“So the Children Come…” a Nativity Sermon

Reverend Brian J. Kiely, Unitarian Church of Edmonton, December 10, 2006

It’s a well made film about Mary and Joseph coming to terms with a pregnancy that made her an outcast in her small village.  It’s about the growth of love between strangers in an arranged marriage.  It’s about the tense political climate in a Judea on the brink of civil uprising, and it’s a story about giving birth.  The director took few risks.  She portrayed the challenges faced by very human people whose lives are touched directly by God.  Hardwicke did not challenge the traditional reading of the birth story.  There are no theological debates or even nuances.  But to her credit, she seldom strayed into the sappy ‘high religious’ moments of tableaus and swelling angelic choirs.  Truth to tell, I found it a moving story and was brought to tears a couple of times.  But then as a fairly new Dad, I’m an easy emotional mark for the birth stories.

I noted that Hardwicke mostly avoided the overripe religious moments, but she couldn’t pass up at least one.  Near the end she created the traditional crèche tableau, replicating as carefully as possible the ubiquitous painted figures we might as well call traditional.  There are the shepherds on one side, down to the young one carrying the lamb on his shoulders.  On the other there are the three kings, one of whom is black, attired in the very same robes and hats that are so familiar.  Mary cradles the babe and wears a blue shawl given to her spontaneously by her wealthy cousin Elizabeth, the mother of John the Baptist.  It’s probably the only blue clothing item in the whole film, if not in all of Judea at that time.  In the background is even the same kneeling blonde ox I have looked at every Christmas of my life.

No question, the scene was trite enough to make me giggle, but I bet I would have missed it if it hadn’t been there.  The Nativity Story has been a presence in my life, well, forever.  Whether the story is factual or not doesn’t matter.  Whether I believe in God and/or Jesus is irrelevant.  I have lived my whole life with that story, so it has a place and an ability to touch me.

One of my fondest childhood Christmas memories is putting up our crèche scene. Using my big sister’s help I would carefully take the wooden stable out of the old cardboard box and carefully unwrap it from its gown of tissue paper trying my best not to hurt any of the wispy strands of straw glued to the roof.

Maureen would place it in the hearth of our fireplace and I would begin to unwrap the plaster figures. There was Mary in blue and Joseph in brown and the baby Jesus in the manger wearing not very much at all. There were the three wise men Casper, Melchior and Balthazar –apparently he’s the black one, two standing and one kneeling carrying their gifts, and that blonde ox and a donkey to fit into the stable stalls. There was a shepherd with a small lamb wrapped around his shoulders and three sheep, including one with a long since broken leg that I would have to lean up against a wall. And finally there were three angels, all blond and curly carrying banners reading "Gloria in excelsis”.

I would spend an hour carefully placing and then rearranging these figures, trying to get them just right as we listened to Bing Crosby’s White Christmas album...and then I would move them around several more times during the season. I would even go and compare my settings to the big crèche at our parish church to see how well I had done.

All the telling and the retelling of that Jesus story for me came down to those small plaster statues and the tale they told me. It was as if by moving them around, I too, could become part of the scene. Jesus, Mary and Joseph were oh so very real, for I knew what they looked like, and I knew exactly where in the east the wise men came from (They came from the vicinity of the television set... while the shepherds wandered down from the bookcase.) For a child, the story depicted in that crèche satisfied my spiritual needs.

Well, sadly, as much as I tried not to, I grew into a man... a thinking and reasoning man. And as I did so, the mystery and the magic of the birth stories lost their allure, at least for a while. They’re silly. They don’t make sense. They couldn’t have happened that way. And then I began to study for the ministry and it got even stranger.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that it’s been awhile since most of you read the two birth narratives contained in the Gospels. In fact I bet there aren’t even all that many who realize that the four Gospels only contain two accounts of the birth of Jesus. Mark says nothing and John makes some deeply philosophical references to the Word becoming Flesh.  Nope, only Matthew and Luke tell the tale...and they can’t agree on much more than a child named Jesus was born in Bethlehem to a woman who was not married at the time of her miraculous conception.

Even some of our most favorite parts of the story are just not in the Bible. Examples? There was no stable...my beloved crèche exists only in our imaginings! All Luke mentions is a manger, and that is something lifted right out of an Isaiah prophecy anyway. Besides, there is no innkeeper to send them to the stable that doesn’t exist. There are no animals: no sheep or cows or donkeys or oxen. There were no three kings, just some unspecified number of astronomers bearing a total of three gifts. There were no drummer boys and there was no silent night...not with all of Matthew’s angelic choruses singing and generally carrying on in the heavens. And to be absolutely clear about the most recent addition to the story I have now seen portrayed in two different places, there was no Santa Claus bowing before the baby Jesus. We have added all of those things in our successive retellings.

And then when we compare the two accounts by Matthew and Luke, we see they are irreconcilably different. Luke has the story of the census being ordered by Quirinus which made Joseph load his incredibly pregnant wife onto a donkey and cart her on a seven day journey across the country. As Catholic feminist theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether wryly noted, "Only a man who had never had a baby could have written that account.”

Well, history tells us there was no empire-wide census at the time, that if there had been, Joseph never would have had to go to Bethlehem for it.  The Romans could care less where he was from, only where he was so they could find him and tax him.  Furthermore Herod who figures so prominently in Matthew’s account, had been dead ten years before Quirinius became governor. From Biblical scholarship we gain a clue that the Gospel might not all be 100% accurate.

It is Luke that has that wonderful tale of Mary and Joseph going to Bethlehem from Nazareth and finding no room in the inn. It is he alone who mentions laying the child in a manger, though he never places it in a stable. Matthew by contrast suggests that Mary and Joseph already live in Bethlehem and that Jesus was born at home. In his tale there is no arduous journey. Well, not until after the birth. In Matthew’s story an angel comes to Joseph and warns him to take the child into Egypt and has Herod kill all the small boys in Bethlehem in order to destroy this new king. That massacre is not recorded in Luke’s account or anywhere else in history. You think someone might have noticed.

There are other inconsistencies as well. The magi visit Jesus in Matthew’s tale, but not in Luke’s. The shepherds hear the angelic chorus in Luke but there is not one to be found in Matthew. Matthew has a star, Luke has none. It goes on in smaller details but the conclusion is inescapable. These are two completely different and irreconcilable stories about the miraculous conception and birth of Jesus.

The obvious question is, "why?”

In our Bible course we will spend an entire two hour session on this, but the simple answer comes from looking at how the Jewish scriptures were written. It is a method called “midrash”.

In the Hebrew scriptures, it was important to keep the presence and the promises of Yahweh before the people. One way to do that was to have present day heroes seem as if they were part of ancient moments when Yahweh was in direct contact with humans as in the books of Genesis and Exodus. And so the writers of Hebrew literature would bring forward pieces of ancient narratives and reincorporate these plots into new stories. These renewed pieces spoke directly of God’s connection to the Jews and made the new heroes recognizable as recast figures of the past.

So the star in Matthew’s story would immediately tie Jesus to King David whose birth was marked by a rising star, and the flight into Egypt and the murder of the children would recall the story of Moses’s birth and the later emancipation of the Hebrew slaves in Exodus. To Matthew’s Jewish Christian audience, this symbolism of Jesus as the new Moses would be as obvious as if we turned on the TV and saw an actor dressed in a Superman suit or, for that matter, an actress in a desert setting dressed all in blue and carrying a baby. We would know immediately who these people were and understand all the underlying symbolism. But we wouldn’t assume we were looking at the real Mary or the real Superman.

The act of writing such symbolic resonances into a text is called "midrash”.

When we understand that, we realize that the birth story is a story and nothing more. Liberal scholars widely agree that the two accounts are complete fabrications, total fiction, simply not true.

And that realization can be devastating to a little boy who spent hours each year playing with the plaster figurines in the crèche. And it can make it hard to sing such lovely songs as "We Three Kings” and "Once in Royal David’s City” when we get wrapped up in saying "Not really!” or "It didn’t happen that way.”

But if we do that, we are letting ourselves get trapped in the quagmire of Biblical literalism. The Bible is just not a book of literal fact as some would contend. To take the Bible as literal truth is to dive into a morass of contradictions and ridiculously outdated and barbaric laws. And for too long, the Bible has been owned by the fundamentalist literalists who would do just that. They are winning the battle for the Bible because they scream their beliefs louder than anyone else.

They have stolen this wonderful book away from us, and we liberals have let them.  And we continue to let them get away with it if we only engage with these stories on the literal level of saying they aren’t true.  I think we have to rise above the facts.  I think we have to quit worrying so much about what is or isn’t ‘real’ and who sold us a bill of goods about the factuality of it all.  Let’s forgive all of that stuff and focus instead on what’s important – the story.

You know I love stories, and I look at that book and see some great tales that speak of human truths, truths that are timeless and that touch us across the centuries. That’s why they have survived, not because they were penned by the hand of any god, but because they were penned by humans who captured for a moment some incandescent spark of the human spirit.

I am as entranced by the birth stories today as ever I was, but in different ways.  As a father who participated in the birth of my children, I am moved to tears by the miracle of birth – any birth.  And even before Lily and Elora entered my life I felt that Sophia Fahs had gotten it right,   “Each night a child is born is a holy night.  Fathers and mothers sitting beside their children’s cribs feel glory in the sight of a new life beginning.”

I find cause for hope in the Nativity story, not because ’A’ saviour was born 2000 years ago, but because the potential for human rebirth and renewal - and maybe even a human redemption for the earthly sins of our species occurs every night a child is born.  It is, for me, hope renewed in a season of darkness, a recovering of belief and faith in the human enterprise, and the understanding that we sometimes need help from outside., be that God or our next door neighbor.

For years I did not have a crèche at home, just the story.  This week I went out and bought one, for I want my daughters to be reminded as they grow that Christmas hope isn’t just about the presents you want.  Maybe these trite little figurines will remind them of the story.

The stories of Matthew and Luke are not factual. But who really cares? Rather they are meaningful, and that's what counts. As Peg Gooding said in our reading, "Why not a star? Some bright star shines somewhere in the heavens each time a child is born. Who knows what it may foretell?"