Christmas Eve 2007 “Journey to Bethlehem”

I was perhaps five or six years old the year that our family got its first nativity scene. It was really initiated by my grandmother. She read some advertisement in a magazine, and sent away for this little crèche. We happened to be at her house at Thanksgiving when it arrived, carefully packed in a large, mysterious crate. She wouldn’t tell us what it was, but she helped us very carefully open the box and put the scene together, piece by piece. This required some advanced skills like gluing and inserting tab A into tab B, but we finally managed to do it.

The end result was unlike any crèche I’ve ever seen. There was a real, substantial stable—well, as substantial as cardboard could be—with a door that led back into a hidden room. There was a small round platform, mounted on a music box. On the platform were a variety of nativity characters—angels, shepherds, wise men; Mary, Joseph and Jesus were in the stable, but not on the platform. Hidden in a palm tree was a little key with which one could wind up the music box. Then you would stand back and watch, and as the music box played “Silent Night,” the platform would rotate and each little ceramic shepherd and angel and wise man would emerge, one at a time, from the palm trees, each bearing his gift for the Baby. Then the figure would slowly disappear into the stable’s back room, and the next figure would come out with a gift.

I was so enchanted by this that I begged my mother to order one for our house, and she did. It was a sad day when the package at last arrived, along with a letter explaining that there were no more musical mangers, and so they had substituted a plain, ordinary crèche where all the characters just stand still in silent adoration. Grandma, being who she was, insisted that she really didn’t care for “Silent Night,” and would I mind if we traded nativity scenes. And so the musical animated manger became part of our household, the most precious and beloved of all the decorations that graced our living room each Christmas.

After I grew up and moved away from home, I would visit at Christmas and wonder what on earth could have made that little crèche so attractive to me when I was a child. It was actually pretty kitschy, even tacky. The ceramic figures were cheap, and most of them badly chipped long before I left childhood. It really couldn’t compare with the delicate African figures I acquired when I started my own Christmas traditions, or the hand-carved wooden figures Lois and I bought in Oberammergau, Germany, some years ago.

I think what captivated my imagination as a child was the movement. It was the little figures coming into the stable, and then going back out again. I loved that! It seemed so much more real to me than the usual crèche where everyone is just a frozen statue, unable to move.

The Christmas story, after all, is about movement, about a journey. “How far is it to Bethlehem?” asks one plaintive carol, as if to remind us that this story tonight, this precious story, involves a willingness not to stay put, but to move, to step out in faith. It requires a journey.

Think, after all, of each contingent in the familiar scene. Mary and Joseph have traveled from their home in Nazareth to Bethlehem—a difficult and challenging journey, especially since she was great with child; and a journey undertaken with no certainty about where they would stay or how they would manage.

The shepherds, too, had a journey, though a shorter one; but it required them to leave their sheep and go off on what must have seemed an improbable search. The wise men, not in our story tonight but they will come later, wise men from the East. In Gian-Carlo Menotti’s wonderful Amahl and the Night Visitors, they sing a song: “From far away we come, and farther we must go. How far, how far, my crystal star?” Yes, a long journey into the unknown.

The angels journeyed even farther. “From heaven above to earth I come,” Luther’s lovely Christmas hymn has it. What an incredible journey that must have been—although the angels, at least, probably had been given better directions than the wise men, and they did not have to ride camels. Still, a journey it was, and a very long one indeed.

Seeking the Child Christ always entails a journey. It is not enough to stand here this night like some silent ceramic statue. You need to move, to step out in faith. But it is a journey of the heart. And whether you are far away from Bethlehem, like the wise men from the East, or close at hand, like the shepherds in the field—there is a journey to undertake this night.

Kass Dotterweich tells the story of the Christmas gifts given one year by her seven-year-old Joseph, the youngest of six children. For some weeks before Christmas she had observed him behaving a bit oddly. He would come into a room, open a drawer or a cupboard, or crawl under a bed or behind a chair as if he were looking for something. Her parenting philosophy was that if a child wasn’t doing anything dangerous to himself or others, she wouldn’t question or interfere, but finally after some weeks of this she asked what on earth he was doing. “Oh, um, nothing,” he replied.

As Christmas drew near, she saw Joseph emerge from his room with a pile of presents, clumsily but gaily wrapped, one for each member of his large family. She had a moment of panic. She knew that Joseph, being seven, had little money to his name, and he wasn’t the type to manage a craft project unassisted or unnoticed. There had been a couple of instances of shoplifting—a candy bar, an eraser. The boy didn’t quite seem to get all the nuances of morality so evident to adults, and now she wondered if these gifts, whatever they were, had been stolen.

Well, it was needless worry. His sister Christine was the first to open her gift. It was a hair brush—her favorite hair brush, which had gone missing some months before. Joseph had found it, wrapped it, and given it back to her. With each gift it was the same. “Each family member rediscovered a treasured object that had somehow been lost, misplaced, or forgotten in a chaotic household of eight people.”

His gift for his mother the most precious. It was a small statue, Madonna and Child. She had picked it up at a yard sale some years before and it had been sitting on her desk. Joseph had found it under the desk several weeks before; she had not even noticed it was gone. Now she looked at it with new eyes—and so did everyone else, with their gifts, things they had taken for granted until they were gone, but now they saw t hem in a new way. [Kass Dotterweich, “Christmas Shopping in the Mall of the Heart” in Christmas Presence: Twelve Gifts that Were More than They Seemed (ACTA Publications, 2002)]

Could that be your journey to Bethlehem this night? Could it be a journey of looking at life, your life—looking at your home, your family, your friends, your work, not as givens but as gifts? Martin Luther, in one of his Christmas sermons, marveled at the miracle of Christ’s birth—but then pondered: “Isn’t every birth a miracle? Where do the little fingernails come from?” Our life is filled with miracles, filled with the wondrous gifts of God; can our journey this night open our eyes to see them?

Early in Advent, someone directed me to a web site which, he warned, had a high geek factor. I suppose it does. It’s a web site where you can listen to recordings of the bells of several different churches in Germany. I started listening, just for the heck of it. Church bells, after all, are not that common around here, certainly not real ones. I kept listening—even had them going a few times in my office. They play no melody, of course; just church bells, deep, resonant, a handful of different tones simply ringing—but their purpose, their vocation if you will, is to ring out peals of praise to God. It reminded me of hearing such bells in Europe, a constant daily reminder to lift one’s heart to God in praise.

Could that be your journey to Bethlehem this night? Could it be a journey of sounding out words that praise God? I don’t have in mind just the alleluias we sing this night, the Gloria in excelsis Deo. Those are wonderful songs, and it is good to sing them. But what about the opportunities each of us has every day to sound out beautiful expressions—words like “I love you” and “God bless you” and “Thank you”—words of prayer, words of praise, words of thanks to God, and also to all the other people that God puts in our lives.

The journey to Bethlehem is a journey of the heart. How far is it to Bethlehem? Not very far! It is, indeed, as near as your heart, where Christ is born again this night. But near as it is, it is a journey that lasts a lifetime. You cannot stay where you are. This journey bids you to open your heart to the songs of angels, the beckoning of a star. It invites you to see all of life as a gift, and therefore to love and praise, serve and adore this Savior who is born this night in Bethlehem and in you.