It’s almost here! This is the big week, the week we’ve all been waiting for, the week and the day that is the target of all the hustle and bustle, the endgame of all the cheer and excitement. For many of us, particularly if you’re a parent of young children (or have ever been), these are the days before the Christmas Pageants, our annual reenactments of the Nativity, with their barely controlled rehearsals and frantic directors just hoping that at least a few of the angels will stay healthy. After the rehearsals have ended and the Pageant crowds disperse into the night, we’re left with that eager anticipation of that magical morning with all of its treasure and delights. After all, as Ralphie famously exclaims in A Christmas Story: “Christmas was on its way. Lovely, glorious, beautiful Christmas, upon which the entire kid year revolved.”
But as we grow up and move beyond kiddom, as we take on the responsibilities and burdens of adulthood, as we experience those parts of life that don’t make it into the animated Christmas specials, we may begin to wonder about what it all means. Every Christmas we inevitably think about the nature of belief as we encounter the person of Santa Claus, and wonder if we can still hear that sleigh bell, that first gift of Christmas from The Polar Express. Do we believe in Santa? What does that mean? Does the Nativity scene have anything to say to us now? We just survived Thanksgiving, and now we’re approaching more family gatherings where we may encounter many flavors of “truth”. Is Christmas really just for kids? I mean, Santa is great, and shepherds and angels and lambs are cute, but I have to go to work on Monday and deal with that.
But there is something about that Nativity scene. Ever since St. Francis of Assisi first staged a live reenactment in 1223, people around the world, in various cultures and languages, with a variety of characters, colors, cloths, animals, and decorations, have created and recreated the scene again and again. The uncountable number of figurine sets are like the constellation of chess sets: figures of every type and description, but all immediately recognizable as Mary and Joseph, the shepherds and wise men (added from Matthew), the Creche, the site of the Birth, the Incarnation, and no explanation is needed.
This is just a tiny testament to the magnificence of the gift that Luke bequeathed to the church when he wrote the opening of his gospel, perhaps the greatest Christmas ornament ever conceived, a multifaceted literary jewel that commands our attention and that can as easily communicate to a three-year-old child as to a seasoned bishop or theologian.
So as you go to your various Pageants, Recitals, Cantatas, and Celebrations this season, I offer a few thoughts to take with you. For I have no doubt that there is a Word waiting for you there, a Word that can reach into any situation or chapter of life, a Word that is thunderous, revolutionary, life-changing, and full of Love and Grace.
Let’s start with the problem of Truth. We humans have been wrestling with this for a long time (not just in the present climate), probably since the very beginning. Remember Pilate’s famous line, “What is truth?” The problem is that most great truths, the truths worth knowing, are very hard to describe directly. We can come to understand them, but they’re hard to explain. So we often will wrap them in a pithy saying. Consider phrases like “less is more.” Three simple words that speak paragraphs. Or these: “You must fail in order to succeed.” “You must give in order to receive.” You can likely think of many others. If asked what they mean, almost always we will answer not with a definition, but by telling a story, a story that exemplifies the truth. It is not the story that matters, but the truth that the story illuminates. Notably, many of these little sayings are paradoxes: they juxtapose two seemingly contradictory statements. So we tell the story and wait for that “Oh, I get it!” moment in our listener. Now, I’d like to introduce you to an entire library of literature that does little else but tell such stories: the Bible.
It should not surprise us that Luke is a master at such storytelling. If we now consider his Nativity, let’s remember the context. Remember his program, the radical openness of God, a God offering grace to all people. Remember that an infancy narrative was not necessary (as we discussed last time with Mark, who didn’t include one), and so Luke had an opening to craft a story from what little was known about the early life of Jesus into a literary jewel that would accomplish one of his greatest goals that he shared with the other evangelists: to proclaim who Jesus is. Finally, remember his audience: the intelligentsia and cultural elites of the Roman Empire, along with other Gentiles and outsiders.
With all that in mind, let’s turn to the story. At first, it all goes according to plan. Luke’s audience would immediately recognize the story as that of the birth of a Roman Emperor, who proclaimed himself to be the “son of god”. We have the astronomical portents (the star), the choirs of angels (divine proclamation), and the proclamations of peace, goodwill, and a “golden age” for everyone. This is exactly what the Cult of the Roman Emperor demanded, a cult that Luke’s elite audience actively supported (at least publicly) and through which they received much of their status and influence. But soon the story starts to drift sideways, and then goes horribly wrong. First, it happens at night, in the cover of darkness, where no one can see the majestic parades, armies, and festivities. Second, it happens not in Rome or in any great imperial city or even a mid-sized town. It happens in a field, in the middle of nowhere. Third, there’s no one there. No one can hear the great proclamation or see the parades! Well, there are some sheep, and a few shepherds: in other words, no one is there. Shepherds were the lowest of the low, barely more than the animals they protected. They were castoffs, unmentionable to Greeks and unclean to Jews. What’s more, there is no parade. There are neither armies nor flashing spears nor unfurled flags nor a single banner to be found. The angels simply disappear into absolute silence. (By the way, it’s just glorious how Handel ends the chorus “Glory to God” in the Messiah. Have a close listen.)
It just keeps getting worse. Already a marketing and publicity disaster, with apparently everyone involved in making the parade floats and brass bands either sick, overslept in bed, or otherwise delinquent, we now move to the site of the glorious birth. It does not take place, as mentioned above, in a capital city or palace of any kind, but in a barn, with the precious baby laid in a feed trough! And the parents are not from the aristocracy, but mere peasants, and they’re not even at home! They’re off on some bureaucratic misadventure to answer a census, of all things. Their families are absent, they have no servants or staff attending the mother or infant, and no one in the pathetic little village where they find themselves seems to be aware of what’s happening. Not even the innkeeper who let them in. Once again, it is the shepherds who show up! Amazingly, the shepherds, those nobodies, actually listened to the angels, believed what they heard, and showed up at the barn. They did not run away in terror like nobodies do. No. These lowest of the low acted like Roman citizens and came to pay the newborn King their respects. They go to Mary and Joseph, and at that point, since Christ is there with them and these shepherds, there you have the first Christian church service, right at the Nativity. And everyone else is asleep. This was the first Christian community. It should not be lost of us that to those shepherds, a barn was very much their place. The animals and nomadic peasants were their people.
At this point, many of Luke’s readers may well have thrown the scroll out the window in frustration, or more likely, fear. They likely should have, because this story was not only offensive and insane, but it was a frontal assault on the Imperial Cult, a proclamation that not only was the Emperor not the true king, but that the true king was something unimaginable. The story made an utter mockery of everything the Cult held dear, and offered a vision of and an invitation into a very different kind of kingdom. The story was dangerous, and Luke was not hiding it, but putting it right there for anyone to see. It was such an act of bravery to write this gospel to that audience. And remember, this is the just the opening salvo of his two-part work.
I would make one more observation. Strange things happen to ordinary mathematics when Infinity becomes involved. We have a name for it: calculus. Disastrous things happen when both infinity and its reciprocal, zero, are involved. The classic example is when you try to divide any number by zero. The result is described either as infinite or “undefined”, and if that happens in any computer program, it will cause an immediate crash. It is a bane of every software developer. When such an event happens in an unsuspecting mathematics equation, practitioners will simply say that the equation “blows up”. Everything stops. The math breaks down in a singularity. No further progress can be made. Such things should be prevented at all costs. Even more fun are forms that are known as “indeterminate forms”, such as when zero and infinity combine together. Such forms have an unknowable number of possible values and cannot be defined without knowing more about the context in which they occur.
Look at what Luke has crafted in the barn. We have the almighty and infinite God of Gods, Lord of Lords, present before and beyond the universe, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, now appearing in the person of a newborn human infant, an “absolute zero” human in a family with absolutely zero worth. Who could be more destitute than this family? They have no home, no friends, no wealth, no status, and are invisible to everyone. This immense juxtaposition is the shining nexus of Luke’s Christmas, a Singularity, an Impossibility yet an Indeterminate form of infinite possibilities, a rip in the fabric of spacetime, a point where the Christ tears through the ultimate barrier and enters our reality, and we cannot take our eyes away from it.
The picture is exquisite and beautiful, but has the power to overturn Empires and blow away every barrier we humans attempt to put between ourselves. This a very new kind of kingdom: we bring nothing; God brings everything. As we stare at the Nativity, the questions arise: Who can be more destitute than us? Who is righteous before God? Who are we without our wealth, our families, our professions, and our nationalities? The answers are simple. We are God’s. We are God’s children gifted with unique spiritual gifts that become our ministries and our source of purpose and life.
Everyone can understand this story. Everyone can identify with that family. We stare into that Indeterminate form of the Nativity, into those infinite possibilities, and catch of glimpse of who God sees us becoming. That new baby has nowhere to go but up. He has and remembers no past and no hangups, but offers only growth. That is the gift of Christmas that God offers each of us. It is a call to rebirth, to leveling up, to leaving the past behind and to come and follow.
So, by all means, attend those Pageants, Plays, Cantatas, and Recitals. It is Christmas, after all. But as you watch, take a moment to see that Nativity as Luke presents it, a shining jewel of possibility, an Empire-shattering promise of new beginnings, and meditate, if only for a moment, on your next faithful step. Because maybe Ralphie was right. Christmas is on its way. Lovely, glorious, beautiful Christmas, a crazy, joyful Impossibility around which all of our lives revolve.
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