In 1843, Charles Dickens described Christmas as “a good time: a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time, the only time I know of in the long calendar of the year when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of other people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys” (A Christmas Carol).
Call it madness, call it absence of mind, call it a strange collective hysteria, call it what you will: Christmas is a time when sane people go mad and mad people become sane. It happens but once a year, and in it — or by it — an exception is made to the accustomed order of things, as if to say: “Okay folks, now we are going to do things differently for a time, so please stand by for station identification. Don't panic! We'll return to regular programming as soon as possible.”
Christmas in the West may occasion shocking greed and debauchery — but both hearts and treasuries fly open, as if by magic. The ordinarily distrustful even enter God's house upon Christmas Eve. Yes, it sometimes takes the curl out of their naturally curly hair, but people make detours from the broad road of customary life. Then, and only then, “the bird of dawning singeth all night long/ And then, they say, no spirit dares stir abroad/ The nights are wholesome; then no planets strike/ No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm/So hallow'd and so gracious is the time” (Hamlet).
Every child knows this. Every year, growing up, I knew exactly when Christmas began. It began with the first snowflake outside my window; first a snowflake, then a wish, then a prayer, then another snowflake — and another, and another. Not only was heaven falling to earth, but Christmas was on its way, and with it the unbidden sense of another world, so bright, so beautiful, so full of wonder. I was out of doors in a flash, leaping, dancing, running in circles, trying to catch the snow in my hands, trying to see what a snowflake looked like before it melted away. I had been stabbed, flashed even — with an irresistible lightning bolt of joy.
Yes, I grew up in Canada, where winters are cold and snow obligatory, but that's entirely beside the point. That first snowflake started a whole freight train of joy that careened wildly, magically, breathlessly, all the way to Christmas. It would just build and build and build, each succeeding day closer to The Day more magical than the last, till Christmas came. “O great mystery; O wonderful sacrament; that animals should see the new-born Lord, lying in a manger!”
And then there was the Christmas pageant at First Baptist Church — I was not yet a Presbyterian — directed with military precision by a certain Mrs. D., beloved if brutal maven of the flannelgraph whose casting calls were not noted for their flexibility, any more than her ideas about wardrobe, script, set design, or blocking. “Every Christmas it's the same; I always end up playing a shepherd,” I recall saying at the time, not long after Charles Schulz gave Shermy the self-same line. (But having attended Sunday School in the days before child-centered education, I knew how to keep my mouth shut.) Always Christmas but never Joseph. Sigh! Out came the red-checkered bathrobe.
But by the time the lights went up on pageant night and our storytelling began, that strange hush, that something, that Someone, even, came back. Suddenly I began to hear what C. S. Lewis called the “real story . . . the Great Story, which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.”
Childhood fancy? Perhaps. But it is clear that at this extraordinary time of year something hindering is removed, and by the outreaching Spirit of God a veil falls away — in a flash, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye.
“The value of story,” Lewis once wrote, “is that it takes all the things we know and restores to them the rich significance which has been hidden by 'the veil of familiarity.' The child enjoys his cold meat (otherwise dull to him) by pretending it is buffalo, just killed with his or her own bow and arrow. And the child is wise. The real meat comes back to him or her more savoury for having been dipped in a story; you might say that only then is it the real meat.” This is how the Gospels function, more so at Christmas than any other time of the year. They are a new kind of literature for a new reality, “deeper, more wonderful, more like places in a story: in a story you have never heard but very much want to know”(Lewis, The Last Battle) — a reality at once ordinary, after all, Jesus was just a carpenter from Nazareth like his father before him, right? Or was he? And if this is the case, how do we, the church, become storytellers for new ages, new peoples, new generations?
Credit for inventing the Christmas pageant goes to Francis of Assisi (1181 — 1226). Pilgrimages to Bethlehem had been underway since the fourth century, after the pagan temple Hadrian had built there (to irritate Christians) was duly removed by Constantine, though both Justin Martyr (100 — 165) and Origen (185 — 254) had already claimed to have seen the “actual manger” where Christ was born, not to mention the countless painters and iconographers who were hard at work creating images of the nativity now considered normative.
On his way to Rome in 1223, Francis stopped in the tiny village of Greccio, about 100 kilometres east of Rome. On Christmas Eve, he found a tiny grotto in the mountains and placed a donkey, an ox, and a small group of villagers around a small free-standing crib (or crèche). The results were electrifying. “Nor was this an unfitting vision,” wrote Assisi biographer Thomas of Celano, “for in the hearts of many the child Jesus really had been forgotten, but now, by his grace and through his servant Francis, he had been brought back to life.” In the words of author John Fisher, Francis “made real what he already believed,” and the town of Greccio was never the same again. In fact Greccio has become, for many, the “new Bethlehem.”
Telling the story — the Great Story. Making real what we already believe. Bringing back to life. Recovering the unbidden sense of another world — so bright, so beautiful, so full of wonder. Christmas is not only a unique time in the life of every child, it's a unique time in the life of the church — and an unprecedented opportunity for daring and creative ministry. Call it madness, but the doors swing open, and hearts and minds of every description are suddenly willing to hear the Gospel. Let the church preach, to the greater glory of God.
The Little Church that Could
Yes, Christmas is the shining star of Western civilization. But how can one take advantage of this? What's a Presbyterian to do, when daring innovations are not exactly the hallmark of our tradition? For years I have had to tiptoe through ministry, a little tea here, a little tea there, constrained by the expectation that I work in precisely the same way one worked 60 years ago; as if the world had not changed; as if whole new generations — including my own generation — had never been born. “We'll always have retired people coming to this church,” one old-timer kept saying to me. “We're content; we're just the way we're supposed to be.” The implication? “Be quiet. Do nothing. Keep on singing the oldest hymns till the cows come home — and die — and call that 'ministry.' Community outreach? Are you kidding? It might mean touching the choir loft or moving the pulpit. It might mean an untimely end to the same old, same old. (Yawn!) So just be quiet, little boy, and do what you're told.”
As the new kid in ministry I felt like a ghost in my own parish. And meanwhile, teacup by teacup, the great slip sideways into obsolescent mediocrity went on apace.
Thank God we decided not to be ruled by the old timer! Instead, St. Andrew's, Penticton, B.C., has staged three over-the-top Walks to Bethlehem, with more to come. Out of nothing, we built an extravagant artisans' marketplace, an ancient Near Eastern food fair, a Roman garrison, a synagogue. We brought in live animals. We staged a play in the sanctuary. We offered a live music café in the fellowship hall. We took photos of the public in Palestinian garb. Yes, we moved the pulpit. Yes, we borrowed the choir loft. What happened? Something beyond our wildest expectations . . . Christmas. Larger than life, deeper than time. And St. Andrew's, Penticton, will never be the same. — CC
