By Bill Leonard
For more years than anyone remembers First Baptist Church, Highland Avenue, in Winston-Salem, N.C., has marked Advent with “The Nativity,” a living reenactment of the birth of Jesus presented in worship on the second Sunday of the season.
The service begins as a narrator reads the familiar texts while well-costumed church members dramatize the story. Mary receives the “Annunciation” from the Angel Gabriel, and then confers with her cousin Elizabeth, pregnant with Christianity’s first Baptist. Next, she and Joseph find their way to the manger with a real baby Jesus in tow, to be visited by shepherds, angels and magi, all sung into Bethlehem by choirs of children and adults.
It is one of the world’s best known stories, retold annually in churches around the world, congregations where Mary, Joseph and the babe are of varying racial, ethnic and linguistic heritage.
Advent readily fits Kathleen Norris’ Cloister Walk description of a spirituality that often focuses “on the fuzzy boundaries, where definitions give way to metaphor.” Indeed, the Christmas story itself includes recurring details and symbols, ideas and images, all undergirded by individual memory at once biblical, ecclesiastical and personal.
The timeless stories from Matthew and Luke are in many ways inseparable from our own memories of Christmas pageants, candle lighting, greens hanging, and carol singing, the Hallelujah Chorus, or a Christmas Eve baptism (our daughter’s great memory.) In fact, most of us have been down the road to Bethlehem so often that it doesn’t seem all that far away, even after 2,000 years.
This year, at First Baptist Highland Ave’s “Nativity,” I was captivated by the power of certain extra-biblical twists to sharpen the “old, old story.” For no sooner had Mary and Joseph deposited the Christ-Child in the manger than his Mother popped a pacifier in his mouth! The swaddling-clothed Savior of the world receives the momentary comfort of a pacifier. If that’s not a symbol of unpretentious incarnation, nothing is!
The choir began singing “Rise Up Shepherds and Follow,” and suddenly there were shepherds abiding in the aisle, decked out with robes, staffs and sneakers, keeping watch over a flock of gentle cardboard sheep. As the energy of the music overcame them, the shepherds danced a little on their way to Bethlehem, an outward and visible sign of inward Advent exuberance. When all was said and done — drama, homily and Holy Communion — some angels helped take the offering, a tangible response of our collective goodwill. Perhaps we should enlist them every Sunday.
We Protestants have had a love/hate relationship with Advent and Christmas since the Reformation. On Christmas Eve, 1538, Martin Luther observed: “And we [Christians] believe so feebly even though the angels proclaim and preach and sing, and their song is fair and sums up the whole of Christian religion, for ‘glory to God in the highest’ is the very heart of worship. This they wish for us and bring to us in Christ.”
The later Puritans, however, were not so sure. When they gained sufficient political clout in England and New England, they pretty much shut down Christmas all together, at least for a time. Yale’s Ezra Stiles wrote in 1776 that while “three quarters of Christendom” celebrated December 25 as Christ’s birth, any day would do, noting that if “it had been the will of Christ that the anniversary of his birth have been celebrated, he would at least let us have known the day.” Puritan Boston kept its distance from Christmas celebrations till the 19th century.
These days many Protestants fret over the loss of Christmas privilege in the larger American culture, yet Advent at First Baptist convinces me that we don’t need nativity scenes in shopping malls or on government property. Instead, we Christians must renew Advent’s message in faith communities that know the story and can articulate it from the inside out. Otherwise, it becomes just another seasonal kitsch, sandwiched between Santa, elves, reindeer and American cultural materialism.
Let the masses camp out at Best Buy on Black Friday Eve for a taste of holiday capitalism if they wish, but let’s not bless all that by piping in hymns like “Away in a manger, no crib for a bed,” “cast out our sin and enter in, be born in us today,” or “O bid our sad divisions cease, and be for us the Prince of Peace.” Those sober/celebrative confessions belong to another way of looking at the world.
So this Advent, if any of your Christian friends complain that the bone tired clerks at the Temple of Mammon (AKA shopping mall) didn’t wish them a Merry Christmas when they took their money, just smile, confiscate their credit cards, and give them each a pacifier. Prince of Peace, you know, Prince of Peace.