Favorite Christmas Stories
Rod Frohman Third
Presbyterian Church
January 2, 2005
Luke 2:1-20
What’s your favorite Christmas story? For me it was Christmas
of 1950. The family opening of presents had been completed.
We were all sitting around celebrating our largesse. I had received
the football, my brother, the basketball. "Hey Enneth!
Lemmie see!” I exclaimed, from across the living room.
The 14 year-old threw it as hard as he could to his 5 year-old
brother. I caught it, not with my hands, but with my face. There
was blood all over the place. It is a Christmas that will partially
live in infamy. But after the mess was cleaned up and my brother
confined to his room for a short time, traditional Swedish Christmas
dinner was served with Lutefisk and potatiskorv and julkaka.
The victim had become the center of attention, and that’s
why it is my favorite Christmas story.
You can always tell it is going to be a story the way it begins,
“In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus…”
“Call me Ishmael….” begins Moby Dick. “Late
in the afternoon of a chilly day in February…” begins
Uncle Tom’s Cabin. “The children’s section
of the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church was wiggling and giggling…”
begins I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.
The gospel lesson today is Luke’s favorite Christmas
story. "In those days.” In what days? "In those
days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world
should be registered. This was the first registration and was
taken while Quirinius was governor of Syria……”
In case there is any doubt, Luke is telling his story to a Greco-Roman
audience. “In the days of Caesar Augustus…”
are words whose familiar cadence immediately indicated a time
and place to Luke’s audience as immediately do the words,
“Four-score and seven years ago…” conjure
up to us Lincoln at Gettysburg.
Caesar Augustus was an heroic figure for the Romans. Augustus
was the ruler of the empire that had pacified the world from
Spain to India. Before he became Caesar his name was Octavian,
and he was in a political alliance with Anthony, as in Anthony
and Cleopatra. Both of these career Italian generals maneuvered
for opportunity after the assassination of Julius Caesar in
44 BC and divided Caesar’s empire. Soon their uneasy alliance
broke apart. (William L. Langer, Western Civilization, Vol.
1. P. 244)
In the Roman civil war that ensued after the assassination,
Anthony committed lover's suicide with Cleopatra in Egypt and
Octavian became Caesar Augustus and the national hero, restoring
peace and stability to the Empire. To symbolize the rise of
Augustus to power, a monument propagandizing Augustinian ideals
was erected in Rome (13-9 BC) just four or so years before the
birth of Jesus (6 BC). It was in effect an altar to the Peace
of Augustus. It stands as a tourist attraction in Rome to this
day. http://italic.org/aratxt1.htm
About this same time the Roman citizens of Asia Minor, (our
modern Turkey) and Luke's home province, adopted September 23,
the birthday of Augustus as the first day of the new year. An
inscription to Caesar Augustus claimed, "The birthday of
the god has marked the beginning of good news for the world”.
With the adoption of this date the Romans hailed Augustus as
the "savior of the world”. It was a marvelous era
of great national pride featuring a new savior and a new calendar.
It was the era of the Pax Romana, the Roman peace. Of course
it is important to remember that beauty is in the eye of the
beholder.
By Luke’s era, the Augustinian myth had had almost a
century to become cultural and political orthodoxy.
Subsequent emperors had reinforced the Roman peace at Luke’s
time of writing, some brutally. Nero burned dissenters, including
some Christians, as human torches in his gardens. Titus reduced
Jerusalem to rubble as part of a massive pogrom of anti-Semitism.
Christians inherited the animus directed against Jews because
of original Jewish-Christian links.
So Luke had a credibility problem. What relevance did the story
of Jesus, the Jewish savior born in Bethlehem, have for the
Greeks and Romans who had their own savior?
By the time Luke put pen to parchment, versions of the Christmas
story were in wide circulation among Christians in oral form.
Was the "peace on earth" of which the angels spoke,
a reality? Did this story of angels and shepherds have contemporary
power in people's lives, or just the power of nostalgia?
The first Christian answers to the relevance question came
in the form of short creeds and formula statements focused only
on Jesus' death and resurrection as affirmations of Christ as
Savior and Lord. Indeed this was St. Paul's focus. St. Paul,
as you remember, wrote some 40 to 50 years before Luke. Paul,
a first generation Christian, didn't mention the life or even
birth of Jesus, only his death and resurrection. Without being
tied to real events in human history Christianity of the first
generation was looking precariously similar to stories of the
myths, gods and heroes of ancient Greece and Rome.
But then the second generation Christians began to ask, "Did
Jesus become our savior only at his resurrection? What about
his life? So Mark wrote his gospel to say that Jesus became
the savior at his baptism. That's where Mark begins his Jesus
story. I’m sure you have noticed that there is no Christmas
story in the Gospel of Mark.
Each successive generation wanted to know what contemporary
power and meaning did this Jesus of Nazareth have for them?
Luke, with the credibility problem, had to tell his story. So
he began with, “In those days a decree went out from Caesar
Augustus…”
It can scarcely be accidental that Luke's story of the birth
of Jesus presents a subtle, yet explicit, challenge to the imperial
propaganda. To Christians who had long recited the pledge of
allegiance, "The birthday of the god Augustus has marked
the beginning of good news for the world", Luke purposely
critiques the imperial orthodoxy with his favorite Christmas
story. "In the days of Caesar Augustus, when Quirinius
was governor of Syria..." a pregnant refugee couple, forced
out of their own hometown by an imperial census decree, gave
birth, not to an emperor, but to a peasant child who is the
true "savior of the world." .
And who broadcasts this good news? Imperial heralds with trumpets
running from Marathon to Athens? No, the messenger is an heraldic
angel, "Behold I bring you good news of great joy which
will come to all people. To you is born this day, in a city
of David, a savior who is Christ the Lord."
Instead of a national shrine erected to the peace of Augustus,
there was an angelic messenger proclaiming peace to those favored
by God. And who hears the story? Procurators and Roman senators?
No, poor rural folk, simple shepherds, “abiding in their
fields.”
In so-telling his favorite Christmas story, Luke tells a competing
story. The peasant infant savior is set over and against the
emperor savior. Luke calls this infant, “Savior”
and “Lord" in a political context in which the emperor
is also called “savior and "lord”.
Luke calls the infant the "messiah" and in so doing
affirms that the story of God's activity in human history does
not emerge out of the genealogy of pagan deities of the Greco-Roman
pantheon but out of real history of expectation of the Jewish
peoples, (RE Brown Messiah, p. 415) the very people subject
to official hatred of the empire.
Luke's favorite Christmas story tells us that the birthday
worthy of divine honor, and marking the true beginning of new
time took place not in the world capital of Rome, but in the
little town of Bethlehem.
What is your favorite Christmas story? Whatever it is, it always
involves a merger of stories, a clash of stories, an intersection
of stories. Our story with Christ's story. Caesar's story with
Christ's story. Isn't that merging of stories why we always
keep coming back here? We want to hear the story again and again.
Why? Because the Bethlehem story is everyone's story.
The refugee survivors of the SE Asian earthquake and tsunami
see in the fleeing Mary and Joseph, fellow refugees. They all
look for room at any inn that will give them food and shelter,
and they are looking to us as the innkeeper.
For unwed mothers, and all single parents, consider 14 year
old Mary, consider the possibilities of your off spring. Those
who think themselves to have brilliant intellects are reminded
of the magi, Zoroastrian priests who contemplate a peasant infant.
For those who feel themselves forgotten, and on the margin of
everything, remember the shepherds to whom the angel sang.
Victims of torture in the Ukrainian elections, Iraqi prisons,
Palestinian refugee camps are reminded in this Christmas story
that their stand for justice does not require their punishment
any more than did Jesus' birth require Herod's slaughter of
the innocents.
For presidents and prime ministers who are guided by their
own egotistical assumptions of power, beware the guiding star
power of the one born in Bethlehem whose law is love and whose
gospel is peace. For those who would be saviors of their own
country, corporation or church, remember that we have a savior.
We don't need to be one. We need servants-citizens, not saviors.
For those of us far-removed from the events by 20 centuries,
let us give thanks for those first story tellers, and the compiler-editors,
like Luke.
We still want to hear the story of the little town of Bethlehem.
Why? Because we find ourselves in it. We are there. Bethlehem
is here. We are in the dark streets of our lives. "Yet
in the dark streets shineth…
