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Dec 24, 1999
The following Christmas message was given by the Rev. Gene Preston at the late Christmas Eve worship (l0:30PM until Midnight) of Community Church Hong Kong. The magnificent venue for this liturgy was the APEX at the top of Central Plaza, 800 feet above central Hong Kong. The sanctuary was softly lit with candles, decorated in red trimmings, and brimming with dozens of poinsettas, making for a memorable setting for the final Christmas Eve celebration of the second millennium after Christ.
"GOD'S SIXTH SENSE AND OURS"
One of the surprises of the world of cinema in l999 was the wild popularity of the film called THE SIXTH SENSE.
The film features interaction between a psychologist and a nine-year-old boy troubled by the conviction that he is visited by "dead people." Only the boy, exercising his sixth sense, sees these strange and terrifying visitors but he does not know the meaning of it all.
Through therapy with the psychologist, who himself is deeply troubled by his failure to have helped an earlier young patient also deeply disturbed by extra-normal experiences, they explore issues of death, the after life, morality and responsibility.
I liked the movie because it is a reminder that things are not always as they seem. Spiritual reality often calls for the exercise of a sixth sense beyond the five senses with which we usually access reality. If we judge reality only by our five senses we will come up short again and again on meaning, insight and inspiration.
When Christmas comes around each year, it quickens all our senses with its music, wrappings, and celebrations. But Christmas would stir us to exercise our sixth sense if we are to truly receive what God has done in the birth of Jesus Christ.
If we do not think about the extra normal significance of Christmas then we shall leave the season as most cinema goers left the theatres after enjoying the Sixth Sense. Christmas celebrants like movie goers can be touched for a while, even deeply touched, but then, as with movie goers, leave the theatre, returning to normal existence, and dismissing that which had stirred us as only so much movie stuff.
Do you go through Christmas, enjoying it, but come out the other side just dismissing it as so much Christmas stuff? The spiritual symbols of Christmas are many: the Angels, the Stars, the Wise Men, the barren wilderness, the humble stable of the Nativity birth, the flight of the holy family, the slaughter of the innocents, and at all times the cross that shadows the crib. These symbols are bound to touch our five senses. Do they touch our sixth sense wherein spiritual imagination and living faith are formed?
An angel a tells Mary that the Holy Spirit will come upon her, and the power of the Most High will overshadow her; therefore the child to be born will be called holy, the Son of God….And of his rule there will be no end.
If Mary had operated only from her five material senses, she would have quickly dismissed this experience as unreal, a premature Hollywood script into which she was thrust. The announcement to Mary is on its face ridiculous and just how ridiculous it all was proven when about 33 years later Mary stood as the grieving mother of her grown up boy and experienced with him his final hours of his suffering on the cross. And yet things are not as they appear and God acts in a dimension which challenges our normal experiences and re-channels our sensations of the real.
Mary was born and grew up in a world dominated by ordinary senses, heightened and brightened by the indulgent paganism of Rome. Human eyes, ears, taste, smell and feel have rarely been as exercised as by the upper classes able to enjoy Roman indulgence. The public and private architecture of the Empire, the poetry of Pindar, the taste of bacchanalian feasts, the smell of perfumes of the empire, and the feel of pagan sensuality, were all taken by granted as the essence of reality and meaning.
But none of it lasted. Paganism began unravelling within the lifetime of Mary. By contrast, the name "God with us" which Mary gave to her child would survive and become celebrated to this very last Christmas of our millennium. Every human is confronted with two supreme mysteries: the mystery of the universe and the mystery of oneself. It is possible to demystify both the universe and oneself by concluding that the universe is a random result of impersonal energy and that oneself is likewise the product of the interaction of random molecules.
With the demystification of oneself, however, the process is more challenging since the self immediately raises awareness issues: Why am I here? Only to die? Or to live? To live in order to die? What is the mind? Where does my sense of oughtness arise? Why am I bothered about issues of evil and ultimate good if I am only a random happening in an impersonal universe? Is there life after this life? If reality is only what my five senses can judge, why am I not totally happy when my five senses are fulfilled?
All these questions bring us to the threshold of opening ourselves to our spiritual sixth sense so that we might experience God.
Underlying the Christmas symbols and whatever mystique they generate in each of us this Christmas night is the ultimate mystery of the God who acts toward us. The God who is holy yet humbles Himself in the form of the God child; the God who lifts up humanity by anointing a human to show the way through our ordinary senses to the divine sixth sense.
The sixth sense of Christmas stimulates our imagination and the enlivens our spirit. Through imagination and spirit we can be reached by Christmas symbols that suggest a mystery beyond our rationale grasp of reality.
The writer Richard Crashaw has caught the mystery of Christmas in this poem:
Welcome, all wonders in one sight; Eternity shut in a span: Summer in winter, day in night; Heaven in earth, and God in man: Great little one Whose all-embracing birth Lifts earth to heaven, Stoops heaven to earth
The Christian sixth sense is to see that there is more than what we can literally see; there are more thoughts yet to be thought that we have already thought; there is more to discern about who we are this holy night than what our five senses have led us to believe there is.
God has created the five senses for us to enjoy but God exists beyond our five senses in the sixth sense realm of the holy. Because God is spirit, God can come to us at Christmas, God can enter our hearts now, God can abide with us now and forever. And of the reign of Jesus Christ there shall be no end.
Merry Christmas!
Pastor Gene Preston
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The Rev. Gene R.Preston14th Floor, Blk 36, Lower Baguio Villa Tel : 25516161 Fax: 25512114E-mail : gpreston@netvigator.com |
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