That First Christmas

Poolesville Presbyterian Church
12.25.11; Rev. David Williams 


 Scripture Lesson:  Luke 2:1-20 

 Why did that passage sound so familiar? 

It’s like...we heard it only yesterday...

 The repetition and retelling of things is an important part of how we both identify ourselves and structure how we approach both our present and our future.  We are storytelling creatures, our lives woven from a tapestry of tales that stretch back as far as our memory allows. My own memory can be a bit on the spotty side.  I am not entirely sure, for example, what I had for breakfast one week ago today.  The further back I go, the more scattered that remembrance becomes. 

How far back do you recall?  How many Christmases?  As the years go on, going back to your first Christmas gets harder, as more and more memories get layered upon it.   Rewinding back through the forty two Christmas mornings I’ve experienced, I think I can get back to one sometime in the early nineteen seventies.  I was four, or maybe five, and living in East Africa.  That memory is a fragmented thing now, cobbled together from textures and scents and still-frames, as frayed and well-worn as a Christmas tree decoration you made when you were a child.

 I remember getting up early on that Christmas morning, before the sun rose.  I can remember five year old me sneaking silent down the hall like a tiny footy-pajama ninja, to steal a look at the Christmas tree downstairs in the great room of our house in Nairobi.   It was still there, sparkling with tinsel, its big fat hot incandescent colored lights off so as not to set the tree and the house on fire.  Under it lay presents, not the vast impossible piles of today, but enough.    After that peek, I can remember sitting in my room and waiting for my parents to awake, and inexplicably passing the time attempting to read an obscure Victorian novel called Tom Brown’s School Days.  

 I’m not entirely sure about the accuracy of that last memory.

Of that Christmas, I remember one gift, a large toy Jaguar.  E-Type, I think.  I can remember the smoothness of the plastic, hard and chitinous and light-beetley-green.  It was battery-powered, and had lights that lit up.  It would go forward, honking and flashing, until it crashed into an object.  That object could be a wall, a door, or, ideally, my younger brother.  It would then turn to the left, and, honking and flashing, continue on to it’s next destination.  It honked and flashed pretty much continuously for half a day, before the six primitive C cell batteries that powered it punked out.   

As I recall, that was the last time it worked, much to the great relief of my parents, who somehow managed to never quite get around to replacing those batteries.

At this time of year, those echoes of Christmases Past whisper like the first of Scrooge’s ghosts in our ears, padding around our subconscious in their footy pajamas, shaping and forming us as stories do. That is the purpose of story, after all.   That’s the reason for the retelling of that very first Christmas story, spun to us year after year out of Luke’s Gospel.  

In last week’s sermon, I talked a little bit about the purposes of Greco-Roman storytelling, about how rich it was with human detail.   The reason to tell the stories that had come before was not just to absorb historical factoids so’s you could do well on standardized testing.   It was to participate in those stories.   They were meant to form and shape the reality of the listener, to draw them in to the telling. Luke does precisely that in his retelling of the story of how the birth of Jesus came about.  

He begins before the beginning, spinning a story of an older couple who’d wanted to have a child but could not.   His story of Zechariah and Elizabeth is full of the scent of incense in the temple, of human yearning and doubt, all suffused with joy and hope and promise. As Mary meets Elizabeth, the story tells of infants stirring joyfully in the womb, and as filled with song as an episode of Glee, as both Mary and then Zechariah burst into celebratory songs in response to the unexpected good news they’ve received. 

And then, of course, there is the story we have just heard, again.   It’s a tale of a long journey to Bethlehem.  There’s an overbooked Bethlehem Ramada, a stable full of the stench and warmth of animals and birth, angels and shepherds and a new mother pondering what all this might mean.

Strikingly, what Luke’s narrative lacks is any fear, any sense of tension and dysfunction or sorrow.   We don’t hear about Herod and his plans and plots. We don’t hear about wise men steering clear on their way out of town.  We don’t hear about the fears of a young man whose fiance has conceived, a conception that could doom her to death or a lifetime of isolation.  Matthew’s story gives us that.    But this time of year, when the time comes for the telling, we tell Luke.   And Luke’s story is relentlessly, defiantly joyous. 

Those other realities may be there, but in choosing to emphasize the most gracious elements of the season, Luke is making an interpretive point.  These stories are fundamentally about hope and joy, and their retelling should serve that purpose. We retell this story every year for a reason, the same reason we retell the history of our selves in our minds.  The grace and the joy of this season is intended to define our lives together, and in doing so, define who we know ourselves to be.   This sacred story is what some scholars of the sacred would describe as an anamnesis, the fancy-pantsy academic way of speaking of a remembering that defines the present.   It is a narrative that has the power to transform, one that is both ours and greater than us.  

As Professor Herbert Anderson and Father Edward Foley put it in their book Mighty Stories, Dangerous Rituals, taking these ancient stories as part of our own story is a “weaving together of the human and the divine,” which “enables us to hear own own stories retold with clarity and new possibility.  And when our own stories are retold, our lives are transformed in the telling.”  (p.7) Hearing this rich and glorious tale, we’re asked to see ourselves as participating in it, and that can require a little effort.  

There may be other echoes in this season, other stories that are not so joyous.  As we move through the years, those less joyful stories can also build up, and take on lives of their own.   Just as stories of hope and promise work within us to define us, so too can stories of brokenness and sorrow and  anger.

But the truth of it is that we can choose between them.  Instead of becoming ensnared by those less-pleasant echoes, we can instead embrace that joy in the same way that Luke embraces that joy.  Instead of letting them define us, we can let our lives tell another story, defined by joy. So here as we are gathered, hearing that story of the first Christmas again, let it sink in just a little bit.  Let it define and sustain you.  Let the message of birth and good news and new life be your story for this morning and this season. 

Merry Christmas!  Let it be so, for you and for me, AMEN.