Homily for Christmas, 2006

The Group Around the Manger -- Today

I’d like you to imagine that you’re going to direct a movie – a re-creation for today of the story of Christmas.  And to make your movie as accurate as possible, you want to get not professional actors but people who live today the way the people in the Christmas Gospel we just heard lived.  Who will you get to play Augustus and Quirinius?  How about the shepherds?  Joseph, and Mary?  And (even though they appear only in Matthew’s account, not in Luke’s that we just heard), the Magi?  I’ll serve as your casting director, and tell you some things about the characters in the Gospel, and then we’ll see if we can find present day equivalents.

We can start where the Gospel starts: “In those days Augustus…”  The Roman Emperor: most powerful man on the planet.  A history-maker through his decisions.  And Quirinius: the local governor, representative of Rome.  They’re not evil characters in this story: they just set the stage on which so many other people have to play their parts.  We could get any high government officials from any nation on earth for these.  You can just pick one for each role from your own sense of the news.  For our Christmas movie, these are bit parts and they’re off-screen quickly.

The next figure in the Gospel is pretty central, though, and so we’d better be careful.  What do we know about Joseph?  Not much, from the Gospels, except that he was an “upright man” who acted honorably in very difficult circumstances when he got the unexpected news about Mary’s pregnancy.  And now we see him far from home because of Augustus’ command, in circumstances he no doubt didn’t enjoy and which frightened him, but where he had a job to do and again did his best.  Maybe we could find some infantryman in Iraq or Afghanistan who knows from the inside what it’s like to be far from home and yet have a job to do, and to try to do it honorably.  One of them would be a great Joseph for our movie.

Let’s hold off on Mary, since she’s the central adult in the story and it will be vital to get her right when we look for someone who lives a Mary-like life today.  Let’s go to the next character, even though it’s an off-stage part: the full-up innkeeper.  It’s not hard to imagine the disruption the census caused for everyone in the travel business; and most of us have dealt with hotel-clerks, or airport check-in people, who are just overwhelmed.  They try to do a good job in impossible circumstances, but just can’t give everyone what they want.  One of them could be a good innkeeper.  Or maybe we should search more widely, and think of all the people who come up against situations in which they’d like to help, but just don’t have the resources.  Us, for instance.  How many times have we read or heard a story of tremendous need somewhere, but what can we do about poverty in Africa or AIDS in the inner cities?  Closer to home, how many times have we wanted to do something for someone we love, but don’t have the money, or the skill, or the time?   Maybe any one of us could play the innkeeper…  We wouldn’t have any trouble finding someone who knows what it feels like to say, “Sorry, no room…”

The shepherds are another matter.  Here we have to turn to the historians for help, because the life of a shepherd in Israel two thousand years ago isn’t something we know much about.  According to the historians Jewish shepherds at the time of Jesus weren’t part of mainstream society: their job kept them away from the temple rituals, so they were considered irreligious.  They had to live on the fringes of society, so they were mistrusted.  Polite society would have liked them to disappear.  And yet they provided meat and clothing that the people needed.  Who’s like that today?  On the fringes… suspect… mistrusted… wished invisible – yet necessary if the society is to continue to function?  Maybe we ought to look toward some of those undocumented workers who were arrested at the meat-packing plants a few weeks ago – they’d know what the life of a first-century shepherd was like.  Or maybe, closer to home, we should look to fill the shepherd’s roles from people we could meet out in the Hamptons during the summer; not the vacationers, but the farm workers…  Or maybe we don’t even have to go so far, and we could fill the shepherd’s parts by driving up to a local corner where day-laborers wait for work as landscapers, or in construction…  Or we could look to the dishwashers in the restaurants we visit…  Today’s shepherds are out there – when we peer under the cloak of invisibility our society lays on them (as Jewish society did to the shepherds of Jesus’ time).    These would be the people who are the first in our movie to hear the message of the angel…

Ah, the angel: Who could be a messenger of “great joy” today?  Who brings a message of hope?  My own suggestion would be to look for an artist or a poet or a songwriter.  Think of some piece of music, or art, or poetry that gave your spirits a lift when you needed one.  We could get such a person to play the angel.  Or maybe there’s someone in your life who brought you God’s message – maybe it was a Religious Sister in school when you were growing up; or maybe it was your AA sponsor; or a teacher who helped you to discover your calling.  The choice of an angel may have to be a very personal one…but take some time to cast your Nativity movie carefully: Who’s the angel in your particular version?

Since we’re casting all the parts before the show begins, we can try to fill the slots for the Magi even though they won’t be on stage until “Little Christmas” twelve days from now.  What do we know about them?  Well, they’re foreigners, they’re rich (from their gifts)  and powerful (they deal with King Herod as an equal); and they’re clearly followers of some strange religion: astrology is no part of Jewish faith.  Who could serve as the Magi today?  Oh, and they’re “from the East” – maybe we can follow that hint and find some Middle-Eastern sheiks: they’re followers of a foreign religion, rich and powerful – just unexpected and strange enough to us to be suitable Magi.  If we could find some who were also religious scholars of the Qu’ran, they could even qualify for the other occasional English translation: they could be “wise men.”

Finally, we get to Mary.  Again, here we need to turn to the scholars to help us to understand the Gospel.  We know she was devout from the Scriptural story – what we don’t know until the experts tell us is that she’s probably around age 15.  We also know from the Gospel that her pregnancy would have been considered shameful by her relatives – that’s why Joseph had to make it legitimate by “taking her into his home.”  So we need to find a teenager with a pregnancy that people would call “illegitimate” to be our Mary.

And there we have our group assembled around the manger (which, by the way, today would be an animal feedlot).  Some Middle Eastern sheikhs, some migrant farm workers, an infantryman away from home, a teenage mother, all brought together by your personal version of an angel.  What could God have been thinking, coming into the midst of such a group utterly helpless and dependent on them?  You might spend some time with a manger scene, here or at home.  If you have small children, use the manger to teach them about the story we heard in the Gospel.  And wonder – maybe even talk about over Christmas dinner – what the manger scene (oops, feedlot scene) would look like today: Who would be there in your movie?  And what could God have possibly had in mind?