Christmas 2011 Message from the Bishop

I enjoy all our Christmas nativity scenes and carols but in their soft familiarity they may allow us to forget the harsh details of the birth of Jesus.  In the idealized version Mary smiles, her hair is unruffled.  She looks fresh as a daisy, unlike any newly delivered mother.  Jesus is silent and still, clean and pink and happy unlike most newborns.  But we need to think and imagine a little more accurately about the birth of Jesus. 

Joseph would not leave Mary behind, alone to face the shame and difficulties by herself, so he took her with him.  We may want to accuse him for making a young first time pregnant mother travel such a distance.  It's no wonder she had the baby after that kind of trip.  Donkeys don't carry evenly they swing their hips as you ride.  It would be a lot more of a roller coaster ride than a trip on a bus.  We can forget all this, the difficulties and obstacles, but Luke brings them into play.  We have a story of a young girl surprised by her pregnancy which would bring shame and dishonour and a puzzled man engaged to be married to her.  Mary and Joseph believed, but she must have been afraid and he must have had his doubts.  Luke's detail about the census for taxing explains why a couple living in Nazareth had their child in a Bethlehem barn but it also shows more of their difficulties for the taxes and the census were part of the Roman occupation of Judah.  Mary and Joseph belonged to an oppressed people living in an occupied land. 

I imagine Bethlehem as an overcrowded city, full of rotting garbage full of people and noise and jostling everywhere.  And let's be honest barns stink.  The barn may have been warm but it would have smelled of manure, animal hair and rotting straw.  The barn of a busy innkeeper is not spotless.  It is smoky from torches.  Mary is tired and dirty from a long trip and despite the angel’s assurance, she is afraid.  She has no midwife, and it is hard to imagine that Joseph attended prenatal classes and practiced as her labour coach.  So this young mother must give birth in a barn with only the help of an old inexperienced man. 

It is our human inclination to soften the dirt and suffering and fear but we must recognize that God was born into poverty, dirt, homelessness and fear, into a very real world, our world.  God was born a wrinkled, bloody baby to a scared young girl in a barn.

The world of our imagined nativity scene needs no redemption, it is perfect already.  But God was born into the world we know with all its wonders and with all its hatred, fear, dirt and pain.  God so loved the world and God so loves you and me as we are. 

But that harsh manger scene is transformed into something warm and sweet by the presence of Jesus’ himself.  We see a stinky barn as something warm and mysterious and wonderful because we see it in the light of Jesus Christ.  If we can see the loveliness in that scene, it is by the same light of Jesus Christ that we can see the loveliness, see what God so loves, in ourselves and in one another.  My prayer is that we might see that loveliness in ourselves, one another and all the world.  “Shine forth and let thy light restore earth’s own true loveliness once more.  Amen.”

-- The Rt. Rev'd Michael Hawkins
Bishop of Saskatchewan