Jesus said, If your leaders say to you "Look! The Kingdom is in the sky then the birds will be there before you are. If they say that the Kingdom is in the sea, then the fish will be there before you are. Rather, the Kingdom is within you and it is outside of you. (Saying 3a)

His disciples said to him: Show us the place you are, for it is essential for us to seek it. He responded: He who has ears let him hear. There is light within a man of light, and he lights up all of the world. If he is not alight there is darkness." (Saying 24)

Jesus said: When you give rise to that which is within you, what you have will save you. If you do not give rise to it, what you do not have will destroy you. (Saying 70)

Earlier this week, I was called on the phone by Ashley Lopes, a reporter from The Taunton Gazette, who asked what our church was doing for Christmas. That was an easy question, although the answer got re-worded by the reporter as our service became... yet again...a "mass." But then Ms. Lopes asked me a question I didn't anticipate, but which maybe I should have. "What does Christmas mean to your church?" I thought that was a good question. I quickly came up with something that sounded so traditional and safe to my ears. I said something like "Christmas is a time of bringing light into the world with messages of hope and peace." I also added that generally Unitarian Universalists didn't consider the Jesus to be divine, but thought he was a wonderful and divinely-inspired teacher. I was curious if that part would get quoted in the paper. However, sadly, none of what I said about the meaning of Christmas got quoted. Maybe Ms. Lopes didn't want to stir up any controversy.

And I suppose that in this time of Advent where we gather to worship in "Christmas City" with its spectacular light displays, it's good to reflect on this question: "What is the meaning of Christmas?" What or whom are we celebrating here... beyond a time to be together with friends and family, decorate evergreen trees and sing some old carols?

In this country increasingly divided between the orthodox Christians and "others" (Christians and non-Christians alike), I think again about how doctrine divides us into believers and non-believers. And I think again what Jesus can mean for religious liberals. It's a struggle I know many of us have. In my continuing search for new insight and meaning into Christianity, I continue the study which I began nine years ago when I entered theological school and took my first course in Christian history.

And good news! I think I'm making progress. I wonder how many of you have heard of the Gospel of Thomas. It was one of the ancient writings discovered in 1945 by an Egyptian shepherd boy. The scrolls were in a jar in a small desert cave near Nag Hammadi, which is in upper Egypt. The Gospel of Thomas was one of several books which were declared wrong or heretical by the early Catholic Church and were hidden by monks for safekeeping. This gospel, unlike the ones in the canon of the New Testament, contains no story of Jesus' birth or life or death and resurrection. It only contains a collection of Jesus sayings as written down by the disciple, Thomas, or by a follower of Thomas. Perhaps the writer assumed that everyone knew the basic facts of Jesus' life from Matthew, Mark or Luke and didn't need to repeat them. It was the teachings of Jesus which were most important to him. And it gave a view of Jesus which was in stark contrast to that of the accepted gospels.

This finding at Nag Hammadi in 1945 was huge discovery for Christian history, shedding new light on some alternative and radical teachings of the early church. I read a translation and explanation of the Gospel of Thomas by Stevan Davies, a professor of religion. I also read a book by Elaine Pagels: Beyond Belief: the Secret Gospel of Thomas, which was published this year. You might know Elaine Pagels as the author of The Gnostic Gospels. She is one of the most important modern writers and thinkers on religion and history. And Professor Pagels spoke last June at our UU General Assembly. Although she is an Episcopalian by practice, she is quite Unitarian Universalist in her beliefs and got a tremendously positive response at the people at the General Assembly.

Just a bit of background in Christian history so you get the setting and the controversy. At this time in the Near East and Southern Europe, Christianity was just beginning. It was the first and second century. And there were many different "schools" of Christianity, some of which contradicted each other. Many early Christians disagreed over just who Jesus was and what this meant to the rest of humanity. Some, like a powerful and important bishop named Irenaeus, claimed Jesus was the one and only Son of God and was divine in a way that no other human being was. Stories of his birth to a virgin in Matthew and Luke were just meant to shore up this belief in his special divinity.

A couple of centuries later, Athanasius, with the backing of the Roman Emperor Constantine, took this one step further and claimed that Jesus WAS God incarnate. He was the Divine Light brought into the world. This wasn't just symbolic light, bringing greater understanding of God, but a literal light cloaked in human flesh.

And, he taught that the rest of humanity, although originally made in the image of God, was damned by Adam and Eve's Original Sin. For Irenaeus, this Early Church Father, humans don't inherit any divine spark at birth. And it followed that no human being could hope to be saved except by belief in Jesus as the Savior.

So no other human had a spark of divinity and no one could come up with any new divine inspiration. Jesus had it all. This belief became set in stone with the Nicene Creed... which later became the Apostles Creed. I guess this part isn't new to most of you here, especially those who grew up in Catholicism or other Christianity.

On the other hand, there were the so-called "heretics and schismatics"... which included anyone who didn't believe in the orthodox Christian view. They were the ones who were eventually drummed out of the church, taunted and even killed. These were the ancestors to our movement, the ones who considered themselves spiritual seekers more than believers. They sought after God and believed that through dreams, visions and other revelations that they could have glimpses of the mystery that was God.

One of these seekers was Thomas, the one called doubting Thomas by his detractors. He doubted because he was a philosopher. He wouldn't accept what others told him on faith and needed to experience or think through something himself. (Sounds like an early Unitarian Universalist to me!) Thomas taught his followers that we all had within us a special quality which enabled us to have an original religious experience... to sense the divine if we worked at it hard enough through prayer and fasting. It wouldn't be an easy journey and what might be found is not made clear since God is still mysterious and each of us may have a different view. Thomas seems to have encouraged diversity and creative thinking. The basis of his teachings were what he called the hidden sayings of Jesus, things he said in secret to his disciples. These were sayings for the initiates or the inner circle.

Here's a sample. Thomas wrote down this hidden saying of Jesus, "Let the one who seeks not stop seeking until he finds. When he find, he will become troubled; when he becomes troubled, he will be astonished and will rule over all things." (2) Thus for Thomas, Christianity is not based on grace, on salvation given as a gift by God, but it's based on actual individual effort. If successful, this will bring forth strong emotions, for whatever is found will be disturbing, then astonishing. Once this truth is found, the seekers will become god-like and will rule over everything like God in Genesis.

To emphasis this point, Thomas quoted Jesus as saying, "the Kingdom [meaning the Kingdom of God] is within you and it is outside of you." (3) As Stevan Davies comments, "The idea that self-knowledge is a road to salvation is perhaps as old as philosophy itself." The famous inscription on the oracle at Delphi is "Know Thyself." Although this Gospel of Thomas is a spiritual gospel... focusing on our internal state, it also points to the real world outside of us, the world of nature and to the realm of all creation. This saying about to the Kingdom of God within you and without affirms the goodness of human nature and the nature of the world outside

There's another saying of Jesus which Thomas recorded, "When you give rise to that which is within you, what you have will save you. If you do not give rise to it, what you do not have will destroy you." (70) Again, self-knowledge is important. We think we know what he means from our own modern perspective and knowledge of psychology. But it doesn't mean exactly what we mean as modern folks. It doesn't mean, for instance, that we're all crazy and are doomed by our craziness. It is more mysterious and elusive than that. We have to understand its ancient context to grasp what Thomas means by "giving rise to what is within you."

Let's take another Jesus saying to help us understand. Thomas quotes Jesus in response to his disciples: "He who has ears let him hear. There is light within a man of light, and he lights up all of the world. If he is not alight there is darkness." (24) Jesus urges his disciples not to look to him for the way to salvation or to the Kingdom of God, but to themselves for the light.

This requires a little explanation into an ancient meaning of "light" to put this into context. Davies offers us the following:

"If that light is understood in terms of some ancient theories of vision, it is not simply light serving as a metaphor for self-understanding or divine wisdom. Rather, it is light that emerges from a person into the world so as to illuminate the world and make the world visible.

The Gospel of Thomas presents the idea that world can be comprehended in either of two fashions. You can see it in the usual way, the standard mode of human perception from the time of fallen Adam to the present day, or you can see the world in the light of the first day of creation, when light came forth from God. ... If people can see the world in the actual light of the first days, then they see it as the Kingdom of Heaven, but if they see it in the ordinary light of everyday experience, then they do not see the Kingdom of Heaven at all.

So, what is within a person is the supernatural light of creation. If it shines, it brings with it the Kingdom and eternal life; if it does not shine, the world is darkness. If the world is darkness, then it is death, and what you have failed to light up will destroy you. According to [this] saying, your destruction is under your own control, as is your salvation." (Note 84)

To Thomas, inner transformation precedes the ability to shine forth this divine light which illuminates the world. It is not something which comes about with baptism or mere confession of belief. It is something which is hard work and over time.

Thomas and other early Christians who were labeled "heretics and schismatics" spoke about two kinds of conversions. The first conversion was for people who needed to see God in a human way, as creator, lawgiver or divine father. But eventually, many following a Christian path began to see these images as human creations which point to a divine reality which words cannot express. They realized that all religious language consists of such images. They then experienced a second conversion when they seek a more mystical path. We may only "see through a glass darkly" but we do possess an inner resource which makes us susceptible to revelation. We seek the divine within and without, even while we become aware that the fullness of God is beyond human comprehension. This kind of religious experience actually transcends any particular religion, but is common to Kabbalists, Sufis, Buddhists, and religious mystics from ancient times to now.

It may not surprise you that Thomas had a large following. This belief in the goodness of humanity and in the ability of the seeker to find a God-like light within had great appeal. It appealed in particular to those who were powerless, to women and slaves. And there were many other early Christians like him who preached about our susceptibility to divine revelation.

But this presented the question, "Who possessed the truth if the truth was so subjective? Who spoke for God?" Diversity was encouraged by Thomas and others like him, but diversity was a problem for those who needed conformity to gain power. It was important to have one unchanging standard set of beliefs. This was true especially for people like the bishop Irenaeus who was trying to unite the church and, later, the Roman Emperor Constantine, who was trying to unite an empire. In the year 325, the creed for all Christendom was set with the Nicean Creed.

To gain universal acceptance of the creed, it required much vigorous suppression over many decades to stamp out more liberal beliefs. But orthodoxy eventually succeeded. It was only with the Protestant Reformation centuries later that things began to change. And maybe with discoveries like that at Nag Hammadi and further research, many Christians may discover a new, more liberated Christianity.

So at this Christmastime, what is the meaning of Christmas to us as Unitarian Universalists? I don't think there's any one correct answer. But I'd like to think its freeing humanity from the bonds of narrowness and hate. Its each human being recognizing the divine light within and without. And it's the coming of the light of hope, understanding, peace and justice into the world. May it ever be so.

Amen

Bibliography

The Gospel of Thomas; Annotated & Explained. Translation & Annotation by Stevan Davies. Woodstock, VT: Skylight Paths Publishing, 2002.

Elaine Pagels, Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas. New York: Random House, 2003.