Birth

The Inner Meaning of The Manger

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Photo: Roger Talbott

No, this isn’t my Christmas tree. It belongs to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art; and, yes, it is a real showstopper.

Jacquie and I visited the museum to look at Nativity scenes for a project Jacquie was doing for our church.

I’ve been contemplating what we saw ever since. The two that stand out for me are the one above and this one:

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The Nativity and Annunciation to the Shepherds. Carving from the portal of an unknown church ca. 1275–1300. The New York Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Quite a contrast!

Yet, both are recognizable as “manger scenes.”

It may surprise you that there are few depictions of Christ’s birth before the 1200s.

Peter, Paul, and other early Christians celebrated Easter every Sunday. However, no one celebrated Christmas for the first two or three hundred years after Jesus’ birth. It wasn’t until the fourth century that a church council set the date of the Feast of the Nativity on December 25.

Almost a millennium later, St. Francis of Assisi (d. 1226 CE) popularized the manger scene.

We seminary graduates like to talk about “incarnation” at Christmastime. Ask us what incarnation means, and we will quote John’s gospel, “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” Ask us what that means, and we will open our mouths . . . and nothing will come out.

A linguist once said, “A word only has meaning if you can put your hand over your mouth and point.”

St. Francis didn’t talk about the Incarnation; he lived it. He also pointed to it when he saw it. And he saw it in the birth of Jesus. Instead of preaching to the poor about what St. Paul meant when he wrote, “God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself” (2 Cor. 5:19), St. Francis created what the French call a crèche. Thus, he put his hand over his mouth and pointed to the baby in the manger.

Soon, Francis’s followers were creating these scenes all over Italy during the 12 days between the Feast of the Nativity (December 25) and the Feast of the Epiphany (January 6), when the Wisemen offer Jesus their gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh.

What moved people was not simply seeing the scene. It was being part of it. Like the shepherds and the Magi, they, too, came to the manger.

The Met’s 17th-century Neapolitan figures and the children that I inadvertently caught in my photo remind me of an experience I had forty years ago.

The church I served then had a tradition of creating a live outdoor manger scene every Christmas. The scene included cows and sheep, shepherds and kings, Mary and Joseph, and a doll—the only thing that wasn’t alive. This was December in Northeast Ohio, after all.

People came from all over the area to see it. Some just drove by. Others parked and came over, their coats from LL Bean, Walmart, or Goodwill mixing with our shepherd’s costumes. They were like the people of Bethlehem who heard about the angels and the birth from the shepherds and “were amazed” (Luke 2:17-18 NRSV).

The museum’s carved Neapolitan figures represent all the characters from the Bible stories. They also depict folk tales that have grown up around the birth of Jesus. The artists used their seaport city’s multi-ethnic, multicultural residents as models.

This picture shows the meaning of some of the Bible’s most mysterious words. Jesus says, “I will draw all people to myself” (John 12:32). We seminary graduates like to call this “high Christology.”

Sadly, some of the loudest “Christians” in our country don’t believe in it. Only people who fit the Procrustean beds of political belief, gender conformity, or White middle-class Protestant respectability, can “come to Jesus.”

You probably can tell how I feel about those folks.

But the older Nativity scene confronts my contempt for them.

Look at it again. The nativity forms the left side of the sculpture. It is pretty simple compared to the cast of thousands under the tree. Joseph is standing at the foot of the bed that Mary is lying on. Jacquie says an exhausted Mary makes a lot more sense to women who have given birth than the theologically correct Mary, who kneels in reverence next to her divine son’s manger.

Above their heads (artists had not yet discovered the mathematics of perspective) is the manger with the baby Jesus. And above the baby Jesus are the heads of two animals: an ox and an ass.

The ox and ass are in every manger scene from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. They refer back to a verse from Isaiah written seven centuries earlier:

“An ox knows its owner,

A donkey its master’s crib:

Israel does not know,

My people take no thought.”

(Isaiah 1:3  Revised JPS)

In other words, folks who call themselves “God’s people” (and that goes for most of us who think we are Christians) are dumber than an ox and a stupid ass. The ox doesn’t say, “Well, I’m not going to eat from the same manger as that ass.”

All kinds of people. That’s the other thing about the ox and the ass. According to biblical law, the ox is a “clean” animal. The ass is an “unclean” animal. Bible scholars have theories, but they don’t really know why animals with a split hoof and chew their cud are clean, and those who don’t are unclean.

In other words, it makes as much sense as my not wanting to hang out with Trump voters.

The mystics of all religions say that in our spiritual development, we need binaries like good and evil, male and female, Republicans and Democrats, divine and human, and oxen and asses. These binaries create our moral consciousness and teach us to make responsible choices. That is what grown-ups do.

But on the other side of that moral consciousness is a wholeness that brings the opposites together. Only Love and Light can pull everyone and everything together. (Colossians 1:15-17) Your spiritual journey and the spiritual journey of the human race will take us all there someday.

As the Sufi poet Rumi says:

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right-doing,

There is a field. I’ll meet you there.”

Love is in the manger. The ox and the ass know that they are sustained by love. Most of us are too dumb to know that, except maybe at Christmas.

Most of us lament the polarization and increasing hostility in our society. Is there any way to overcome it?

There is a way — in the manger.

How to Know When To Let Go

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We all know intuitively that the essence of the art of living is knowing when to let go. This is longer than usual, so I’ll begin with a summary:

  • It’s not wise to let go too soon.
  • It’s costs a lot when we don’t know when to let go.
  • If we let go at the right time, we get out of jail and find joy.

The good news is that we have practiced letting go all our lives. You took your first step when you let go of a parent’s fingers. You can’t take a breath without letting go of the one you took before.

We stumble in life when we don’t let go. My college roommate began Freshman year wearing his high school varsity jacket around campus. He was proud of it because his basketball team had won the division championship. But, after a couple of weeks, he realized that upperclassmen were laughing at him. He had to let go of that jacket or look foolish.

On the other hand, it took me almost a year of getting C’s to let go of my high school self-image as “the smart boy” to whom A’s came easy.

Letting go isn’t that hard in the first half of life. Like the toddler taking that first step, we are reaching out for freedom when we:

  • Take the car by ourselves for the first time.
  • Get our first job.
  • Leave home.

In this Third Half of Life, however, we often feel diminished when we:

  • Have to let go of our job/career/identity.
  • Let go of driving the car.
  • Let go of the home we may have lived in for decades.

I bet you know people who didn’t let go of those things soon enough. Do you think you will know when to let go?

Pharaoh can teach us about letting go.

Pharaoh? You mean the Egyptian king?

Yep. Pharaoh

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I ran into Pharaoh a couple of weeks ago when I was asked to lead a Torah study for the National Advisory Committee of the Jewish Grandparents Network. How did a retired Methodist preacher find himself doing that? Because I let go. I’ll get to that below.

The Torah portion began at Exodus 3:17. Jews name their weekly Torah portions using the first word or two in the first verse. But the first word in this verse, in Hebrew, is “Pharaoh.” They didn’t want a Torah portion named after the Hitler of the 13th century B.C.E, so they used the second word, b”Shalach. The root, Shalach, means “to let go” — an action.The prefix “b’” turns it into a time. B’Shalach means “letting-go-time.”

So we translate it: “WHEN Pharaoh LET the people GO.”

This Third Half of Life is b’Shalach, “letting-go-time.” Time to let go of:

  • A job. A blessed relief for some. For others (OK, for me,) it means letting go of our identity.
  • The house we needed to raise a family.
  • Habits that our younger bodies could sustain (or survive) but are damaging our aging bodies.
  • Our role (and status) within our communities or in our family.
  • Communities in which which we have lived most of our lives.
  • Beliefs and prejudices that we grew up with that we have never examined.

What can Pharaoh teach us about when and how to let go?

Something will tell us when it is time

Pharaoh had Moses — a voice that kept coming to him to say, “Let my people go.”

You and I will hear a voice. It may be a doctor’s voice, a spouse’s voice, a child’s voice, a friend’s voice, or that voice inside our heads. It will say, “Time to let go.”

For many years, I was part of a committee that interviewed and guided people who felt “called” to become ordained clergy in my denomination. That may sound like religious mumbo-jumbo to you, but bear with me.

Most of these folks were going to have to let go of good jobs in order to go back to school to prepare for a profession that is usually underpaid and overworked and that carries a psychic load that few others in our society have to bear. That is a big jump. The only thing that sustains people through that change and in the practice of pastoral ministry is a deep inner conviction that this is what they are meant to do.

We asked if they were hearing that inner voice?

We got all kinds of answers. Some people had visions rivaling the Prophet Ezekiel. Others heard a still, small voice.

We also asked if anyone on the outside was saying the same thing?

Some people only heard the outside voice — a parent or spouse telling them they should become a minister. Others only heard the inside voice. No one else thought they would make a good pastor. We were most sure of the people who heard both voices.

We were even surer if they had a history of resisting those voices.

If we are smart, we will ignore the voice at first, like Pharaoh did.

Pharaoh didn’t rule Egypt by obeying every crackpot carrying a staff who criticized his policies.

You didn’t get to where you are by stopping every time the going got tough, leaving a relationship at the first argument, or changing your mind every time someone told you that you were wrong.

Most of the pastoral candidates we interviewed confessed that they kept thinking they were mistaken — or God was. They were there because they couldn’t shake the feeling that this is what they were supposed to be doing.

If we are stupid, we will continue to ignore the voice even after it starts to cost us, like Pharaoh did.

Pharaoh, famously, suffered — and Egypt suffered — through nine plagues, including the death of the first-born in every household, before he let the Israelites go. Pharaoh illustrates this truth:

“There is that law of life, so cruel and so just, that says that we must change or else pay more for staying the same.”

Norman Mailer, The Deer Park

One day I stepped on the scales at the doctor’s office and the nurse said cheerfully, “198. First one under 200 today.”

I was there because my acid reflux was so bad I began worrying about getting esophageal cancer. I had been ignoring my body, my doctor, the scales, the mirror, and reality itself. It was costing me too much to stay the same. I was as dumb as Pharaoh.

I weigh 148 this morning because I let go of eating meat, dairy, eggs, salt, oil, and sugar. It wasn’t easy, but I also didn’t do it all at once. In fact, it has taken me twenty years to make these changes. Ninety percent of the credit for that is that I eat every day with someone who has made getting healthy her life’s mission.

Letting-go-time is when we move from jail to joy.

Your first act of letting go — birth — happened because you could not grow anymore in your mother’s womb. It was a good place for you, until it wasn’t. When b’Shalach came, you and your mother both let go and you were free to grow into the mature adult you are now.

We have to leave Pharaoh behind here. He did not see letting go of his slaves as a growth experience, although it could have been.

Every time I have let go of something in my life, I have grown. That’s how I wound up on the National Advisory Committee of the Jewish Grandparenting Network. It is both a great honor and a source of much amusement when I think about where I came from.

I grew up as a conservative evangelical Methodist. I still think I’m a conservative evangelical Methodist, although many of my conservative evangelical friends would disagree so much that they want to start a new denomination that will keep out people like me. They think I am “tossed about by every wind of doctrine”.

Instead, I kept running into people of faith that led me to realize:

  • God is not a Methodist.
  • God is not a Protestant.
  • God is not a Christian.
  • God is not a White heterosexual male.

I didn’t even know that I believed some of those things until I let go of them. But, every time I let go, my heart grew, and my God got bigger.

When our son, Jim, decided to convert to Judaism and marry, Rachel, a Reform Rabbi, it was b’Shalach, letting-go-time, once again. We don’t celebrate Christmas and Easter with our grandchildren, but that’s OK. We get to celebrate Passover and Yom Kippur. Our lives are larger because we have Jewish grandchildren, which makes us Jew-ish grandparents. It was only a few more steps to doing the Torah study that night.

One final story. Four years ago, Jacquie and I started talking about the possibility of moving to New York City to be closer to those grandchildren and . . . to be in New York City. One more adventure. But, that meant letting go of a house that we had spent years (and thousand$) to make our own. It meant letting go of a neighborhood and city we loved. I, newly retired, and still reeling from having let go of a job I loved, was resistant.

Jacquie said, “Today’s joy is tomorrow’s jail.”

What time is it in your life?

In some ways, it is always b’Shalach, letting-go-time. We let go of every breath. We let go of every day when we go to sleep. It may have been a good day, but we have to let go.

Indeed. Life is like the monkey bars on the playground. If you don’t let go and reach out, you just stop and swing there. You have to keep letting go in order to reach the next one.

That’s the secret of life. The day will come to each of us when we will let go of our last breath and reach out for whatever joy lies beyond. That will be easy or difficult depending on how much we have practiced letting go.