December 24, 2011 | 6:00 p.m. | Christmas Eve

Christmas Eve Meditation

Adam H. Fronczek
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Luke 2:1–20

In the house where I grew up, the family Bible is a small, leather-bound, 8-point font King James Version given to my mother on the occasion of her confirmation. Each year of my childhood, it appeared Christmas Eve when we returned from late services at church. We changed from our church clothes into pajamas, retrieved one present each from under the tree, and Mom and Dad poured a glass of wine—the same wine they’d been drinking since their first Christmas Eve together when they bought it for $3 a bottle and were excited that it was imported from Portugal. Into the formal living room we went, lit the Christ candle, put the baby Jesus into the manger, and opened that Bible to the page marked with a silk ribbon, and there we read the story of Christmas from the Gospel According to Luke, chapter 2; my brother Ben and I took turns.

Over time, the words from that King James Bible were the words that came to mean Christmas to me: “And it came to pass in those days,” it read, “that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed. This taxing was first made when Quirinius was governor of Syria; Mary brought forth her firstborn son and wrapped him in swaddling clothes; an angel of the Lord appeared to the shepherds, who were sore afraid, but they came with haste and found Mary and Joseph and the babe, lying in a manger.”

It was not until I became a minister and led my first Christmas Eve service that I realized just how deeply ingrained in me these words had become. That night I read from the New Revised Standard Version, the one you heard tonight, the one in the Bible in your pew rack. In this version, the people are not “taxed”; they are “registered.” “Swaddling clothes” become “bands of cloth”; the shepherds are no longer “sore afraid”; they are “terrified.” I had learned in divinity school that Quirinius did not become governor of Syria until several years after the birth of Jesus and that the “inn” probably looked much different than the nativity set in which my brother or I placed that olive wood baby Jesus. I wasn’t troubled by those discoveries, but the words, the ancient words from that old King James Bible were so precious to me, so familiar, that when I read the New Revised Standard Version aloud in my first Christmas Eve service as a minister, I stumbled and stuttered, and finally I got lost, hopelessly, miserably lost on the page, resulting in a long period of silence in a sanctuary almost as large and every bit as full as this one. I had grown so comfortable with hearing the story one particular way that it was hard for me to hear anything else.

It’s not always bad to be comfortable with a familiar story. But my comfort with that one version of the Christmas story makes me uncomfortable, because the trouble with comfort, with getting used to something, is that you don’t think about it as much anymore; we take for granted most of the things we get used to. It is my hunch that just as I became stuck in a particular set of words used to tell the story and was unable to move past that set of words, many of us have become used to this story and have stopped asking real questions about it, important questions like, Who were those people who witnessed the birth of Jesus Christ? Why did they go to Bethlehem? And why are we here tonight?

On that first Christmas night, it was an eclectic group of people, that’s for sure. The young couple, Mary and Joseph; shepherds, filthy and poor; wise men with gifts, who stopped at the royal palace for directions—they all wound up in Bethlehem, at an inn. Bethlehem was a small village, small enough that there was probably no “inn” as we might think of it. More likely, Mary and Joseph found lodging in a private house. I’m not saying that your nativity scenes are all wrong; in fact, it was customary in those days to keep animals, a valuable possession, inside the house at night, so a donkey or some lambs might very well have been there, and a manger as well, so they could eat. I imagine it would’ve been an interesting mix when the family, the shepherds and the wise men, the donkey and some sheep, came to rest in a common place, when the owner of a crowded house in Bethlehem allowed them to come in.

As I tried to imagine this faraway scene this week, I was reminded of an article I read this year about Don Colcord, the pharmacist, or “druggist” as he prefers it, in Nucla, Colorado. Main Street Nucla is about as far as you can get from Michigan Avenue. “In the southwestern corner of Colorado . . . there is a region of more than four thousand square miles which has no hospitals, no department stores, and only one pharmacy.” It’s been there for more than thirty years, and its name is the Nucla Apothecary Shoppe.

In a town like Nucla, vital services are offered by the druggist. The article tells of time-tested low-cost treatments for arthritis and shots given in the bathroom for privacy; it tells of a young pregnant women receiving advice in order to avoid birth defects; there was even a preacher looking for a remedy for his paralyzed vocal cords—incidentally, I just try not to shout too much! Whatever their needs, all these people come to see Don Colcord at his store (“Dr. Don: The Life of a Small Town Druggist,” New Yorker, 26 September 2011).

What was striking to me about the story was not the diversity of the ailments, but of the people who brought them. There was a young immigrant family with a sick baby, and longtime residents struggling to understand Medicare Part D. There are plenty of conservative Republicans in Nucla, but there are also holdovers from the first settlers of the area, who arrived as part of a Marxist commune. In a region where we might guess that the definition of family is rather narrow, a great variety of living arrangements and sexual orientations are welcome in Nucla, just like they are here at Fourth Church.

All of these people visit Don regularly, sometimes just to talk. He’s a bad businessman by most definitions, consistently behind financially because he sticks his neck out for the community. Don helps the uninsured; he takes IOUs; he helps patients who are on what he calls “extended vacations”—their receipts are all taped to the wall behind the counter. Don knows these people, all of them. He calls them by name, remembers their stories; he’s helped them when they have been down and out, and one way or another most of those favors have been returned. And everyone keeps coming, some of them driving several hours at a time, to that little apothecary shop—it’s a place people like us will never see, and were it not for an article in the New Yorker by a skilled writer, we could not even imagine it.

That is sort of how I feel about the Christmas story in Luke, chapter 2. None of us were there, and most of us don’t have much of a concept for this place and time that was so different than our own. We understand parts of the story. Some of us have spent time on a farm and can imagine the warmth and the scent of the animals resting after a day’s work. Some of us relate to the wise men: we’ve been blessed and can bring gifts to show our appreciation. Some of us can relate to Mary or Joseph because a child has arrived in our lives a little sooner than we were ready.

But all of us are here tonight for at least one common reason: Luke chose to tell a story, and it stuck. We retell it every year; we hear it in songs and in prayers; we hear it comforting us in our feelings of loneliness and inadequacy; we hear it challenging us when we are faithless and seek something to believe in. We all hear the story and find in it something of what we need.

The shepherds heard the story their own way. I’ve come to believe the King James Version is a bit misleading when it so sweetly says they were “abiding in the fields, keeping watch over their flock by night.” It was risky work. Shepherds were considered to be disreputable in most circles; they were not to be trusted. The pay for a shepherd was subsistence living at best. Shepherds didn’t have a lot of good options in life, and the group in this story was probably not spending the night out in the fields by choice—being out all night on a back road in ancient Israel wasn’t any safer than it is in dimly lit parts of Chicago today. When an angel appears to them, it’s no wonder they are terrified. And yet they believe the story they are told, and they get up and go. They look to the heavens and find their way to that private house in Bethlehem. They enter the room, perhaps a bit embarrassed about their shabbiness. They introduce themselves to the young couple. “I know we’ve never met,” they say, “but we just had to come. We believe that there is something special about that baby.” Not fully understanding why, they bow down and worship him.

The wise men came from a different place. As far as we can tell, they were astrologers. They would have been surprised that night for a different set of reasons than the shepherds, for they had been looking for a sign in the heavens for quite a long time, and finally the sign came. They observed the star when it rose, and they went straight to Jerusalem and asked, “Where can we find the one who has been born King of the Jews?” They cited ancient texts from the prophets Micah and Samuel to explain why they were there: “You, Bethlehem,” they read, “in the land of Judah . . . from you shall come a ruler who is to shepherd my people Israel.” And looking to the night sky, the wise men are guided away from the royal palace they expected to visit and to a private house in a small village. They enter in the night, overdressed and out of place. Why they are here, why the scene is so different than they expected, they do not know. But the proud men are humbled by something greater than themselves. They bow down and worship the child, and opening their treasure chests, they offer gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh, strange gifts for a newborn baby who lies in the manger, where the animals feed, because there is no crib for a bed.

The young couple’s story is perhaps the strangest. It is Mary’s first pregnancy, filled with some mix of the delight and fear that accompanies any woman’s first pregnancy, and there is extra anxiety. She is not married but is pregnant. In her culture she would have seemed to have done something terribly wrong, and Joseph may turn her out and divorce her for the shame of what has taken place. But that is not what Joseph does. Both Mary and Joseph have been visited in dreams, and they have found with one another a common belief. For reasons they do not know, something special is happening to them; and so Joseph learns an important lesson earlier than most spouses, and he offers acceptance and forgiveness, practically to the point of insanity, because he knows that is what family life will often require.

I believe that the mysterious power of this story, and the child who is at the center of it, is what brings all of us here tonight. In the same way that a disparate and unlikely group, shepherds and wise men and a young couple, find themselves drawn together in that faraway place, comforted and challenged by who and what they see, we are here tonight, from the many and different places in our lives, seeking comfort, seeking answers, seeking challenge. We are drawn in by this story and the words in it: “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light” (Isaiah 9:2); “A voice cries out in the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord”; “for a child has been born unto us, a son given to us and he will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace” (Isaiah 9:6).

From wherever we come, these words carry power; they welcome us into this place where we find a home tonight. This story finds us in the midst of illness or sadness and promises us hope. It finds us in the midst of joy and newness and grounds us in purpose. It finds us in the midst of boredom and complacency and urges us to see the new life that is always around us, even in the most unexpected of places. Like the shepherds and wise men, we find ourselves here, in a house together. And for reasons we may not even fully understand, we are here bowing down as they did and singing as the angels sang, “Glory to the newborn King.”

In a few minutes from now, when you light your candles in the midst of a dark room, all of you will give a wonderful Christmas gift to Judy and John and the choir and to me. Standing here, looking back at you, we will see the light of Christ passed from one person to the next; we will see it grow and fill the room; we will see people who have never met each other and people who have known each other their entire lives share the light with one another and with the world; and we will know that in houses of worship around the world tonight, people much different than we are doing just the same thing—bringing the light of Christ to their own corner of the world because of their love for this story and its potential to change our lives.

This year, having heard the story of Don Colcord and his little apothecary shop, the candle lighting will bring up an additional image for me. As the article closed and the author reflected on the many and different lives Don has touched, he told a story of sitting on a hilltop outside town with Don. It was the Fourth of July; the little fireworks show had come to an end, and the town was quiet and dark. Looking up to the heavens and noticing the stars, Don made a statement, simple but true: “They look so close together,” he said, “it’s hard to believe they’re millions of miles apart.”

We live in a world where so much keeps us apart. We are separated by our disparities of wealth and power, by our political beliefs and our upbringings. Individually, each one of us has our own particular set of doubts and fears about life. Each of us has reasons why it is difficult to trust ourselves and others, reasons that we find it hard to love one another the way we should.

We are here tonight because the child who is God with us shows us a different way of being. The Christ child, and the Savior he will become, welcomes us all tonight, regardless of who we have been, what we have done, or from where we have come. He calls us by name. His way of justice and freedom and peace is great enough to change the entire world and is particular enough to be granted to every lily of the field and every hair on our heads. His light shines forth from every star in the night sky and from the tip of each candle that is lit and raised in his name. His grace is for all of us. His grace is for you. Thanks be to God. Amen.