December 24, 2008 | 6:00 p.m. Family Service

Telling the Story

Adam H. Fronczek
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Luke 2:1–20

It happened three years before he died, as the story has it, that an Italian monk visited the town of Gregio just before Christmas. The minister looked over the mountainside and into the valley; he noticed the vineyards and the town carved into the side of the hill. It was a small town, but upon arriving he realized at once that there were far too many people in that little town to fit into the chapel for midnight mass on Christmas Eve. So he gathered a few animals—donkeys and sheep—a few men, a woman and a child, and a manger, and he invited the people of the town to come out to the vineyard to see the story of the birth of Jesus Christ. The year was 1223, the monk was St. Francis of Assisi, and that scene was the very first nativity scene as we know it today.

It happened in the small town of Oberndorf, outside of Salzburg, that one year, just before Christmas, the organ stopped working in the little Church of Saint Nicholas. The pastor had made big plans for Christmas Eve. An acting troupe had come from out of town to perform a special Christmas play, and the church would be crowded on Christmas Eve, as it is in most places. The night before it all was to happen, the pastor, worried about the organ but thoughtful about the message of Christmas, wandered through the hills outside Oberndorf and looked down at his little church in that little town, all lit up by the starlight. The beautiful sight caused him to remember the words to a poem he had written, and he thought that the words might fit nicely to music played just by a guitar, and that might make a nice carol for a Christmas service in a church with no organ. The next day the church’s talented organist quickly set the poem to music, and that night he played it on the guitar to the great enjoyment of the people who were gathered there. The year was 1818, the minister was Josef Mohr and the organist Franz Gruber, and the song was “Stille Nacht” (“Silent Night”).

These are two wonderful tales of Christmases past, and as I thought about them this week, it occurred to me that they have something to do with a dilemma that faces every preacher, even when the organ works and there’s plenty of room in the church: the Christmas story is so well known and it’s the same every year. How do you help people to hear it again for the first time? How do you make it new? Most pastors share a fear that over time all of our senses have somehow become dulled to this wonderful story. As my opening stories would indicate, this is not a new problem; in some way, both the nativity scene and the singing of “Silent Night” came about because pastors were trying to find a fresh way to tell the story. And we don’t just have anecdotal evidence of this problem. Theologians for centuries have puzzled over the very idea that the shepherds and wise men had no idea what they were getting into and yet they dropped everything and went to see, but those of us who are gathered here know the whole of the Christian story “and yet make no movement” (Kierkegaard, “Only a Rumor,” in Watch for the Light: Readings for Advent and Christmas). So how do you get people to hear the story anew?

I’ve heard a couple of bad ways to go about it. One way is to make Christmas a downer. A good friend of mine went home for the holidays a couple of years ago and attended her home church in western Illinois. The minister was new to the congregation and new to the ministry. Like many of us, that young minister was thoroughly committed to social justice, which is not a bad thing at all. But assuming that he would have his biggest audience on Christmas Eve, he chose to use that platform to share with his congregation how many things were so very wrong with the world that night. He reminded them that their end-of-year charitable donations, their volunteer service, and, most of all, their merry hymn singing would not put an end to all of those problems. Over the course of that sermon, he replaced Christmas hope with Christmas despair. “It was the worst Christmas ever,” my friend told me. “We haven’t been back.”

Another mistake commonly made by preachers has to do with getting a little too creative. We read stories like the one about St. Francis and the nativity scene or Franz Gruber and “Silent Night,” and we think, “You know, what Christmas worship needs is something new.” Just think what it might be like tonight if I were a little more like Josef Mohr or Franz Gruber. Perhaps I would suggest that we shut down the organ and the choir—we use them every year—and instead, in a few moments, the ushers will be coming up the aisle with copies of a new Christmas carol. I wrote it myself, yesterday, and if I may say so, it’s just lovely. We’re going to sing it, instead of “Silent Night,” by candlelight. I considered that. Then I considered the voicemails I might get tomorrow from my boss. He might try to be nice:

“Adam, John Buchanan here. I wanted you to know that not since the very first Christmas have people been so . . . surprised by a Christmas Eve service.”

“Adam, John here. Your Christmas Eve service made such an impression that we’d like you to repeat it next year—someplace else.”

You know, there are some things that are good enough just being familiar. Perhaps, after all, it’s a good enough story just to tell the story.

In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus. . . . Joseph also went . . . to the city of David, called Bethlehem, because he was descended from the house and lineage of David. . . . He went to be registered with Mary, his betrothed, . . . and while they were there, the time came for her to deliver her child. And she gave birth to her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn.

In that same region there were shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flocks by night. And suddenly an angel of the Lord stood before them and the glory of the Lord shone round about them, and they were sore afraid. But the angel said, “Fear not, for I bring you glad tidings of great joy. . . .” So they went with haste and found Mary and Joseph and the babe lying in a manger.

And in that time of King Herod, wise men from the East came to Jerusalem, asking, “Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews? For we observed his star at its rising, and we have come to pay him homage.” . . . On entering the house, they saw the child with Mary his mother, and they knelt down and worshiped him. Then, opening their treasure chests, they offered him gifts of gold, and frankincense, and myrrh.

When you think about it, it is not only a familiar story, it is actually a story that happens to quite ordinary people. Mary and Joseph are a young couple on the way to register with the census and pay their taxes. There are shepherds from the lower strata of society and wise men from near the top; it’s a story that carries equal importance for all of us. The thing that makes the story distinctive, of course, is God. A star appears in the east. Angels are singing. The Christ child is born. And as that child grows and people find out who he is, some will be disappointed that God came not as a king or a warrior, but as a child in such an ordinary story.

But there is something about that ordinariness that is really quite helpful. God appeared to ordinary parents and to shepherds and wise men alike so that every one of us may know, all these years later, that at any moment God may break into our lives. To really hear and understand that the Christmas story happened long ago to ordinary people means to be awestricken by the reality of God’s presence with us here and now. God may, at any time and in any average, ordinary place, come to be with us. Your work, your family life, your meetings on the street—all the things we do have the potential to be sacred. Reading the Christmas story for the ordinary tale that it is, we have to ask, “Who is to say that there isn’t a sacred character to our lives?” Who is to say that there isn’t something amazing about you that you have yet to discover, something that might show God’s presence to the world, something that reminds all of us that we’re much more than we thought we were?

The Christmas story is an ordinary story that suddenly becomes quite extraordinary when the Christ child appears. I want to tell you one more thing about that story. It’s about what happened to the ordinary people in that story.

A few days ago, I was reading a commentary on the Christmas story by a theologian named Cynthia Rigby, who made the interesting observation that in the story of Mary and Joseph and the shepherds and the wise men, no one is home for Christmas. If you read the story carefully, she points out, you can’t help but notice that these people couldn’t have been that comfortable; they couldn’t have felt very much at home (Feasting on the Word, Christmas Eve, Year B).

Mary and Joseph were making their way to their hometown. Mary was pregnant. She couldn’t have been all that comfortable up on that donkey. She was so pregnant, in fact, that before they arrived at home she went into labor. Like most things in life, little went as planned that night; there was lots of improvising. There wasn’t any room in the inn, but the innkeeper offered a place in the stable. It was warm enough, and as childbirth went in those days, it was clean enough. The child was born, and it was messy. There were makeshift towels and blankets and diapers. They laid the child in the manger where the animals fed, which seemed to work as a crib. And then, at the time when Mary and Joseph probably wanted most to be left alone, there they were: shepherds and kings, wanting to see the baby. Any woman who has given birth: think of the last person you wanted to see show up, and that probably describes the discomfort of this situation. Mary is visited not in her own home, not even in a nice hospital, but in a stable, by a few shepherds, who are dirty and disreputable enough to make her pretty nervous, and wise men, who were probably just enough out of her league to make everyone else feel pretty inadequate and certainly underdressed.

And yet it’s strange that that’s not the way we remember the story. We don’t remember discomfort or anxiety. The way we remember it is different; it’s familiar. “Comfort, comfort ye, my people.” “Speak tenderly to Jerusalem.” “The wolf shall lie down with the lamb and the leopard with the calf, and a little child shall lead them.” “Peace on earth and good will to all.” “O little town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie.” “The little Lord Jesus laid down his sweet head. No crying he makes.”

It may be OK for us not to be too taken aback by the Christmas story, because you get the sense that Mary and Joseph and those shepherds and wise men somehow felt right at home when that baby was born. They were all away from home and out of their element; none of them knew exactly what had happened; they probably felt scared about what would come next. But that night, they were right at home.

And that’s how the child would live his whole life. He challenged the normal way of doing things. He took people out of their comfort zone, away from their home, but somehow everyone felt at home with him. He knew no strangers. He walked on equal footing with slaves and with kings. He sat at table with religious authorities and condemned criminals. He kept up with the strong, and he strengthened the weak.

Christ’s story is, in a way, a story of comfort, because it is a story for all people. It’s a story that takes the anxiety in life and makes it peaceful. It’s a story about God coming to be one of us so that we might be reassured that it’s alright to give all of ourselves to God, without any fear. It’s a story of a silent night and a holy night. And had St. Francis and Franz Gruber not had to deal with a too-small church and a broken organ, the story about that silent night might have been enough, all on its own.

Amen.