Christmas Eve
December 24, 2006, 10:00 PM
NATIVITY: AN INCONVENIENT MYSTERY
Politician Al Gore recently reinvented himself. He's again in the news, but he says it's not as a candidate; it's as an advocate for the earth.
Earlier this year his movie documentary An Inconvenient Truth was a surprise 3_ star hit... apparently in the running for an Oscar nomination, and for a few weeks, anyway, THE topic of conversation. More than one of you - plus my sister, my former pastoral colleague Josh, and my daughter-in-law - all told me I shouldn't miss this movie. Well, I did, and now I haven't taken time or made time this month, to watch the DVD.
It's harder to reinvent the Nativity. What you see is what you get, I guess, which may be why one critic wrote, about this film, "One of the greatest stories ever told has become one of the year's worst movies." [1]
On this one I did my research. I saw the movie myself last Sunday afternoon and I have to agree. Nativity, in this case, is simply an awkward repackaging of the Christmas cards of 50 years ago.
Not much new there, from the crèche (shepherds on the left, Wise Men on the right, and "the little Lord Jesus asleep on the hay") to the starlight beaming through a tableau bathed in deep blue. Perfect, if you like your Christmas defined by Wal-Mart's discount-special end-cap. But if you'd like something with more ingenuity, newer and creative, well, my advice (for what little it's worth): keep lookin' for some other movie for the holiday. If you saw Nativity and liked it, ooops, I apologize for my negativity on Christmas Eve, but I would expect expressions of our faith and its fundamental stories to show some imagination.
Yet I understand the film director's dilemma. I have to preach on Christmas Eve, after all, and I'm preaching to the choir here, a crowd that has heard the story how many times before and wants some... originality, imagination, and Christmas Eve dexterity, eh? Whew. I don't know. Maybe I'd better quit right now, or your "review" will say, "The year's most boring sermon."
Nativity - the real one, the one that continually is new - cannot be captured on a Christmas card, in a movie or a carol, a sermon or a choir, or even a perfect Christmas night. Nativity always manages to elude us, to break free, or, if we refuse to let it, it grows trite and tedious, for incarnation is a mystery that cannot be contained.
Al Gore's treatise on global warming is presented as a truth inconvenient, because we'd like either to avoid it or ignore it; we could debate it or disprove it; but, he says, truth still stands whether accepted or not.
God's incarnation in the nativity of our Lord is a mystery beyond all telling, even mine. Saint Augustine once said, if we could comprehend him, God would be God no longer. "The heavens cannot contain him" Augustine wrote, "yet a woman carried him in her bosom." [2]
I offer you tonight all that I have, which is the Nativity as holy and simple as it is, the Word made flesh, an inconvenient mystery for "liberals" who can't seem to convince very many of us that this birth makes no great difference... nor can they successfully explain away our personal experiences with this incarnation.
An inconvenient mystery for "conservatives" who are bewildered that hundreds of thousands of people who disagree completely with their formulas for politics and religion still hold precious faith in this same story of incarnation.
An inconvenient mystery for "cultured despisers" of religion who see arguments for science and faith more vigorous than ever. An inconvenient mystery for cynics and skeptics who cannot easily dismiss the continued vitality and good works of Christian individuals and institutions around the world. A mystery awkward and inconvenient for anyone who is a real-life "double" for any of the characters in this year's Hollywood version of Bible history - the governing tyrant, for example, paranoid, psychotic, and quite dangerous... or neighbors who let their judgmental assumptions control their attitudes about those who follow God... or even Joseph and Mary themselves, faced with untimely demands, yet nurturing the gospel within them at personal cost.
A mystery, inconvenient for US, perhaps, but costly and immeasurably precious because this incarnation changes and challenges every truth we know except the one that makes the difference, the truth that God is now made one of us, and we are safe.
Nathan Castens
Chanhassen, Minnesota
Footnotes:
[1] Jeffrey M. Anderson, "Astray in a Manger," on combustiblecelluloid.com
[2] Augustine in "On the Birthday of Our Lord Jesus Christ." I found the quote in "Reflections," Christianity Today, December 2005
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