The Best Christmas Ever

Children’s Sermon1
The Sunday school at St. Matthew’s had done the Christmas pageant the same way every year. It was always in the church, on the fourth Sunday in Advent. The play was put on mostly by the by the first and second-grade children. As the parents, grandparents, and older children crowded into the sanctuary, the younger children, all freshly scrubbed, gathered in the adjoining hallway.

The Christmas story unfolded in the expected way. The choir of older children sang a Bethlehem-type song, and in from the hallway, encouraged by the tense second-grade teacher, came the beaming Joseph and adorable Mary. Joseph had a striped dish-towel tied round his head with dad’s old tie, while Mary wore a blue veil that looked a lot like the material in the curtains in the first-grade teacher’s family room. Despite Joseph’s frantic waving at his mother in the back pew – and his mother’s waving back – and Mary’s veil slipping dangerously over her eyes, the expectant couple arrived safely at the stable, right between two rows of caroling children.

The innkeeper got his lines right – no fluffed lines this year – the baby Jesus was duly delivered and laid in the manger, and the shepherds made their entry complete with crooks and stuffed animals under their arms. (Well, there was one animal that did look like a lamb, but was the boy at the back carrying a monkey with red and white striped trousers? Oh well, the value of modern exegetical interpretation of scripture .…) The tableau was almost complete, Mary and Joseph right up front, shepherds watching their flock by night on Bethlehem’s plains, and the angelic carolers singing beautifully.

All was ready for the coming of the three kings. The pianist struck the appropriate chord. The singers launched into an impressive royal song. The hallway door opened, and out walked – two kings. “We three kings from Orient are,” they sang, not realizing that one had lost his way. The two kings headed straight for Bethlehem. There was no way these kings were going to miss the action. Their journey was well planned, down the side aisle, up the center aisle, and right into Bethlehem’s manger-square. They had rehearsed carefully, and they walked with style, slowly, in time to the music, and ready to present their gifts when the carol ended.

The two kings were doing fine and all was going well, until the hallway door burst open and, falling through it, came the third king – cloak flapping, present for the baby Jesus tucked under his arm, cardboard crown at a crooked angle, and LATE!

Well, this third king may have been tardy, and he clearly didn’t follow instructions, but he was still smart. Obviously there was no way he could get to Bethlehem by the time the music was finished and meet up with his two companions ready for the next scene. So he decided to take a short cut – right through the singers. Now that might have been OK if the singers had known he was coming, or if a teacher had been able to warn them, or he if hadn’t decided to run as fast as he could. But the singers weren’t ready, and the teacher didn’t move fast enough, and the king wasn’t going to walk.

So he ran. He tripped over a singer’s leg, fell, caught his shoe in the carpet, and arrived at the manger just in time to join his more sedate regal companions. But, having arrived, he couldn’t stop arriving. He continued to run, right into the stable, right up to the manger, and right into the lap of a very surprised Mary. The manger went one way, the precious gift of frankincense went another. A cardboard crown landed in Joseph’s lap, and the baby Jesus, freed from his swaddling clothes, rolled gently towards the first row of pews.

Adults ran to the rescue. The inventive pianist continued to play carols until a semblance of order was restored. Everyone sang the final carol. The star performers took their bow – to the most thunderous applause anyone could ever recall at a church Christmas pageant. And one tearful parent whispered that that year the children had given her one of the best Christmas presents she’d ever gotten!

Adult Sermon
Christmas pageants! Why do we do them? Why do we take such pleasure in seeing children – not adults like the real characters in Luke’s story but children – act out that sacred drama? And why do we set up – and bless – representations of the story in the pageants? For that matter, why are you even here tonight? Why do we leave our warm homes on a wintry evening and flock to churches?

Is it that we are certain – as if we had just heard a historical chronicle – that the gospel according to Luke depicts exactly how Jesus was born? You may indeed think so – and that’s OK. Or, you may not think so. You may question the historic details in Luke’s account – and that’s OK too. Scholars know that the supposedly historical markers that Luke embeds in his tale don’t square with other historical documents. And we know too that Luke and the other evangelists wrote their accounts from particular theological perspectives using particular rhetorical strategies. Whether it all happened exactly as they depict it, two thousand years later we will never know.

So why are we here? It’s not all a fairy story is it – although fairy stories do embody deep truths, more than we realize when we read them as children. Even so, we did not come out to hear a fairy story. We came out to hear the truth that Christians have proclaimed ever since the first hardy souls opted to join the band of Jesus’ followers that began to form after his resurrection. We came out to hear again the deep truth that the Word became flesh and became one with the human family. We came out to hear that God took the great risk of becoming human, of joining the divine life with the human body.

Could that be possible? Why would God want to take on a human body? Most of us dislike our bodies. We think we’re too fat, too thin, too short, or two tall. If we’re young, we think we’ll never be adults, and if we’re old, we mourn the passing of our youthful bodies. Worse, we know that we are mortal, finite, and fragile. And worst of all, many of us are firmly convinced that our bodies are sinful, and that flesh and spirit are at war with each other.

If nothing else, then, the Christmas story reminds us that in the tiny baby, whose birth angels announced to shepherds, the divine and the human are bound together inseparably. This holy story reminds us that our bodies are not wrong, or ugly, or sinful. How could they be, when God was pleased to join Godself to a body? This holy story reminds us that Spirit and flesh are not at war with each other, but are joined together in us as one treasured and beloved whole. How weak and needy we are, how slow we are to learn this truth. And so, God chose to be born as a beautiful child to remind us of who we truly are. For, ultimately, we too are infused with divine life. We too are part of the creation that, out of love, God blew into being, as God’s Spirit hovered over the waters of chaos. We too are part of the creation that God pronounced to be “good.” Spirit and flesh are joined together in us too. Lest we forget that truth, every reading of the gospel story and every Nativity scene provide us with compelling reminders that God and humanity are inseparably joined, not only in Jesus, but also in us – in all of us. And even more important, God is visible to us, not only in the Jesus whose birth we celebrate this night, but also in each of us – and in everyone we meet.

Now here’s a story for the adults. Frederick Buechner relates that, many years ago, he attended Christmas Eve mass at St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome.2 As he waited, the church filled up with a motley assortment of pilgrims. Finally, there was a sudden hush. Way off, Buechner could see the resplendently dressed Swiss Guards coming up the vast aisle. Then, slowly, slowly, the old pope, Pius XII it was then, came up the aisle. He was dressed in the plainest white cassock and skull cap. As he walked, he seemed to be scanning the crowd. Then he came up to Buechner. His large eyes, made larger by his thick lenses, peered into Buechner’s face. Then he looked into the faces of those around him, with such a charged look that Buechner was sure the pope was looking for someone in particular. “He was a man whose face seemed gray with waiting,” Buechner says, “whose eyes seemed huge and exhausted with searching for someone, some one…. I have felt that I knew whom he was looking for. I felt that everyone else who was really watching must also have known.”

Buechner goes on to remind us that, of course, the face of the one whom the old pope sought was not hidden at all. The one he was looking for “was at that moment crouched against some doorway against the night or leading home some raging Roman drunk or waiting for mass to be over so he could come in with his pail and his mop to start cleaning up that holy mess. The old pope surely knew that the one he was looking for was all around him there in Saint Peter’s. The face that he was looking for was visible, however dimly, in the faces of all of us who had come there that night … because we had come looking for the same one he was looking for….”

My friends, God and humanity are inseparably joined, in Jesus and in us. Never forget that. Let the gospel story and the crèche continue to remind you of that holy truth. As we celebrate the birth of Jesus, may we also see him in each other and in all whom we meet in this holy season.

1. Adapted from Tom Gordon, A Blessing to Follow (Glasgow: Wild Good, 2009), 33ff.
2. Adapted from Synthesis, Christmas Day, 2014, 2.