Miracle births
Rev. Edmund Robinson
Unitarian Universalist Church of Wakefield
December 22, 2002

Reading: Birth of Confucius by Sophia Lyons Fahs
	Some of you have been around Unitarian Universalism long enough to remember the blue hymnal, which was called Songs for the Celebration of Life. Some of you may also have run into a great parody collection whose title was a takeoff on the blue hymnal, Songs for the Cerebration of Strife, from the pen of Peter Raible, one of our wittiest ministers.  Anyhow, it occurred to me that the attitude many Uus bring to the Christmas story may be best stated in the following song from this classic collection, entitled God Rest Ye Unitarians.

Gods rest ye, Unitarians, let nothing you dismay,
Remember there's no evidence there was a Christmas Day.
When Christ was born is just not known, no matter what they say,
O tidings of reason and fact, reason and fact,
Glad tidings of reason and fact.

Our current Christmas customs came from Persia and from Greece,
From solstice celebrations of the ancient Middle East.
This whole darn Christmas spiel is just another pagan feast.
O tidings of reason and fact, reason and fact,
Glad tidings of reason and fact.

There was no star of Bethlehem, there was no angels' song,
There could not have been wise men for the trip would take too long.
The stories in the Bible are historically wrong,
O tidings of reason and fact, reason and fact,
Glad tidings of reason and fact.

Now you may notice two things about this parody: (1) it is a bucket of ice water on the whole Christmas warmth, and (2) it leaves out the Universalists altogether.  Maybe there is some connection between these two facts.
	It is all too easy to pooh pooh the birth narrative of Jesus that we tell at this time of year.  Yes,  it is true that there are not one but two narratives in the Gospels, one appearing in Luke and the other in Matthew.  They are mutually inconsistent accounts: Luke has the shepherds and the Angels and Matthew has the Wise men.  Each is improbable for a variety of reasons and they can’t both be historically true.  Yet we tell and retell these stories every year.  What is the power they have?
	Those of you who have been attending the Joseph Campbell series will know the answer to that: they have the power of myth.  We see in them a deeper truth than the historical one.  They speak to us of a different order of reality.
	A minute ago, I read the story of Confucius’ birth, which has striking similarities to the story of Jesus’ birth: there is a prophecy that the child will be a great king, and as the child is being born, there is a heavenly host proclaiming his birth.  Put these two stories alongside the story of the birth of the Buddha.
	When the Buddha descended into his mother’s womb, it is said that “even in the boundless realms of space, with their darkness upon darkness, where yonder sun and moon, so magical, so mighty, are felt not in the sky, there too appears the splendor limitless and eminent, surpassing the very might of the devas, so that beings who are born there observe among themselves by reason of that splendor: ‘Friend, indeed there are other beings born here, and this ten-thousand world-system rocks and quakes and tremendously trembles: a splendor limitless and eminent appears in the universe surpassing even the might of the devas.’”
	At that moment his mother was pure from sexuality, has abstained from taking life, from theft, from lusts, from evil conduct, from lying, and from all kinds of wine and strong drink, which are a cause of irreligion.
Moreover, she had no sickness at all, but is happy in a body free from pain, and sees the Bodhisat transparently in the womb (literally, gone across the womb) in full possession of all his limbs and faculties. Even as a gem or precious stone, ÂÂnanda, being radiant, fine, octagonal, and well wrought, is therefore strung upon a dark-blue string or upon a tawny or a red or a white or a yellow string.        	Moreover, his mother gave birth standing up, and as the Buddha leaves his mother's womb, he does not touch the ground: four sons of the devas stand before his mother and receive him. "Be thou a blessed goddess," they say: "unto thee is born an eminent son."
 	The birth was accomplished without any blood or dirt or other messy fluids, as a precious jewel wrapped in a beautiful cloth,  and at the moment of the birth there descended from the sky two showers of water, one cool and the other warm.  
	Now one thing we can say about these stories is that they were all later inventions.  The Gospel accounts of Luke and Matthew were not written down until 70 years after Jesus’ birth.  If the writings of St. Paul were the earliest Christian writings, and they don’t mention the birth stories, and the sayings source Q or the Gospel of Thomas don’t have anything about Jesus’ birth, we can conclude that most probably the writers of Luke and Matthew simply appended these stories to what they had received.  Perhaps the stories were floating around in oral tradition, or perhaps the writers simply made them up.
	For who would have taken any note at the time of Jesus’ birth of the circumstances?  The Gospel accounts taken at face value show that Jesus did not have any significant notoriety in Palestine until the beginning of his public ministry, at about the age of 30.  That public ministry lasted at most three years, and perhaps as little as one year.  So it is unlikely that any literate people first becoming aware of Jesus in his adulthood, would have sought out and written down firsthand accounts of his birth.
	I mean, births happen all the time, and what would induce someone to take note of a birth who isn’t directly involved in it.  I can remember sharply and distinctly the miracles of the births of my two children.  Luke took about 26 hours to make his appearance, and the epidural had his mother throwing up into the basin I held for her.  Sally also decided to wait about two weeks past term to prance onstage, and then only after her mother had taken castor oil at 11 at night, which got her so lubricated that the baby was almost born in the hospital elevator.	That was twenty-four years ago yesterday, the shortest day of the year.
	Now the births of my children are two of the authentic miracles that have happened to me in my lifetime, but until now, very few people knew of them, and you all will probably forget them, because as soon as I started telling you about mine you started thinking about yours.  As Sophia Lyons Fahs says in that reading we love to read on Christmas Eve, every night a child is born is a holy night.  Even if my children or yours later become famous, it’s unlikely that people will tell the stories of their births.  Do we know the birth stories of contemporary people who are famous, like President Bush or Britney Spears?   I don’t even know my own birth-story.   How would the miracle stories of Jesus’ birth have been preserved in an oral culture for seventy years?
	Now we have four first century sources which don’t mention Jesus’ birth: the Gospels of Mark, John and Thomas, and the writings of St. Paul.  So it is clear that many who called themselves followers of Jesus did not think it essential to talk about the circumstance of his birth.  In a similar way, there are many accounts of the life of Confucius which don’t talk about anything miraculous happening when he was born. He was born, they say simply, into a poor family and his father died when he was three.
	Why then are the miracle stories in some accounts and not in others?  Most Biblical scholars will answer this by pointing out that both narratives, in different ways, serve to legitimate Jesus, to give him not only the divine imprimatur, but to put him into the lineage of King David.  You see, at the times these Gospels were written down, the Jewish nation was in great disarray; the Romans had crushed the rebellion of 70 C.E., and worse yet, had desecrated and then destroyed the temple in Jerusalem, the ritual focus of Judaism.  
	The account in Luke actually begins in the Temple, with the archangel Gabriel appearing to Zachariah, a priest of the Temple, and announcing that his wife Elizabeth will bear a child who shall be named John.  This ties the Jesus narrative back into the now-vanished temple lineage and gives it some authority.  Matthew, for his part, starts his account with genealogy, showing the generations from Abraham down to David, and from David down to Joseph, as if to give Jesus a pedigree.  He also takes care to blend in prophecies from the Hebrew Bible at every turn.
	Now I have noted before that these prophecies don’t stand up to a lot of scrutiny.  If you go back and look at the original passages that Matthew claims to prophesy the birth of Jesus, you usually find that the most reasonable interpretation is that it’s talking about something completely different. 
	But the fact that the attempts to legitimate Jesus for 1st Century readers are a little spotty in light of 21st Century Biblical scholarship should not be allowed to obscure the main point: someone was writing these stories down because the life they told about was important, and important for reasons other than political.  If Jesus was supposed to be a political Messiah, he had been a dismal failure.  He had not brought the children of Israel out from under the yoke of Roman oppression during his lifetime, and he was put away in the most brutal and humiliating way possible.  Moreover, if the forces he set in motion in 30 C.E. had any effect on the rebellion of 68-70 C.E., that rebellion was now crushed.
	So there is a miracle of sorts in the fact that there was still a Jesus movement enough to inspire writers to write out accounts of his life.  And that is testament to some sort of spirit which had been shown forth in his brief ministry – really only one to three years in a thirty-three year life – and which still had power to move people forty years later.
	The some might be said of the miracle stories of the Buddha’s birth or of Confucius: they are ways of honoring the spirit of the adult life, the teachings that affected the immediate disciples of the holy one and which continued to resonate down through generation after generation of oral tradition until finally written down decades or even centuries later.
	A truly great spirit, a truly wise teacher, can have this effect, can show the world in a new light, and the new enlightenment breaks through the fog, and one person tells another and it spreads out and forward in time.
	For I suspect that real miracles don’t happen through bending the laws of nature.  The real miracles happen in the human heart.  If you look at any telling of a miracle story, you’ll usually find somewhere there an account of a fundamental transformation of the heart.
	At General Assembly, a minister from Connecticut got up and gave a brief one-person dramatic presentation.  She assumed the role of a woman in the crowd following Jesus in the loaves and fishes story.  The way this story is told in the bible, Jesus miraculously feeds a crowd of five thousand with two barley loaves and five small fishes.  As the minister retold, or rather reenacted the story, it turned out that she had brought a little bit of food that day for herself and her two children to eat on the road back home.  When they started calling out for people to contribute to the common basket, she held back because she was saving this food for herself and her own.  But then something came over her, she had a change of heart.  Suddenly sharing with everyone on that hillside became more important than keeping the food for herself.  And as she opened her cloak to contribute the food she’d been hoarding, she saw that everyone else in the crowd was doing the same thing.
	So the miracle happened, the crowd got fed.  But the miracle happened through a change of heart.
	Well, my hunch is that’s the way it usually works.  We have a change of heart, and that change, that transformation, is what is accounted a miracle.  Maybe that’s not enough for you; maybe it sounds tepid compared to an interruption of the laws of nature.  For myself, I think it’s equally mysterious.  It’s just as impossible to explain rationally why some people have changes of heart as it is to explain virgin birth or transparent wombs.  Saul of Tarsus went from being one of the principal persecutors of the followers of Jesus to their greatest minister.  The explanation given in the Bible is that he had a vision of Jesus while traveling on the road to Damascus.  WE may accept this notion or not, but it is undeniable that he had the change of heart, and that is, in the long run, the important thing.
	We are sorely in need of changed hearts in these times.  We are sorely in need of reasons for hope at this season, in need of acts of grace.  We are in need of miracles my friends.  We are a country whose basic values are imploding; we are becoming the kind of imperialistic bully we have always deplored internationally, and a phobic security state internally.  Justice is getting thrown out the window.
	And on a personal level, we have to confront the longest nights of the year with all the baggage they bring, all the shortcomings, fears, losses, pains, angers.  We are in need of hope, and we are in need of miracles.  We are in need of changes of heart.	
	Some of this feeling is captured in a fragment of a poem by Seamus Heaney called the Cure at Troy, which got a lot of reading in the weeks after 9/11.  The poet writes out of his own experience living in Northern Ireland, a land which has its own peculiar sorrows and angers, riven by decades of bitter revenge-violence between Catholic and Protestant.  Here it is:

	Human beings suffer,
	They torture one another,
	They get hurt and get hard.
	No poem or play or song
	Can fully right a wrong
	Inflicted and endured.

	The innocent in gaols
	Beat on their bars together.
	A hunger-strikers father
	Stands in the graveyard dumb.
	The police widow in veils
	Faints at the funeral home.
	 
	History says, Don’t hope
	On this side of the grave.
	But then, once in a lifetime,
	The longed-for tidal wave
	Of justice can rise up,
	And hope and history rhyme.

	So hope for a great sea-change
	On the far side of revenge.
	Believe that a further shore
	Is reachable from here.
	Believe in miracles
	And cures and healing wells.

	Call miracle self-healing,
	The utter self-revealing
	Double-take of feeling.
	If there’s fire on the mountain
	Or lightening and storm
	And a god speaks from the sky

	That means someone is hearing
	The outcry and the birth-cry
	Of new life at its term.
	It means once in a lifetime
	Justice can rise up
	And hope and history rhyme.

	My friends, these words of an Ulster Catholic are pure Universalism.  They express confidence in a breakthrough of the spirit of good in the most hopeless situation.  The kind of breakthrough which happens in history, with the gift of sages such as Confucius, Buddha, Jesus, people imbued with extra helpings of spirit and who see more clearly than those around them and lead us all into new ways of seeing and knowing and caring for one another.
	Miracles happen daily, my friends.  Each birth of each child is its own miracle, and once in a lifetime or several lifetimes a child is born who carries the promise of breaking through the tired old cycles of despair.  Today I will, in Heaney’s words,
	Call miracle self-healing,
	The utter self-revealing
	Double-take of feeling.
	As we prepare for Christmas, let us all look for miracles; let us all listen for the outcry of new life at its term.
Amen.