Christmas 2017 There s a story about Fr. Bruno who was pastor of St. Elias Church a small church with only a few hundred families. The Church was built over a hundred years earlier by Italian immigrants who poured their hearts into building it. The congregation was very proud of their church and always kept it maintained and looking beautiful. At Christmas, no small amount of money was spent to decorate it with live Christmas trees with white lights. The sanctuary itself was filled with white and red poinsettias. The centerpiece of Christmas was the large Nativity Scene which had been built by a group of men in the parish. The figures in the Nativity Scene of Mary, Joseph, the Shepherds and the Three Kings were made in Italy a gift of a very wealthy family. The nearly life-size statues were painted with great care and highly decorated. You could tell that the congregation loved that Nativity Scene because of the number of families who would take their Christmas photographs standing in front of it. At the Christmas Eve Mass one year, Fr. Bruno decided that it would be nice to have young children dressed as characters from the Gospel process into the Church. Mary would hold the baby Jesus. But Fr. Bruno was a bit concerned. The baby Jesus was one of the Nativity Scene s most beautiful pieces. It was actually the size of a new born child made of ceramic and painted with enamel. In order to keep it safe, the baby Jesus was wrapped in some fabric so as to protect it from any scratches or nicks that might occur. Well, Christmas Eve arrived and the Church looked beautiful. The organ thundered the Hymn O Come All Ye Faithful which the choir led. The procession began. All eyes were on the children who were dressed as shepherds, angels, sheep, a donkey and the three kings carrying their gifts. Then, Mary and Joseph proceeded down the aisle Mary, holding the beautiful baby Jesus wrapped carefully in its blanket for protection. 1 of 5
Everything was going so well until Mary and Joseph reached the step leading into the sanctuary. The 7 year old girl who played Mary was so wrapt in concentration of the treasure she carried in her arms, failed to negotiate the step and landed on all fours. Baby Jesus flew out of her arms and landed on the sanctuary floor and shattered into 3 pieces. The head of the baby lay apart from the body with a huge gash in its forehead. The right arm was broken off and a foot was detached from the leg. The people gasped in horror. The little girl playing Mary got up, dusted herself off then burst into tears running out of the sanctuary. Fr Bruno who saw everything was livid. The people could see his face turning red. No one knew what to do except the young boy who was playing Joseph. He calmly walked over and picked up the pieces of the baby Jesus and gently laid them in the manger saying to Fr. Bruno, I think he ll be OK. He just has a little headache! Fr. Bruno was not smiling. After the conclusion of Mass, Fr. Bruno went to the rectory and got some glue and tape. He had some time to try and repair the baby Jesus before Mass on Christmas morning. He did the best he could--reattaching the arm onto the body and the foot onto the leg. Still, the cracks were very visible. He managed to put the baby s head back onto the body but it was slightly crooked. As he replaced the wounded baby Jesus in the crib he felt frustrated. Before he went to bed he tried to pray. But his prayer was troubled. He prayed that those whose families had donated the Nativity Scene would not see the broken body of the baby Jesus. How could that ever be replaced? God help me he said to himself. On Christmas morning, Fr. Bruno opened the Church to await the large number of people who would be attending Mass. They came in droves all admiring the beautiful Christmas decorum of the Church. After Mass, however, Fr. Bruno noticed something unusual. All kinds of people were standing quietly in front of the Nativity scene. He knew that word had already gotten around the small congregation about the disaster of the previous evening. He approached the people gathered around intending to offer apologies for the broken Christ child. 2 of 5
But, as he looked at the people gathered there, he became aware of something. They were not angry about the broken baby Jesus. Instead, they were gazing at the chipped and slightly disjointed baby with love in their eyes. Some were actually tearful. One was a middle-aged woman who had lost her husband right just a few weeks earlier. Another was a couple whose son had come home from war with a head injury. There was a young girl in a wheelchair who suffered from Muscular Dystrophy. There was an elderly man there leaning on his walker. Next to him was a teenager who Fr. Bruno knew was struggling with an addiction. Fr. Bruno recognized each of this parishioners who had suffered brokenness in some way. Each of them looked at the baby Jesus, itself broken, knowing that the child Jesus understood the meaning of their pain and suffering. They came to realize, along with Fr. Bruno, that Jesus was someone who could relate to their problems and brokenness. He could share their pain and sorrow. It was as if the patched up Christ child was telling them, I share your pain. I know your struggles. Be courageous. I was broken for you. For several years after that incident, the same baby Jesus was used in that Nativity Scene, continuing to draw to himself men and women, adults and children, healthy and broken, rich and poor, loved and unloved as if to share in their joys and sorrow. Each of us has the tendency to view the birth of Jesus through rose-colored glasses. Our Nativity Scenes testify to this with their pristine artistry. The manger scenes we own do not really represent the crude animal trough that was actually Jesus bed. The Christ child himself does not appear to be an infant wrapped in swaddling clothes as the biblical story testifies. As wonderful as our Nativity Scenes may be as works of art, they can mislead us into thinking that all was well with the circumstances of Christ s birth. What we fail to recognize is that the birth of Christ is about our discomfort, our poverty and our own brokenness. Just as the figure of the Christ child in the story 3 of 5
was broken and in need of repair, so too, we must acknowledge that we have all experienced brokenness. We are all in need of repair. Our lives need fixing. We may be experiencing brokenness in our bodies and minds. It may be our relationships that are in disrepair. Certainly, our spiritual lives experience the damage of sin. We may do our best to fix our lives to patch together what is broken. But the fact is we cannot repair ourselves; we cannot bring ourselves wholeness. Someone else must do that for us. The person who can patch our lives together and even make them new is Christ. The one who was born into our world so long ago. The birth of Christ announced that God would repair our broken lives and our broken world. It is in the person of his own Son that God goes about mending our lives but he does not accomplish that simply in the birth of the Christ child. That s because that baby had to grow up and leave the manger. The child had to mature and learn what God was calling him to do on our behalf. It was not enough for Christ to be born into the world like one of us. It was not sufficient that he take on human flesh. The work of Jesus was to move from the wood of the manger to the wood of the Cross. Have you ever wondered why there is no great number of devotions in our Church to the baby Jesus? Why is it that the Nativity Scene is not present throughout the year in our churches? Rather, it is the crucifix that is the primary symbol of our daily lives. It is the crucifix that we see in our churches day in and day out. It is the cross of Christ before which people pray and meditate. The truth is that Christ had to experience his own brokenness in order to heal us of our brokenness. It is his suffering and death on the cross that is the means by which we are healed and saved. That s why the early Christians did not really place a lot of importance on celebrating Christmas. Rather, the focus of their worship was Easter. The suffering, death and resurrection of Christ was their focus. After all, it is Christ s journey from the manger to the cross that brings us to a place of healing and wholeness. 4 of 5
There is a song titled "Bring Christ Your Broken Life written in 1935. The first verse: Bring Christ your broken life, so marred by sin, He will create anew, make whole again; Your empty, wasted years He will restore, And your iniquities remember no more. The second stanza: Bring Him your every care, if great or small-- Whatever troubles you--o bring it all! Bring Him the haunting fears, the nameless dread; Thy heart He will relieve, and lift up thy head. Blest Savior of us all! Almighty Friend! His presence shall be ours unto the end. Without Him life would be how dark, how drear! But with Him morning breaks--and heaven is near! The lyrics of that hymn really sum up what we are truly celebrating at Christmas. The Christ child has come into the world to heal us of our brokenness. Like the parishioners in the story I shared with you, we should gaze upon the Christ child in our Nativity scenes. But we are not there to simply admire what once was. We come before the newborn babe to reflect on what he has done for us as an adult. By his own brokenness on the Cross, he has mended our broken lives, He has taken up our burdens and made them bearable, He has sympathized with our tears and promised that someday they will be no more. That in and of itself is reason enough to celebrate Christmas. 5 of 5