Whether you are Star Trek fans or not, you are probably familiar with the characters who piloted the Starship Enterprise. Kirk was the emotional, "act first, think later" captain of the ship, but he was tempered in his adventures by his Vulcan sidekick, Mr. Spock, whose stoic behaviors were governed only by logic. It’s a classic example of what happens when you have a "feeler" and a "thinker" working together. When the series was first created, this either/or dichotomy worked well with the chemistry of the show. Even with the proclivity to overacting, the audience would have bought into the premise that you’re either one or the other, reasonable or emotional.
Following the Enlightenment, and at least until our most recent decades, it has been the reasonable side of things that we have trusted. Logic has been considered far more reliable than emotion, and while the “Spocks” of this world are thought of as intelligent and knowledgeable, the “Kirks” are the doufuses that only a Wil Shatner could play them to be. We trust scientific knowledge, provable theorems, and anything that smacks of an emotional response is discounted as, well, emotional.
At Christmastime however, a sermon proving the Virgin birth of Jesus is probably not what we had in mind. We don’t want a lecture on the biblical historical criticism that precisely dates the Census of Emperor Augustus. Instead, logic melts away as we yearn for the miraculous. Our sentimentality tells us that this time is more special than any other time of the year. We want to believe in a world where every child gets presents under the tree, and the child of Bethlehem is sent to save us. But even then our logical minds remind us that parents still have a lot of shopping to do, and the story of a baby born in a manger seems unlikely to do much more than tug at our heartstrings. We long to have the spontaneity and blind generosity of spirit like a Captain Kirk, and yet we know that our Spock side tells us that the credit card bills will still arrive in January.
Author and poet, Kathleen Norris, has remarked that rational Christians tend to accept only what they can understand, and then comments that, “It is folly to accept no more than we can understand, but that is nevertheless what we're too often tempted to do. ... If matters of faith and discipleship seem incomprehensible, it only means that we have a lot more to learn about discipleship and God.”
We who live and breathe in the world of reasonableness and rationality, the world of Spock and computer-generated curiosity, may be confused and confounded by the stories of our faith. Even as we come to church and desire something deeper, we are discomforted by the ultimate mystery of God becoming one of us so that we can become closer to God. We’d rather stop with the Hallmark version of the holiday. A baby, born to young parents, surrounded by docile animals, and receiving gifts from afar: it’s a lovely tale, an emotional bon-bon, we like it, it’s neat, and it’s over come December 26, so we can get back to the real world.
But what if there’s something we’re missing? What if that deep longing of our hearts is more than just the doldrums of December weather kicking in? I was reminded by a member of this congregation, that in religion as well as in math, there’s a saying that could help us out, “The Human mind is capable of proving things that are hard to believe and believing things that are hard to prove.” We don’t need proof at Christmas, what we need is a heaping dose of belief.
Now, I don’t mean the kind of belief that says, I have the right truth and you have the wrong truth. I mean belief in the way that children believe. I like to think that children, even these days can be alarmingly truthful. They have ultimate trust – sometimes even in the middle of experiences that will eventually teach them otherwise. They believe. They believe in the love of a jolly old man riding around in a sleigh pulled by flying reindeer. What more can be said for us, if we are to believe in the mystery of the incarnation?
God being born into our world is astonishing, and in many ways unbelievable. The fullness of the divine breaks into our ordinary world in a smelly old manger, where shepherds visit, and foreigners are drawn to the occasion by a sign in the sky. It doesn’t make sense. It’s not supposed to. It’s beyond our logic, and belongs to a power that is inexplicable. We do have a lot more to learn about God, and what kind of disciples we ought to be when God is willing to step into our humanity calling us to something extraordinary.
Again, Kathleen Norris speaks to our confusion and says, “We don’t know, but we’re not lost.” We may not know, provably, logically, exactly what it is that God is speaking to us, but neither are we lost and without a map to guide us. We can trust and we can believe. We can allow our hearts to be touched by the strangeness of this season so that we may more fully grow into the people that God intends for us to be. Our spirits are more than the sum of what we know. Our spirits also attest to what we do not or cannot know, and in that way allow us to believe that which we cannot prove.
Imagine angels and shepherds. Imagine the trust of Mary and the concern of Joseph. Imagine a wide-eyed baby who has no idea who he is to become. And then, then we can sing with the angels, “Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace among those belong to God.” All these things are things not to be processed through our Vulcan minds, but pondered lovingly in our hearts.
Amen.