-24), people ate big dinners, visited friends, exchanged gifts (especially dolls for children), brought bows of laurel and green trees into their homes and lit them with candles and lamps to drive out the spirits of darkness, and masters and slaves ate together.
There is a whole other very ancient tradition which also feeds into this story. In the very ancient Vedic literature of India, there are references to the God Mitra, who is associated with the light of day and the sun. He really came to the fore in Iran about fourteen centuries before the time of Jesus. The religious reformer, Zarathustra, saw Mithra as an element of primitive religion to be weeded out, but he was not ultimately successful in that. Mithra became known as the protector of the innocent, the keeper of the covenant between the people and the gods, the mediator between pure light and earthly corruption. The story is told that in his birth he sprung from a rock, full grown, "as shepherds watched." (Another version has him coming from a tree.) Mithra was the son of the Queen of the Heavens and the high god. He often is depicted, as was Marduk, in the context of the battles between light and darkness as a general leading the forces of light. The military image stood him in good stead and made him appeal particularly to the soldiers of the Roman armies who helped significantly in spreading his fame to the Roman people at about the time of Jesus. Stories were told about his death and resurrection, and his followers drank symbolically of his blood to celebrate his rebirth within them. During the reign of Aurelian, the religion of Mithra became the religion of the Roman state, and it was seen by the followers of Jesus as their main competition.
Because of his identification with the sun, his power was seen to wane each autumn and into the winter, and then, following the shortest day of the year, his rebirth was celebrated in the huge Dies Natalis Invicti Solis, the "Birthday of the Unconquered Sun" on December 25th.
So here we have two popular Roman holidays
- Saturnalia and the birthday of Mithra celebrated on December
24th and 25th. Enter the followers of Jesus who have
a problem. In truth, the followers of Jesus in the second generation knew
almost nothing about his origins. They didn't really care, after all, they
knew what he taught and what he taught was more important to them than who
he was. His follower Paul makes no reference in any of his letters to Jesus
birth. Some believed he was a divinity who had simply come down to earth.
Others believed that he had been born human, but had been adopted by God
at the time of his baptism. Some believed he was fully human. As time went
by, the nature of the person Jesus became increasingly more a matter of
controversy - some suggested in derision that he was the illegitimate son
of a Roman soldier. And so the story of his birth became important to some.
There is no reference to any celebration of the birth of Jesus before third
century of this era.
The Christian leader, Clement of Alexandria,
writing at about the year 200, said that he had concluded that Jesus was
born on the 18th of November in 3 BC, but he acknowledged that
there was a lot of disagreement. Some leaders pushed for April
19th or 20th; others said March 25th or
28th. For some time there seemed to be a consensus developing
that January 6th was to be observed, but that was particularly
so in the Eastern Church.
For the Bishop of Rome, the continuation of the popular celebrations of Saturnalia and the birth of Mithra was a problem. It was solved, in part, when it was concluded that Jesus "must have been born" at the time of those festivals. You see, the people could keep their celebrations and still be Christian. It was a significant and effective conversion tool not to have to ask them to give up anything to join the new religion. It was most likely Pope Liberius in 353 or 354 who first officially proclaimed December 25th as the day of the birth of Jesus.
I said earlier that the idea of Jesus as the "Reason for the Season" is proclaimed by "relatively conservative" Christians. There are a number of truly conservative Christians who fully acknowledge the fact that the celebration of Christmas is not Biblical and that the pagan roots are so obvious that they cannot be ignored. It is, to them, blasphemy to celebrate Christmas. Remember that it was a crime in early Massachusetts to be caught celebrating Christmas in any way - one sprig of mistletoe, one "Ho, ho, ho," and it was "into the stocks with you!"
It is clear that many of the elements that
we associate with Christmas came from pagans in Germany and Scandinavia -
the Swedes in our congregation have taught me to say "Gud Jul," but although
we associate Yuletide with Christmas, in truth it was a clearly pagan
celebration. with many of the same elements we have already discussed from
the ancient Babylonian religion. The Yule feast was an appeal to the God
Frey (after whom Friday is named) for the return of the sun and fertility.
The Midwinter feast on the 24th or 25th of December
was known as Mother's Night. The night (writes one pagan author):
was sacred to the triple Goddess who created (maiden), sustained (mother), and took away life (the crone), but most especially to the great Earth Mother who labors all night on the solstice to give birth to the sun baby, thereby returning light to the world.
The Swedish tradition of St Lucia is blatantly pagan in its origins and observance.
It is not a matter of Christmas having picked
up a few pagan accretions along the way. Christmas is just about as pagan
as it can be. Virtually every element of the celebration associated with
it predates Jesus' birth by centuries: the date, the stable, the shepherds,
the magi, the star, the virgin mother, the trees, the lights, the decorations,
the gifts, the yule log, the holly, Santa Claus - none of these are biblical
and all are clearly pagan in the origins. One Christian home page on the
internet sums it up:
Christmas day is not the birthday of Christ. It is the pagan birthday of the sun god. Most Christmas traditions come from pagan rituals and as such are an abomination to the Lord. The Bible has not appointed Christmas day as a Christian festival. This is a festival wholly adopted from pagan worship, appointed by man, and does not honor the Almighty God. . . . What's Christian about Christmas? NOTHING!
And paganism did not end with the defeat of Mithraism in Rome by the Christians. Indeed, so-called pagan religions continued to exist and to have appeal to the people through the middle ages, and even to this day. They were attacked and maligned by Christians in an attempt to discredit them, but they never were completely defeated because, I would suggest, of the wisdom within them.
The religions we call pagan have within them an appreciation of the cyclical nature of life, which some would call feminine, as opposed to the Judaeo-Christian conception of time as a line projecting into the future - there is past time, present time, and future time - a projection which some would deem masculine. Given its understanding of history and its vision for the future, Christianity has little time for cycles. And yet there is something inside us which knows the cycles to be real, something which cries out to acknowledge that life turns like a wheel, as it has done since time immemorial and will into the future.
I was here last night working on this sermon
when our Earth and Sky Spirituality group gathered for their observance of
the Solstice. I joined their circle for the last part of their rites when
they went down to the fire circle in the woods to kindle the yule flame.
There was no sense that what they were doing was exactly what had been done
four thousand years ago. They are not people who look into the stars and
see what our ancient ancestors saw. Their understandings of science and life
are different - but they share the ancient awareness of the cycles of life,
of the waxing and waning of the moon and of the sun, of the changes of seasons,
and of the eternal repetition of the cycles. They share a belief in the holiness
of the earth and not as a gift for us to plunder.
As we stood there, I, having been reading all week about the ancient Pagans, experienced a sense of connection to them - to our ancestors who kindled flames in days of old, who urged the sun to return, knowing in their hearts that it was likely to.
I remembered the old rabbinical story, often repeated, about the rabbi who saved his people by going into the woods to a special place, building a fire in a special way, and saying a special prayer; and his successor who didn't know the place, but built the fire and said the prayer, and his successor who didn't know where or how to build the fire, but said the prayer, and his successor who didn't know where or how to build the fire and did not even know the prayer, but who told the story and told God that would have to suffice. Well, contemporary Pagans may not know where, and may not know the ancient prayers, and may not even know precisely how the fire is to be built, but they build it nonetheless in an expression of their relationship to the fire builders of old. And there is eloquence and power in their attempt to affirm and maintain the circle of life.
But the point I am trying to make with all of this is that Christianity is not less because its major celebration is thoroughly pagan in its roots and expression, but that it might be seen therefore as more. Christmas is not just the celebration of the birth of one magical baby. It is, I would suggest, the reinterpretation of ancient wisdom, the use of powerful ancient symbols, to express a relatedness to what came before. That is good, not bad. It adds depth and breadth to the celebration of the season. It is a melding of the old and once new. Those who try to fight against its expression are fighting a battle much bigger than they know. The ancient church fathers who compromised with the festivals of the people were not selling out - they were acknowledging a reality greater than them.
When we gather for our Candlelight Services tonight, to decorate our altar, and sing our songs, and recite the story, and light our lights, we will not be celebrating historical fact - we are giving ourselves to the contemporary celebration of something much older than the central figure about whom the story is told. He is but one manifestation of our search for relatedness to the world which transcends us and our vision. But it is in search of greater joy and deeper understanding and greater relationship with our human past, that we will perform the rites and seek to kindle the flame of love and hope within our hearts as we kneel at the cradle of a child.