The Play of Heaven and Earth: A Homily for the Fourth Sunday of Adveent

 

Preached on the Fourth Sunday of Advent, 24 December, at All Saints, Collingwood, Anglican Diocese of Toronto.   

Readings - Isaiah 9:2-7; Psalm 96; Titus 2:11-20; Luke 1:26-38

 

“Adoration of the Shepherds” by an unknown artist a part of the Google Art Project. Wikimedia Commons.

 

Today I want to offer my thanks to everyone, adult and child, who was a good sport and took part in our Christmas pageant.

 

The Christmas pageant or nativity play is a curious sort of church ritual, isn’t it?   I wonder sometimes why we put such effort into them when there is so much else to do at Christmas?

 

Surely the nativity play is an expression of our sheer delight at having children present with us at Christmas time, as families reunite over long distances.   That delight is especially poignant and bittersweet in a church such as ours which remembers crowds of children and now sees them but seldom.

 

So we want the nativity play out of a sense of nostalgia, a desire for things as they were, but we also do it out of a sense of duty, for the psalmist tells God’s people that we must teach the next generation “so that they should set their hope in God, and not forget the works of God” (Ps 78:6-7).   And what can story is more important to tell our children than that God loved us enough to be part of our human family?

 

The Christmas story is an ideal lesson for the young because it is full of things that children understand: family, parents, babies, love, gifts, animals.   It’s a solid foundation on which to raise children in the faith, and it’s a place for we adults to return to when our faith is shaken.  

 

The nativity play is a classroom for all of us, young and old, that teaches us the mystery of the incarnation, and reminds us that God loved us enough to become flesh and dwell us.   We need to be reminded of this truth when God seems distant in our darker moments.

 

If there is a danger in the nativity pageant, it is that we adults become patronizing and think that this is  merely an activity for children.   But even when it’s just as adults present here on Sunday, what is our worship but big children at play?   Liturgy is when we as adults imagine the glory of heaven and try to recreate it as best we can through songs, vestments, altar hangings, and rituals.   Liturgy is us giving what poor gifts we can find, gifts that in no way match what we have received from God.   Worship is us imagining, as best we can, what the kingdom of heaven might look like, in the same way that CS Lewis created a magic realm called Narnia in order to show us what a divine realm might look like. 

 

The nativity play invites us to see our world as being open to God’s action and presence, when “heaven and nature” can be unite and sing together.   That angel may be a child with tinfoil wings and a tinsel halo, those shepherds may just be awkward fellows in bathrobes, but seeing them together before us reminds us that the God who sent an angel to a humble peasant girl also delights in and inhabits our ordinary lives.   As I said earlier, the nativity play is a classroom of the incarnation, and we come away learning that we can find mystery in the ordinary.

 

Others have learned these lessons before us.   In England in the later middle ages, people would reenact biblical stories in dramas that scholars call mystery plays.  One of these plays, about the birth of Jesus, is called The Second Shepherds’ Play, and I confess that this play helped inspire the simple rhymes used in today’s pageant.   This medieval play is about three simple shepherds, country men with thick rural accents, and there’s a comic first half about how they outwit a thief named Mak and his wife.   This villainous couple steal a sheep and try to disguise it as a baby in a cradle, but the three shepherds finally see through this ruse:

 

 

(The other SHEPHERDS come back.)

Give me leave him to kiss, and once lift him out. What devil is this? He has a long snout!

1ST SHEPHERD

He is marked amiss. Let's not wait about!

2ND SHEPHERD

The ill-spun weft always comes foully out. Aye, so!

He is like to our sheep.

 

In the second half, the three shepherds are awakened by an angel, who tells them:

Rise, gentle shepherds, for now is he born

Who shall fetch from the fiend what from Adam was torn. God is made you friend now at this morn,

 

So the three shepherds go to the manger, apologizing that because they are poor men (“we're rough all three”), they can only offer simple gifts:  a bird, a few cherries, and a ball to play with.   The play ends as the three shepherds leave rejoicing:

 

2ND SHEPHERD

Lord, well is me.

3RD SHEPHERD

In truth already it seem to be told Full oft.

1ST SHEPHERD

What grace we have found!

3RD SHEPHERD

Let's make a good sound, And sing it not soft.

 

 

I’m sure that the medieval audiences appreciated the two-part structure of the Second Shepherd’s Play.  The thief disguising the sheep as a baby in the cradle in the first part is a comic expression, whereas in the second half, the baby in the manger is not only the Lamb of God but also the Lord as shepherd who will protect his flock.  And so, the play tells us, we are saved from the evil one:

 

1ST SHEPHERD

(They enter stable.)

Hail, comely and clean! Hail, young child!

Hail, maker, as I mean, of a maiden so mild!

Thou has cursed, I believe, the warlock so wild;

That false guiler of vexation has himself been beguiled

 

Likewise, our nativity plays announce good news, that the babe in the manger was born to save us from ourselves, from evil, and from death.   We could tell this story in so many ways, in soaring music like Handel’s Messiah, in elaborate Renaissance paintings, and in high liturgy amidst chanted psalms and liturgy.    However, we can also all this story as an ordinary church nativity play, with adults and children in their bathrobes and tinsel wings, awkwardly and playfully telling the story about how heaven and earth comes together.   

 

And maybe a simple nativity play is a more honest gift to our saviour because we’re not trying to impress anyone with our skill and talent.   We’re as artless as children playing dress up.  We offer this simple play to the child in the manger, because like the three medieval shepherds, we give what simple things we have.    Our nativity play is a simple gift, but it’s heartfelt, and it’s joyous, because today is a story that children can understand and mystics can forever ponder, that the God of love and majesty came among us a child, to save us.  What can we give him?  Poor as we are?  What we have we give him, our hearts, our selves.  These are gifts enough.