December Message From The Pastor's Desk: 

Merry Advent!

I have given exactly ONE Christmas Eve sermon. It was 1998 and it wasn’t very good. It was my first Christmas as a solo pastor. At the previous two churches I served, I was an associate pastor. The senior minister got to preach on Christmas and Easter.  When I came to the first church I served as a solo pastor, I got to preach on Christmas Eve, Easter, and pretty much every other Sunday. What surprised me the first time I preached on Christmas Eve was, it is not a service for preaching. It is a night for stories.

        Throughout Advent and Christmas, we immerse ourselves in the Nativity story. When we were children, we reenacted it in Christmas pageants, like the one that will take place on the Common after our Candlelight Service of Lessons and Carols. Christmas Eve is the night for the story we have known whole lives, Christmas after Christmas. We know the story and we know the people in it.  In my own Christmas pageant days, I got to be a shepherd and a king.

        On that first Christmas Eve I was in the pulpit, our youngest Kit, played the baby Jesus. Kit was a big baby Jesus, having been born in June. Still, they were the youngest kid in the church at the time. They wailed all night, and we worried how they would react in front of the congregation. We need not have worried. As soon as they were passed to their teenage babysitter who played Mary, Kit promptly dozed off in Julia’s arms and slept in heavenly peace for the rest of the service.

        The next year, I started a Christmas Eve practice that I have continued ever since. Instead of writing a sermon, I wrote a story.  That first year, I told the Nativity story from the perspective of one of the shepherds who had been watching his flocks by night.  I imagined what it must have been like to be a shepherd that night. What was it like to see a multitude of the heavenly host appear in the sky above? Had he noticed the star, marking Jesus’ birthplace?  What was it like to find and worship the Christ child?

        The following year, I thought about telling the Mary’s story. Most New Testament scholars believe she must have been a teenager.  In a traditional agricultural community of her time, that would be a fairly common age to marry and start a family. The more I mulled the story in my head, the less comfortable I felt writing in the voice of a woman. I decided to put off the Mary story. That year I would tell the story from the perspective of an Angel.

        The angel story was fun to write. Because they are not human. Angels are eternal heavenly beings. As such, an angel is able to describe the events of the Nativity, current events, and anything in between. The Next year, I still was not ready to write the Mary story, but I did move a little closer. I told myself that I would write five Nativity stories and rotate them, using a different one every Christmas Eve. The third year, I told the story from Joseph’s voice. As someone who first became a parent by marriage, I have come to think of Joseph as the patron saint of stepfathers. In the fourth year, I told the story from the innkeeper’s perspective. Of the first four stories, the speakers were mentioned in scripture, but not named. We know they were there, mentioned in the narrative. However, the shepherd, the angel and the innkeeper were not named in the text. The innkeeper is, actually, only implied.  That allowed for a lot of room to compose and speculate and have some fun. I just had to be careful nothing I wrote contradicted what was in the Bible.

        So, when I came to the fifth year, I stuck to my plan to limit the series to five stories. I had to face Mary. Mary is a fascinating and beloved person. I had a professor in seminary once ask, “How would you like to be responsible for Jesus religious education?” Though Mary is named in the Bible, we don’t really know a lot about her. She is especially venerated among Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christians. For the most part, Protestants have left Mariology (theology about Jesus’ mother Mary), largely unaddressed.

This will be my fifth Christmas Eve in Walpole. I will read the fifth in the series of five Nativity stories. This one is called Most Blessed Among Women. It took five years to work up the nerve to write it. You can tell me if it was worth the wait. In the meantime, have a wonderful Advent Season.