When we lived in Downers Grove 20+ years ago, we lived close enough to walk downtown to Main Street. We loved to walk there with our young family and shop locally. I had a favorite store I would visit frequently. I loved that store. It was quaint, cozy and had merchandize that met my tastes. It wasn’t a national chain. It was local.
Feeling nostalgic recently I visited that store again. I am not sure what happened. It didn’t seem as cool or quaint or interesting as I had remembered. The store felt cramped and claustrophobic. The lighting was harsh. The décor was dated. The carpet and rugs, well, the carpet and rugs were gross. As a matter of fact I thought they could have been the same carpet and rugs that were there 20 years ago. What happened to my store?
Nothing. In a literal sense not much had happened to my store. It was pretty much the same, but didn’t seem as quaint or cozy. I loved the merchandise in this store and therefore had fallen in love with the store itself. I think that over time I had romanticized how cool that store was and now reality set in. Or, 20+ years later my ideas of quaint and cozy have changed significantly.
We have a tendency to do that. As time goes by we romanticize the “good old days”. Anything that was bad, or average seems to fade away and we make whatever was good, great.
We’ve done that with Christmas. We’ve taken that original Christmas night outside of Jerusalem in Bethlehem and we’ve painted a Norman Rockwell painting. A beautiful, glowing young mother, her sturdy husband by her side; a sanctified barn with golden straw; a well groomed cattle and sheep stand nearby; a star looms overhead; well groomed shepherds kneel before a carefully constructed manger. It is so beautiful, it brings a sentimental tear to our eye.
I don’t mean to be “Rev”eneezer Scrooge, but the picture that we paint on Christmas cards and in church pageants isn’t very accurate.
Mary was a very young, unmarried teenager, who was no doubt an outcaste, if not the talk of the town, because of her presumed immorality, from a backwater town in Northern Israel. She had been accompanied by her humble carpenter fiancé to the home of his ancestors outside Jerusalem to pay still yet another Roman tax. The trip had been arduous. She had bounced along on a donkey over uneven terrain while nine months pregnant for 3 or 4 days. Dirty, dead tired and in labor, this illegitimate mother and her fiancé couldn’t find a place to stay and finally collapsed in a lean-to, or perhaps a cave, where animals were protected from the elements at night. The straw was no doubt urine soaked and dung infested; the animals scrawny and scraggly. Joseph, understandably, struggled to stay awake. When the baby was born someone had to cut the umbilical cord and clean the new born up. When shepherds arrived, they must have startled the parents and probably smelled worse than the animals.
Not very romantic. But that non-sanitized version of the story is much more meaningful for me than the romanticized version. God loved us so much that he was willing to endure that kind of beginning to become one of us. It was a foreshadowing of His life and ministry of mingling with the marginalized, living humbly, often being lonely and alone, not forcing his way into lives with fanfare and bright lights, but understated and lovingly simple. God used ordinary, common, down to earth, “real” circumstances to give us His greatest gift! He can, and is, still doing that today.
I understand why we romanticize the story. The real story is kind of gross, messy, and perhaps not as attractive. Which is often God’s way.
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