Christianity

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.

The Light in A Winter Solstice World

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tealight candle lit up
Photo by Mohammad reza Fathian on Pexels.com

As a pastor, I knew that the Christmas Eve candle-lighting service was probably the most important religious experience many congregation members would have all year. One proof was a bride who insisted she wanted a candlelighting service at her wedding. I explained to her that it would have a different impact on a July afternoon than on Christmas Eve. She insisted. I could tell by the look on her face, as the candles were barely visible in the sunlight, that I had been right.

But, on one of the longest, darkest nights of the year, lighting those candles does pack an emotional and, yes, spiritual wallop. It still moved me, as tired and frazzled as I usually was by the time the organist began to play “Silent Night” around 11:40 PM.

The symbolism is obvious: a single candle lights another candle and those two candles light two more and the four light four more, and by the time we were singing:

Radiant beams from Thy holy face

With the dawn of redeeming grace

Jesus, Lord at they birth!

the dark sanctuary was bathed in a beautiful warm light. Yes, once again, we see that “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” (John 1:5)

I got up early this Christmas morning and reread a journal entry from a few years ago in which I recorded the words of St. Symeon the New Theologian (if you can call someone who lived 1,000 years ago “new”), who had another perspective on the lighting of one candle by another:

Just as if you lit a flame from a flame,

it is the whole flame you receive.

It caused me to look at this sad old world differently this Christmas morning, guided by St. Symeon and Fred Rogers, who told parents that when there is news of wars and disasters, they should teach children to “look for the helpers.”

Where are they?

They are the people who, Jesus says, not only do the works that he does but will “do greater things than these.” (John 14:12)

For example, the gospels tell us about the dozens, perhaps hundreds, of people that Jesus healed. Every day, millions of people heal millions more in our world because the healers believe in life, which I believe is the same as believing in the One who called himself “Life” (John 14:6).

Jesus is said to have fed “five thousand, not counting women and children.” Yesterday, our pastor said that our church’s hunger program serves almost that many meals weekly, and we are just one of hundreds of programs in New York City. There must be millions around the world, from the small churches that serve a meal once a month to the UN trucks trying to get into Gaza. It is still not enough, but the number grows every year.

Jesus welcomed into his fellowship people that others rejected. I understood early that every church, no matter how small, always has at least one person whom one of my colleagues called a “humdinger” — someone who was difficult to love. Yet, the congregation did, in fact, love that person. If you go to church, you can name that humdinger. And even if you don’t, I am sure that someone in your circle of friends and family is difficult to love, but you include that person anyway. And, if you are like me, there are days when you are the humdinger. And I believe that anyone who welcomes a humdinger welcomes Christ. As Mother Teresa used to say, “Jesus wears distressing disguises.”

I know that our world is torn apart by war. Millions are being forced out of their homelands by hunger, violence, and extreme poverty only to be met by walls built by people who have not yet been forced out of their homes. I know (too well) that cancer still kills people before their time, and new diseases appear without warning. I believe my own eyes, so I see the climate changing in real time. There is so much to be discouraged about.

But, if I look for the helpers, the people who have caught fire from Jesus — or have the same fire that Jesus had whether they call themselves Christians or not, I do not despair. They are not “little Christ,” which is what the word “Christian” means. They burn with the whole flame and fill this world with a soft, warm light if only we would look for it today.

When Churches Split

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In 1996, Bob Dole was running for President against the incumbent, Bill Clinton. It was, like all presidential campaigns, hard fought and, at times, nasty. I mentioned in a sermon that both attended the same church in Washington, D.C. — Foundry United Methodist. I said I thought that was remarkable until I realized that our own congregation included both Frank, whose liberal views were well-known, and Roy, who everyone knew was pretty conservative. That got a big laugh from the congregation, especially from Frank and Roy, who embraced each other and joked about it for years afterward.

This kind of connection across a lot of social, political, and economic barriers was something that made me proud of the church that formed my faith and that I served as a pastor for forty-five years.

But, something has changed. In the past three years, the United Methodist Church, once the largest Protestant denomination in America, has been shrinking like Greenland’s glaciers as congregations break off and, in many cases, join newly-forming Methodist denominations.

The presenting issue is the church’s stance on homosexuality.

As a world-wide denomination, our official rules prohibit ordaining “practicing” homosexuals and marrying same-sex couples. An increasing number of clergy and congregations in the U.S. are critical of, and even defying, these regulations. They argue for an open and affirming acceptance of people in the LGBTQ+ spectrum. This has, of course, led the other side to demand compliance.

Both sides accuse the other of being captured by the culture: 

Conservatives see Liberals are replacing scripture with  "Woke" ideology.

Liberals say conservatives are ignoring the core command to love God and to love our neighbor by joining in the political Right's scapegoating of LGBTQ+ folks.

Both sides are right, but not for the reasons they think.

The culture we have been captured by is the Culture of the False Binary. It is the culture that believes:

  • “If I am right. You must be wrong.”
  • ”If I am right about one thing, I must be right about everything.
  • And, if you are wrong about one thing, you must be wrong about everything.”

This is not a new phenomenon. The world in which Jesus lived was split between Pharisees, Sadducees, Zealots, and other religious-political groups that believed they were right and everyone else was wrong. They sorted the world into “good people” and “bad people,” Jews and Gentiles, clean and unclean.

The dominant culture has almost always encouraged people to split into these kinds of binaries: heretics and believers, solid citizens and welfare cheats, native born and immigrants, white and not-white, traditionalists and progressives, “Men” and “Women.” It is always easier to win an election or get people to fall in line by pitting “us” against “them.”

In contrast, Jesus gathered people from all those groups into his band of followers. Two of them, Simon the Zealot and Matthew the tax collector, would have made Joe Biden and Donald Trump look like best friends.

The church, at its best, is Roy’s and Frank’s church. It counters fearful division by creating a community that brings “us” and “them” together at the communion table and in service to the world. Now, however, “Traditionalists” want to create a “pure” church and “Progressives” want to be free to welcome everyone.

The split has become personal for me as the first church I was appointed to after I graduated from seminary is going through a process to discern whether they want to stay in the denomination or leave it.

Even after almost fifty years, I still know members of that church. A couple of them have asked if I would write about it. I haven’t wanted to. It breaks my heart. And, I have nothing new to say about the issues that divide us than has already been said.

But, I guess I could share the most important lesson that church taught me in those early years of ministry:

I am not always right.

It was a hard lesson to learn. I had, after all, spent seven years in college and seminary learning to become a pastor by studying psychology, Hebrew, Greek, theology and other subjects that I thought would help. Furthermore, the church I served part-time when I was in seminary had grown big enough to support the full-time pastor that followed me. I was hot stuff.

When I arrived, I could see the things that needed to change, and I began to institute them. Some of them worked. But, to my surprise, not everyone agreed with everything I said or did.

At first, I took this personally. But, over time (perhaps longer than it should have taken) I began to understand that none of us is as wise as all of us. My beautiful ideas got mashed up in Administrative Board meetings and produced solutions that weren’t as elegant, but worked in the real world.

This did not mean that I gave up producing ideas and proposals that I really believed in. It did not mean that I had no convictions. It meant that I learned to hold them with the kind of humility that John Wesley exhibited when he prefaced many of the things he said with the words, “Until I am better instructed, I will believe . . .” These are not words we hear when Republicans and Democrats debate each other, but they are words that I think Methodists should use when we make our assertions.

Back then, I had many of the same convictions about human sexuality that the most conservative Methodists hold today. But, in that church and the five that followed, I met people who did not fit my theological cookie cutter. Their experiences, their love for Jesus, the faithfulness of their commitments, and their spiritual maturity convinced me to reread my Bible and change my mind. That is why I am on the “progressive” side in this argument.

However, I have friends on the other side who have parishioners who were chewed up by a permissive and promiscuous culture. These people found healing in churches that gave them structure and guidelines for their lives.

I do not think my friends have to be wrong for me to be right.

I think it would be more helpful for all of us to first of all ask:

How well do I understand my own sexuality?

How well do I understand my partner’s sexuality?

. . . before we make dogmatic pronouncements about the sexuality of people we have never even met.

We would be much more helpful to each other and to the world around us if we approached this particular subject with humility and compassion instead of self-righteousness.

Right now, that kind of respectful dialogue may be beyond the capabilities of a small-town congregation. It is certainly beyond the capabilities of the larger denomination. So, ultimately it will come down to a vote: “Yes?” Or “No?”

That reminds me of the another lesson I learned in that particular church.

When I was there, the congregation made a huge decision that involved a large amount of money and some big changes. One of the “pillars” of the church was particularly opposed to it. I was firmly on the other side. When the vote came, most people voted for the proposal.

Afterward, that man came to me and said, “You know that I was against this. But, I believe that the majority should rule. My wife and I will support the decision and give to it.” And, they did.

In the next four decades, I lost a lot of votes in the churches I served and on the floor of my denomination’s ruling bodies. Sometimes, those loses were pretty tough, but I remembered his words and I moved on.

I suspect that, in the end, that little church will not go the way I want it to go. But, whatever it decides, I will love it and pray for it.