Historically, the Jewish Festival of Lights, Hanukkah, is a story of the importance of faith. It is a story of an oppressed people forbidden the practice of their faith, a faith that forms the core of their identity, and their battle, really a war, that allowed them to practice their faith, and be themselves.

Given Hanukkah's chronological proximity to Christmas and the overwhelming significance of Christmas religiously and secularly in the United States, Hanukkah is sometimes treated as the Jewish Christmas. Emphasis in the United States is placed on the aspects of Hanukkah that are somewhat like the Christian holiday, the gift giving and family and food and lighting of candles. In fact, Hanukkah is sometimes praised as a better version of Christmas because you get eight days of gifts instead of just one.

But Hanukkah isn't about gift-giving, any more than Christmas is. Giving gifts to loved ones is a way to celebrate the holidays, but the reason to celebrate, the reason that each holiday is a holy day to its respective religion, is something far different from giving and getting gifts, and also far different from each other.

At the time of Jesus' birth, Christianity didn't exist. There were no Christian people. There was no Christian faith to be learned, shared, lived, or protected. There is no battle fought on Christmas and no earthly enemy is overcome by his birth. The Christmas story is modest, and quiet, and private. The people who gathered in the manger to honor Jesus' birth were Jewish peasants, and eventually pagan kings and miracle workers from far outside Israel, not Christian leaders or warriors. Most people didn't even notice that the birth had happened, even the Christian gospel writers who would eventually write about it weren't aware of it at the time. It was only several decades later that the people who would come to call themselves Christians, looked back toward Jesus' birth and celebrated it as a remarkable event in their faith history.

At the time of the Jewish rebellion led by the Maccabees against the Greek government who controlled their land and culture, the Jews had been a people identified by their faith for hundreds of years. A thousand years had passed since the time of David and Solomon, 15 hundred years since the exodus from Egypt, maybe two thousand years since the time of Abraham. If Abraham is the founder of Judaism and Jesus is the founder of Christianity then we are as far today form the beginning of Christianity as the Maccabees were from the beginning of Judaism. The rebellion against the Greek oppressors, two hundred years before Jesus' birth, was a war fought by a people already formed and identified by a long and complicated faith history. The war itself immediately showed itself to be another milestone in that faith history. Although it occurred too late in Jewish history to be included in their scriptures, Hanukkah quickly found a place in the Jewish ritual year.

Hanukkah is about returning to and making possible the living of a faith that is already known and respected and vital. Christmas is about the founding of a faith that will gradually become important but only many years in the future and will only eventually be seen by a community of people as an important beginning. Hanukkah, which means, "dedication" in Hebrew, is about re-affirming a faith already strong and proven, and defending that faith against forces that would denigrate or destroy it.

Christmas and Hanukkah, therefore, represent two very different points along a faith journey. Christmas comes at the beginning, the birth of Christianity into the world. Hanukkah represents a point much further along the path, where the faith is already formed and lived and trusted, but now finds forces outside the faith criticizing and attacking it. Hanukkah isn't the end of a spiritual path (and what could that possibly be?) but Hanukkah represents a spiritual stage far distant from Christmas.

We need from time to time to remember as Christians do at Christmas, the beginnings of our spiritual path. How did we get started? What insights and experiences were important to us? What did we read that inspired us? Who did we talk to that challenged us? What church did we walk into that really got us going on who we are today? What did we probably not even recognize at the time, that now, these 10, 20, 30, 40 or more years later we see as the quiet, modest and private beginning of the faith the defines our lives today?

And we need from time to time to recognize as Jews do at Hannukah and on many of their holidays that walking a spiritual path and staying on it is a difficult task. Forces around us such as a secular, materialist culture and a religious majority we don't belong to work to pull us off our path. And internal forces too threaten our resolve: distractions of other things we could be doing with our time, temptations to lapse into the values of our culture that attract us even though they conflict with our faith values, friends who don't support our need for religion, and other people, some of them friends and some of them not, who question our beliefs or even insult them.

When faced with those situations we need our own Hanukkah, our own holy day of re-dedicating ourselves to the faith which has proven its importance in our lives but remains so easily attacked or taken from us. Having a Hanukkah in our lives, either as Jews or as people of a different faith who can learn from the Jews, remembers those times in our lives when we did fight for our faith and stayed on the path, and gives us the strength and dedication to still fight for our faith as we need to in the future, and stay on the path we're walking.

Hanukkah is a holiday for people who have a faith life. The lessons of Hanukkah don't offer very much for people still at the beginning stages of forming their beliefs and values and associated actions.

At the beginning of our faith life we welcome influences from outside. They represent resources we can draw upon to form our faith. Every word or voice or idea or action we encounter either from our own intuition or outside ourselves can get pulled into our spirits. Filtered through our discernment process of reason, and the corrective of the community that advises us about what voices to trust and which to be wary of, these spiritual data points can then become part of our spiritual identity. Eventually our tradition and community becomes stronger as we voluntarily associate more and more with a particular group of people and ideas. It becomes easier and easier to more quickly dismiss those ideas and beliefs that just aren't going to work for us. Though we strive to keep our minds open, there's also a need and good reason to start saying that some ideas just don't feel right or make sense and some beliefs are just so extraordinary that it would take extraordinary evidence for us to consider them.

As children we learn the faith of our parents and take in the teachings of their faith (whether religious or not) with open eyes and ears and unquestioning acceptance. As older children we begin to question and develop sufficient powers of intuition and reason to ask questions and perhaps reject. Hopefully we're also at this time able to find other resources of beliefs and move away from the rejecting stage into a constructive faith to replace the one we're giving up, whether that be a mature version of the same faith we had as children, or something altogether different from our childhood faith.

And then, as young adults we start to form a personal faith life around a few core principles. People are inherently good and valuable. Democratic systems that give voice to every citizen in how they will be governed are better than systems that silence some people. Healthy communities demand both personal freedom and recognition of our interdependent connections. Metaphysical beliefs and associated actions in the world stay fluid for a time as values coalesce. We still think and consider and change our minds about beliefs and strategies for work in the world, but our values start to concretize at this point and become less fluid. We're able now to say an assured "yes" to some faith principles, and an unqualified "no" to others. It's at this point in our faith journey that a holy day like Hanukkah starts to have relevance.

What do we do when we affirm the worth and dignity of all people and then someone comes along who either by word or deed denies our worth or dignity, or the worth or dignity of someone we love? That's the question of Hanukkah. What do you do when someone questions your faith, steps on it, acts against it, or attempts to prevent you from acting on your faith? The challenge of Hanukkah is to say my faith life is too important to let something or someone take it from me. And if you insist on attacking and insulting my faith, I will fight back until you quit. I will not let you deny the inherent worth and dignity of all people. I will not let you deny my access to the democratic process. I will not let you act as though we weren't all a part of an interdependent web of existence that demands respect.

From the point that we firmly say yes to some principle we will begin to have to say no to elements that question that principle. As our faith life continues to develop we find more and more aspects of faith that become non-negotiable for us. At the point of shared values Unitarian Universalists can gather as congregations and speak as a shared community. But although shared values form our congregational centers, values alone do not represent a complete faith life. A complete faith needs to include strategies for manifesting those values in the world, and already here Unitarian Universalists start to part ways. We don't agree on politics and methods of social change and nor do we need to. We don't need to agree as a congregation on appropriate actions, because we do share the same values, but we still need to come to some decision about actions appropriate for each of us as individuals in order to flesh out and deepen our personal faith. Values have no meaning if we don't strive to manifest those values in our world. Eventually we need to decide how we're going to do that saying yes to some strategies for action and saying no to others.

Here again we come to the Hanukkah moment. What do we do when we affirm, say, total non-violence as our action strategy, and someone else affirms, or requires of us as citizens of a nation, violent action either as self-defense, or as pre-emptive war? What do we do when our values demand laws that ban guns or provide universal health care and the actual laws passed by our legislature allow guns in our community and don't provide health care to all? That's the question of Hanukkah. The challenge of Hanukkah is saying action in the world of a certain type has become a defining aspect of my faith life and when you say I shouldn't act that way or won't let me act that way I will fight back until I can. My faith life, including the kinds of actions I take in support of my values are too important to let you denigrate or prevent them and so I will take you on and I will force you to give me space to practice my faith.

And then finally, as our faith continues to develop and mature, we begin to encounter certain metaphysical understandings, beliefs, that also become certain for us. Complete faith includes values, actions, and also a description of metaphysical reality. Does God exist or not? Does something of us survive our death or not? Is the universe a realm of meaning and purpose or not? Answers to those questions are hard to come by, but refusing to ever answer or even strive for answers, locks us into a shallow spirituality. The universe is one way and not another. It makes a difference. Our lives would be very different, or ought to be, if this is a universe including a deity, an afterlife, and an ultimate meaning, than if it does not include those things.

At that point our sense of certainty about the way the world is, at least in some aspects, and our need to move forward with a faith life that tackles deeper questions rather than constantly re-addressing the same questions, outweighs the benefits of retaining an open mind. It's at this point that the open mind becomes a detriment to our deeper faith rather than a boon. While forever remaining tolerant of and compassionate toward people of other beliefs we need to have the courage to stake out our own faith ground and say, you know, for me, this is the truth, I'm going to trust the work I've done so far and move on to the next question.

And then again, we face the Hanukkah moment. What do we do if we don't believe in God and yet our teacher insists our joining in a pledge stating that we are "one nation, under God"? What do we do when we believe that the world includes meanings and purposes in a natural system and yet the church tells us it's controlled by a supernatural deity and the scientists tells us the world is not motivated by any intelligence but is simply a partly automatic, partly random, accident? The challenge of Hanukkah is to say my beliefs are important and I'm going to hold on to them when attacked and not be distracted by questions I've outgrown. My faith life gives me my identity as a person, comfort in face of hardship, courage in face of threat, and enlightenment in face of doubt, and I'm not going to let anyone or anything take that away from me.

In the Hanukkah story, historically, the threat to the faith of the Jews came from an oppressive government. The threat in their case was obvious and total. The faith life of the Jews at the time required a sacred temple. The rebellion led by the Maccabee family was predicated on the Greek governor's action of robbing the temple and setting up a statue of Zeus in the holy of holies. The intent was not only to insult the Jews but also to prevent their faith practice and eventually to destroy the Jewish identity by converting them to the Greek religion.

It's almost unimaginable for us to think of an insult to our faith, no matter how strong, worth going to war over. But, of course, our situation in the United States is very different from the situation of the Jews before Christ, or the situation in other parts of the world today. We don't face the threat that some people do of not being able to practice our religion. Our religion, unlike the ancient Jewish religion, requires only our minds and hearts and not a physical temple to practice. The United States government is not interested in shutting down Unitarian Universalist churches, or forcibly converting us to a state religion.

But the threat to us, to our personal faith lives, though less dramatic, is no less real. And though we may not be faced with the loss of our people or our culture, we may be faced with the loss of a personal identity, and the personal benefits of our private faith. The threat to our faith lives comes not from the government but from other people and I think most importantly from ourselves. And the threat we face is seldom so blatant as to say you can't live your faith, as it tempts us to simply stop living our faith by throwing up other distractions that clamor for our time and effort.

It's always easy when studying a moral tale, whether the story of Hanukkah, or a parable of Jesus, to identify with the hero. We're Jesus letting the adulterous woman go free rather than the people throwing stones. We're always the Maccabees, never the Greeks. But in some ways we are the Greeks. In some ways we are ourselves the ones to blame for distracting ourselves away from our faith lives. Oftentimes the major enemy of our faith is our own selves, our tendencies to put everything else first, our tendency to allow our base temptations to pull us away from our values, our fear of making a scene that keeps us from speaking out against unjust actions in the world, our own lack of discipline that keeps us from ever getting any nearer final, convincing answers to the big questions of belief.

Celebrating Hanukkah, means recognizing and honoring the need for and the beauty of faith. This faith life of ours is worth having in a complete and deep way: values, actions, and beliefs. And once we've arrived at the point in our spiritual lives where we have a faith to honor, Hanukkah reminds us our faith ought to be important enough to fight for. Unlike the Maccabees, we don't need to take up arms for our faith, but we still need a little of the Maccabean spirit that led them to take up arms. Fighting probably means for us, luckily, something short of war against an oppressive government, but it means even for us, holding up and holding on to our faith, against forces that would cheapen our faith or take it away: forces in our government, but also forces, some seemingly benign, among our family and friends, our neighborhood, even in our congregation, or even, maybe most dangerously, within ourselves, that would threaten to denigrate or destroy our faith or give us something else less important to spend our lives on.

The point is, first of all, to develop a faith life worth defending and then, following the lesson of Hanukkah, when necessary, to defend it for all it is worth.