Editor’s Note: This is the first in a series on “Christmas sermons I wish I could’ve given.” Imagine if clergy could say what they really believed when they gave their yearly Christmas sermon. I asked a few Clergy Project members to think about this and got some great responses.

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By Bob Ripley

When I look at my old sermons, the same question pops up. Who was that guy?

He was the person I am now, of course, with one huge exception. I was once an ardent apologist and proponent of Christianity. I loved to preach. I loved being, as St. Augustine put it, a “vendor of words.”

The highlight of my week was when I rose to deliver the 25-minute monologue I had carefully crafted and, for the most part, memorized.

If I could go back to those days, knowing what I know now and with the convictions I hold now, and could step into a pulpit again, what would I say? Would I tell everyone to go home and enjoy some Sabbath rest because the divinity they were there to worship doesn’t exist? Or would I simply proclaim the need for more love and kindness, whether my listeners were theists or atheists?

I honestly don’t know. But if I did have a chance to speak to a Christian congregation during Advent when believers are preparing for the coming of baby Jesus, I would likely talk about how the story came to us and leave it up to my listeners to decide if they wanted to believe it was true or not. I’d give the sermon a nifty title such as “The Birth of the Nativity” and start by pointing out that life in the first century was rife with virgin births and archetypes of a savior.

Horus of Egyptian mythology, for instance, was a divine son who left the courts of heaven and descended to Earth, was born of a virgin and became a substitute for humanity. I would also point out that the earliest of the four gospels, Mark, makes no mention the birth of Jesus or appearances after his death but by the time we get to the latest gospel, John, Jesus is the “word made flesh through whom all things were made.” Oral tradition is so malleable.

I would likely include some of the inconsistencies and improbabilities from my book Life Beyond Belief: A Preacher’s Reconversion:

Only two of the four canonical gospels, that is, the gospels of the New Testament, mention the birth of Jesus. The Christmas story we have come to know and love is a mixture of colour from the palettes of Matthew and Luke to paint a harmonious tableau, even though there are differences and discrepancies between the two accounts. In Luke’s nativity story, Jesus’ parents lived in Nazareth in the north of Galilee. A Roman census forces the family back to its ancestral city of Bethlehem in the south of Galilee near Jerusalem. While they are there, Jesus is born. The story is an invention because there was no empire-wide census and it seems highly unlikely that a Roman official would order people to be counted in cities their ancestors left years before. It would be like me travelling to Yorkshire, England today to be counted as part of the Ripley clan. Besides that, no census could have happened when “Quirinius was the governor of Syria,” as Luke suggests, if Jesus was born when Herod was king. Quirinius did not become governor until 10 years after Herod’s death. So why did the author of Luke want to have Jesus of Nazareth born in David’s City? Simple; to fulfil the Old Testament prophecy of Micah that the saviour would come from Bethlehem (Micah 5:2). Matthew and Luke both include genealogies of Jesus. There are three problems here. The first is that both writers insist Jesus’ mother was a virgin when she gave birth to him. Joseph was, for all intents and purpose, the foster father to Jesus, not a blood relative. So why do the writers trace Jesus’ genealogy through Joseph? The second problem is that the genealogies are different. In Matthew, Joseph’s father is Jacob. In Luke it is Heli. The third is that while Matthew traces Joseph’s lineage starting with Abraham, the father of the Jews, through King David to Joseph, Luke’s genealogy goes from Joseph all the way back to Adam, the father of the human race. With a little help from the Internet, I can trace my lineage back to the clan of Ripley Castle in Yorkshire, England in the 17th century. To trace a lineage back to Adam in the Garden of Eden is an amazing genealogy, to say the least.

Before my listeners felt discouraged by the problems with the Christmas story, I would shift gears and conclude by pointing out how much I still love Christmas with the lights and music and mincemeat pie even if I no longer believed that a creator entered humanity in history. I would encourage everyone, as I do now, to take the opportunity afforded by the host of mostly pagan holiday traditions, to focus on hope and charity as these short days gradually begin to lengthen.

The reason for the season, after all, is axial tilt.

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Bio: Bob Ripley, aka “Dave the Atheist ex-pastor” is a syndicated religion columnist, broadcaster, former preacher and author of Christian devotional material. His new book which came out in October, 2014 is titled Life Beyond Belief: A Preacher’s Deconversion.

>>>>Photo Credits: “Augustine Lateran” by Unknown – http://www.30giorni.it/us/articolo.asp?id=3553. Licensed under Public Domain via Commons – https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Augustine_Lateran.jpg#/media/File:Augustine_Lateran.jpg

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Temple_of_Edfu_05.jpg#/media/File:Temple_of_Edfu_05.jpg

“Globespin-tilt-23.4” by Wikiscient, Tdadamemd – File:Globespin.gif – created using NASA’s “Visible Earth” image (in the public domain).. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Commons – https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Globespin-tilt-23.4.gif#/media/File:Globespin-tilt-23.4.gif