An e-mail joke I received a few years ago speaks to this somewhat. It goes,

“Continuing the current trend of large-scale mergers and acquisitions, it was announced today at a press conference that Christmas and Chanukah will merge this year. Especially since this year Chanukah begins on December 25th. ... While details were not available at press time, it is believed that the overhead cost of having twelve days of Christmas and eight days of Chanukah was becoming prohibitive for both sides. By combining forces, we’re told, the world will be able to enjoy consistently high quality service during the Fifteen Days of Christnukah or Chanumas, a name has not been chosen yet. Massive layoffs are expected with lords a-leaping and maids a-milking being the hardest hit. Apparently olive press workers will not be much affected. Actually, a spokesman for their union was almost ecstatic at the prospect that almost twice as much oil would have to be processed for the fifteen, rather than the eight day period, for which they must provide fuel.”

We, Unitarian Universalists, actually don’t seem to have much trouble with most phases of this holiday season. We find it easy to participate in the festival atmosphere, to eat with gusto, and to exchange gifts with happy anticipation. We find this season rewarding as a family time and as a time to visit with friends.

But, many UUs come to a dead halt when they encounter the Baby Jesus and are pressed to accept the concept of God incarnate, which the Baby Jesus represents to many minds. He, the Baby Jesus, was, in fact, noticeably omitted from the e-mail fictional “news release”, probably joining the lords-a-leaping in the unemployment line. This suggests that we really don’t know what to do with him, which I believe is unfortunate. After all, beyond the theology of it all, Jesus is such an important cultural part of the celebration that he cannot be avoided. But, the Baby Jesus and the man, Jesus, do contradict historic Unitarian concepts of the unity and the oneness of God. And, it does take a major overriding of rationality to treat Jesus as the “holy babe” who radiates divinity from a crèche.

In recent decades what we usually have done is to sidestep the divinity issue and focus on the phenomenon of birth itself. This is what one of the most beautiful UU readings at this time of the year does. “Each night a child is born is a holy night,” wrote Sophia Lyon Fahs, the major shaper of liberal religious education in the early middle part of the twentieth century. These words highlight the sheer humanity of Christmas as nothing else I have read quite does.

It is true that the phenomenon of birth deserves to be celebrated and that December 25th is as good a time to do this as any. It is, also, true that Jesus’ birthday has come to be celebrated on December 25th because a third century Bishop of Rome chose that date in order to coopt the birthday of the Roman god, Mithra. Nowadays, Jesus can easily be taken as the symbol of all births everywhere. What we overlook is that, from a religious point of view, the primary message of Christmas (Christ-mass) is not the fact of Jesus’ birth, but the impact of his birth -- the nature and reason for his birth as seen through “religious” (i.e. Christian) eyes.

To focus mainly on Jesus’ birth as a symbol for all birth is an uneasy truce with the idea that Jesus’ birth represents not just “a human being born to be human” but “God being made human.” Now, today, I am not about to propose that we renounce our historic UU convictions about the humanity of Jesus. Especially, I do not intend to suggest that we celebrate the birth of Jesus as the only occasion when “God took on human form.” But I do propose something else. I propose that we be a bit more responsible to the Christian motif of Incarnation itself and acknowledge that it speaks directly to a basic religious and existential reality. This basic reality actually transcends the rather limited notion of Jesus being a one-time birth of God in human form.

To begin, let’s dismiss the idea that the story of Jesus’ birth is just an ancient legend that has no real meaning for us as modern persons. Let’s, also, dismiss the idea that, because the story of Jesus’ birth has parallels in other traditions (namely, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Confucianism), it is no more relevant to us than these other traditions. This is a favorite liberal dodge that allows the whole Christian aspect of the winter holiday season to be rejected. On the contrary, the story of Jesus’ birth is of great meaning and relevance to us because it is not just “one of a kind”. It has relevance because, although it strikes many of us as legendary and fictional, it is the kind of story that arises whenever people try to express a particular religious truth embedded deeply in their nature. That truth is the truth of incarnation.

By incarnation I don’t mean merely the concept of God literally becoming a human being, although this is what most people take it to mean. Rather, by incarnation I mean a particular reality of the spirit that is universally shared by people everywhere, a reality of the spirit that finds expression in almost every religion in some way. This reality is that the physical world, at its most precious and meaningful point, makes real our highest aspirations, hopes, and loves. It makes real our deepest impulses of the spirit. It is in this physical world that our hopes, aspirations, loves, and faiths become tangible -- become real in the lives of persons who actually manifest in their actions and in their being those religious values which are the objects of their most earnest worship. Incarnation, in its basic theological meaning, is putting “flesh” on that which is “holy” -- that which is of ultimate concern, in my terminology. It is letting these things break into our pragmatic, commonplace world as shaping attitudes and motivating ideas. It is goodness and truth given body.

This is perhaps the most basic of all religious concepts, and it lies at the root of all acts of faith. For it is the hope of that which is perfect being made real and that which is good being made tangible which drives the religious person to acts of faith. It is the memory of those persons in whom these things have already been done that sustains this hope. Every major religious tradition has its stories and teachings about such people -- symbolic teachings that express the incarnation of the sacred in the here and now. Judaism has its “angel of the Lord” who appeared to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; it has Moses’ transforming experience on Mount Horeb. Buddhism has its Buddha and Bhodhisattvas. In the Lotus of the True Law, the Bhodhisattva says: “Having crossed the sea myself, I would help others to the shore. ... I would refresh and renew all beings, spreading everywhere in season the rain of the law.” And, as truth made flesh, the Bhodhisattva takes on human form time after time to do this.

Confucius was the incarnation of wisdom. Legend has it that, at his birth, there were earthquakes and a dragon flying through the sky to proclaim his birth. Hinduism abounds with divine avatars who, as Krishna (speaking of himself in the Bhagavad Gita) explains it, “whenever the truth is forgotten and wickedness prevails I become flesh to show the way and the truth” to humankind. Christianity claims to be the fulfillment of the Jewish religion at this very point because it proclaims Jesus to be the promised one of Isaiah’s words to “the people who walked in darkness and have seen a great light.” Christianity tells Judaism that Jesus was that light: the child born to them, the son given unto them, the one whose name is “Wonderful-in- counsel-is-God-the-mighty, the everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace.” (Isaiah 9)

The idea of the holy world of the spirit being made real in the practical world of the flesh runs deeply in humankind. And, it runs deeply in us. We, too, create stories about persons in whom a “specialness of spirit” has been evident. We venerate Thomas Jefferson, William Ellery Channing, Margaret Fuller, Abraham Lincoln, Dorothea Dix, Susan B. Anthony, and others as special persons in whom much of the highest human aspirations actually were incarnated in the mundane world of politics, commerce, and religion. Moreover, we remember these people as guides and mentors and we seek to be like them insofar as circumstances and our own capacities will allow.

It, really, is not a question of whether we will believe in the principle of incarnation or whether we will in some way celebrate and observe it. It is more a question of “how”. Our biggest problem here, as it is with most of our problems with religion, is a mixture of semantics and tolerance. Semantically, we can be confused by the words others use to explain what they mean by “incarnation.” It all seems so literal, the way it usually is put. People who say to us, “Jesus Christ is God Incarnate” actually seem to mean literally that! And, if they don’t then we usually assume they do. What we need to do is remember that there are levels of meaning in such terms. “Jesus Christ is God Incarnate” can mean any of at least four things. (1) That he literally is the physical being of the one God; or, (2) That, in some less physical way, he is a unique spiritual presence of God; or, (3) That he is the symbol of the infusion into humankind of God’s holiness; or (4) That the apex of humanity is also the apex of the wonderful “good” that some call God and others simply call Good. Different persons will mean different things when they say these words. It is our responsibility to be able to distinguish their meaning. Also, it is our responsibility to allow them to mean what they desire to mean, when they say such things. After all, however they mean it, it is an article of faith for them.

And this is where tolerance comes in. Somehow, we must overcome our tendency to be offended by the beliefs of others. If a person believes that Jesus was literally the physical son of God, we must allow that person this belief -- even if we hold to a broader idea of Incarnation as Good, not just God, being made flesh. If we can remember that there are levels of meaning in the concept of incarnation, levels that probably correspond with a person’s capacity to handle various levels of abstraction, we can perhaps not throw out the baby with the crèche.

This is important to us. Deep within each of us is the strong awareness that life itself is a process of becoming, a process of the good we know being made into actual events and persons -- a process of continual incarnation. And we need to be able to focus unabashedly on it and to celebrate it as the life-giving, life-directing force we know it, deep down, to be. If we take our religion seriously, we need to reaffirm this fundamental impulse of the spirit.

In our culture, Christmas is the inevitable time for this celebration. It is the appropriate time because, if we look beyond the exclusivistic, literal emphasis on the birth of Jesus, then the crèche, the star, the shepherds, and the wise men can symbolize for us, also, our most precious hopes and aspirations breaking into the everyday world and taking on flesh -- our flesh.