Sermon by Nanette Sawyer | December 31, 2023

First Sunday of Christmas
December 31, 2023

More Than a Single Story

Nanette Sawyer
Associate Pastor

Psalm 148
Luke 2:22–35, 39-40

New Year’s Eve. The first Sunday after Christmas. It’s such a turning point. We have come through the celebrations after all the waiting of Advent.

In Advent we heard the song of Zechariah, Jesus’ uncle, the father of John the Baptist, who sang out about the anticipated Messiah, “Blessed be the Lord, the God of Israel, who … has raised up for us a mighty Savior from the house of David.” Of his own son, John, Zechariah said that he would be a prophet of the Most High and give God’s people knowledge of salvation.

As we drew closer to Christmas, we heard the song of Mary. The Magnificat, it’s called, because in Latin it begins with those words — the greatness of the Lord, the magnificence of God. “My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord, my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,” Mary sang.

And after Mary’s song, Christmas arrived, and we heard the song of the angels at Christmas: Gloria in Excelsis Deo, “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to people of good will.”

The Song of Simeon comes today. It is the fourth liturgical song of this season that is traditionally lifted up. “Now, Lord,” Simeon sings, “you have fulfilled your promise. My own eyes have seen your salvation.”

Everyone is telling the story of Jesus. From their different angles and different experiences, they tell the story. Zechariah and Mary tell it as family insiders. The mom and the uncle have their angle.

The heavenly angels give their perspective, a joyful and devoted one. “We bless you, we adore you,” the angels sing. And Simeon, a righteous and devout resident of Jerusalem has held the baby Jesus in his own arms.

I love the stories. I love the season. I love the songs. I love the lights. I love the baby Jesus — the tiny vulnerable God who is also magnificently powerful in and through his deep and steadfast love.

And now, here we are, New Year’s Eve, at a turning point. Some years, on this first Sunday after Christmas, we read the story of the slaughter of the innocents, the death of all the children under two-years-old living in Bethlehem, as King Herod tries to stop the newborn King from growing into his destiny.

All is not right with the world, and that story is one indication of it. There is war and there are tears. There is suffering and loss; we receive bad news that turns our worlds upside down.

And yet Jesus lives. The Prince of Peace is here; the King of kings is here; Salvation is here. This is not a single story, not a simple story, not a simplistic story, but a living story that was told by many, experienced by many, and continues to be told by many even now.

It can tempting to make a complex story into a single story, to keep it simple. One story might be “All is well, because Jesus is here.” It works for some of us, for a while, if things are going well. We might think, if I just act right, if I just believe in God enough, if I just do this or I just do that, then I will be blessed.

But every simple story has its cracks. We get the phone call. We lose a loved one. A whole community is devastated by an act of violence. We lose our bearings. We’re not sure what we should do. Or we feel a strong desire to do something that we know we should not do. To retaliate, maybe. To self-medicate, maybe, in a way that undermines our true well-being.

“All is well” can quickly become “All is not well. Nothing is well!” The world is a mess. There are wars and rumors of wars. We’ve read this scripture too, and it resonates. It can awaken fear in us and spark despair and paralysis. This, too, is a single story that is not the whole story.

Jesus’ story is not a simplistic one, not an either-or story. Christ is the Magnificent, the Glorious Most High God. And Jesus is also a human baby born into a poor family.

There are clues about his poverty. He’s born in a manger, for example. Clue #1. The dad who raises him is a carpenter, a tradesman. Clue #2. But the pigeons are a clue also.

As Jews, Mary and Joseph are bringing Jesus to the temple to be purified and redeemed. The book of Leviticus instructs that a family should bring a sheep or a goat as an offering. But if you can’t afford that, scripture says, bring two turtledoves or two pigeons (Leviticus 5:7, 12:8, 14:22). And so Mary, Joseph, and Jesus show up with two pigeons. Jesus is a poor boy, and he is a Magnificent God. He is not limited by a single story about who he is.

Jesus is both-and. The many stories about him definitely surface patterns. Some of the same qualities show up in Zechariah’s telling and Mary’s telling and the angels’ and even Simeon’s. Jesus will bring justice and freedom, mercy, and grace.

But Simeon gives us some information about salvation that Zechariah and Mary, and even the angels, don’t give. Jesus will be a sign that will be opposed, Simeon says. The transformation of society will not be easy or painless. And in and through the opposition to Jesus, Simeon says, the inner thoughts of many will be revealed. The inner thoughts matter. The revealing of these inner thoughts is part of the rising and falling of many, and exposing them is part of what Jesus does.

The inner thoughts cause us to take steps, to act. The inner thoughts reflect the stories we tell ourselves. If our stories are too simple, or too singular, we can limit ourselves and fail to see the fullness of the image of God in each other.

There is a powerful TED Talk called “The Danger of a Single Story.” The talk is given by a Nigerian novelist, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who describes growing up in Nigeria, in a middle-class Nigerian family with a father who was a university professor and a mother who was an administrator.

As a child, she read a lot of British and American books. So when she started writing her own books at about age seven, in pencil and with crayon illustrations, she said, “All my characters were white and blue-eyed, they played in the snow, they ate apples, and they talked a lot about the weather, how lovely it was that the sun had come out. Now, this despite the fact that I lived in Nigeria. I had never been outside Nigeria. We didn't have snow, we ate mangoes, and we never talked about the weather, because there was no need to.”

She had come to believe that books, literature, by definition, was about foreigners and about things that she couldn’t identify with. She was vulnerable, as we all are, to the power of story and, in this case, to the power of a single story that was told over and over again until it became the norm, the standard. That is how you make a single story, she points out. You “show a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become.” But that is not ever the full story.

Adichie grew and went to college in the US, and there she experienced how people reduced her to a single story — a set of stereotypes and expectations. There was a roommate who asked to hear her tribal music and was disappointed when she pulled out her Mariah Carey music. The roommate had a single story about what Adichie’s life was like in Nigeria.

Adichie had a writing professor who told her that her writing wasn’t authentic because the characters she wrote about were too much like him. He expected them to be very much unlike him, to be “others,” to be different. When he could relate to them, he didn’t believe they were authentically African, authentically Nigerian. And he didn’t believe that she was being authentically herself. He had his single story about her. He couldn’t see the fullness of who she was.

In her TED Talk Adichie said, “The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.”

I used to have a single story about Christians — before I became one. It kept me from becoming one, because I didn't want to become “that” story. Although I had been raised in a Christian family, I renounced the faith as a young preteen. Later, in my early thirties, I still had my single story.

“Christians are hypocritical and judgmental,” I said. I had personally felt judged by such Christians and was offended by a type of theology that would exclude some people from the grace of God. I repeated my single story to a trusted friend who was in training at the time to become a Presbyterian pastor. (God works in mysterious ways.)

“Christians are hypocritical and judgmental,” I said. My patient and wise friend looked me in the eye and said, “Nanette, I am a Christian.” And my friend was none of those things I said that Christians were. Looking into his face, I had to see my single story fall apart and fall to the ground all around me. With his life, my friend was telling another story of who Christians were.

How we live the story of Jesus matters. And the stories we tell — about Jesus, about ourselves, about the world we live in — those matter too. Because the stories shape our responses, they shape our inner thoughts, they shape how we act, how we treat ourselves and others. With our lives we tell the story of who Christians are and, hopefully, a little bit of who Jesus is.

To know Jesus means to know him in his many forms, to hear his many stories, to see him in the faces of everyone we meet. It is an act of faith and a spiritual discipline to resist the danger of a single story, whether it’s about Jesus, about ourselves, or about each other.

Adichie said, “Stories matter. Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity.”

As Christians we have a calling to examine our inner thoughts and learn to recognize when we become captive to a single story. When I let go of my single story about Christians, it took me awhile to enter the Christian story myself, to become Christian, to seek to follow God in the way of Jesus. But eventually, letting go of my single story allowed my story to blossom, too.

And that is how single stories function. When we keep others in single stories, we limit ourselves. We limit our own ability to see the image of God in all of God’s glory, in the faces and lives and stories of ourselves, and of Jesus, and of each other.

The Christmas story of the birth of the vulnerable baby, the Majestic God, becomes, over time, the story of the lifetime of Jesus and eventually the story of his death and resurrection, too. It won’t be all glory and joy.

The birth is not the whole story, but it’s the beginning of the story, and it sets us on a path with the Majestic God who became vulnerable and came to dwell with us in human flesh and teach us how to follow God.

So let us sing with Zechariah and with Mary, with the angels and with Simeon, even with the shepherds and the three magi, with the prophet Anna, and with everyone and anyone who ever told a story about Jesus. Today we sing of his humble birth as a poor boy. But he is so much more than that. Amen.