Where Stars Are Born
Rev. Craig M. Nowak
Sermon Given at the Brookfield Unitarian Universalist Church
December 20, 2015
A couple of weeks ago I was in the Berkshires for Thanksgiving. My husband Kevin and I have been going to the Berkshires for Thanksgiving for several years now. It’s a sort of self-care practice before we host our families including our six nieces and nephews on Christmas Eve. Often, though not this year, it snows when we’re in the Berkshires at Thanksgiving. There are few things as magical to me in this world as a snowy day.
What I love most, aside from the visual beauty, is the unique hush that descends over even the busiest landscape when it snows. I usually make of point of taking a walk or at least going outside when it snows just to listen to that peaceful, serene sound. Of course, snow can also be a pain, necessitating clean up, and the delay, if not, cancelation of plans. Snow afterall pays no mind to our schedules, nor does it submit to our our priorities no matter how well or carefully planned. It is a good reminder of that stubborn truth which Robert Walsh names in our second reading, “our control over the cosmos, or much of anything else, is...an illusion.”
We human beings don’t like to admit this truth. Indeed, we generally work really hard to push against it, if not deny it altogether. This seems especially true during the holiday season, a time of the year when push comes to shove both literally, at the shopping mall, and spiritually, in our hearts and minds.
“Its the most wonderful time of the year” so the song goes. We’re exhorted to “Deck the halls....” and proclaim “Joy to the world...” and yet, sometimes, the big moment arrives and the star fails to shine. That’s what it can feel like when we don’t quite feel the spirit of the season when or how we’re “supposed” to. And in that moment we might find ourselves wondering, What happened?
It is a strange irony that the time of year intended to connect us most deeply with our humaness often pushes us to adopt a machine like existence with added tasks to carry out and extra deadlines to meet. Cuturally we talk of the Christmas or holiday spirit like its something we can, or should, be able to switch on just before Thanksgiving and aburptly switch off after New Years.
Indeed, like so much in our lives, Christmas...the holidays...have become not only highly commercialized but highly automated as well, losing much of their depth and richness in the process. Oh we know the stories, so we think.
The holidays, we say, are about peace, hope, love, family, cheer, goodwill. Christmas is about the birth of Jesus; Hanukkah is about the miracle of the oil and the Winter Soltice is about the rebirth of the sun.
Yes, that’s all true, but it’s only half the story...the half that’s easy to think about and to celebrate. The half that is safe. The half, that, to be honest, doesn’t ask very much of most of us in the modern world.
We begin to get some of the other half of the story when the “on” switches of the season, shopping and sales, songs, paegents and parties, or expected weather don’t work and the star or spirit we expected to shine brightly, within, fails to light. It can be disconcerting to remain in the shadows when the face’s of others seem to glow with the spirit of the season. When it happens the truth of our lack of control over the cosmos hits close to home and can even feel like we’ve lost control of ourselves creating or intensifying feelings of estrangement that characterize life in the shadows...or darkness.
Among the scriptures which form the larger narrative of the Christmas story in the Christian tradition are these words from the Hebrew Bible, Isaiah (9:2) “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who lived in a land of deep darkness— on them light has shined.”
It’s easy to focus on the “great light” spoken of in these words. Light, we’ve been taught, is synonymous with good. Light represents desirability and purity. It represents truth. Suffice it to say, we’re pretty fond of light. We’ve been taught to value light...no matter its source. Indeed, artificial light allows us to keep night, the dark, at bay and break out of the rhythm of the natural world. Thus in the modern world, light has also become equated with safety and control.
Darkness on the other hand, for most of us, has been associated with ignorance or falsehood, even sinfulness and evil. A sharp contrast from how we view light which, when projected upon people, has, and continues to have, tragic consequences.
Still, for better or worse, darkness largely symbolizes or reminds us of our vulnerability. In the modern world, where the occasional power outage thrusts us into darkness, we can barely tolerate the vulnerability we feel disconnected from glow of our screens and loss of control over the night. Thus, darkness is seen at a minimum, as an intolerable inconvenience and at worst, a threat to be avoided or enemy to be subdued.
By cloaking ourselves in perpetual, albeit artificial light, physically and spiritually, we come to believe we are in control. But this is an illusion. We are just as vulnerable as a species as we’ve ever been, but less acutely aware of our vulnerability on a daily basis in many ways.
Spiritually, we labor under the illusion that the key to seeing the “great light” in our own age is to aspire toward a brighter bulb, one capable of eliminating all darkness...including all mystery in life. If you’ve ever driven in a whiteout, you have some sense of what a harrowing existence that would be.
The words of the prophet Isaiah speak of light yes, but they also remind us the light appeared to people dwelling in darkness, that is people aware of or connected to their vulnerability. The arrival of “a great light” would have no real meaning without this connection or awareness. It would have been just like any other day.
When we make light our hero and darkness our enemy we miss the more subtle points of the stories and myths of the season....the other half of the story as I noted earlier.
Holidays that lift up and celebrate peace, hope, love, family, cheer and goodwill also call us to recognize and respond to the presence of war, desperation, hatred, isolation, sorrow, and hostility. We can’t do that when we’re working to control the cosmos through the quirky application of intellect, creed, or through emotional coersion.
More than a fable about the birth of Jesus, the Christmas story is a reminder of our need for hope and that that transformative hope emerges out of the rawness of life where fear, doubt, and joy intermigle, that what might inspire or save us arrives in unlikely, even humble, unexpected places. “Why not a star?” our first reading asks. It’s a call for openess of mind and spirit, for “Who knows what uncommon life may yet again unfold, if we but give it a chance?” A chance that emerges from lives connected to or aware of human vulnerability rather than fearfully avoiding or in denial of it.
The miracle of the oil in Hannukah speaks to our longing for faith and trust in the resiliancy of the human spirit in the face of great adversity. It demonstrates that despite “our inability to control the cosmos, or much of anything else,” we are not powerless.
And the Winter Soltice restores our connection to the earth and its creatures, reminding us life is governed not by calendars on smart phones but the cycles of the season. For “if the divine presence breaks through”, Robert Walsh observes, “the timing is up to it and not us- the best we can do is to stay loose enough to be open to it.” To be open to anything, we must maintain some connection to it.
And this leads us back to Walsh’s wonderful little story about the paegent when the star didn’t light as expected. We can and have created calendars, invented holidays to observe significant events or lift up certain ideals and set dates for their observation. We can and have created liturgies, rituals, and song, both sacred and secular to evoke the spirit of the season. We can and will continue to struggle to balance the spiritual and commercial expression of the season.
The one thing we cannot do however is control how or when the light, the divine presence, the Christmas or holiday spirit will break through for each of us. The best we can do is ready ourselves. The observances, songs and fesitivites of the season are all ways we ready ourselves, ways many of us look forward to, even if the spirit is sometimes slow in coming.
Perhaps most importantly, though, we ready ourselves by acknowledging, rather than fearing, the darkness, that we might recall, reconnect to... and inhabit our vulnerability as human beings. The place where darkness and light meet...the place where stars are born.
Amen and Blessed Be
Rev. Craig M. Nowak
Sermon Given at the Brookfield Unitarian Universalist Church
December 20, 2015
A couple of weeks ago I was in the Berkshires for Thanksgiving. My husband Kevin and I have been going to the Berkshires for Thanksgiving for several years now. It’s a sort of self-care practice before we host our families including our six nieces and nephews on Christmas Eve. Often, though not this year, it snows when we’re in the Berkshires at Thanksgiving. There are few things as magical to me in this world as a snowy day.
What I love most, aside from the visual beauty, is the unique hush that descends over even the busiest landscape when it snows. I usually make of point of taking a walk or at least going outside when it snows just to listen to that peaceful, serene sound. Of course, snow can also be a pain, necessitating clean up, and the delay, if not, cancelation of plans. Snow afterall pays no mind to our schedules, nor does it submit to our our priorities no matter how well or carefully planned. It is a good reminder of that stubborn truth which Robert Walsh names in our second reading, “our control over the cosmos, or much of anything else, is...an illusion.”
We human beings don’t like to admit this truth. Indeed, we generally work really hard to push against it, if not deny it altogether. This seems especially true during the holiday season, a time of the year when push comes to shove both literally, at the shopping mall, and spiritually, in our hearts and minds.
“Its the most wonderful time of the year” so the song goes. We’re exhorted to “Deck the halls....” and proclaim “Joy to the world...” and yet, sometimes, the big moment arrives and the star fails to shine. That’s what it can feel like when we don’t quite feel the spirit of the season when or how we’re “supposed” to. And in that moment we might find ourselves wondering, What happened?
It is a strange irony that the time of year intended to connect us most deeply with our humaness often pushes us to adopt a machine like existence with added tasks to carry out and extra deadlines to meet. Cuturally we talk of the Christmas or holiday spirit like its something we can, or should, be able to switch on just before Thanksgiving and aburptly switch off after New Years.
Indeed, like so much in our lives, Christmas...the holidays...have become not only highly commercialized but highly automated as well, losing much of their depth and richness in the process. Oh we know the stories, so we think.
The holidays, we say, are about peace, hope, love, family, cheer, goodwill. Christmas is about the birth of Jesus; Hanukkah is about the miracle of the oil and the Winter Soltice is about the rebirth of the sun.
Yes, that’s all true, but it’s only half the story...the half that’s easy to think about and to celebrate. The half that is safe. The half, that, to be honest, doesn’t ask very much of most of us in the modern world.
We begin to get some of the other half of the story when the “on” switches of the season, shopping and sales, songs, paegents and parties, or expected weather don’t work and the star or spirit we expected to shine brightly, within, fails to light. It can be disconcerting to remain in the shadows when the face’s of others seem to glow with the spirit of the season. When it happens the truth of our lack of control over the cosmos hits close to home and can even feel like we’ve lost control of ourselves creating or intensifying feelings of estrangement that characterize life in the shadows...or darkness.
Among the scriptures which form the larger narrative of the Christmas story in the Christian tradition are these words from the Hebrew Bible, Isaiah (9:2) “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who lived in a land of deep darkness— on them light has shined.”
It’s easy to focus on the “great light” spoken of in these words. Light, we’ve been taught, is synonymous with good. Light represents desirability and purity. It represents truth. Suffice it to say, we’re pretty fond of light. We’ve been taught to value light...no matter its source. Indeed, artificial light allows us to keep night, the dark, at bay and break out of the rhythm of the natural world. Thus in the modern world, light has also become equated with safety and control.
Darkness on the other hand, for most of us, has been associated with ignorance or falsehood, even sinfulness and evil. A sharp contrast from how we view light which, when projected upon people, has, and continues to have, tragic consequences.
Still, for better or worse, darkness largely symbolizes or reminds us of our vulnerability. In the modern world, where the occasional power outage thrusts us into darkness, we can barely tolerate the vulnerability we feel disconnected from glow of our screens and loss of control over the night. Thus, darkness is seen at a minimum, as an intolerable inconvenience and at worst, a threat to be avoided or enemy to be subdued.
By cloaking ourselves in perpetual, albeit artificial light, physically and spiritually, we come to believe we are in control. But this is an illusion. We are just as vulnerable as a species as we’ve ever been, but less acutely aware of our vulnerability on a daily basis in many ways.
Spiritually, we labor under the illusion that the key to seeing the “great light” in our own age is to aspire toward a brighter bulb, one capable of eliminating all darkness...including all mystery in life. If you’ve ever driven in a whiteout, you have some sense of what a harrowing existence that would be.
The words of the prophet Isaiah speak of light yes, but they also remind us the light appeared to people dwelling in darkness, that is people aware of or connected to their vulnerability. The arrival of “a great light” would have no real meaning without this connection or awareness. It would have been just like any other day.
When we make light our hero and darkness our enemy we miss the more subtle points of the stories and myths of the season....the other half of the story as I noted earlier.
Holidays that lift up and celebrate peace, hope, love, family, cheer and goodwill also call us to recognize and respond to the presence of war, desperation, hatred, isolation, sorrow, and hostility. We can’t do that when we’re working to control the cosmos through the quirky application of intellect, creed, or through emotional coersion.
More than a fable about the birth of Jesus, the Christmas story is a reminder of our need for hope and that that transformative hope emerges out of the rawness of life where fear, doubt, and joy intermigle, that what might inspire or save us arrives in unlikely, even humble, unexpected places. “Why not a star?” our first reading asks. It’s a call for openess of mind and spirit, for “Who knows what uncommon life may yet again unfold, if we but give it a chance?” A chance that emerges from lives connected to or aware of human vulnerability rather than fearfully avoiding or in denial of it.
The miracle of the oil in Hannukah speaks to our longing for faith and trust in the resiliancy of the human spirit in the face of great adversity. It demonstrates that despite “our inability to control the cosmos, or much of anything else,” we are not powerless.
And the Winter Soltice restores our connection to the earth and its creatures, reminding us life is governed not by calendars on smart phones but the cycles of the season. For “if the divine presence breaks through”, Robert Walsh observes, “the timing is up to it and not us- the best we can do is to stay loose enough to be open to it.” To be open to anything, we must maintain some connection to it.
And this leads us back to Walsh’s wonderful little story about the paegent when the star didn’t light as expected. We can and have created calendars, invented holidays to observe significant events or lift up certain ideals and set dates for their observation. We can and have created liturgies, rituals, and song, both sacred and secular to evoke the spirit of the season. We can and will continue to struggle to balance the spiritual and commercial expression of the season.
The one thing we cannot do however is control how or when the light, the divine presence, the Christmas or holiday spirit will break through for each of us. The best we can do is ready ourselves. The observances, songs and fesitivites of the season are all ways we ready ourselves, ways many of us look forward to, even if the spirit is sometimes slow in coming.
Perhaps most importantly, though, we ready ourselves by acknowledging, rather than fearing, the darkness, that we might recall, reconnect to... and inhabit our vulnerability as human beings. The place where darkness and light meet...the place where stars are born.
Amen and Blessed Be
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