Friday Dec 1 | The Dallas Morning News | ST. ALBANS, W.Va. – “Christ is missing from Christmas in this small town. The community’s holiday display has a manger with shepherds, a guiding star, camels and a palm tree, but no baby Jesus, Mary or Joseph.”
Well that caught my attention! According to the Associated Press story, “The parks superintendent said Jesus was left out because of concerns about the separation of church and state. But Mayor Dick Callaway said it was done for purely technical reasons: ‘It’s not easy to put a light-up representation of a baby in a small manger scene, you know.’”
Then yesterday on the train to work in Herndon, I read the followup in the Washington Post saying the town had relented and put Jesus back in the Nativity.
Church-and-State issues aside, I was struck by the fact that for the manger and the shepherds by themselves to have become so iconic of Christmas that anyone would even consider leaving Mary and Joseph and Jesus out, our imaginations must really not connect Christmas very intimately anymore with childbirth and babies and mothers and husbands waiting in the wings.
So it’s no wonder that we really don’t connect the season of Advent with pregnancy – the literal kind that always precedes childbirth of real screaming, pooping, incessantly hungry babies. The Annunciation of Jesus’ birth by the angel to Mary was celebrated last March 25th. Her husband Joseph – who has a prominent role in the nativity story only in Matthew – is honored in the church calendar the week before (and then mostly forgotten). All those months of creeping spring, blooming into summer, swelling into the suffocating heat of August and the chill of fall and now the cold of winter (Christians in the Southern Hemisphere should reverse the order of the seasons) – Mary has been pregnant. And wondering, as only an expectant mother can. And Joseph has been by her side, wondering his own thoughts as well.
What will this baby be like? What does a child look like or how will he act, who has been conceived by the Holy Spirit? There were no sonograms, no pre-natal tests. We don’t know if she had any complications, or whether there were scary moments when she was afraid something was wrong, or that she might lose this child. We don’t know how uncomfortable she was, or whether Joseph rubbed her feet for her, or went searching for the home remedies her friends advised for morning sickness or all the other physical discomforts of pregnancy. This was a time of anticipation, yes, but also of wondering, and worrying a bit, about what it would look like to have God born in a person, a child. Were they ready?
In Advent, what do you anticipate — and wonder and worry about — if God really is waiting to be born in you this Christmas? What will it look like? How do you prepare for it? Maybe that’s why St. Albans, West Virginia took the parents and baby out of the manger. It can be a scary thing to leave them in.