Someone suggested to me, concerning the Christmas birth

story, that if there had been Three Wise Women, they would have:

Asked directions;

Arrived on time;

Helped deliver the baby;

Cleaned the stable;

Made a casserole;

And brought practical gifts.

We will never know. But curiously enough, some of the most important things about Jesus are the things we do not know. Scholars seem reasonably sure that the two accounts of his birth, written many years later by the men we call Matthew and Luke, are myths. Jesus was probably born about the year we call 4 B.C., probably in Nazareth. Some years ago I was in North Yemen, attending a meeting one evening at which some archeologists were reporting on their research, and about fifty of us were sitting on the floor to hear them. I introduced myself to the lady beside me and asked her where she was from. “Nazareth,” she said, and so I asked her whether the people of Nazareth today thought that Jesus had been born there, as my teachers had taught me was likely. She had never heard that theory, and that seemed a little surprising.

Perhaps you have had the experience of being asked, as I have, “Do Unitarian Universalists celebrate Christmas?” When I reply in the affirmative, the next question is invariably “What are you celebrating?” It is a fair question and one we ought to be prepared for, like that other usual question, “What do Unitarian Universalists believe?” I have a standard two-word response to that one. I say, “About what?” The reasons for our celebrating Christmas take a little longer.

Historical facts about the birth of Jesus we simply do not have, but we have myths, which are much more important. For the beauty of myths, when they are not distorted into acceptance as history, is that they become vessels of universal experience. We have just enough elements of myth here—the shepherds and their flocks, the manger and the stable, the star over Bethlehem, the gifts of gold and frankincense and myrrh—to give shape and meaning to the most incredibly successful festival the world may ever have known. For about sixteen centuries (Jesus’ birth was not celebrated until the fourth century) the artists, the musicians, the poets, and the religious teachers of our culture have woven with artistry and imagination, and sometimes with genius, a tapestry of birth, beginnings, joy, hope and peace, out of the simple story of one birth, one life, one beginning.

This was a life with profound effects for Western civilization. Like all human possessions, the memory of this man’s life and teachings has been used for good—and for ill. But we might say that no other life, perhaps, has stirred so many hearts to redeem a suffering world. And no other birth, however many facts we know about it, has caught the imagination and the conscience of people in many parts of the world as this one has, about which we know almost nothing. Here we see the power of myth at work, becoming a vessel of universal experience, expressing the hopes and the truths of the children of earth. The trick is to pick among the many hopes and truths it can be made to express the ones which are valid, enduring and most highly compelling—and then to celebrate those.

We live lives upon which we struggle to impose some order—for we all need order. We are sustained by beliefs and behaviors and institutions and remedies which seem to secure some order in the worlds in which we live: the Rose Bowl and the Rose Parade, and vitamin C, and the scientific method, and political struggles and the Dow-Jones. We want some order out of all that mess, and we want our families and our society to be strong enough and there when we need them to support us and to keep some parts of our world orderly. Because we have a strong sense that though people everywhere are really like us, that larger world is really a zoo. We know that in every major city in our wealthy country there are people sleeping on the street—on the sidewalk over the hot air grates if they are lucky. And I heard of a woman who was looking at a condominium n Sutton Place, New York, a condominium that cost a million dollars. She noticed that it had no dining room, and she mentioned this to the real estate agent, who replied, “Lady, what do you expect for a million dollars?” Part of the craziness of the world that baffles us is trying to put those two pictures together—the luxury of that rush of warm air up through the sidewalk and the modesty of that apartment on Sutton Place.

We venture out into larger worlds; we read the daily paper and watch the morning and evening news; we learn about Baghdad and Falluja and Kashmir, but we live most of our lives in our smaller worlds which are more orderly—except when the order is interrupted. We have little good to say for most of the interruptions: loss of a job or failure to find one; illness or accident or a death in the family, a quarrel or a crisis, a divorce, a misunderstanding—all of these can throw the normal order and stability of our lives into a tailspin—but the larger world goes on in its normally crazy and violent way. There are a few interruptions to the usual pattern that we welcome—like winning the lottery or getting a promotion or having a baby—now there’s an interruption!

So we go to church—to a very human, imperfect, voluntary institution which is trying to stand for hope in this kind of world, by putting together a community, reaching out beyond itself, and tying these normal, everyday lives of ours to some symbols that are bigger than our small worlds, but no so crazy or violent or scary.

When we confront the reality of the warfare, the bombings, the atrocity of growing evidence that our own nation is justifying torture in Abu Graib, and Guantanamo and other places we are just beginning to hear about, our souls cry out for some moral order. And we know that in the next few weeks in every part of the world there will be people evoking the image of the two weary travelers of long ago who found no room in the inn and whose child was born in a manger. The shepherds, the wise men, the singing angels and the moving star—all of them are a call to us for peace and a larger and more benevolent order than we experience where we live—in the suburbs of reality.

It is further reassuring for us to know that at other times of the year there are religious festivals of other cultures which pointsometimes to more universal ways of living. Each of these religious traditions is a way for its followers to make larger sense of the world. For the job of religion is always to try to put the whole together—the pain,k the suffering, the woes of sin and strife—with our best and most generous hopes.

So let us be thankful for the interruption in our lives that is the holiday season. Let us draw closer to all who are significant in our lives and let us to forth strengthened to do our best to radiate that hope as far as we can make it shine.