Devotional from Pastor Dave December 6, 2023

On display in the lobby outside the sanctuary are no fewer than fifty nativity scenes that many of you are letting us borrow for this Advent season. I’m grateful to Courtney Malone for suggesting that we do that, and we are so grateful to those of you who have shared your special scenes with us as well as notes and stories about their significance to you.

They are made of many different kinds of materials, and they come from all around the world. Some of them came from Bethlehem and places like Peru and Guatemala. Many of them were gifts given to you by friends or family members. Many of them the children constructed out of natural materials a few Sundays ago behind the parsonage before roasting S’mores. Some of them were the nativity scenes you or your children or grandchildren played with. One of them even features snowpersons in the starring roles!

This church had a long-standing tradition in the past of the youth presenting a live nativity scene in front of the church on Christmas Eve for the passersby along Ridgeway Avenue. Charles Maynard talks about the time he was called in to portray the Virgin Mary when he was a youth, and he describes the smelly fake beards that would get passed from one magi to the next.

The tradition of the nativity scene has a long history in the church. The story is told that St. Francis of Assisi – the monk probably best known for presiding over bird baths the world over – started the very first live nativity scene in Greccio, Italy, at Christmas in the year 1223. That means that the nativity scene is 800 years old this year! It was reportedly inspired by Francis’s trip to the Holy Land where he visited the traditional site of Jesus’s birth in Bethlehem.

I remember our family’s nativity scene from when I was growing up. It was one similar to a few of the ones here in the sanctuary lobby. It was a simple wooden structure with flaky green paper shreds loosely glued onto the roof and little strands of straw strewn about the floor. There were the usual suspects – the baby Jesus mid-squirm in a bedful of hay, serene Mary kneeling by the manger in her soft blue shawl, protective Joseph standing beside her in his dark red robe, a couple of curious shepherds with a smattering of sheep, three majestic magi with their camels and crowns and gifts, and an angel of the Lord atop it all in a glistening white and gold robe with gossamer wings.

I remember nights in our living room with my mom telling my older brother and me the Christmas story, bringing each of the figurines into the scene at the appropriate time in the story. Then she invited each of us to take turns retelling the story ourselves. I remember bringing in the magi from the next room over since the story said they “came from afar.” I also remember sometimes going into the living room just by myself, just to tell the story again.

I suppose that’s the genius of the nativity scene, whether it’s a live nativity or the kind we place in our homes or sanctuary lobbies. They help us to learn the story so that we can tell, and retell, and then tell again the story. So that, perhaps in time, we can come to live the story – the story of God’s love for us and for all the world in the one born in the manger of Bethlehem.