December 19, 2019 by Jesse Lebus
St. Luke’s, friends and family:
I am really looking forward to this Sunday. Call it the Sunday before Christmas or call it the fourth Sunday of Advent. Really, you call it whatever you want. I’m calling it Christmas Pageant Sunday. I know that our young families are looking forward to it and I have a feeling that the rest of the church is, as well.
Pageants have a rite-of-passage facet to them. As children get older they garner different roles in the production. One year you’re a sheep, another a shepherd; angels then magi and maybe one Christmas Mary or Joseph. I’ll have fun this Sunday asking the congregation who was in the Christmas pageant at St. Luke’s in bygone years. I’ll bet there are plenty of pageant memories in our pews. We might all have pageant memories. They have a way of sticking in our minds.
That’s another facet of pageants that I love: that they cement the story of Christ’s birth into our children's minds because they reenact them with thier bodies. It’s one thing to hear the story, but to recreate the story… to embody the story, is to make it our own. Even to those of us who aren’t watching our own children in the pageant, a theatrical production of scripture helps bring the story to life.
At the heart of this season is just that: a story, the nativity of Christ - the infant wrapped in swaddling clothes. At the heart of our faith is a story: the story of Christ’s whole life - from beginning to end - his death and, of course, his resurrection. At its very essence, at its most basic, it is a story. Believe this and you might unburden yourself of some rather heavy notions of what it means to practice faith because the first step is just to learn the story; to hear it read or to read it for yourself.
If we believe that we are children of God and “heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ,” (Rom. 8:17) then we are indeed brothers and sisters and this story, from Bethlehem to Golgotha, is our story. To learn the story is to learn about ourselves, who we are and how our God has been with us, is with us and will forever be with us! O come, O come Emmanuel!
See you at the pageant!
Your brother in Christ,
Jesse+