I am delighted to be able to open our advent season this year. This gives me an opportunity to present some of my thinking over the last several decades about how central Jesus is to my own faith and how easily distracted we are by the poetry and awe with which people have responded to Jesus over the centuries and the poetic license they took in adding their own religious traditions to the central story of Jesus even as early as the first centuries after his death. I’ve been hoping to integrate and present this material to you for some time, usually thinking of it under the title “Why I am a follower of Jesus despite the atrocities of the historical Church”. But our Advent theme, “Full Attention” serves even better. We really ought to respond with Full Attention when we are challenged by the inadequacies of the language of the faith that has been handed down to us and by the even more woeful inadequacies of the people and institutions who have transmitted that language.

          One of the gospel readings for this morning, from Mark, includes the phrase “Beware, keep alert.” I’m afraid I am going to follow the long precedent of preachers by taking this phrase completely out of context, because I have no interest in examining the all too frequent signs of the end of the world– they have been occurring for 2000 years and I see no evidence that they are likely to stop. What I want you to be alert to, to pay full attention to this morning is Jesus’ effect on the set of traditions and myths that marked the society into which he was born and what His Spirit has done since to the myths and symbols of an even larger array of cultures and religious traditions.

          We have recently witnessed numerous failures in a variety of Christian orthodoxies: The scandal in the Catholic Church; the failing of the Mennonite Church in maintaining fellowship among all of its member congregations; and, more generally, and most important for me today, the pervasive historical failings of the organized Church to keep to the simple teachings of Jesus. Instead it built an elaborate and complicated orthodoxy of compromises, accommodations and downright sellouts to the cultures and political powers that dominated it over the course of the centuries of its evolution.

          Current Christian orthodoxy as reflected in the mainstream denominations as well as the Mennonite Church is at best a mosaic of religious traditions accumulated over centuries of adaptation to the other religions practiced by the people which it encountered and often converted. At its worst it is a hodgepodge of conflicting and irrelevant superstitions, dogmas and empty rituals that serve only to reinforce the power of the status quo. But give this your full attention. Jesus brings new meaning to even the most archaic of myths, superstitions and dogmas.

          There are many practices in Christian orthodoxy that have their origins in other religious traditions. As a young man I was taught that this is a reflection of the wonderful flexibility of Jesus message and an example of how it speaks to all cultures and all people. I like that idea, and still ascribe to it to an extent. But in order to really understand Jesus’ significance and value we have to pay full attention to the unique thread that Jesus’ message weaves within the powerful imprint other cultures and religions have left on what we think of as Christianity.

          Let’s examine, first, one of the most difficult propositions of the Christmas story: the virgin birth. Now there are some people who feel that to challenge the idea of the virgin birth is tantamount to sacrilege. What they don’t remember, or perhaps are unwilling to admit, is that there is a long history in pre-Christian religions of virgin births. All kinds of mythical hero’s and pre-historical strong men were considered to be conceived without the convention of normal intercourse. Here is a listing of what I found in literally two minutes of internet research. According to several web sites claims have been made that Krishna, one of many Hindu god’s, was born as the result of a virgin birth. Buddha was born of a virgin birth. There were any number of Greek and Roman champions who were purportedly conceived in unconventional ways. The Zarathustrians claim a virgin birth as part of their origin myth. In fact, even Anikan Skywalker, AKA Darth Vadar “had no father”, though one could say that this might be derivative given the timing of the writing. Buddha aside, most claims of virgin births resulted in men of astounding power and strength in battle. Men who took lordly roles in the realm of the gods or of humankind, men whose virginal conception gave them the entitlement to kill and maim and who were privileged to do so because they were special – they were born by a special act of the god or gods they worshiped.

          They may have been special to themselves and their allies, but they were hardly well liked by the people they killed and oppressed. Isaiah conceptualized a kind of powerful king of a Messiah of this sort in today’s lectionary passage:

O that you would tear open the heavens and come down,

    so that the mountains would quake at your presence-- ...

to make your name known to your adversaries

          What a surprised that the Virgin who bore Jesus announced a far different person, a teacher, a man of peace, one whose power was inspirational rather than that of domination. A person who would introduce us to a new concept of human equality, human worth and intimate access to that which is Most Holy. As Mary says in the Magnificat: in giving her Jesus to bear

God has scattered the proud in their conceit.

God has put down the mighty from their seat, *

and has exalted the humble.

God has filled the hungry with good things, *

and the rich God has sent empty away.

          These are hardly attributes one can ascribe to those previously born of virgins, mythological figures that we scarcely remember today because of the ordinariness of their greatness. So it is hardly the virgin birth that makes Jesus the one who we follow. If you pay full attention to the context and the consequence of the advent of Jesus into the world you can see that Jesus did not need the virgin birth to bring legitimacy to His message. Rather, Jesus life and message brought remarkable new meaning to the idea of the virgin birth.

          Jesus being the Son of God is no less of a second hand mythological distinction. I didn’t need to do a bit of research on this one, nor will you have to run to the history books to check my accuracy: How many “sons of god” are out there in history? All of the Egyption Pharaoh’s, most of the Roman Emperors prior to Constantine, a host of far Eastern warlords and heads of kingdom’s and reaching into our own hemisphere, the leaders of the Aztec and Inca domains – all of these men and a few women claim to be the unique offspring of god. And what did they do with this special entitlement? They conquered surrounding kingdoms, amassed vast sums of wealth, sent their citizens to death in battle and slaughtered enemy combatants and innocents alike.

          So it will be no small surprise for you to hear me state that Jesus wasn’t joining an august company when his disciples proclaimed him to be the Son of God. In fact, Jesus more frequently refers to himself, as we see in today’s reading, as the Son of Man, particularly in those first three gospels that we understand to be more historical and less theological and poetic.

          And why would Jesus want to be a Son of God in the image of the many sons of gods that preceded him? Jesus used his uniqueness, not to exalt himself, but rather to lift up all of humankind. It was through Jesus that we discover that we are each and every one of us a child of God, sisters and brothers not only to each other, but, as early gnostic Christians were persecuted for saying, siblings of Jesus himself. No wonder the first and second century Christians were so often people who were poor or slaves – through Jesus they could claim their rightful place as full participants in those things that were most valued and most holy.

          Jesus didn’t have to be The Son of God to legitimize this message. Rather, Jesus life and message brought remarkable new meaning to being the Son of God.

           The number of myths and incorporated traditions and rituals that could be examined in this way expands way beyond the three points that my father always told me should be made to support the thesis of a sermon. We could examine the tradition of textual literalism. We in the Christian world think of this as Biblical literalism. Other traditions that also value their founding texts as highly and profoundly as we do would call it something else. We could examine the bloody explanations of the atonement – that Jesus was a sacrifice to appease an angry God, or that he died as a surrogate for human sin. But there are other traditions of human sacrifice. We could look at the arbitrariness of the Christian calender, or the symbolic borrowings of things like Christmas trees, gift giving and mistletoe. We could even look at some of the less savory aspects of communion. Interestingly, there are even new myths emerging in contemporary speculation about Jesus, one of which has Jesus traveling to the far east and studying with Taoist teachers before returning to Israel. We’ll see in a hundred years if this one has legs.

          I believe if we pay full attention we would find that Jesus himself challenged the literalism of his own tradition and that while traditions of human sacrifice litter history both in Europe, Asia and in the Americas, Jesus death was far more than appeasement, no matter how universal, but rather it was the consequence of espousing a revolutionary set of ethical and spiritual teachings that challenged the power hierarchy of his day. We would also see that Jesus himself usually went along with the structure of his religious tradition, accepting practices that reflected and contained centuries of human spiritual yearnings and only challenging them when they conflicted with the greater truth that He knew. Like with the myths of the Virgin Birth and the Son of God, these myths, superstitions and rituals are transformed by the reality of Jesus’ message that God loves us all, unconditionally and that God has always granted each and everyone of us full access to that which is most holy and precious: God’s very presence. If we pay full attention, we can see that God is right here, before us, beside us, behind us, beneath us, and above us – supporting, loving, accepting, nurturing, and always available. We see this modeled and taught best by Jesus, the one whose birth we celebrate in this season, the one who transforms the myths.

          I haven’t picked any of these easy marks for my last point. Rather, I’ve chosen to focus on a myth that Jesus himself appears to have accepted: that of the apocalyptic end of the world. This tradition, too, is not unique to Christianity. As Eva Shaw points out,  

“it's not simply Christian sects who believe and have believed that the End is near or here. Although the evidence is in some cases extremely sparse, the Guarani of South America, the Aztecs of Mexico, the Karen of Burma, the Lakali of the island of New Britain and the Native American Indians of the Pacific Northwest had rituals and rites in regard to the myths” of the apocalyptic end of the world.

          My childhood and youth was filled with terrible predictions of this sort. My first memory in this regard was of my mother commenting to my father that a particular religious leader predicted that the very day of their conversation was to be the end of the world. I worried for the rest of that day. In high school I read books whose titles and authors I can, I’m pleased to say, no longer remember without effort. Books that accumulated superstitious correlations between selected Biblical references and current events and predicted that the end was near. I never expected to see my thirtieth birthday, let alone find myself approaching fifty with all the fear and trembling I used to reserve for the end of the world.

          I don’t know what the Jesus Project says about the passage in Mark we had read for us today. It appears that Jesus believed in an apocalyptic end of the world. Frankly, I don’t doubt it myself. It seems unlikely that we as a human race will ever achieve the technology imagined in the science fiction books and television shows that I’ve encountered over the years. I don’t think the flight of the Enterprise is anything more than a wonderful flight of imagination. I don’t think humans will colonize other worlds via a Stargate, I don’t think we will be blowing up suns and terraforming planets in order to extend our existence in the galaxy. I do think that there will be an end, perhaps when the Sun runs out of power, or perhaps sooner with some cataclysmic natural event or if we as a race so poison our world with pollution or violence that we can no longer survive.

          But I don’t think that this is always the thing to which Jesus would want us to pay attention. In my experience the end of the world comes often and repetitively in the lives of each human being on earth. I don’t just mean the fact that we will someday die and the value of our lives will rest, not on the impact we made on the world around us, but on the experience we had of God’s love and the transcendence we were able to attain in touching and transmitting that love. Paying full attention to Jesus will enable that experience. But paying full attention to Jesus will also enable us to experience countless second comings throughout the developmental transformations of our lives. We each encounter what has sometimes been called the long dark night of the soul. Events that, examined in psychological terms, are times of painful personal transformations. Events that we experience periodically in the natural development of our personalities. Times when the sun is darkened, the moon will not give its light, the stars fall from heavens, and the powers we know are shaken and even destroyed. I have had times like this. I’m sure you have as well. We rarely know the time or the place when these events are going to occur. But we do know that it is during these times that paying full attention to what Jesus taught and lived will comfort us, sustain us and sometimes even bring us back to life. Jesus was not the first nor the last to predict an end to the world. But his message and example that God loves each of us better than any human parent changes the meaning of our personal and our cultural apocalypses.

          For me, Jesus has altered the myths. He is the one whose message and example are of such significance that it is only through the poetry and the power of myth that past followers were able to express His value to them. To understand the momentousness of His message it must have come from purity beyond measure, conceived by a power beyond our ken. Jesus is the light against the darkness, the Good in the face of any evil, His departure must have shattered the power of death itself and His return to us endows us with capacities beyond our imaginings. Jesus brings the end of the world, and Jesus restores it again.

          But we must never forget that He was human, as human as the baby whose arrival we celebrate during this season. If we allow the myths to envelop the man, then we risk being enveloped in the myth’s ourselves. If we do so we risk losing Jesus. So we must pay full attention.

          There have been many times that the need to conform to the powers and myths of a given time have distracted Christians from Jesus. I believe the Constantinian creation of a Christian Orthodoxy from among a large number of heterodox practices was one of the earliest. Other signs of when Christians lost sight of Jesus are frequent and all to familiar: the crusades; the recurrent pograms against Jews; the use of Christianity as an ideologic banner of nationalistic conquest; the behavior of Christians during the holocaust. I don’t think a list could ever be complete.

          But there are also many times when the Spirit of Jesus has broken through and brought new life to small numbers of His followers: the monastic movements of early Catholicism; the French Huguenots; the early Anabaptists; the Quakers; the Methodist revivalists; many more. Each movement expressed the yearnings of a group of people to know God better than the traditions and teachings approved by the status quo. Each time some aspect of the teachings of Jesus served as a catalyst for a new experience of Spiritual growth and ethical conduct. Many times these revivals shed some old myths and traditions, but rarely did they shed them all. Jesus valued Judaic practices and only challenged those that prevented equal access to the gifts of God for all humans. These groups also valued many of the myths and traditions given to them. But they rejected those that prevented them from gaining full access to the Presence of God.

          The accurate history of Jesus is lost to us. But, as we know, history becomes legend and legend becomes myth. It is in this way that we can say that all of these myths are valuable, holy and spiritual. Like we interpret the words of the Bible by seeing it through the eyes of Jesus, we must also see these myths and traditions through Jesus’ eyes. We must pay full attention to the person that we strive to know, to emulate and to love. 

           And so I believe we can say with Paul: in every way (we) have been enriched in Jesus, in speech and knowledge of every kind..

          In this season we have a tradition of celebrating Jesus birth. We have a tradition of proclaiming our love for him in symbols and stories each of which reflect a truth greater than words can say. Jesus brought us the great gift of knowing that God loves us and wants to be close to us far more than we can reciprocate. And so, as best we can, with whatever language, imagery or mythological reference we have, we proclaim Jesus as teacher, as Rabbi, as Messiah, as Son of God, as uniquely begotten, as Lord and Savior, indeed, as Ruler of the Universe. And we thank God for bringing Him into the world.

          Let’s pray together. Almighty God we thank you for the gift of Jesus whose value we can scarcely express. We thank you for the tradition of celebration at this time of year. We thank you for the many attempts our spiritual ancestors have made to describe the experience of transcendence and redemption that they have found in Jesus and we pray that you will always draw our full attention to this man, who we love as we love you. Amen.