Watch the recording of the Marcus J Borg Foundation’s December 10, 2021 Second Saturday Conversation. The season of Advent is upon us. This is a subject we touched on last December as well. Learning from past hymns and understandings of Christmas and what these may stir in each of us through the season of Advent. Advent meaning “to come” anticipates the coming of Jesus and the second coming. In the beginning of this new liturgical year, what are our hopes and fears?
In addition, here is the transcript of the chat from the session.
Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan
From the Preface of The First Christmas: What the Gospels Really Teach About Jesus’s Birth (slightly edited)
In contemporary Western culture and even for many Christians, the commemoration of Christmas exceeds the commemoration of Easter. Because of the importance of Christmas, how we understand the stories of Jesus’s birth matters. What we think they’re about — how we hear them, read them, interpret them — matters.
They touch the deepest of human yearnings: for light in the darkness, for the fulfillment of our hopes, for a different kind of world. The stories of the first Christmas are both personal and political. They speak of personal and political transformation. The personal and political meanings can be distinguished but not separated without betraying one or the other.
Set in their first-century context, they are comprehensive and passionate visions of another way of seeing life and of living our lives. They challenge the common life, the status quote, of most times and places. Even as they are tidings of comfort and joy, they are edgy and challenging. They confront “normalcy,” what we call “the normalcy of civilization” — the way most societies, most human cultures have been and are organized.
We are not concerned with the factuality of the birth stories. Rather we focus on their meanings. What did and do these stories mean? Our task is twofold: The first is historical: to exposit these stories and their meanings in their first-century context. The second is contemporary: to treat their meanings for Christian understanding and commitment today. Both tasks are historical and theological.
Advent and Christmas Stories
The stories of the first Christmas are pervasively anti-imperial. In our setting, what does it mean to affirm with the Christmas stories that Jesus is the Son of God (and the emperor is not), that Jesus is the savior of the world (and the emperor is not), that Jesus is Lord (and the emperor is not), that Jesus is the way to peace on earth (and the emperor is not).
The Christmas stories are about light in our darkness, the fulfillment of our deepest yearnings and the birth of Christ within us. They are about us — our hope and fears. And they are about a different kind of world. God’s dream for us is not simply peace of mind but peace on earth.
Suspended
I had grasped God’s garment in the void
but my hand slipped
on the rich silk of it.
The ‘everlasting arms’ my sister loved to remember
must have upheld my leaden weight
from falling, even so,
for though I claw at empty air and feel
nothing, no embrace,
I have not plummeted.
Denise Levertov
The Stream and the Sapphire:
Selected poems on religious themes
Oh Little Town of Bethlehem
Oh little town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie
Above thy deep and dreamless sleep the silent stars go by
Yet in thy dark streets shineth, the everlasting light
The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight.
Phillips Brooks 1868