Dec 24, 1999
The following Christmas message was given by the Rev.
Gene Preston at the late Christmas Eve worship (l0:30PM
until Midnight) of Community Church Hong Kong. The
magnificent venue for this liturgy was the APEX at the
top of Central Plaza, 800 feet above central Hong Kong.
The sanctuary was softly lit with candles, decorated in
red trimmings, and brimming with dozens of poinsettas,
making for a memorable setting for the final Christmas
Eve celebration of the second millennium after
Christ.
CHRISTMAS
MESSAGE FOR DEC 24, 1999
"GOD'S SIXTH SENSE
AND OURS"
One of the surprises of the
world of cinema in l999 was the wild popularity of the
film called THE SIXTH SENSE.
The film features interaction
between a psychologist and a nine-year-old boy troubled
by the conviction that he is visited by "dead people."
Only the boy, exercising his sixth sense, sees these
strange and terrifying visitors but he does not know the
meaning of it all.
Through therapy with the
psychologist, who himself is deeply troubled by his
failure to have helped an earlier young patient also
deeply disturbed by extra-normal experiences, they
explore issues of death, the after life, morality and
responsibility.
I liked the movie because it is
a reminder that things are not always as they seem.
Spiritual reality often calls for the exercise of a sixth
sense beyond the five senses with which we usually access
reality. If we judge reality only by our five senses we
will come up short again and again on meaning, insight
and inspiration.
When Christmas comes around each
year, it quickens all our senses with its music,
wrappings, and celebrations. But Christmas would stir us
to exercise our sixth sense if we are to truly receive
what God has done in the birth of Jesus
Christ.
If we do not think about the
extra normal significance of Christmas then we shall
leave the season as most cinema goers left the theatres
after enjoying the Sixth Sense. Christmas celebrants like
movie goers can be touched for a while, even deeply
touched, but then, as with movie goers, leave the
theatre, returning to normal existence, and dismissing
that which had stirred us as only so much movie stuff.
Do you go through Christmas,
enjoying it, but come out the other side just dismissing
it as so much Christmas stuff?
******
The spiritual symbols of
Christmas are many: the Angels, the Stars, the Wise Men,
the barren wilderness, the humble stable of the Nativity
birth, the flight of the holy family, the slaughter of
the innocents, and at all times the cross that shadows
the crib. These symbols are bound to touch our five
senses. Do they touch our sixth sense wherein spiritual
imagination and living faith are formed?
An angel a tells Mary that the
Holy Spirit will come upon her, and the power of the Most
High will overshadow her; therefore the child to be born
will be called holy, the Son of God….And of his rule
there will be no end.
If Mary had operated only from
her five material senses, she would have quickly
dismissed this experience as unreal, a premature
Hollywood script into which she was thrust. The
announcement to Mary is on its face ridiculous and just
how ridiculous it all was proven when about 33 years
later Mary stood as the grieving mother of her grown up
boy and experienced with him his final hours of his
suffering on the cross. And yet things are not as they
appear and God acts in a dimension which challenges our
normal experiences and re-channels our sensations of the
real.
Mary was born and grew up in a
world dominated by ordinary senses, heightened and
brightened by the indulgent paganism of Rome. Human eyes,
ears, taste, smell and feel have rarely been as exercised
as by the upper classes able to enjoy Roman indulgence.
The public and private architecture of the Empire, the
poetry of Pindar, the taste of bacchanalian feasts, the
smell of perfumes of the empire, and the feel of pagan
sensuality, were all taken by granted as the essence of
reality and meaning.
But none of it lasted. Paganism
began unravelling within the lifetime of Mary. By
contrast, the name "God with us" which Mary gave to her
child would survive and become celebrated to this very
last Christmas of our millennium.
******
Every human is confronted with
two supreme mysteries: the mystery of the universe and
the mystery of oneself. It is possible to demystify both
the universe and oneself by concluding that the universe
is a random result of impersonal energy and that oneself
is likewise the product of the interaction of random
molecules.
With the demystification of
oneself, however, the process is more challenging since
the self immediately raises awareness issues: Why am I
here? Only to die? Or to live? To live in order to die?
What is the mind? Where does my sense of oughtness arise?
Why am I bothered about issues of evil and ultimate good
if I am only a random happening in an impersonal
universe? Is there life after this life? If reality is
only what my five senses can judge, why am I not totally
happy when my five senses are fulfilled?
All these questions bring us to
the threshold of opening ourselves to our spiritual sixth
sense so that we might experience God.
Underlying the Christmas
symbols and whatever mystique they generate in each of us
this Christmas night is the ultimate mystery of the God
who acts toward us. The God who is holy yet humbles
Himself in the form of the God child; the God who lifts
up humanity by anointing a human to show the way through
our ordinary senses to the divine sixth sense.
The sixth sense of Christmas
stimulates our imagination and the enlivens our spirit.
Through imagination and spirit we can be reached by
Christmas symbols that suggest a mystery beyond our
rationale grasp of reality.
The writer Richard Crashaw has
caught the mystery of Christmas in this poem:
Welcome, all
wonders in one sight;
Eternity shut
in a span:
Summer in
winter, day in night;
Heaven in
earth, and God in man:
Great little
one
Whose
all-embracing birth
Lifts earth to
heaven,
Stoops heaven
to earth
The Christian sixth sense is to
see that there is more than what we can literally see;
there are more thoughts yet to be thought that we have
already thought; there is more to discern about who we
are this holy night than what our five senses have led
us to believe there is.
God has created the five senses
for us to enjoy but God exists beyond our five senses in
the sixth sense realm of the holy. Because God is spirit,
God can come to us at Christmas, God can enter our
hearts now, God can abide with us now and forever. And of
the reign of Jesus Christ there shall be no
end.
Merry Christmas!
Pastor Gene
Preston
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