"The Winter Holy Days"

His birth was prophesied long before he was in fact born. He was born of a virgin, and a star marked the time and place of his birth. He was saved in infancy from the murderous jealousy of the secular ruler. At the age of about 30 he began preaching; he was tempted by the devil in the wilderness; he cured the blind, cast out demons, and performed many other miracles. His central message was about a Supreme God of truth and goodness.

I am of course describing the prophet Zoroaster, born in Persia about 700 years before Jesus....

Next Sunday, our church school will present the annual Winter Holidays pageant – a celebration which over the years has become increasingly eclectic, trying to include every variation on every December holiday and every cultural “festival of lights” we can manage to squeeze in. Sometimes there’s a bit of a stretch – Divali is often included, for example, although that Hindu festival follows a lunar calendar and so travels around in the year; in 1998, it was celebrated in October. And some of us will never fully recover from the Saturnalia scene presented a few years ago . . .

Robert Morley once commented that it is almost an impertinence to try to write anything “new” about Christmas in particular, and this is the time of year when we truly don’t want everything new, when retelling old stories we already know is a traditional part of all the celebrations.

So that’s what I’d like to do this morning – tell some of stories from the three traditions that are central to our Unitarian Universalist winter holy days, in part because they’re all good stories and I enjoy telling them (I can only hope that you also enjoy hearing them), and in part because it is helpful to remember the human stories, the human hopes and fears and longings that are honored in this season.

In the oldest of our stories, we meet Frigga, the ancient Norse goddess of love, mother of Baldur, the god of the Sun. It was very long ago, during the midwinter "peacestead" or "peace time" of the gods, when violence was forbidden and all hatred and strife were to be forgotten. Frigga had a dream -- that her beloved son would be killed. Hoping to prevent such a tragedy, she went to all the beings and spirits and creatures of the heavens and the earth, extracting from each the promise that they would not harm Baldur.... But she missed the tiny mistletoe, growing high up on the oak tree. And Loki, the god of darkness and evil, noticed her oversight....

Loki suggested a new game for the gods -- although violence was forbidden at this time of the year, since Baldur was now truly immortal, let's play throw the spear at the sun god. Baldur agreed to play, and everyone was vastly amused. Only Hoder, the blind god of Winter, did not participate. But Loki made a special arrow, tipped with a sharp sprig of mistletoe; gave it to Hoder and guided the god's hand... And Baldur was killed....

All the gods were horrified, and would have slain Loki and the guilt-stricken Hoder immediately were it not for the fact that it was "Peacestead" -- they tried for three days to raise the dead god, while Frigga wept, and her tears, falling onto the mistletoe, turned to golden berries. At last, after three days, the power of Frigga's love restored Baldur to life, and in her joy, Frigga declared that the mistletoe was to be forever harmless, forever a symbol of love.....

The Druid priests of pagan Europe held the mistletoe, therefore, to be sacred, and never allowed it to touch the ground. Holly too was sacred, for it had been given by the gods to keep the world beautiful while the sacred oaks were leafless. During their solstice rituals, the priests, with the sacred holly in their hair, went into the oak forests to cut the mistletoe, bless it, and give it to their followers (in return for gifts their followers then gave to the priests). The golden berries were understood to contain the sunlight of Baldur for safe-keeping until he rose from death and the light of the sun returned.

They celebrated the midwinter triumph of the thunder god Thor, who, dressed in red, left his dwelling in the far frozen north to drive away the gods of ice and snow. Odin, Thor's father, would at this season ride his eight-footed horse Sleipner through the world, distributing rewards or punishments as appropriate to everyone.

Pagan Germans, worshippers of the goddess Hertha, in midwinter would build a great fire on a sacred hearth; the smoke would rise from a hole in the ceiling, and the goddess would descend through the smoke and the chimney-hole to distribute gifts of good fortune to her people.

The Norse and Druid peoples also lit great fires at the solstice. The Druids burned an oak or apple log, saving a bit of it to use as kindling for the next year's sacred fire. The Norse, seeing the HWEOL or wheel of the sun rolling away from them as the solstice approached, lit a fire to celebrate its turning back toward earth again at HWEOL-TID -- Yuletide, the time of the wheel's turning.

The Northern Europeans weren't the only ones holding celebrations around the time of the solstice in mid- to late- December:

In pre-druidic England, the Angli had celebrated "Mother's Night" on December 25 as the beginning of the new year....

In Syria and Egypt, the solstice was celebrated on December 25 by priests and worshippers who entered a cave or shrine and then, at midnight, would come forth proclaiming "The Virgin has brought forth a son; the Light is returning!"

The Virgin, of course, was Isis, mother of the sun-god Horus, who was born every year on December 25. Her priests came out of the sacred shrine holding aloft an infant -- or an image of an infant -- to reassure the people that the Nile's flooding and ebbing would remain reliable, and that the Sun God and his Virgin Mother would continue to bless them all. Her brother/husband Osiris, the father of Horus, was also supposedly born on December 25; and Osiris, murdered by his brother and rival Set, is annually reborn in the person of Horus, his son.

In Rome, from about the 17th until the 25th of December, the feast of Saturn -- the Saturnalia -- honored the god of agriculture with the giving of gifts, visiting friends, feasting, and carousing. During the Saturnalia, people decorated their homes with holly and laurel (sacred to the sun god, Apollo), they brought trees into their homes and decorated them with candles and small ornaments, and set an image of the Sun God at the top; during this festival time, all violence and hatred were to be set aside.

In Persia, fires were lit at the solstice to celebrate the birth of the god Mithra, the god of light, who came to be known to his Roman cultic followers as Invictus -- the unconquerable one -- and his birthday -- again, December 25 -- combined with the Saturnalia festivities to celebrate NATALIS INVICTI -- the Birthday of the Unconquered God, who was both human and divine, and who personified the triumph of good over evil, light over darkness.

Also by the way: Angels sang at the births of both the Buddha and Confucius (Confucius also got a unicorn instead of an angel for his birth's Annunciation, and two dragons were present at his birth); 4 kings were present at Buddha's birth. Krishna of India was born of a virgin in a cave marked by a star; Indra of Tibet was also born of a virgin; he descended from heaven to enter her womb. And Zoroaster, as I mentioned before, was also born of a virgin; the Zoroastrians believed and believe still that a star heralds every birth, and the wise men who supposedly went looking for Jesus if they existed at all may well have been astrologers from the Zoroastrian priesthood.....

In 332 BCE, the Greeks took over Jerusalem. They were a big improvement, the Jews thought, over the Persians, so the Jews welcomed them. So long as the Greeks allowed the Jews to worship in their own way, all was well. But after the death of Alexander the Great, control of Judea -- and so Jerusalem -- passed to the Syrians.

At first the Jews noticed no particular changes -- they just mailed their taxes to a different address -- and they were left pretty much in peace -- until the ascension to the Syrian throne of Antiochus IV, "Antiochus Epiphanes" ("the Visible God") to his friends; but Antiochus Epimanes (the Madman) to the Jews....

Antiochus wanted to use Judea as a base to conquer the Western empire -- and he decided that he needed the Jews to be fully assimilated into Hellenic customs -- speak only Greek, follow Greek customs, and worship only the Hellenic gods.... Not surprisingly, opposition arose.

When word reached Jerusalem that Antiochus had been killed in battle in Egypt, they rose in revolt, slaughtered the Syrian supporters and collaborators, threw the Greek gods out of the temple, and rejoiced in their triumph -- until Antiochus himself (the reports of whose death had been greatly exaggerated) showed up in Jerusalem.

Antiochus added to the slaughter, sacked the Temple, and decreed that the Jews could no longer observe the Sabbath, circumcise their sons, or study the Torah; to prove their loyalty and save their lives, the Jews were forced to offer public sacrifice to the Greek gods.

In the village of Modi'in, in 168 BCE, the priest, Mattathias, and his sons, John, Jonathan, Simon, Eleazar, and Judah, were ordered by Antiochus's soldiers to sacrifice and eat a pig, which the priest refused to do. Another villager, hoping to ward off an attack, offered to conduct the sacrifice himself. Mattathias was so outraged by this Jew's willingness to give in that he grabbed a sword from one of the soldiers, killed his fellow Jew and then killed the soldier's commanding officer, while his sons finished off the rest of them.

And so began the Maccabeean Revolt -- "Maccabee", or "Hammer," being the nickname given to Judah, then broadened to identify all his followers. After three years of guerilla warfare, the outnumbered and ill-supplied Maccabeeans drove the Syrians out of Jerusalem. They reentered the desecrated Temple and set to work restoring it.

On the 25th day of Kislef, 165 years before the Common Era, they were ready to rededicate the temple -- and Judah lit the Temple menorah, even though there was not enough undesecrated oil to burn for more than one day. But the lamp burned -- and burned for eight days, until new oil could be prepared -- and so the Hanukkah festival, the Festival of the Dedication, the Festival of Lights, lasts, as that first Hanukkah light lasted, for eight days....

About a century and half later, sometime between about 6 BCE and 9 CE (during one of the two terms of Quirinius as Roman governor over Syria), more likely the earlier date because that was also the date of the clustering of Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn within the constellation of Pisces (a clustering that also occurred, according to tradition, at the time of the birth of Moses), somewhere in the Gallilean region of Judea, maybe in Bethlehem, but probably not, a child was born to a carpenter named Joseph, a descendant of the House of David, and his wife Mary.

And not a single story told about that child was new.

There are 2 nativity stories in the New Testament -- Matthew tells about the wise men from the East and the star, the encounter with Herod and the "slaughter of the innocents" -- an event taken by most Christians as reliable history but in fact there is no independent historical confirmation that such an attack on Jewish families actually took place. In Matthew, there's no manger; the wise men -- of unspecified number -- go to a house; there are no angels and no shepherds. Luke tells about angels and shepherds, emphasizes Mary's virginity, and tells about Mary's earlier encounter with her cousin Elizabeth but makes no mention of wise men or stars.

Matthew's gospel was (say some scholars) written about 40 years after the death of Jesus -- about 70 CE -- to a Jewish audience, to convince them that Jesus of Nazareth really was the Messiah foretold by Jewish scriptures.

Luke's gospel came about 10 years after Matthew's -- it was written by a Greek Christian for a non-Jewish, Greek-influenced audience -- hence the emphasis on the supernatural virgin birth (which would be familiar to and expected by followers of the pagan religions), and the emphasis is not on Joseph and his Jewish lineage but on Mary and her cousin, Elizabeth, the mother of John the Baptist -- themes that would be familiar to worshippers of the Goddess...

The earliest Christians didn't celebrate Jesus's birth -- only evil people, like Pharaoh and Herod, it was believed, celebrated birthdays -- BUT when Jesus kept not coming back through the Christian community's first two centuries or so as an "underground religion," the stories about Jesus dropped his humanity and threatened to transform him into a god just like all the others --

The church leaders realized they had to re-humanize the Christ, or their whole doctrine of the Atonement fell apart -- so they had to give Jesus a birthday....

Started with a spring date -- since the world was created at the vernal equinox, it was believed, so too would that clearly be the right time for the New Creation. Besides, the tradition said there were shepherds around, and shepherds would only have been in the fields from mid-March until about mid-November. So they tried March 28, April 2, April 19, and May 20.

Those dates didn't stick in large part because the Christian people had already been celebrating the birth of Jesus at the same time the pagans were holding their solstice celebrations -- decorating their homes with holly and mistletoe -- in large part so as not to be too conspicuous.

The church tried to separate the birth of Jesus from the Saturnalia by suggesting January 6 -- which is when some Eastern branches of Christianity still celebrate Christmas -- to get it away from the pagan rituals. They didn't really succeed here, either, since January 6 is the day of the Greek festivals of Dionysus and of the birth of Aeon -- or "the new year" -- to the virgin goddess Kore, daughter of Demeter.

Rome had long celebrated the Mithraic Natalis Invicti on December 25; after Christianity became the official religion of Rome after Constantine's conversion in 312, December 25 came to be regarded as the obvious date for celebrating the birth of the Christians' Son of God. The date became official in 350 by decree of Pope Julius I.

The Christians then went to work trying to eradicate the pagan elements -- gift-giving was condemned as pagan; the use of evergreens (especially mistletoe) for decoration was condemned as pagan; from about 350 through the early 12th century, Christmas was supposed to be a purely spiritual, purely Christian celebration....

But in the 12th century, gift-giving began again -- people revived the stories of the third-century Bishop, Nicholas of Patara, the son of wealthy parents who disguised himself and went about his community giving small bags of gold to the needy. The church canonized Nicholas in the 9th century, and although John Paul II officially revoked Nick's sainthood (on the rather silly grounds that the man might not even have existed), well, as we've seen, you can't erase a good story or a good role model from people's hearts....

In the late 14th century or thereabouts, the old pagan decorations and celebrations, such as the yule log, returned, re-mythologized to be "Christian" -- but the pagan symbolism was never overcome

Nor should it have been....

This is an eclectic season, but it's eclectic because all these different stories belong together -- if not in human history, then certainly in the human heart. For all these stories, all these celebrations -- of the annual solstice, or return of the light of the sun; of the historical triumph of the Macabbees in defense of their worship of their God; of the mythical birth of a real man and great teacher of love and compassion and service to God and to Life -- all share common themes, all tell true stories of the human spirit, all speak of the eternal longing for love, hope, trust, and peace. All are stories about the never-ending effort of the human heart to push itself (or perhaps allow itself to be pulled) into a new way of being, into a time -- however brief -- in which myths are not just stories and miracles are not delusions, when the words "Peace on Earth, good will to all" and "Shalom aleichem shalom" are tidings of living truth, not a mere sighing after distant dreams.....