My Take on the Christmas Story--Part II (for children of an undisclosed age)

I want to tell you a story.

It’s a story about darkness and light.  All ancient people have stories of this kind.

The stories often involved primitive people seeing a  big golden ball rising above them to give heat and light.  Then they saw the ball slowly fall until it disappeared and it was dark and cool.

Some Chinese do an exercise called ‘the sun and moon exchange.’ They raise one arm up to the sky and spin it around and look up at the sun.  They lower that arm and raise the other so they can observe the moon rising.

At times the light and warmth stayed for as long as did the dark and chill.  But as time passed  there was less and less light and more and more darkness.  Then all of a sudden the time of light began to be longer than the time of darkness.

The people  would wait and wait through many cycles, appearing and disappearing,  sometimes doubting that the sun would ever return.  They thought that maybe they would live in the dark forever.

Finally, when they saw that the sun began to be around longer, the remembered it as a very important day, a day of celebration and joy.

This story I am going to share with you is about a young woman who was waiting for the light.   She had learned by then that you didn’t have to be afraid of the dark.  She also knew that the sun coming up didn’t always make things better.  

She wanted light that would help her to understand her life better,  because it had become so puzzling to her.  She didn’t know what to do.   She was going to have a baby but had no husband. She was poor and her neighbors were going to ignore her.   Her name is Mary.   Her heart was troubled.  It had darkness in it.

This is a story about how the darkness of her heart became light for her and for others.

A good man in town saw her troubles and offered to become her husband.  His name was Joseph.  Some mysterious voice came to him in a dream that gave him courage.  He was told that the baby that Mary would have would be very special.  So special that he would be called the people’s King.

Now that was really pretty wild.  How could a tiny baby be the King?  King’s were usually powerful and did not like poor people like Mary and Joseph.

The King of the people at that time was a strong, not so nice guy named Herod. He was ordering poor people like Joseph and Mary to sign up with the government so the King could collect taxes, get money from them to make him and his friends richer and more powerful than they already were.

It was a dark time for Mary and Joseph and for their families. Kings had been ordering them around for hundreds and hundreds of years.  They only wanted their own place to live and their own people as their leaders.  But this never happened.  Every time they tried to get rid of the bad king, they were defeated. There was no justice.

Mary and Joseph’s great, great, great, great grandmothers and grandfathers and aunts and uncles and cousins by the dozens had been waiting for this new King, the King of the Jews, their people.  But a King never came that favored them or Mary.  How long could they wait for kindness and justice to appear?

So seeing no choice in the matter, they would have to register to pay taxes.   They had to travel a long way from their home, from out of the way, small town Nazareth to Bethlehem, the center of government.

When they got to Bethlehem every place to stay was taken.  There was no room anywhere for them to spend the night.  Mary’s heart was troubled.  It was still dark. Where was the promise of light to come from? 

But when they had lost all hope, an Innkeeper who had no regular room for them to stay pointed them to the back of the Inn where they could lie down with the animals.  They settled in to do the best they could in this not too nice place.  In some ways they couldn't imagine being more lowly.

And then it happened!  Mary’s baby was born.  It was a boy.    She and Joseph were relieved and happy.  Mary wrapped him up securely in some old blankets. Suddenly the future seemed bright.

But many people, mostly poor and ordinary people, including some tending their sheep, saw the light coming from the stable and rushed in to see what had happened.  They heard Mary’s story and went out across the country to tell everyone that a new King was born.

They named the baby Jesus which means ‘one who saves’ or ‘one who brings the light.’

The light was not only for Mary and Joseph and the shepherds.  It was for all who looked for a different kind of King.   Could poor Mary and good Joseph be the parents of such a great person?   It may sound silly for a baby to be a King,  but these people didn’t think so.

Light, a great light,  had finally come into their lives.  And the Darkness was overcome.  That’s why we tell Mary’s story at the time of year, when more light appears day by day.

Mary became the bearer of ‘the simple truth.’  Every person is special. No one is better than anyone else.  The tiny, the weak and the poor are precious. For a small group, he became their king and everything for them was changed forever.