A Solstice Sermon

Entering the Harshest Season… with Hope
by Paul Kent Oakley, Student Minister
Carbondale Unitarian Fellowship
December 19, 2010

“O Holy Night!”
“A thrill of hope! The weary world rejoices, for yonder breaks a new and glorious morn!”

We are Unitarian Universalists. So, while some of you certainly loved the carol we just heard, some of you may not be completely comfortable with it. Perhaps it too strongly presents a particular view of Jesus, a view that does not leave room for your personal truth. Perhaps it’s just too supernatural or mythical for your tastes. Angels flying through the night sky? It's not a rational image. So if you feel boxed in by this carol, please come with me briefly to explore this great Unitarian gift to the celebration of Christmas, the Christian interpretation of the northern hemisphere’s winter solstice. Yes, it IS a Unitarian gift!

Come with me back in time to 1855. Boston, Massachusetts. The home of John Sullivan Dwight, an ordained Unitarian minister. Dwight was a transcendentalist and an abolitionist. Though ordained, he earned his living not in the pulpit but as a music critic. He was a sophisticated, Harvard-educated Bostonian. Imagine a spacious 19th-century home. It is night. Dwight is in his library, walls lined floor-to-high-ceiling with bookcases filled with leather-bound volumes. The place smells of erudition. And, yes, of privilege. A single lamp burns on the library table. Spread out on the table are loose sheets of music that had arrived from Europe earlier that day. While his wife sleeps soundly in her chamber upstairs. Dwight sorts and classifies and hums a few bars of this song or that carol. His imagination is captured by one particular carol. He imagines his wife Mary singing it. He is particularly moved by the last verse’s declaration of the common humanity, the brotherhood – they spoke in masculine terms in those days – the brotherhood of slaves and free men alike. He starts to translate the lyrics from French into English.

And what an effort the translation took. A Roman Catholic parish priest in France had commissioned the lyrics from Placide Cappeau, a wine merchant, abolitionist, and amateur poet. That was in 1847, the year before France finally and completely abolished slavery. Cappeau’s lyrics linked the hope in God’s grace as shown in the Christmas story with the social justice issue of abolishing slavery. Working late into the night, night after night in his Boston home, Dwight struggles with the fact that slavery still exists here. The work of abolition continues. Dwight translates the hope offered by this Catholic text into hope consistent with his Unitarian worldview. Cappeau’s French lyrics told of the Christ as a God-Man, an orthodox Christian view found in the Nicene Creed. They told of original sin. Of the wrath of God. Of the deadly sin of human pride. Of deep penitence. This was not Unitarian theology!

So under late night lamp light, Dwight begins to translate from Catholic theology to a Unitarian theology that may not match ours today in every detail but which is still amazingly close to who we are now. Using the outline of the Christmas story, Dwight’s Jesus is a redeemer, a savior. But he is not God. Dwight eliminates the condemnation of human pride and substitutes the human soul feeling its worth. The wrath of God is gone. Dwight’s savior preaches a law of love, a gospel of peace. Where Cappeau’s lyrics saw the slave as a brother, a sentiment Dwight shared, of course, Dwight added urgency, writing of the breaking of chains and the cessation of ALL oppression. And, as if to emphasize the mythic and metaphoric nature of the Christmas story, Dwight’s chorus introduced the angel voices that Cappeau had left out.

We see the early morning light streaming in through Dwight’s library window. He looks down on his labor of love. It is truly a Christmas miracle! Wrath and condemnation have given way to a perfectible world! The Christmas story has been translated from rescue from human fear and penitence in the face of an angry God to a celebration of the return of the light! A celebration of what WE might call the inherent worth and dignity of every person! A celebration of human equality, of peace, of love! Imagine Dwight, invigorated despite the lack of sleep, bounding up the stairs to wake his wife Mary, to give her this Unitarian carol of hope! A carol that is sung in Dwight’s Unitarian translation by Christians across the English-speaking world – from Australia to South Africa to Ireland, Canada, and the USA. Catholics and Protestants alike sing it. Most have no inkling how radical this translation was in 1855 in a nation still plodding under the weight of slavery, a nation yearning to see peace and love made flesh in this world.

This holy night, this Unitarian interpretation of a Catholic interpretation of a Christian story built on a primordial understanding of the renewal of hope and possibility – this solstice song calls out to us. It challenges us to bring the world to the experience of divine love. It challenges us to repair a broken world. This is the message of the winter solstice: we’ve been through a diminishing, we’ve survived the darkness, so now, right as the harshness of winter weather typically increases, we know that the increased light brings the promise of renewal, growth and future harvest. It is the solstice message that still speaks to us across the millennia from prehistoric times.

I invite you to come in your imaginations back much farther in time. It is sometime around 3,200 BCE. We are gathered in the ancient forests near the Boyne River on the island that will be called Ireland in our time. The Celts have not arrived yet. On the neighboring island, Stonehenge has not been erected yet. And in more distant lands, the Pyramids of Egypt are yet to be built. The people here have no writing system, so we don’t know their thoughts. We look at what we see and heap on a heavy dose of interpretation. It is the human way. But standing here in the forest five millennia before our own time, we see an enormous construction project under way in the clearing at the top of a hill. Newgrange, it will be called by the people who come after the people who come after the people who come after the people who come after the people who are building it. We stand towering over these short and short-lived people – their life expectancy is only 34 years, and yet they are engaged in a building project that will take about 80 years to complete. The grandchildren - even the great-grandchildren - of the people who started this monument will finish it. One lifespan or two more after its completion and it will be abandoned to the elements.

There is so much we don’t understand. The more modest archaeologists look us in the eye and admit that it is a mystery why the ancients started this project when they had no writing system to use to work out the details, no way to direct the generations that will complete the project. It is a mystery how the huge kerbstones, stones nearly as big as an SUV, were moved by a stone-age people from the quarries more than 50 miles away, over uneven terrain, through forests, and finally up this hill. And the smaller stones that complete the project were brought even farther. The final mound covers more than an acre. What was it for? What kept a society going to engage in public works on this scale when they had so little else? When they knew they would never see it completed? Newgrange was a passage tomb. But was that its primary purpose or was that an afterthought? We stand here watching this ancient people doing backbreaking labor and can’t bridge the language divide to ask what it is all about. So we decide to come back when it is finished to see what the descendents of the architects do with this legacy of their ancestors.

Wrap yourselves warmly because we are transporting back to the eve of the winter solstice some five millennia ago. We find ourselves again at the base of the hill, the mound is complete, and gathered around us we imagine the chieftains and shamans and matriarchs and midwives of this society dancing in the dark of night, chanting as they process up the hill to the entrance of the mound that will be called Newgrange. We fall in behind them, and they ignore us because we are there in our imaginations, not theirs. We follow them down the dark passage into the heart of the mound to the inner chamber and wait with them in deathly silence. Outside, unseen by those of us entombed in the darkness of the earth, the sky begins to lighten, the sun nears the lip of the horizon. With knowledge that comes from a lifetime attuned to natural cycles, a matriarch starts to chant, invoking the sun, we might speculate. Then suddenly as if magically, a shaft of sunlight dispels the darkness of this earthen tomb – for less than 20 minutes before the angle of the sun is again too great.

On the morning of the winter solstice and for two mornings on either side of it each year, the sun rises, positioned to shine down the passage at Newgrange into the inner chamber. For most of the 5,000 odd years since it was built, the passage was blocked by erosion. But even today the sunrise on the morning of the winter solstice banishes the darkness from the inner tomb at Newgrange. Now that is dependability! That is reliability!

For those of us raised in or surrounded by the Christian tradition, it is hard to think of waiting in the darkness of a burial chamber in the mound of Newgrange without thinking of a verse in the Hebrew scriptures: “The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light: they that dwell in the land of the shadow of death, upon them hath the light shined.” (Isaiah 9:2 KJV) Certainly I’m taking it out of context, but it is within the matrix of meaning that is part of our congnitive and cultural identity. The shining of the light, being bathed in solstice light is inextricably linked with our myths and metaphors of renewed hope, our emotional sense of salvation, if you will.

On Tuesday evening we will enter a period of growing light following on the heels of darkness, a season of recovering hope, I am reminded of a scene in a favorite movie of mine – Babette’s Feast. The setting is sometime in the 19th century in a remote town on Denmark’s Jutland peninsula. The now old unmarried daughters of a deceased local puritan religious leader have taken in a refugee from political unrest in France. They do not know the treasure that has come into their humble home, as Babette was a famous chef in Paris. When Babette wins a lottery, she uses the entire amount to produce a gourmet feast for the women who have taken her in and the handful of people who remain from the dwindling congregation of their father. There is a last minute addition to the guest list as a retired General is visiting his aunt who lives in the town. The general, when he was young, had courted one of the daughters of the puritan minister but had decided his path was as an officer in the army. His career had taken him to the royal court and, for a time to Paris. Other than Babette, the General is the only person present who recognizes the quality of the feast that has been given. And he is amazed that, while he had made his choice long ago to leave and pursue his military career, these women who stayed in their modest surroundings also have the experience of this gift. He says, in effect that in life what is lost to us may also return to us in some manner. It is a simple observation placed in a specific circumstance but is also a profound recognition that, like nature, our lives can go through patterns of relative well being and despair. And sometimes the return of hope depends on waiting for return of the sun. We wait in silence in our metaphorical tomb-like chambers buried deep in the earth, but on the winter solstice, the sun breaks through, illuminating our hearts, giving us a physical manifestation of the hope that psychological and social humanity needs to forge through difficulties.

In the traditions of the world it is common to combine our thoughts of the return, the rebirth of the sun, with stories, myths, and legends from our ethnic and religious traditions, and a special attention to infants and children. Christians see this in relation to the Christmas story of the divine entering the world in the form of a baby. Non-Christians have only to look at the emergence of the sun and the increase of daylight hours after the solstice to find analogies to birth and childhood. And too, in a season when we’ve just experienced decreasing light, the excitement of children may well be our best source of hope.

The following words are from Sophia Lyon Fahs, a 20th-century Unitarian religious educator – You may recognize them from a responsive reading in our hymnal:

For so the children come,
And so they have always been coming,
Always in the same way they come,
Born of the seed of man and woman.
No angels herald their beginnings;
No prophets predict their future courses.
No wisemen see a star to show where to find
The babe that will save humankind.
Yet each night a child is born is a holy night.
Fathers and mothers, sitting beside their children’s cribs,
Feel glory in the light of a new life beginning.
They ask, “Where and how will this new life end?
Or will it ever end?”
Each night a child is born is a holy night –
A time for singing,
A time for wondering,
A time for worshiping.

Hope enters the world again and again in the form of a child!

This winter solstice, may we be generous in our thoughts of pregnant possibility coming to fruition, thoughts of birth and infancy and human potential. May we be lavish in expressing our sense of wonder at a world, a universe that has given the gift that keeps on giving – light and life. May we pause to worship, to lift up what we hold to be worthy of praise. May we recommit to repairing the world, to building a habitat in which all humanity may find shelter from the elements. May we enter the harshest season with hope and joy!

Happy Solstice! Good Yule! And Merry Christmas!
Amen and Blessed Be!

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Carbondale Unitarian Fellowship

Sunday, December 19, 2010

Mr. Paul Kent Oakley, Presiding and Speaking

Mr. Ricardo King, Special Music

Ms. Geri McKee, Pianist

Order of Service

• Gathering Music – “Ring Out, Solstice Bells” by Jethro Tull (recording)
• Welcome and Introductions
• Kindling the Chalice Flame – Lily Sronkoski
• Announcements
• Prelude – “L'heure exquise” by Reynaldo Hahn
• Opening Hymn – #73 “Chant for the Seasons: Winter”
• Opening Reading – #551 “Earth Teach Me”
• Sharing Joys and Sorrows
• A Moment of Silence
• Hymn – #51 “Lady of the Season’s Laughter”
• Unison Offering Reading
• Offering Music – “O Holy Night” by Adolphe Adam
• Message – “Entering the Harshest Season… with Hope”
• Closing Words
• Closing Hymn – #346 “Come, Sing a Song with Me”
• Benediction