The Celebration of Christ's Nativity
The Rev. Nigel Taber-Hamilton, Rector
I came across a quote from the Southern author Reynolds Price the other day that goes something like this: "a human being can last days without water, many more days without food, but not one day without a story." And there's another old adage which says that God invented humanity because God loves stories.
Our lives are made up of stories - our lives are stories. And today we come to hear a story - well, not just a story, not just any story, The Story.
I would have told this story we've heard this morning quite differently two weeks ago - I had already written much of what I wanted to say about Jesus' birth, and it didn't look a lot like where I am now.
You all know what happened in the last two weeks - two weeks that seem like months! Several winter storms happened, including one that was predicted for Christmas Eve described by one TV weatherman as "a storm of biblical proportions".
Unless you live on or close to Hwy 525 you have been pretty much homebound for most of the last two weeks. It's only been in the last few days that we've been able to move around freely. And there are some folk who wondered to me yesterday if they could get here this morning because they still couldn't get out of their driveways
Going out during that time was somewhere between an adventure and a horror story. Several of my drives between Bush Point and the Church added new meaning to the phrase a "white knuckle drive"!
We have been humbled by nature - shown in stark terms that we cannot control our environment but that it controls us, that we are largely powerless and at it's mercy.
All of this adds a new layer of meaning to the story we reflect on today: the Christmas story. Think about what we just heard: a dangerous winter journey that, for Judean Jews from the region of the Galilee, went more than 100 miles to Bethlehem, with the potential for frigid temperatures, and, sometimes, snow.
They would have been about as able to deal with it as we have been - less so, in fact, given the mode of transportation - no warm vehicle interior...just the back of a donkey, or your own two feet.
All of which is to say that the journey to Bethlehem and the stark conditions on arrival - the ones we tend to idolize - would have been much more desperate, much more brutal and cruel, than anything we conjure up in our 21st century imaginations.
Yet it's the idolized Christmas story - of journey, and of birth - that forms us as Christians. We celebrate that story as The Great Story of God and of creation and of us.
We idolize it, but we don't often see what the story means in the greater sweep of the history of our faith.
Because there's not just one but two, distinct stories that have, since the time of Jesus, defined us as people of faith - one is found in part of the Hebrew Scriptures, the other in the Christian Scriptures - in the Gospels.
The first story was created because in the tradition of the Hebrew people there was a prohibition against creating any image of God. So the Hebrews really went to town on narrative - they told stories. Throughout the Hebrew scriptures we read story and counter-story describing worlds and the God who is active in those worlds.
One story comes to us in the Book of Deuteronomy, which could be described like this: you get what you deserve, and God rewards the righteous.
But then the Book of Job comes alive as a counter-story, protesting that ill-fortune falls on the righteous too, and that the reasons are hidden in the depths of God.
Which brings us to the Christmas story. The Christmas story is a counter-story. It's a story that is holding out for a God and a world which will work differently than the one in which the storytellers live.
The two Gospels that tell us of Jesus' birth - Matthew and Luke - start with different stories but end up in the same place. As a basis Matthew uses the Moses story, and Luke the call of Samuel, but they're both telling the same story: that the God who was present in these classical tales is present in Jesus of Nazareth.
These counter stories not only offer a different view to the Deuteronomist's one - which says "you get what you deserve" - they also propose a different story to that of the dominant and dominating culture of their era, the Pax Romana, the peace of Rome.
I've told you before that the titles "Son of God" and "Prince of Peace" were, before they were titles for Jesus, both titles for Caesar Augustus, who, with the Battle of Actium in 31 B.C.E., reunited a divided and warring Empire and brought The Great Peace to Rome.
Of course, Roman Peace is fine if you are Roman and so long as Caesar has the biggest army.
Both Matthew and Luke, in using titles belonging to Caesar, were saying the same thing: Jesus is the Son of God and the Prince of Peace and Caesar isn't, and that sonship and that peace are about different things with Jesus than with Caesar: The peace of Jesus of Nazareth is about seeking out those who do not benefit from Roman peace, and including them at life's table. Our Christmas story is asking us whether our God is more likely to be found in a Roman palace, or a cow's feeding trough.
So here's a central question that the Christmas story poses for us - this counter-story to the prevailing wisdom that seeks to turn Empire and Orthodoxy and Power on their heads: what is the story we tell ourselves at this time of year about ourselves?
The power of stories is that they are ways of inviting us to consider who we might be, they invite us to make lives in the worlds they describe, and they invite our loyalty and our resources. This is too much power to be left unfulfilled - there are lots of people who want that power to describe worlds and thus to control our loyalty AND our resources.
Into this space come the storytellers we know in our contemporary world: news organizations, spin doctors and advertisements, each seeking to frame the world and our place in it.
Be afraid, be very afraid, they say. Or Buy this to feel good.
The same thing is happening to our children - now they're being formed by stories told by Nintendo, and Sony and Microsoft, by the Wi and the Play-Station and the X-Box. As of yesterday the three most popular video games were the post-Apocalyptic world of "Fallout-3", and the extreme violence of "Grand Theft Auto 4" and "Super smash brothers - brawl". After school our children step into virtual worlds which are laid out before them.
New narratives - new stories - are being quietly assimilated, and these are shared in the schoolyard, and young friends measure each other by their skill and knowledge in worlds barely guessed at by those who have the care of developing the next generation.
The invitation of the Christmas story is to dispense with these other ways of defining us - with all of those other stories that take away our fundamental humanity and offer us hollow promises in return.
This Christmas story calls us to try and recover its true meaning and content: this counter-story to the story of the world where it was first told, a world which was about brute force and malnutrition, about abject poverty and cruelty, and the imposition of Imperial rule by whatever means necessary....We're being called to rediscover the power of telling stories of a God which runs counter to the prevailing values - the prevailing stories - of our day.
So today is about so much more than a child in a crib in a stable. Or, rather, because of the story being about a child in a crib in a stable and not in a palace, it's about so much more than the stories that much of our world would have us embrace.
And so today is a day of invitation for the rest of the year - to reconsider and to embrace again the Christian counter-story and to share it with a world so desperately in need of its integrity and its truth and its transforming power.
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