A sermon by F. Jay Deacon
Preached at the Unitarian Society of Northampton and Florence

December 12, 2004

Advent and Chanukah


As Mass Electric knows far better than I do, this is a season of light.

The Hanukkah Menorah stands as a symbol for all those forces that, twenty-two hundred years ago, surged up within the human spirit and met a corrupt and oppressive regime that seemed immovable. And the symbol was light, a fire that burned unaccountably far beyond what anybody could have expected from a day's supply of oil.

And often during this Advent season in Christian churches, the first chapter of the Gospel of John is read. It speaks of the Word that was at the Beginning as a Light that shines in the dark, and the darkness has never overcome it, a Light that comes into the world and enlightens us.

And all you have to do is look at any street after dark to see the association of Christmas with light. Both of our Christmas Eve services, each in their own distinct way, ends in a blaze of candlelight shining out in the dark night. And it gives us a kind of thrill.

Why do we respond to the visual image of light? Light is essential, fundamental. You can't touch it or taste it but it's more fundamental than flesh and blood and wooden pews.

Religions are loaded with images of light— like the Hindu festival of lights last month.

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The light that strikes the eye is known only through the energy it releases — which is translated into a physical image — which appears to be composed of light. But that light is a composition of the mind; we never see "the light itself." Light itself is pretty much a deep cosmic mystery, something for subatomic physicists to contemplate. It will have to suffice to say that it's everywhere, even in the dark.

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There's an association between light, and human knowledge and consciousness. Neither is really part of the physical universe. We know that when we contemplate these mysterious things, we're approaching whatever it is we might mean by that troublesome and elusive word, "Spiritual." There's something is transcendent about it.

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For Jews it's the fourth day of Chanukah. And for Christians, today is the Third Sunday in Advent. The Christian Gospel of John has a lot to say about Light.

It starts out like this — chapter one, verse one:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. . . . In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. He came . . . to bear witness to the light . . . He was not the light,but came to bear witness to the light. The true light that enlightens everyone was coming into the world.

So all those candles at Christmastime.

But what's this light about? UUs always want to know what it is we're actually celebrating. We want to know what it means and what it doesn't mean because we've seen too much of what goes on in the name of religion to plunge into it without thinking about it. Religiously we'll stay on a safe skeptical surface-level until we're sure it's really okay. Do you know what I mean? Sometimes, I think, we approach our religious life in a wary, frigid sort of way, always afraid of responding too deeply because we want to be sure what we're getting into.

For good reason, of course. From the beginning in the 1500s, Unitarians have asked hard questions of religion. They've the crusades and inquisitions, the mind-numbing and authoritarian anti-intellectualism. Don't want to be rushed into anything rash.

So as we enter two weeks of intense religious symbolism, we're doing what we typically do — wondering what to do with it. So — It's essential to get the transrational imagery and the rational thought together on the same page.

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The light, the fire — seems to tell so much of our story, the descent of life itself.

And we are descendants of the first light, the fire that once flared forth from an unimaginably hot and compact region of pure energy that expanded and cooled and condensed into elementary particles, and then atoms, and then all this radiant Universe. We are come from that light and we are that light from the first fire.

Now, poets and religious geniuses and mystics who never knew the science of cosmic evolution have somehow understood something about this light, that we are all somehow a part of it, its descendants, its manifestations.

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The Gospel of John was written toward the beginning of the Second Century of the Common Era, maybe sixty or seventy or eighty years after the death of Jesus. Other accounts of Jesus, other gospels already existed. The author of John knew about them. Among these was the Gospel of Thomas.

In the Gospel of Thomas, the disciples ask Jesus where they should go. The answer Jesus gives them, in this same Gospel of Thomas, is this:

There is a light within a person of light, and it lights up the whole world. If he does not shine, he is darkness.1

Another one of these Gospels was one called the Dialogue of the Saviour. It says:

Bring in your guide and your teacher. The mind is the guide, but reason is the teacher . . . Live according to your mind . . . Acquire strength, for the mind is strong . . . Enlighten your mind . . . Light the lamp within you.2

Oh — a light that's already in us! That was regarded by the Church of the early Second Century as a dangerous idea: that there is a light within you, and you should let it shine. The same theme comes up over and over again in these very early Gospels — you have an inner light in yourself.

So listen to how the same question is answered in the Gospel of John: where should they go?

Jesus said to him, "I am the way, the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father, but by me."3

And there's this:

God sent his Son into the world . . . that the world might be saved through him. He who believes in him is not condemned; he who does not believed is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God.4

No inner light. You've gotta accept Jesus. And listen to the Apostles, and believe what the Church tells you. They have the light. You don't.

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But that's not what these other Gospels said. Here is another example from the Gospel of Truth:

If one has knowledge, he receives what is his own, and draws it to himself. . .

Say, then, from the heart that . . . in you dwells the light that does not fail. . . . Do not be concerned with other things which you have rejected from yourselves.5

And the Gospel of Thomas:

Rather, the Kingdom is inside you, and it is outside of you. When you come to know yourselves, then you will be known, and you will realize that you are the sons of the living Father. But if you will not know yourselves, then you dwell in poverty, and it is you who are that poverty. 6

In the Dialogue of the Saviour, Matthew is asking Jesus to show him the "place of life" which is the "pure light." Here's Jesus' answer:

Every one who has known himself has seen it.7

The Gospel of John that sits on the pulpits of churches today was composed with similar language to these Gospels, fullof images of light — precisely to counter the dangerous idea that there is light in you, that one side of you lays already open to the Divine, as Emerson once put it. It was written to say you cannot have the light directly, on your own; that you must get light and truth and salvation from a broker who stands between you and the ultimate light and truth and salvation, and that broker is the Church.

We know now why it happened, why the Church of the early Second Century felt it had to assert its authority, take full credit for all truth, assume the right to judge who is saved and who is not, what is true and what is not. It's very simple: They were afraid. They had come under terrible persecution and they were afraid. They didn't want any loose canons out there putting them in danger.

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But it's time to proclaim a truth more ancient than Christianity, a truth that was well understood by the Galilean teacher whom Christianity claims as its founder:

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There is something in you that is more compelling than greed.

There is something in you that is stronger than fear.

There is something in you that is more true than the delusion that sometimes takes you in.

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That is what the great Unitarian pioneer Channing meant when he said

the likeness to God . . . belongs to [our] higher or spiritual nature. It has its foundation in the original and essential capacities of the mind. In proportion as these are unfolded by right and vigorous exertion, it is extended and brightened. In proportion as these lie dormant, it is obscured.8

And then he asks, where, anyway, do we get this idea of "God"? His answer must have startled that congregation in 1821:

I answer, we derive [it] from our own souls. The divine attributes are first developed in ourselves, and thence transferred to our Creator. The idea of God, sublime and awful as it is, is the idea of our own spiritual nature, purified and enlarged to infinity. In ourselves are the elements of the Divinity.

Now, John does everything he can to discredit Thomas. He even invents the image of "doubting Thomas" who doesn't have enough faith. But the light is in you. And hope, and love, and goodness.

When you see the lights this season, take heart. However deeply buried under however much junk, there is light in you, in every heart and mind.

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In the thirteenth century, in Persia, the Iraqi poet Rumi sang the same hymn of light that is in everyone. He was a Muslim, but not all Muslims appreciated what he had to say anymore than all Christians appreciated what the Gospel of Thomas had to say. He knew he was speaking of a light that is in every one, however buried and obscured, a light that is the exclusive property of no single religious tradition or authority. He even said:

I am not a Christian, I am not a Jew, I am not a Zoroastrian,
And I am not even a Muslim.
I do not belong to the land, or to any known or unknown sea.

Christ wasn't a Christian, Mohammed wasn't a Muslim and Buddha wasn't a Buddhist. The sacred fire is all. We are the sacred fire, and Christ, and Mohammed, and the Buddha, and Rumi, too. Concentrate on essence, he said. Concentrate on Light. In lucid bliss, calmly [burning in] its own holy fire.

He speaks to our own sacred identity, and what he says has the electric eloquence of our own innermost truth. He speaks with an almost frightening intimacy of address.

Rumi is never sentimental; he suffered for his illumination. He, too, was a heretic and his message cost him something.

He knew that the light within him demanded not less than everything. Of that Light, he wrote

You say you have seen It, but your eyes are two stones.
You say you have known It, but nothing in you trembles.
You still say "I" when you speak of surviving Its glory;
No ego that has seen It has ever survived.

This thirst that is in all our souls
Is the Water drawing us always to It.
We belong to It, and It belongs to us.

He knew there is a kind of mystery of accepting grief and death that has to be learned in the furnace of a transformation that burns away all illusion. There is a seared and sometimes ferocious honesty about his testimony to the life that is lived in contact with that Light and in fidelity to it.

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In Nepal, Andrew Harvey once met and loved a man from Iran. One day Andrew saw his friend's bare back for the first time: it was covered with scars, all of it. What happened? Andrew asked.

"Now I must tell you the whole story," his friend replied. He was a Sufi, arrested by the police under the Shah, brutally tortured. He had fled Iran to wait in Nepal for the American-backed regime to fall. Now, he knew he couldn't go back because if he returned to Iran, he would be brutally tortured again, but for a different reason, as gay man.

Under the Shah, he had been tortured because he was a Sufi, and so Andrew asked him what that terrible experience had done to him. He smiled and said nothing. Instead he said, "It's six o'clock — let's go out to the lake and I will sing you a song." They stood in the middle of the lake and his friend sang one of Rumi's poems. Part of it went:

I'm tired of cowards, I want to live with lions, with Moses, not whining teary people.

I want the ranting of drunkards,
I want to sing like birds sing, not worrying who hears or what they think.
A flute says I have no hope for finding what I seek, but Love plays the flute.
Love plays and plays, and is the music played.
Let that musician finish this poem.

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In this world, in this time, we need, I think, to be reminded of that.

Today the world is in terrible danger. We have very little time left in which to awaken to the light that is in us and to make the changes that must be made in every arena of life.

I don't think there's ever been a time when we have needed as much as we need now the capacities of light and of love that now lie hidden within us.

The light we need is not far from us, nor the Love that must transform this endangered world of life. We scarcely know the capacities of that Love for our lives or its possibilities for this aching world. We can turn to it, awaken to it, celebrate it — not guardedly, not cautiously, but joyfully, deliriously.

Then we can save this planet, because then we will really know that our life here is a theater of enlightenment, in which every moment is agelessly fresh with the energies of Love, fed from deep wells, transfigured by a light that could blind the Sun.


Copyright © 2004 F. Jay Deacon. All rights reserved.

1 Gospel of Thomas 22.
2 Teachings of Silvanus 88:24-106.14, in Nag Hammadi Library 347-356.
3 John 14:5f.
4 John 3:17-19.
5 Gospel of Truth 32:31-33:14 in NHL 44.
6 Gospel of Thomas 32:19-33:5 in NHL 118.
7 Dialogue of the Saviour 132:15f in NHL 233.
8 His sermon, "Likeness to God."

Many of the translations of Rumi are from Andrew Harvey, Light Upon Light: Inspirations from Rumi. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 1996.


Meditation

In a time that sometimes feels alien and dangerous, something stirs in us, gently, in the quiet; — stirring with a strange familiarity, as a lover lost long and long and now returning, flaring with the brightness of light unknown and yet familiar, drawing us close, filling us with the refulgence of suns, purifying, melting, burning away all that is false and clutter and without value.

Let us be awakened to the Light that is in us and be not distracted by appearance and glitter. Let course and direction be set to that great star that shines above show and pretence. Be still and know that truth that is in you. In the face of fear, in the sorrow of loss, in the face of obstacles: know the strength of light in you.

Unchain your hope. Be strong.

Know the love that embraces the core of you, forgiving, renewing; — and from this place see deeply, with spacious vision and clarity.

In this silence. In this silence.

Readings



From the thirteenth-century Sufi poet Rumi, as translated by Andrew Harvey:


I

You say you have seen It, but your eyes are two stones.
You say you have known It, but nothing in you trembles.
You still say "I" when you speak of surviving Its glory;
No one who has seen It has ever survived.

II

This thirst that is in all our souls
Is the Water drawing us always to It.
We belong to It, and It belongs to us.

III

Hear from the heart wordless mysteries! Understand whatcannot be understood!
In our stone-dark heart there burns a fire
That burns all veils to their root and foundatin.
When the veils are burned away, the heart will understand completely
Ancient Love will unfold ever-fresh forms
In the heart of the Spirit, in the core of the heart.

IV

The one to whom is unveiled the mystery of Love
Exists no longer, but vanishes into Love.
Place before the Sun a burning candle
And watch its brilliance disappear before that blaze.
The candle exists no longer; it is transformed into Light.

V

Light
Will someday split you open
Even if your life is now a cage,

For a divine seed, the crown of destiny,
Is hidden and sown on an ancient, fertile plain
You hold the title to.

Love will surely bust you wide open
Into an unfettered, blooming new galaxy

Even if your mind is now
A spoiled mule.


Andrew Harvey:

The situation is so extreme that we have no choice but to reach for the highest in us, because it is only the highest that can possibly give us the endurance, passion, courage, truth, peace, sobriety, and certainty that we will need to survive or to bear what may now happen. . . .

Action truly, deeply, and most effectively springs form an absolute passion for the Divine, not just for humankind itself; an absolute passion to be a clear mirror for the Divine, and a calm and absolute passion to be the channel through which divine justice, divine purity, and divine love flow. And we must now allow the Divine to flow through us so that we can act not for humankind alone but for the Divine, the Divine in us and in all our fellow beings.


Parting

Rumi:

Concentrate on essence, concentrate on Light.

The Light streams toward you from all things,

One matter, one energy, one Light, on Light-mind,

One turning and burning diamond.

Stay there, until you see

You are gazing at the Light

With its own ageless eyes.