Advent III: Patience, Myth and the Mystery of God – Aldred H. Neufeldt – Dec. 12, 2010

The song comes to an end, as it must.  Everyone sits in silence, entranced in the after glow.  After a while, a few children start fidgeting.  Their parents quietly rise, and then others, as the congregation gradually takes its leave for home – embracing one another with wishes for a blessed Christmas.  

Left unsaid – perhaps because we couldn’t find the words, perhaps because we were only sub-consciously aware of it – is that we’d just had an encounter with the Devine.

It’s late in the first century, and there now exists a community of believers.  It has become apparent that becoming a people of justice and righteousness is complicated.   James is concerned about some of the same issues Mary’s song raises, except in this case he is concerned about divisions amongst Christians – between rich and poor.  In the verses before our reading, James warns against favoritism towards rich members, and against commitment of slander, greed, violence and fraud by the wealthier amongst them. 

Then, beginning in verse 7 he exhorts the poor to be “patient”.  Rather than a life of grasping and exploitation, patience makes
makes possible a life of deferred gratification he says, waiting for fruit to ripen before harvesting it – be patient until the coming of the Lord – in other words, until the coming of the ‘promised land’. 

There are many sayings about patience.  One heard most often is: ‘patience is a virtue’ – a statement that can be traced back to to at least Cato the Elder more than 150 years before Christ.   The Dutch have a proverb: “A handful of patience is worth more than a bushel of brains.” There are many others.  In Christian church tradition, patience is one of the most valuable virtues of life.  Increasing patience is viewed as the work of the Holy Spirit.

But, try to imagine a more countercultural way to live in our materialistic, fast-paced society.   I grew up with snail mail.  Then e-mail came along, and I’d get impatient if someone didn’t respond within a day.  Since retiring, I’m a little more relaxed.  Then came texting, and I notice others around me who seem impatient if a response takes more than a few seconds. 

God hasn’t said these issues will be overcome easily.  But, James refuses to indulge a spirit of hopelessness.  Patience is not a passive state.  Gripped by unpleasant experiences that can’t be easily changed, there is a tendancy to confuse helplessness with lack of hope.  James says that as long as we can breath, there is room for hope.  Like the patient farmer (v. 7), we can discard the discomfort of helplessness by looking for new, outside-the-box ways of helping ourselves and each other.  Patience leads to hope, and hope drives life forward even in the most difficult of situations.

Myth and the Mystery of God
It is now some 2000 years since Mary’s ‘boy child’ was born, as the Calypso carol says, and the challenge continues.  Patience, an active patience, is needed. The ‘promised land’ is not yet here.  The church has been an imperfect instrument over the centuries.  And, yet, God continues to work within and beyond us to address the challenges of the day. 

One we currently face is that our society has raised several generations of people who are largely Biblically illiterate.  There are many contributors; but, like the congregation James addresses, some of them are of our own making.  My generation, and those just before and after, in our attempt to get away from what we perceived as the narrow religious dogma of our parents’ generations, introduced a new problem – a willingness by many to reject the essential truthfulness of the Biblical story.  We’ve pursued historical veracity and scientific accuracy, and raised questions about various aspects of the Biblical account. 

Now, of itself, to question is not wrong  – and, pursuit of knowledge is a good thing.  But, if we raise doubts about matters of faith in a way that is not replaced by substantive planks on which the next generation can place their feet in belief, then we invite disbelief.  A colleague of mine, raised in a church, once said of her young adult children, somewhat ruefully, that she had raised two ‘heathens’ – fine people, but with little belief in a higher power or in the possibilities of the Christ child.

When it comes to the birth of a child, all of us are romantics.  A new life, a new hope, innocence coming into a jaded and weary world.  If there is beauty anywhere, surely it is here.  And, in Christmas, it is hard even for the unbeliever to not believe in something – peace on earth; goodwill to all; a dream of innocence that it is good to hang onto, even if only a dream; the possibility of hope.  Small wonder that Christmas has been adopted as a tradition around the world, though often in the form of a benevolant Santa Claus and elves.  Even so, for a moment or two, the darkness of enchantment, cynicism and doubt draw back a little, and the usual worldly witcheries lose something of their power to charm.

But no moment lasts forever.  It is not for twelve months that ‘the bird of dawning’ –as Shakespeare in Hamlet called the rooster crowing through the night before Christmas – it is not for twelve months that the “bird of dawning sings all night long”.  The normal hurried nature of life returns, with all its demands and ambiguities.  And, old questions of faith return in new ways.

Amongst these, the when, where and how of the Nativity have been the subject of endless questioning and conjecture.  Over the years there have been debates about the date of Christ’s birth, of the ‘how’ of his birth, and an immense amount of poetry has grown up around the entire story – about the wise men and the star, the shepherds keeping watch over their flocks by night, and the hymn the angels sang.  God gave humankind the gift of questioning, and we’ve used it to the full.  Basically, the question asked has been: if someone had been there with a camera, would it have recorded the story in the same way as passed down to us?  Whatever the answer is, it can only be by faith.  The kind of objective truth a camera would have recorded is buried beneath the weight of 2000 years. 

There is, of course, another kind of truth – that the particular details scholars dig up, while informative, don’t really matter – what matters is that, when the child was born, the course of human history was changed.  It is difficult to conceive how differently things would have turned out if that birth had not happened.  And, a further truth is that for untold numbers of people who have lived since the birth of Jesus, that birth made possible not just a new way of understanding life, but a new way of living it. And, untold numbers continue to be grasped by the child who was born, so caught up in the message he taught and the life he lived, that they have found themselves profoundly changed by their relationship with him.  What the birth meant – meant to them, to the world – was the truth that mattered to them most; and, when all is said and done, is perhaps the only truth that matters to anyone.

It is here that the mystery of God’s works shows itself.  It is not so much in science, though that is not to be dismissed; rather, it is in the truth underlying the stories handed down through the generations – the realm of ‘myth’.  The word ‘myth’ has come be understood in the scientific era as something that is false.  But, there is an older and deeper meaning I refer to – one that a myth speaks to a world-view that is important.

Some scholars  have spoken of myths as a particular kind of narrative, characterized by truth and reality
, which exceed more scientific accounts of historical reality because of their ability to answer the deeper questions of life. In this sense, myths are a way of understanding truths underlying such existential questions of the human condition as: Who am I? What does it mean to be human? What is it about me that God relates to?  What does the birth of Jesus some 2000 years ago mean to me?  Myths understood this way, more than science-based evidence, can help one discover the underlying sacred truths otherwise not revealed. Science may help clarify our understandings, but not replace them.

What I take from these arguments is that part of our task as a community of believers is to embrace Mary’s song, to celebrate with her the stories of the birth, and to accept James’ admonition to work patiently in interpreting these to others.

Back to the Beginning
So, I enjoy the traditional Christmas carols.  Some may embody mythical elements – but, to me, these myths unfold a world-view that is important.

When we left TUMC that evening years ago, after the singing of Silent Night, we rapidly returned to the rational, hurly burly world of every day life.  It was Christmas Eve, after all. We live in a time of abundance, and there were places to go and things to do. 

Yet, the memory traces of that experience stayed with me – long past the actual event – not only the mental, factual part, but also the emotional, feeling part. It was when time stood still.  It was when the poetry of Christmas became intertwined with our lives, nurturing our spirits, giving hope – to pursuing the commitment of the ages – to seek the support of the Holy Spirit in working patiently for a place and time when all people can live in peace and justice, when wolf and lamb eat together.