My sister serves as a missionary in southeast Asia. We both grew up at the First Baptist Church of Harrah, Oklahoma — a church much like FBC Angleton in a lot of ways. When we were young, our church was having our annual Christmas program, just like we had last week, and it featured some of the children from our church doing a live Nativity scene. I don’t remember being in it myself, but my sister was in it — she was an angel, hovering over the manger scene. That can be a tough spot, in a heavy costume, with all the lights, and all the pressure and so on. And it was for her too, I guess, because right in the middle of the nativity, she fainted, and crashed down right on top of the manger scene — at the very moment they were singing, “And the angel of the Lord came down …”! Depending on how you look at it, it was either “perfect timing,” or the worst nativity ever!
We try so hard to make things like our Christmas nativities “perfect” — we want just the right picture; just the right look on the stage, or on our mantle, or under our tree, or wherever it is — and I thought our group did a fantastic job last week! But as our kids were marching in Sunday I thought, you know, if they do mess up, that’s just real life; and that very much reflects what happened at the first Christmas. When Jesus was born, it was not some “perfect model” scenario. It was what we might call a “messy” situation with a lot difficulties and “real life” problems.
There’s a message for us there. Many of us work hard to achieve that “perfect,” “normal” life (whatever we deem that to be!). But C.S. Lewis wrote in his Screwtape Letters, “What humans call a ‘normal life’ is the exception.” (p. 157) Actually the real “normal” life is not the neat situation we might hope for. “Real life” is often pretty messy.
If we see anything here in Luke 2, which is for many of us the most familiar Christmas story, we see that what happened there was not a “neat and packaged” production, but a “Real Life Christmas,” that came in a real place, in the midst of real life difficulties — but in it, God gave us a real Savior who would change our real lives.
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shawnethomas 