First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis

Hold High the Flame

More than one person has said to me recently, "I just don't feel that I can celebrate the holidays this year; I don't have the heart for it, I'm so disappointed about the election, and the war, and everything that's going on in the world. Mistletoe and candy canes and decorating trees all seem so frivolous; I can not get myself into the Christmas spirit." It isn't surprising that any of us might feel this way; the holidays, with all the extra effort and money that they require, along with the expectations of generosity, good will and general cheerfulness, can appear incongruous when significant liberties, values in the progress of the human race, and even loved ones' lives stand in danger. And indeed, if these annual festivities are merely the self-congratulatory bleatings of a consumerist culture's prosperity, then those among us who are finding ourselves at odds with that culture's judgments and ambitions might well want to skip the party at this moment, and declare Ebenezer Scrooge to be our patron saint of the season. "Bah, humbug!" can sound like a reasonable response to ideological cant and political imperialism in the face of international chaos; more honest, at any rate, than a chorus of Hark the Herald Angels Sing - particularly for the humanist mindset that is pretty skeptical about those angels in the first place.

But let's not move too fast in the direction of sheer cynicism. For the truth is that Christmas, as well as Hanukkah and Kwanzaa and even in some sense the Solstice observance itself - all the holidays of light at the turning of the year - are in their roots and at their cores expressions of resistance and defiance to the powers that be. They originate with, and are perpetuated by, oppressed peoples; they are eternal gesture of the human nose being thumbed at the blind domination of nature, tyranny, scarcity, and greed. We have seldom needed Christmas as we need this one; we have rarely owned the holidays as we do this very December.

Consider. Antiochus Epiphanes, a Syrian king and successor to Alexander the Great, crushed the culture and religion of the nation of Israel. As a demonstration of his authority and his demand for conformity to his own religious cult, he looted the temple in Jerusalem, sacrificed unclean animals on its altar, and had the entire building sprinkled with polluted water. He smashed the items consecrated for worship, including the oil for the sacred lamps. The city lay helpless before him, but out in the countryside, resistance and revolt simmered. Those who remembered the days of freedom and religious integrity taught their children, until together they could bear it no longer, and they marched into Jerusalem and overthrew the foreign tyrant. This much is history; the legend is told that when the city had been secured by the guerrilla resistance army, they rushed first to the temple, to cleanse and restore it, so that they might resume the true worship of their own god. One precious jar of the consecrated lamp oil had escaped destruction, and unexpectedly, miraculously, it sufficed for all the eight days of celebration and re-dedication. Of course, we know that historically the victory of the Maccabeean revolt was not long-lasting. The domination by the Hellenistic Greek world would be swiftly followed by subjection to the empire of Rome. For many centuries across the globe, Jewish communities would eke out a precarious existence, never wholly safe from the violence of mobs, the hostility of established churches, and the arbitrary decrees of monarchs. Yet year by year throughout those weary centuries, at the darkest moment of the year, families would defiantly set in the window the lighted lamps that announced to the world their identity and their faith. The candles of Hanukkah are the flames of an enduring resistance; of a people intimately familiar with the face of oppression, who refuse to surrender to it. The fragrant potato pancakes, the gifts and the games, the laughter and the familiar songs; these are not the overflow of comfort and secure prosperity, but a gesture, at times dearly bought, that claims the right to celebration, that insists upon a humanity too often denied, that unites a community in defiance of all that poverty, tyranny and tribulation can do. Sometimes it is an act of courage just to keep going; sometimes it is an act of incredible boldness just to keep believing; sometimes it is an act of supreme integrity to keep celebrating the light, to rejoice in spite of everything, to hold high the flame.

Or consider. A heavily pregnant woman, disgraced before her husband to be and her family by a premature conception, forced to participate in a national migration for the convenience of a census by the Roman occupation government. Arriving in a town already over-filled with travelers, the best place they can find for her to give birth is in the slight shelter of a stable cave, amidst the animals. Within only a few days, the paranoia of the local governor will drive them to flee through the night toward the land of Egypt, in a desperate bid to escape the massacre which will slaughter every male child under the age of two. The legend is of people without power or resources, doing their best to cope with the unreasoning forces of bureaucracy, political ambition, superstition, and violence. The innocence that they give themselves to protect will grow into a radical visionary, a man who challenges the right of either emperor or priest to force the conscience of any individual, who invites people into their own authentic relationship with the creative source of life, and teaches them to see injustice for what it is. His leadership will so inspire the dispossessed, disenfranchised peasantry of Palestine that the Roman government, with the assent of the Jewish religious authorities, will execute him as a dangerous traitor and disturber of the public peace. In this same way, authority has long disposed of any who threaten the systems of domination that have shaped the history of the world. But the people did not forget; the teacher's stories lived on in the minds and hearts that recognized their transforming power and the sly way in which they undercut the foundations of external authorities in the service of a more vital, honest, and joyful way of being in the world. Sometimes it takes a fiercely brave soul, just to tell a story.

Consider, too. When the Christian church, transformed from the teacher's stories into a tool of cultural conquest, began to spread across the continent we now know as Europe, its promulgators burned the sacred tree groves and smashed the altars of the people they met along the way. The ancient gods and goddesses were forgotten, or went underground, assuming the character of Catholic saints, while the new priests forbade the people to practice their ancient rituals of earth magic and fire, of healing and fertility. But in fact the priests could not be everywhere at once, and they did not always understand what was happening even right under their noses. So the people kept their old ways of honoring the spirits of the trees, of celebrating the sun's return, of making magic for the great hunt. How many of the customs that we associate with the holiday of Christmas actually have anything at all to do with the story of Jesus? The holly and the ivy, the rising of the sun and the running of the deer, the blazing yule log and the mistletoe, the feast of the boar's head, the evergreen tree and the solar wheel of the wreath, the bonfires and candles - even the powerful, half-divine figure who comes down the chimney bringing gifts - all these have their origins in traditions far older than the Roman emperor Constantine's trinitarian notion of a Christian god. Especially for women, whose once honored spiritual gift of fertility was made into a symbol of corruption and sin, and for a great many others as well, the hegemony of Christendom was a culture of oppression. The celebration of yuletide at Christmas was a time when the old ways could live again; even if their real origins were only half-remembered, their images at the turning of the year were too powerful to suppress, or to be forgotten entirely. Sometimes it takes both great love and great courage to keep a custom alive, to honor the earth in the face of an authority that wants to point people only toward rewards in a heavenly afterlife. Sometimes a feast is more than just a great meal; sometimes it is an act of witness, a refusal to let go of a generous, sensual, optimistic way of making meaning here in this world. Sometimes the flame we hold high is the light of an older way, a stubborn vision of a holy earth that will not be extinguished by theological conformity.

And do not forget that at times when the earnestness of even our own Puritan Congregationalist ancestors recognized the humbug of Christmas, with its pagan origins, its aesthetic extravagance, and its irrepressible exuberance, they were able, with great effort, to suppress it with legislation forbidding its observance, mostly, for a little while, but always the human impulse toward celebration has bided its time. Christmas has lived, in the underground treasure house of memory, and revived in full glory as soon as the imposed restraints could be thrown off. But what of our own day, when it is common among sophisticated intellectuals to despise Christmas, not only for its theologically dubious underpinnings, but for its rampant commercialism and thinly disguised consumer greed? It seems to me that we need to re-discover the resistance that lies at the heart of Christmas. For Christmas, properly understood, is supposed to be about generosity, about giving, about the very opposite of the lessons we are fed the rest of the year. As much as it was ever resistance to tyranny - and we need to remember how to resist tyranny now; as much as it was ever resistance to theological conformity - and we need to practice resistance to theological conformity today; Christmas has always been about resisting the human impulse to selfishness, about resisting the notion that we can make our own lives safe and whole by what we hoard, that any of us can be secure and comfortable and happy at the expense of the rest of us. This is what all the modern stories tell us, starting with Dickens' classic fable. Bob Cratchit's family, balanced on the thin edge of economic desperation, celebrates Christmas with as great a feast as their means can manage. They will not succumb to meanness, to the kind of grasping stinginess that Scrooge would no doubt advise them to practice. And Dr. Seuss's Grinch begins to understand Christmas rightly when he hears the Whos singing, even though all their anticipated presents, decorations, and feast are gone. Through their song, they bear witness to that same spiritual stubbornness, that will not be silenced in its capacity to rejoice by the mere accidents of oppressive circumstance.

Dearly beloved, acts of celebration are acts of resistance. Christmas is what happens when we are willing to be spiritually stubborn, when we refuse to give up and give in to the forces of darkness, whether they are political, or religious, or economic, or cosmic. The earliest celebrations there were at this season had to do with defying the apparent death of all things in the gathering cold and dark of winter; they had to do with the spiritual persistence to trust the turning of the light, the coming of spring, the rebirth of the sun. They had to do with holding high the flame of survival and hope, with tending the fires that meant warmth and light and life until the seasons would change once more. Hanukkah, Christmas, Kwanzaa - they all represent that same refusal to give up, that same power that is within ordinary people living ordinary lives, to come through persecution and disappointment and pain; to believe, at the darkest moment of the year, in the power of light, and to hold high the flame that bears witness to that refusal to give up.

Here in the institutional life of our own religious heritage, we can also make the power of that resistance felt. No one of us can produce Christmas alone, and no one of us can ensure the future vitality of Unitarian Universalism here in the Prairie Star District alone, either. But through our shared generosity, awesome things can happen. Since its inception in 1984, the Prairie Star District Chalice Lighters program has provided more than $315,000 in funding to promote the growth of Unitarian Universalism throughout the Midwest region. The program has offered opportunities for all individuals in the District to participate in the growth of existing and emerging congregations. Participants are asked to respond to as many as three appeals for contributions from the District Office over the course of a year, by sending ten dollars each time they are called upon. Of course, if you feel that you are able to make a larger donation, that is always welcome, but the amazing power of this system is founded upon the ten dollar commitment to enable some congregation in the District to build or expand facilities, secure their first minister or other professional staff, or accomplish a program improvement that will allow a congregation grow and help spread the liberal light.

These grants have helped to secure ministers in Burnsville, Minnesota (1993), in Eau Claire, Wisconsin (1994), and in Topeka and Manhattan, Kansas (1995). They have helped establish new congregations in Grand Forks, North Dakota (1993) and in Kansas City, Missouri and Salina, Kansas (1998). They have helped congregations construct buildings in River Falls, Wisconsin (1994), in Davenport, Iowa and Shawnee Mission, Kansas (1996), and in Arden Hills, Minnesota (1998). They have also made possible a regional advertising campaign by several congregations working together in the Kansas City area, and helped to hire a part-time music director in St. Cloud, Minnesota. This kind of generosity goes beyond our investment in our own congregation's ability to serve our personal interests, to a commitment that is a witness for the significance of our larger movement in the world. In this 20^th anniversary year, we are asking everyone at FUS to consider becoming a District Chalice Lighter, to unite in this small gesture of resistance against the impulses of narrow self-interest and the tendencies of popular repression. It is a flame held high against the darkness that is always there, small in its individual power, but combined with light of dozens and hundreds of others, it can work surprising wonders.

The only way to survive difficult days is to stick together, and to practice the small acts of resistance that keep the triumph of authoritarian power from ever being complete. Generosity is resistance; so is celebration. Every act of human joy and connection, every gesture of beauty, love, and faith weaves the living web that is finally stronger than any tyrant that ever lived. Christmas is not about our success, it is about our immortal longings; it does not require that we be comfortable, but rather that we be stubborn in our adherence to the first principle of faith, which is that all the darkness in the universe has never put out a single candle. In this recognition, this morning's offering will now be received, and in addition to your support for the work of this Society, I invite you to place your completed Chalice Lighter commitment forms in the plates as they are passed. May we hold high the light of our faith together, in this season even of this year, and at all times.