Managing a Manger
If the world has become flat to you and you live your whole life around a card table and you can’t stand to dial another 800 number and talk to another robot or change another diaper or wash another dish or pay another bill or eat another egg, Christmas is for you. If the fizz has gone out of your life, Christmas is for you. Remember when Auntie Mame sang, “We need a little Christmas right this very minute?” Or when you could have danced all night? Remember not being able to sleep Christmas Eve because Santa was coming?
There is a difference between the flat spirit and the soaring spirit. People always want to know how other people can believe in God. The real question is the reverse. How can people get through their day living in the flat ticky tacky of the ranch house, all on one level, three bedrooms, two baths?
People used to think that Christianity was about a three storied universe. Like one of those Philadelphia rowhouses cunningly called “Father, Son and Holy Ghost” architecture. They had three floors, implying a structured Heaven, Hell and Earth.
More recently we have begun to think of theology as a courtyard. Long entry ways, curling rooms, levels both half and full. Like many of the gorgeous churches here in San Miguel, you kept going inside and then inside some more to a quiet chapel, then one more quiet.
Today I want to applaud and approve all kinds of living, including the kind at cardboard tables, temporary and crowded as they are. Three stories, ranch houses, courtyard are just pictures for us to occupy for a minute so we can see what kind of God it is that we don’t believe in and what kind of God compels us.
The manger animals can help us. We often like to think of the lowly manger. We sing it that way. But in the manger what really happens is that God comes down and the human looks up. It is an assault on the either / or of so much thinking on behalf of both-and kind of thinking. Looking up and looking down as one motion. Pope Francis calls this an ecology. A Christological ecology. An insistence that all is linked to all. Bug to bear. Female to Male. Gender fluidities of all kinds, in both animals and humans. Houses to houses. Mangers to mansions. Pope Francis wrote a brilliant book called Laudato Se. He bases it in his Saint’s name, St. Francis of Assisi, the patron saint of animals. He does bring the human down a peg or two while lifting the animals up. He does “highly” regard the manger. And he magnificently tells the Christmas story by showing that it is the story that awes us with the grand size of the universe. Glory to God in the Highest. And Peace to us on Earth. Linking glory to earth. Not uplifting heaven to denigrate earth or denigrating earth to magnify heaven. But linking. A profound doxological interconnectivity. If I sneeze, a butterfly knows it somewhere. Christmas pushes the question deep inside us: Why does one thing have to be better than another? Or Taylor Swift better than Beyonce? Why can’t things cuddle up along side each other and rest peacefully in a manger? Anybody who knows anything about animals knows that some of them don’t get along either. I’ve never understood why there had to be so many different kinds in the creche. But walking through the markets yesterday here and watching the children buy two sheeps, two cows, two hens, two oxes, etc…I got it. God endorses the abundance of diversity and the diversity inherent in abundance.
Christmas lasts because the story is so good. It lasts because it hides big truths in small packages. It lasts because it wraps the whole. The pompous language is the relationship between the transcendent and the immanent, the whole universe, detail by detail. Christmas lasts because it grasps the whole and puts a holy child, a divine child at the center. It’s a little like my cell phone. I didn’t know how much I needed a cell phone till there was one in my hand. I didn’t know how much I needed a center to the cosmos until I met Jesus, the one called Christ, the one called King, the one called Holy, the one called Cosmic Christ, the one called Son of God and Son of man/human.
We are not a seminary but a church here so I will stop this theological grandiosity for now and insert the sturdiness of the Christmas carols. One of the reasons they last is that they are easy to sing. Most come in an accessible key. Another is most of us know the words. We act like the carols are ours when we sing them. Written just for me. Or You. I really don’t mind that they start as MUSAC in November.
That connection, that belonging to music is a big comforting deal. Most babies become like most teenagers who then become like most adults and wonder what in the world they are doing on this planet. Snippets and souls. We know we are just fragments, just a gesture, so very small, so short in life span, so ridiculous in the so-called grand scheme of things. We know. And along comes a story that says we belong. We are linked. Not only are we linked but the heavens and the earth are linked. Angels bother to visit us here in our galaxy.
As Nicholas Kristoff says powerfully in yesterday’s New York Times, miracles are essential to life on earth. Essential, like water or air. Essential.
The Carols make miracles out of mangers. They join heaven and earth. Let heaven and nature sing. The carols join large glory and big skies and great mystery to immediate experience. The carols tie a ribbon around the cosmos and say that you and I belong to it. “What child is this who came to earth on Mary’s lap is sleeping? Whom Angels greet with Anthems sweet while shepherds their watch are keeping?” The child answers the question about heaven and earth. High and height comingle with low and depth. Card tables become cathedrals.
It’s not like the shepherds were just watching their flocks that one night, when the angel disrupted their boredom. They likely watched their flocks every night. They likely watched in the dark of the moon as well as in its various iterations around the earth. The light was constantly shifting.
This night was different. A big announcement was made. But they probably still watched their flocks the next night also.
I’ve been having fun with real stories about real animals, just to get myself in a shepherd’s mode. I hear the angel calling but so is the cat wanting food.
But first let me assure you that this is not an anti-vegetarian sermon or even a grinchy one. It is just the opposite. I love animals. I love shepherding. Some even think that is my job. But shepherding is not all hatching, matching and dispatching, baptisms, weddings and funerals, those great times of gathering and food and dressing up and dancing. Following Jesus is not just for Christmas eve either. It is marvelously quotidian while being marvelously glorious. It’s for the day when the fizz has gone out of your soda. Those Alfie Days. Remember, “What’s it all about, Alfie?”
Christmas is like a long rerun of the 1998 movie “How Stella got her groove back.” When living in God’s miracle mind of a manger, preposterous as that alliteration may sound, GOD’S MIRACLE MIND OF A MANGER, we move out of the three story building into a cathedral of a courtyard and everything glows. We don’t just listen. We Hark. We don’t just watch. We wonder as we wander.
Manger scenes always have more animals than humans. Just think about the characters. My collection of manger scenes is in a closet somewhere. Lots of pieces are missing. Yes, I collect creches. One of mine, from Guatamela, has lost its Jesus. Others have lost their Mary’s. Quite a few have extra camels and no sheep. Children have played with them and surely some of the pieces are still under their bed. One of the sets we used in New York was a blow up of all the characters. The children would frolic with them in the children’s service on Christmas Eve. Another that I almost brought with me, as though you couldn’t find a manger scene here!, is a rubber duckie. Our Menorahs are the same. Gaudi-esque. One is a VW Microbus.
Rudolf, the red nosed neighbor, is not a character in any of my creches but he/she/they should be. Many people insist that there are chipmunks involved in the holy birth. I’m unsure. According to the Christmas carols, which I always find authoritative, Ox and Ass before him lay. Why not a chipmunk or a reindeer? As Tony Robinson put it in his latest missive (Yes, we are friends): Christmas is the holy blend of sacred and secular.
If there is a problem with these grand Christmas assertions of the arm that God has around the wholeness of the whole world -- including the heavens and the earth in one embrace -- it has to do with something the carols confuse. We as humans remain eternally confused about what is low and what is high, what is better than the other. Is heaven better than earth? Well. Is it? Is the human better than the Sheep or the cattle? Well. The “Lowly” manger? Does God really look down on the manger? Or does God uplift it and make it holy? This is not a small problem but actually a giant problem. The human dominance over the animals may bite us in the you know where yet. What Pope Francis said so well in Laudata Se – and yes he did talk about the cosmic Christ – is that we are a rich connection, one with the other, not a bigger/smaller/ manger down, heaven up thing. Is an angel better than a human or just different from a human? The Pope votes more for the labyrinthian courtyard and Cathedral and less for the skyscrapter or three story buildings. Note MAS O MENOS. Not for or against.
Ironically, it is Pope Francis who finally helped me see these distinctions at the heart of this cosmic Unity come at Christmas. We are all animals at a certain level. We are bodies at first and bodies at the last. Our health is what matters. If our organs don’t work, we don’t work. The animals have a need to connect, trees and birds and flowers are all interconnected. Put together in a symptom of interdependencies. River has a right to flow, animals to habitat. The order of the universe, God's creation is the ultimate value. The lesser humanity is acting like hamburgers are just hamburgers, made for us to eat. The miracles lurk in the muck, as one poet put it.
Managing a manger means understanding that it is a miracle. Forgive the M’s.
You know I have a life in religious real estate? Bricks and Mortals it is called. A woman whose church was almost dead told me they couldn’t possibly use the small chapel for dance, unless it was sacred dance. This was on the South Side of Chicago where there were bullet holes in the Tiffany-Stained Glass, from gang warfare. The light from the bullet holes created and doubled the holiness of the stained glass. Managing a manger is a lot like managing a congregation or a church building. (First Presbyterian of Chicago)
A thrift store sold all its books for a dollar but had a sign that said, “Religious Books Free.” They didn’t want the tawdry money to invade the holy kind. Or vice versa? Hmm. Sounds like they don’t know much about mangers.
A pastor in a Massachusetts town took her dog to church and people loved it so much they made her keep bringing the dog to church. The dog worships in front of the pulpit. Yes, in puppyhood, once, it had an accident and accidentally pooped on the altar. No one cared.
So many have pooped on the altar by an improper understanding of the incarnation. These good people got the point. May we as well. The sacred soup by itself can be very weak; the temporal soup by itself can be very weak. Together, they are delicious.
Miracles really don’t even really need management. They just need love. Amen