Christmas Day 2012 – a reflection

Christmas Day, 2012

A Christmas bon-bon joke from last year: What sort of cheese do you use to coax a grizzly out of its den?  Camambere!

Although this, like so many other human-other creature encounters, tends to anthropomorphize or humanize the creatures with whom we share this earth. We give them our voices, our perspectives, our thinking. And so we have this story of a baby born in a stable, or, at least, the room at the back of the inn, where the animals were kept. A connection of the divine close to the ground, close to the heart of shared earthspace, close to the aromas and textures of the natural world. Far from the constructed figure in stained glass windows, the idealized white man of Sunday School fame, the halo-ed cherub of ecclesiastic note. Dig deeper and we find an earthling among the other living creatures on an earthen floor among the hay. This is the story of our tradition. Jesus was born outside refined society, outside the protection of locked door and the surrounds of protective human community.

This song originally hails from a 12^th century Latin song “Orientis Partibus” which first appeared inFrance and is usually attributed to Pierre de Corbeil, Bishop of Sens

Jesus our brother, kind and good
Was humbly born in a stable rude
And the friendly beasts around Him stood,
Jesus our brother, kind and good.

“I,” said the donkey, shaggy and brown,
“I carried His mother up hill and down;
I carried her safely to Bethlehem town.”
“I,” said the donkey, shaggy and brown.

“I,” said the cow all white and red
“I gave Him my manger for His bed;
I gave him my hay to pillow his head.”
“I,” said the cow all white and red.

“I,” said the sheep with curly horn,
“I gave Him my wool for His blanket warm;
He wore my coat on Christmas morn.”
“I,” said the sheep with curly horn.

“I,” said the dove from the rafters high,
“I cooed Him to sleep so He would not cry;
We cooed him to sleep, my mate and I.”
“I,” said the dove from the rafters high.

Ivone Gebara, an eco-feminist, in her book, Longing for Running Water, has this to say about the spaces in which we live and by which we are defined.

Once the poor had the story of their champion. A child born in a stable with the animals, away from the places where others laid their heads. Now, it seems the rich have hijacked the story. We have sanitized the stable, sweetened, beyond recognition, the nature of the birth and the situation, and inscribed the chronicle in cathedrals and palaces away from the sense of the original narrative. I do not like the phrase, Little Lord Jesus. It is vaguely reminiscent of Little Lord Fontlaroy, a fictional urchin who lived on the streets ofLondonnearly all his childhood, but, according to a popular film, still managed a rather more dignified English accent than his cohorts, until he is found by his grandfather, a rich peer of the realm, and reinstated to his rightful place in society.

An individual who had quite a profound influence on my life and who encouraged me to consider ordained ministry was an elderly man, who, when I applied to study theology, was the principal of the Churches of Christ theological college. They were not ordaining women at the time but this man didn’t see what all the fuss was about. He was the son of a wealthy wheat and sheep farmer from the dry outreaches of north westernVictoria. And told me the story of how, when his mother was heavily pregnant with him, and the baby was due a week or so hence, she was crossing the flat land at the back of the property in a horse and dray, a few hundred acres away from the homestead. It was then that she suddenly went into labour and very soon concluded that she would not make it back to the house. There was a hayshed not far from the track and it was there that she and her sister pulled up, tethered the horse, and it was there she gave birth to her son who, much later, became the dean of the Churches of Christ Theological College. Knowing the circumstances of his birth endowed him with a profound sense of affinity with the nativity narrative and the baby born in the stable. From this, he concluded, we must never lose the threads of how close to the ground and the natural world we belong.

Rev Dr Robyn Schaefer