A Story Called Hope

It was supposed to be something new. An opportunity to simply tell the Christmas story from Luke to an audience kind of removed from it. In the end, it was not that. A dozen people showed up. Some who might have come said the day, even the week had been exhausting and they had no more energy. But for those who came, an impromptu version of the Christmas story was exactly what was needed.  The girl child was ready to be an angel, even excited about the costume and the unrehearsed lines. The adults were great sports and participated, each in their own way. But the boy, who played both sheep and shepherd, stole the show. Supported by his grandmother’s arms, and wrapped in her love, he repeated the lines as she read them; beautiful, poetic memorized lines from the second chapter of the gospel of Luke. They are the same lines we hear Linus read in the Charlie Brown Christmas special, the lines that find their way into every pageant and Christmas Eve service, the lines that include mystery, and metaphor and a lesser known history.
 
Sometimes I think we’ve wandered far from those pieces of the Christmas story, as Christmas has become a target on an economic calendar or a time to get away, or a visa bill in the mail the following month. The point of good news to a most unlikely group of people on a very ordinary night often seems lost forever.
 
Then, moments like this give me hope. Hope in the importance of telling and retelling. Hope in the next generation. Hope that God still breaks through the mundane, the ordinary, the exhausted, the oppressed, in order that we might be saved! And what, I wonder, does that really mean? It means so much more than the mantra, “Christ saves us from our sins.” Salvation in the Christmas story is everywhere! The detail that the Innkeeper shows hospitality, even though the guest room is full; the improbability of the revelation coming to a group of shepherds, who neither owned the land nor the sheep, and never would; the point that God is not known in the powerful or regal, but in a baby, born to unlikely Jewish peasants from an unimportant town. Salvation, or hope by another word, comes to embrace human dignity and is born in community and everyday life. The promise and possibility that God is present in all of life offers me hope in a faith for today.
 
I heard in that unexpected voice of a little child on a random Tuesday in advent, a story worth celebrating and retelling!  It’s a story that shines as warmth and light on a cold, dark night in another insignificant town. It is our story too. It always has been. God is among us. We are not alone.