A colleague of mine, John Shuck, says that the church made far too much of the virgin birth, and far too much of Jesus being the Son of God, when it came to making meaning of the story of Christ’s birth. He’s right. There were plenty of virgin birth stories in circulation at the time. Mystery religions, for example, at the time of Jesus also had their own virgin birth stories. Every great ruler, including Caesar, the Emperor of Rome, was believed to have been divinely conceived. As to the title Son of God, that too, was a title demanded by Caesar. The virgin birth and the affirmation that Jesus is the Son of God were always intended to be subversive metaphors, not propositional truths about Jesus.
What I mean by subversive metaphors is that the gospel writers wrote these birth stories as a symbolic way of sticking it to Caesar and all those people who believed that his power represented the exercise of divine power, and his office as the powerful man in the world represented the way God exercised power in the world. In other words, the gospel writers were outrageously undermining Caesar’s rule. Jesus, they contended—a Jewish peasant nobody—was God’s Son, not Caesar. His way, and not Caesar’s, was divinely blessed. Jesus, a powerless man from the backwater of Galilee, was divinely conceived, not Caesar. In other words, if you want a model of what God looks like in human form, look to Jesus, not Caesar, not the rich and powerful, not the movers and shakers, not the ones who get first dibs on tickets to the Olympics and every other event considered to be important by society. Such is the outrageous claim of the Christmas story. Come back next week to hear the story of how the reigning governor, Herod, was so threatened by Jesus that he ordered the slaughter of all male children under two when he heard about the birth.
John’s gospel doesn’t have the story of a virgin birth. No angels. No shepherds. No magi. Rather, it kicks off with some serious metaphysics. “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God”. Think of “the Word” as divine Wisdom, Creativity, and Love. That, says John, became flesh in Jesus and dwelled among us. A more literal translation of “the Word became flesh and dwelled among us” is “God pitched a tent and dwelled in our midst”. It sort of brings to mind the Occupy movement, and the tent cities that sprung up around the world. These ordinary citizens have unleashed the metaphor of occupation to cover just about everything and every institution in society. Occupy Wall Street, the banks, and all forms of commerce. Occupy Congress, democracy, and the education system.
It spread from a rallying cry to occupy our social, political, and economic systems to the spiritual realm. Occupy your self, your life, and your value systems. Occupy church. Occupy the planet, the oceans and rivers, and the forests. There’s virtually no limit to what can be occupied. Some people think it’s gone too far. It’s too diffuse. It’s so broad that it has become meaningless. But perhaps it hasn’t gone far enough. Perhaps the soul of the people that has long been dormant and hypnotized by the dominant power system and its assumptions about reality is waking up. Maybe it represents a deep, spiritual impulse that the time has come to take back our lives, our planet, our institutions and imbue them once more with soul. Have you ever considered the possibility that the Occupy movement is one dimension of a new birth story—equally miraculous—and that is the story of the collective birth of our species as a kind of new human. Christianity has always claimed that Jesus was both fully human and fully divine. This story is really about the birth of a new human in the 21st century, one that gets that what we claimed about Jesus, we are ready now to claim about ourselves collectively—that all the love, all the healing powers, all the compassion we see in Jesus was in anticipation of a collective birth that is now underway, and maybe the Occupy movement is an expression of that.
This Christmas, I’m imagining that the birth of Christ is really about a divine occupation. It’s Spirit occupying our world, our planet, our very lives—pitching a tent right in the middle of our comings and goings. The story of the birth of Christ is God’s way of getting in our face, and more importantly into our hearts, so that we may undergo an identity shift the likes of which we’ve never experienced. I’m imagining that there is an empty cavity in the hearts of human, waiting for a heart to fill it. Christ comes once again this Christmas to occupy the cavernous emptiness of a planet that is trying to get by without love.
The cavity meant for a divine heart got stuffed full of other things—by thoughts of success and status. In Mary’s song, called the Magnificat, which we read a couple of Sundays ago she sings out that God has “scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts”. The proud are those whose heart cavity got filled by dreams of untold wealth, gained at the expense of life itself. Mary sings out that the “rich shall be sent empty away”. God never gives up on those who confused wealth with money. God has the good grace to hollow them out, to reach in and grab fistfuls of stocks and bonds from the cavity in their chests, to make room for their divine heart which is their birthright. Then the rich can have their paper money back to see how their heart wants to use it.
Every Christmas, we tell a story about God pitching a tent right in the middle of our coming and going, and occupying our attention—for at least one night of the year—drawn by carols, tradition, family, and I think hope for more. I think we hope that this will be the year that our hearts get so divinely occupied that we experience an irreversible transformation of consciousness. This Christmas story is really about God being born in us, through us, and as us. This is the birth we are actually anticipating.
What the occupiers are saying, and what God is trying to tell us is that our species has gone as far as it can without a divine heart. Corporations have gone as far as they can. There’s nothing wrong with corporations, but corporations without a heart wreak havoc on our one Earth community. Our banking industry has gone as far as it can. There’s nothing wrong with banks. But banks without a heart end up serving the bottom line, and the bottom line is a voracious, pitiless god. Our energy companies have gone as far as they can. There’s nothing wrong with energy companies, but if you are producing energy without love for the planet and future generations, you become an agent of death. You end up with Mr. Potter in It’s a Wonderful Life. Shareholders, you and me, have gone as far as we can without a divine heart. There’s nothing wrong with being a shareholder. But shareholders without a heart fall invest for security and not a better future. Politics and politicians have gone as far as they can without a heart. There’s nothing wrong with being a politician—it is a noble calling—but politicians without a heart end up as strategists, not servants of the public. The church has gone as far as it can without a divine heart—without every disciple of Jesus awakening to their own divine/human nature. There’s nothing wrong with being a church. But churches without a heart end up as servants of Caesar, colonizers, dogmatists and literalists.
To believe in this Christmas story has nothing to do with believing the details of the story as told by Matthew or Luke. It’s a great story, for sure. And I hope we never stop telling it. It’s a story that never actually happened, but one that is always happening in those who feel the empty space where a heart is meant to be.
Jesus wasn’t a great man like Caesar. He was simply a good man. His heart was filled with divine love for the suffering he saw all around him. What others could ignore broke him open, broke him down. Jesus wasn’t a powerful man, like a CEO or a President. If you’ve seen the film Margin Call, you gain a sense of what the culture of a corporate bank becomes when the heart of the President is empty and cold. Jesus didn’t have the power to create phantom financial instruments that would make him and his cronies incredibly wealthy. The only power he possessed was the power of a self-emptying love—the power to give his life away in the service of love. Jesus wasn’t even a religious man. His only religion was love and a passion to make sure everybody, the rich and the poor, felt the love of God to such an extent that they reoriented their faith and their future around love.
God’s occupation didn’t begin or end with Jesus birth. God inhabited an entire universe with Creativity, Intelligence, and Love, which is still in the process of coming to fruition. God occupied our planet and every rock and creature. In the fullness of time, when the human ones emerged God occupied the hearts of the ancient shaman, Abraham and Sarah, Moses, Lao-Tzu, Buddha, Confucius, Isaiah, St. Paul, Augustine, Mohammed, Hildegard of Bingen, Sitting Bull, Baha’u’llah, Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr.. As Christians we celebrate that the whole cosmos coalesced in Jesus to give birth to its full potential for the human species. We interpret Jesus’ birth story as a way of making the claim that in this human being we are given a foretaste of what the whole human species is capable of, and that includes you who are gathered here this evening. We are capable of being the human/divine hybrid identity that we claim for Jesus.
To believe in Christmas simply means to believe that the home of God is with creatures all of species, including humans. The home of God is wherever God pitches her tent, and that can be anywhere and in anybody whose heart is ready to be occupied. If you make of your heart a stable, God will be born. God will occupy your life with the promise that you’ve been waiting to be delivered your whole life.
