We didn’t make it to the Creche: Little Known People of Christmas (Part II/IV)

Jesus came to Bethlehem and brought Christmas.

Pagan friends point out that the Winter Solstice was celebrated long before Christmas and this seems true, though most of “pagan” history is made up in the nineteenth and twentieth century by good hearted people with more imagination than scholarship. Whatever the Winter Solstice was like, and from what we know it was the usual drunken carousing, Jesus made it Christmas.

There is nothing wrong with a party and Jesus saved one by turning water into wine, but you don’t have to look far to see what Christmas would look like after Jesus: try most office Christmas parties. Jesus gave us beauty, without Him beauty degenerates into cheap sentimentality. Jesus transformed poverty, a manger, swaddling clothes, into sacred objects, without Him money determines the quality of the feast. Jesus demands we think, pray, feast, reflect, and give someone other than ourselves honor. Without Him, we are left with a desperate attempt to cheer up. The power of the most secular Christmas specials come whenever they get near His story: the myth made true.

So who would not wish to go? Our house will sometimes put Plato, Aristotle, and Socrates near the crèche as they longed to see what we celebrate, but they did not get to go. For reasons that can never be told, a baby seal has at times been in our Nativity set, but no baby seal made the actual event. Uncle Bob of the West, the most magical of men, reports that he has a crèche open to all animals . . . even the lowly swine. He calls no animal unclean that God made clean, but on that day there were no pigs there.

What is regrettable is when we could go to Bethlehem like the rulers of Israel and we will not go. The most famous person to miss Christmas has to be the lowly innkeeper. Mary and Joseph, soon to be so famous they need no last names, showed up and he had no room in his inn. He has been the subject of so much criticism, that a reaction has taken place. At least he did something: offering the Christ child a stable in cave, likely more sanitary than the actual inn. So I will damn him with faint praise: Jesus came and the innkeeper did not utterly blow it like the sycophantic rulers at Herod’s court.

The Holy Night came and my guess is that he slept through it, having done just enough to sooth his conscience. The innkeeper was not, evidently, a bad man, he just missed his chance. The stable became a legend and he became the guy whose inn missed by the sight of the hotel check in of history.

I read about the innkeeper and realize that I often do not even get to his level. The night divine comes and I miss it watching television. Jesus has no place to lay his head and I haven’t even bothered to send my Christmas check to Star of Hope. Wouldn’t it be better, however, when the critical moment came if I recognized it?

History is full of missed chances. Dad could have bought Apple stock. Papaw might have invested in some coastal California land for a song. Somebody in Britain should have treated that Washington fellow better when he was discharged after the French and Indian War. Moments to change history come and we miss them, because like the innkeeper the busyness of  business drives history out of our mind. The government makes a proclamation, our town is flooded, Jesus is born, and all we have is tired feet.

Stop.

I say this to myself. Where is God? What is He doing? Am I looking or am I putting Christ in Christmas as if He needs me? Am I defending the Faith out of fear or love? Am I loving my family or going through the motions? Is even my charitable giving thoughtful, sensitive to what God is saying, or do I do my best? If the innkeeper had been aware, he would have slept in the stable and the Mother of God would have had his room.

He wasn’t and she didn’t and he never even knew enough to be sorry.

Pagans did not have a Christ in the bleak, cold midwinter. Post-Christians have lost Jesus in our materialism and ugliness. We have even blotted out the Christmas stars in many cities with our light pollution only to buy cheap imitations to make up for it to hang on our artificial trees. But what of Christians? Am I like the innkeeper: honoring Christ just enough to avoid immorality, but missing the light, the power, and the glory of His birth?

What shall I give him? I shall give Him my awareness, my worship, my thought so that unlike the innkeeper I do not sleep under the Christmas star without ever seeing the wonder.