Christmas is the birth of the Christ

This is the fourth Sunday in Advent, the season of preparation and longing. According to Christian tradition this is the season in which we prepare to be reconciled to God through the birth of the Christ, the redeemer who will save us from the curse of the fall. In other words by reconciling us to God Christ brings wholeness where before there was brokenness. So Advent is a time of longing, of thirsting for wholeness! I am reminded of the words the psychologist Carl Jung wrote to Bill Wilson, the cofounder of Alcoholics Anonymous, Jung wrote, and I am paraphrasing here, “the craving for alcohol is connected to the spiritual thirst in our being for wholeness”.  Of course, alcoholism is, like many other things, a misguided attempt at wholeness. This advent, as we thirst for wholeness, how are we preparing for its arrival? The author of Hebrews, our text this morning, is concerned with two distinct ways of attempting to cure brokenness, the old way of the sacrificial system, and the new way of the Christ.

Our text says, “When Christ came into the world he said, Sacrifices and offerings you have not desired” this may seem strange or just plain irrelevant to us—after all I have never seen an animal sacrifice up here.  But we do, of course have a very common sacrificial religion in our modern churches. Richard Rohr calls this “the myth of the heroic sacrifice”. And he says it is the most common substitute for the gospel. While it often looks very caring, very giving, it is usually, as Rohr says, all about me. This is because sacrifice or renunciation to gain something is barter. In this there is no giving up but only exchange. We renounce this in order to gain that. It leaves us in what Jesus might call “a den of robbers”. This so-called self-sacrifice is an extension of the self. This is actually refinement of self disguised as self-renunciation and however refined and subtle the self becomes it is still enclosed and limited. This is so close to us we often don’t see it. Renunciation for a cause, no matter how great, no matter how extensive, global or local, is substitution of the cause for the self; the cause becomes the self. This allows the person who is “sacrificing” to feel better about the disparity between herself and the people being helped. In this process there is no giving up of self, but only a gaining of greater satisfaction; and the search for greater satisfaction has no element of the true sacrifice the gospel speaks of. The helper’s rewards are the pity she feels for the disadvantaged and the social outrage she feels for the injustices of life. This does not bring wholeness. I mean the proof is in the pudding—our culture loves this kind of sacrificial religion—but our culture is not whole. That is because we help without doing anything about the psychological barriers to inter-action—we pass money through a hole in the fence. If we don’t do anything about the barriers to inter-action obviously we can never be whole—we remain separate, estranged, enclosed, and broken. That is our sacrificial religion---with its priests and zealots who, like their counterparts in the ancient temple, perform prescribed rituals, and in their own way serve the poor. All so they can take the moral high ground, as they are subliminally passing along a message of inequality, and diminishing those they assist.

Jesus and the first century Jews he was a part of strongly disliked the temple’s sacrificial system for many reasons both political and spiritual or psychological. One reason is that they saw that this sacrificial religion was without repentance—in other words it was ritualistic sacrifice without changing or going beyond one’s mind—sacrifice without getting beyond self.

If we look at verses 5 through 10 we see more clearly what the author of Hebrews says about Jesus’ approach—an approach by the way, that he says later in the letter, we are to emulate. In these verses we hear Jesus quoting Psalm 40, telling us that sin offerings do not please God. In 7 he says ‘Then I said, see God, I have come to do your will O God”. In verse 9 he repeats this and says “I have come to do your will”. Some very important ideas about Jesus’ religion are being communicated in these verses. For one, sacrifices are no substitute for repentance, in other words, this kind of religion will not bring about a change of mind and will not remove the barriers to wholeness. Also they will not cleanse one of sin therefore they will not reconcile human and divine. The other thing we learn here about Jesus’ religion is that true sacrifice is conformity to God’s will. This will bring down the barriers to inter-action. If those barriers are still up one cannot conform to the will of God because one is still enclosed behind those barriers in a state of self-centered estrangement. Remember, Jesus’ religion was apocalyptic—meaning he directly experienced the divine in visions and revelations. And as many of you have heard me say several times, because it gets at the core of the gospel, certain first century Jews practiced techniques meant to facilitate such visions and revelations. For centuries practicioners of such techniques have reported the experience of transcending self while in higher states of consciousness. In our own day brain science is merging with psychotherapy and showing us how meditative states of consciousness can help transcend self and remove barriers to inter-action, allowing for a process of integration to occur. These therapists may not know it, but since they are helping people to change their minds, they are helping them to repent. In Jesus’ religion accessing these higher states allowed one to conform to God’s will, by breaking down the self-imposed barriers to inter-action. Throughout history mystics have reported this connection to a divine or ultimate level of reality—and these experiences are often so profound that they completely rearrange one’s relationship to the world, therefore changing how one relates to other people. In verse 9 we hear that Jesus abolished the old sacrificial religion by wholly offering himself. And it is in this way that sanctification or the cleansing of sin occurs. When the author of Hebrews uses the word sin he uses the Greek word hamartia—meaning self-originated sin. We are cleansed of self-originated sin by this kind of whole-self-sacrifice. Two thousand years into Christianity and it seems we still don’t really hear what is being said. Perhaps because we misinterpret these strange writings to mean that Jesus was the only one who needed to renounce or sacrifice self, but that, I am more than convinced, is a mistake. Whenever I speak to men and women in recovery about their 3^rd step I think of the New Testament. Step three says, “Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood him”. This kind of self-sacrifice is all over the gospels, and we are told that it leads to union with God, or wholeness. In the gospels we hear Jesus say, “If anyone wants to follow me, let him renounce himself.” In Galatians Paul says, “I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me.” And in his letter to the Romans Paul writes, “Present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.” Paul and Jesus are certainly not talking about some sort of kamikaze or suicide bomber trip. They are speaking in first century Jewish language about the kind of profound self-sacrifice that was obviously a big part of their religious practice. It is only by recovering the meditative roots of our faith that we can hope to have intelligent conversations with the culture at large about these texts.

  This Advent season I can see that the modern church needs to direct its thirst for Wholeness in an ancient and yet completely New Way—the practical and contemplative way of the Christ. This is the time of the year for the birth of the New Being. It seems to me that if the modern Christian church wishes to experience something new, if it wishes to renew its mind so that it can participate in a New State of things,—it will have to do something new—by going down a very old road.  LET IT BE SO!