The power of story

December 19, 2013

Dear People of Christ Church,

The pageant is tonight! The pageant is tonight!
I'm not sure how it came to pass that churches took on the habit of having children act out the Christmas story, but I am so grateful for it. There's something about the Christmas story that's easy to think we've got it all figured out; it's so familiar and so unfamiliar at the same time.  All the heavy theology about human nature and divine nature and all of them coming together can sound so abstract as to be meaningless. At the same time, the manger where we think we've been so many times seems like the house where you grew up, knowing each loose board and creaking step all the way down in your bones.  Somehow actually acting it out makes it more and less familiar; our pageant script has a rather sassy innkeeper and innkeeper's spouse, and it just makes you wonder: What was it like to go from door to door looking for a place to stay? What did Mary ponder in her heart those moments after Jesus was born, he heart crushed by wonder and love at the same time?  Why haven't you pictured a ladybug there at the scene?

Anything in our spiritual lives that can get us to ask questions, to interrogate our habitual ways of understanding is always fruitful. Part of what faith does is to ease our pain; of course it does, and should, help us feel "better." In faith we know that love is eternal and our souls are kept safe at God's breast. In faith we know that the powers of death are already vanquished. But faith can also lead us to become too comfortable, to forget that God desires our doubts as well as our certainties.  By encountering our faith stories as story, we can be a bit more playful, letting our minds wander a little into new visions and new dreams.

Scripture is great about this; much as we forget, each Gospel treats the birth of Jesus in a different way. Luke offers us the evocative manger scene we enact at the holiday and hear on Christmas Eve.  But this Sunday, we'll also hear the first part of the Nativity story according to Matthew, in which the location of Jesus' birth isn't mentioned at all-and it's Matthew that gives us the Magi entering to visit Jesus in a house (they don't show up to the manger at all, actually).  In Mark, there's no nativity, and in John, we get that beautiful prologue about the Word and the Light shining in the darkness. Again, no manger, no magi.  Still, going toward the power of new questions and new visions, I still like the nativity scene that mashes them all together. 

So for tonight-what are those idle imaginings and questions you bring? What do you see dancing around the edges of the Christmas story?

See you soon!

Blessings,
Sara+