'An engaging Nativity isn’t God's story. It's our story'

The use of mini stories involving penguins, fairies and even the famous WW1 Christmas Day Truce certainly appeal to the soft, melting centre in our Christmas Chocolate Box.

Even the Churches’ Christmas advertising campaign, Christmas Starts with Christ, has turned this year from poster to video to show two parents with their newborn baby morph from a 21st century living room into a 1st century stable, complete with gurgling baby.

For some people, though, too much syrup and sugar is sickly and definitely unhealthy.

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The alternative message is to step away from the Chocolate Box and get a healthy dose of reality. Not all children get toys for Christmas; far too many continue to be abused, exploited, neglected and living below the poverty line, even in this country, in our own communities.

Not every family is able to stick to the Christmas Truce in an attempt at a temporary cessation of hostilities in order to sit down at the same table and share a turkey. Some are facing Christmas having lost a child, or parent, or someone they love. Not every battalion stopped fighting to play football on Christmas Day in 1914, and even those who did went back to the killing all too soon.

And penguins... well, the United Nations says there is now some sort of deal on the table at the end of the climate talks in Lima, but there’s still very little action in evidence, or will to change radically the way we live in order to save the planet.

Our pockets and economies are too important. Shame about the penguins though.

A traditional nativity scene

The Christmas Story – the one with the baby in the manger, surrounded by shepherds, wise men, Mary, Joseph and various other hangers-on – suffers from the same kind of sentimentality, and the same kind of alternative response.

There are two parents in this story, a nice clean stable, warm cosy hay, gentle and well behaved animals, a nice quiet baby, and some expensive, if distinctly odd, presents. It’s a lovely picture, that draws us into its homely, soft-centred scene. Then comes the cold water. Read the story. There probably wasn’t a donkey or a stable; there were likely to be more than three wise men (not kings, please!), and all these visitors turned up at different times, not necessarily at midnight.

At the same time you can pick up some familiar themes behind the sentimental vignette: teenage pregnancy, housing shortages, poverty, political intrigues, genocide, social exclusion. It stops being a Chocolate Box at that point.

A few years ago, in a church of my intimate acquaintance, we held a nativity set festival, with over 100 nativity sets from all over the world.

The more time I spent looking at them, the more I noticed about them. I kept finding different ones too.

You’d think once you’d seen one wise man you’ve seen them all. Actually, we haven’t.

The sets were all different, from lots of different cultures, made from different materials, different takes, different interpretations of the Christmas Story.

The best bit was when the children from the local school came to visit.

They did what all children do: they picked them up and played with them. Admittedly, it was a bit of a nightmare, as some of the sets were quite fragile. We kept finding things in different places.

One little set included a pig, and after the children left, we couldn’t find it anywhere. We panicked.

Then we discovered he was visiting the sheep in the nativity next door.

Some of the knitted wise men had obviously found it all a bit too much – we kept finding them lying down on the job. And then there was the Mary who was a single parent family – Joseph went missing ages ago. Someone did offer a nativity set where Jesus is twins (the heir and the spare, I suppose). I thought it might give us one or two tricky theological problems. But the miracle is that even with bits missing and bits chipped off, they all told God’s story in different ways.

It’s a story that invites us to interact with it. It doesn’t have to be sentimental. We learn in different ways.

For the deep, intellectual thinkers, there’s some hefty theology here, in grappling with the concept of the incarnation of the eternal God as a human being.

For those who want to change the world, there’s ample material here for social justice in our own day.

For those who learn through their senses, there’s plenty to explore through many different media.

And what if you are sentimental? Emotional response is also part of our humanity. Let’s not lose the mystery, our ability to wonder at this most engaging story.

It’s as we ponder these things we begin to realise this isn’t God’s story, it’s our story.

It turns out to be about us, and how God came to be with us, in all our varied circumstances. Our story is transformed by his presence, in the present, now.

And in that transformation, our story becomes God’s story.

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