Tag: Jesus

“Unto us is born …”


“The LORD created me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of long ago….”

Proverbs 8:22 [8:22-31 NRSVUE]

And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.

John 1:14 [1:1-18 NRSVUE]

“The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen, just as it had been told them.”

Luke 2:20 [2:1-20 NRSVUE]

I did not know I was dreaming until I had waked. It was one of those settings that you recognize even though none of the dream-details match the reality. I was at Christmas Eve worship for the “pop-up” Christmas pageant: a staging where some parts are planned and practiced and others are improvised on the night. Children milled about. Helpers handed out costumes, reminded the scripted of their parts, readied to aim the walk-ons down the correct aisles at the correct cues.

The children’s minister stepped forward with a short speech of welcome, then nodded to the helpers in back, and the pageant began. Mary was demure in her blue scarf; Joseph held a crook (obviously judged mature enough to wield it safely). The two trod forward to Bethlehem, said their parts, and took their seats by the straw-filled manger. Shepherds came up the aisle next. One, a round-faced blond, was a born performer: she sniffed loudly with disgust at her own sheep stink and exclaimed with comic verve, ‘I smell because I’m a shepherd!’ A responsive chuckle rippled through the congregation.

The shepherds arrived at the stable and it was they — not Mary nor Joseph, nor any of the tinsel-haloed cherubs — who announced the birth to the congregation. The sheep-smelly-smelling shepherd picked up the swaddled bundle from the manger, unwrapped it slightly, and with two hands held high to the assembled faithful the large altar Bible.

‘Unto us is born a book!’ she proclaimed.

What was the dream-congregation’s reaction to the appearance of a hefty tome instead of the expected baby? Dream-me for a moment worried lest the congregation focus more on the missing baby doll than the meaning of the lifted book. Dream-me then was glad — and waked-me glad still — for the pageant’s point that the written word is not some static printing-press artifact but a life that breathes and grows and transforms those who receive and welcome and breathe and grow in response.

Is the Bible a ‘what’ or a ‘who’? And if the latter, then who is the Bible? Or, maybe, how is the Bible a ‘who,’ and how many ‘who’s are the Bible?

How much of this text is the material remains of generations who lived and told and wrote and retold and rewrote and handed on for the next generation’s living, and the generations’ after that? How much of this text is the still-bright spark of something beyond any human creation? The newborn babe who bears the genetic legacy of so many forebears yet comes forth from the womb, mouth mewling and limbs flailing at the first gulp of air, life sparked by a pair of copulating bodies but not created, nor ultimately contained, by either of them.

What if the baby born unto us was the Bible? The bound book, covers open, pages flapping, bawling for our attention and response. Let that imagining change our experience of the whole! The infant demanding engaged attention and active nurture; to whom we bend near, listening closely to its cries and attending to its wrappings and ensuring that it is fed and held and sung to and spoken of and lived with. Through whose presence we are ourselves enlivened into new identities, recognizing our own infancy and need and hope of growth.

Conceive the Bible as the baby begotten and born in our midst. The Bible not a ‘thing’ that exists static and inert, apart from the beating life of human community, but a ‘who’ that delights and frightens and argues and enriches and teaches and transforms and raises a new and whole ‘who,’ bodies of print and people together, hearts beating with life and enlarged in love.

Unto us is born … the Word. May we be devoted to its raising that we may be raised through its being.

Parable

(c) Katherine E. Brown

In July, 2023, I found Jesus on my kitchen floor. Literally. I’d just unpacked the groceries into fridge and cupboards and basement pantry, then bent to gather and stow the reusable bags strewn about the kitchen, and saw him lying there on the green and white tiles. Tiny Jesus. I picked him up. He was made of some sort of laminated cardboard. Posed with arms outstretched, feet in first position, hands and feet inked with red stigmata. Haloed head tilted slightly to the side, dark hair lank on his shoulders, great wide eyes of an Orthodox icon. I looked at Jesus lying there in the palm of my hand and wondered where he’d come from. Fallen out of one of the grocery bags? (Unexpected literature has landed in my grocery bags before.). From a recent wedding attended? (I hadn’t remembered adding any prayer cards to my purse.)

I know exactly when I found Jesus because I was so struck by the unexpected encounter that I texted a photo to husband and daughters, and to my seminary sisters, and wrote about it in my journal. It had been a hectic season, with multiple moving parts meshing imperfectly, and I felt more aware of busyness than blessing. I was a bit weirded out to find Jesus on my kitchen floor — those eyes! those bleeding hands and feet! At the same time, I was a bit delighted to think that I went out for groceries and ended up encountering Jesus in my own kitchen. Little laminated Jesus lying on the floor. But Jesus. I tucked him into the pocket at the back of my journal and every so often took him out to hold and look at. Jesus and I gazing at each other. When that blank book was filled, I moved him to the pocket of the next, and then the next after, until I bought some books without pockets, and then left Jesus on my desk, for his own safety.

Sometime last academic year, I saw that the middle image had dropped out of my key-charm. The cross-shaped charm had been a gift from a colleague. The cross was bigger than any individual key on the ring, and the whole was a difficult fit in the small bag I carry. (The key-ring-and-cross fit more easily before I also carried a cell phone, which gives some indication of how long I’d had the key ring and charm.). That said, I liked the heft of the cross in my hand (if not its fit in my purse), and when I saw its center was missing, I was dismayed. I went back out to the car, looking around the driver’s seat, reaching my hand into the creases, bending low to look on the floor. I checked the other car too, just in case. I did not see the center anywhere. For a few weeks, I left the cross charm on my key ring, then decided that it was silly to spend purse space when its center blank seemed to gape absence whenever I glanced at it. I removed the cross from the ring. It was, I admit, a lot easier to snug the keys into my bag. I appreciated the convenience.

This morning, I again came across the key-charm with its missing center. Why am I keeping this? I wondered. Then I thought Wouldn’t it be funny if the little laminated Jesus could fit in the empty center? Maybe I could trim and fit him in. I looked through my desk and found the Jesus, placed him in the center of the metal cross, and realized Oh … oh … This empty space is the place he’d come from. I set him in the outline, pressed slightly, then ran my thumb over the whole. The surface felt smooth. The fit was precise, even to its depth.

A parable cannot be reduced to any single meaning. Nor can this two year sequence of finding and losing and finding again. I might dwell on the shock of that initial encounter in the midst of everyday, an unexpected, weird, delighting, welcome right there on my kitchen floor. I might be stuck instead in the rueful realization that I hadn’t recognized the kitchen-found Jesus as one I’d carried for years — he looked so unfamiliar there on the floor — nor that I had carried the key-charm for months after without seeing that its center was missing. I might pause on the added thought that without that center, the key-charm didn’t seem worth carrying anymore.

For now I’ll rest in the reunion of the two pieces into a single whole. Find some glue to restore the charm securely, then attach it again to the ring. Yes, the whole will take up more space in my small bag. I’ll have to arrange things carefully each time, if they’re to fit. Do it, that the inconvenience of the matter may become its own parable. Re-enacted every time I take out my keys remembering, now, to look for the center image present.