When you are the solo pastor of a small congregation, as I was many years ago, fresh out of Divinity School, you are pretty much responsible for everything: leading Sunday Worship, preparing and delivering a weekly sermon, recruiting Sunday School teachers, balancing the budget, organizing and leading a weekly program for youth, seeing that the furnace is working and the sidewalks shoveled – and the Children’s Christmas Pageant. And so in the first year of my first congregation in Dyer, Indiana, it fell to me to come up with some kind of Christmas Pageant. To say that I was inexperienced and unprepared is an understatement. I wrote a simple script, persuaded a retired teacher to help with costumes, rudimentary sets and the all-important matter of who gets to be the stars, Mary and Joseph. Boys not cast as Joseph competed for the coveted role of the Magi, or Wisemen or Kings, as they are sometimes called, because the costumes included actual crowns. We rehearsed one Saturday morning and my responsibility was directing and trying to maintain a semblance of order, the church pews alive with excited, squirming children. It didn’t quite rise to the chaos and hilarity of Barbara Robinson’s “The Best Christmas Pageant Ever” but it was close.

When the night arrived for the performance the little church was full of parents and families. The lights went out and the performance commenced with critical help from the school teacher serving as prompter. I stood in the back holding a two-year-old daughter in my arms who was fascinated with the whole process. Mary and Joseph arrived and walked solemnly down the center aisle, the sheep and cattle assembled reverently around the wicker basket manger where my daughter’s Thumbelina doll was baby Jesus. I recall, it actually squirmed when you pulled the string in her back. In the corner of the chancel were ten young shepherds. An angel appeared, illuminated by a flashlight she was holding, and announced: “Behold! A child is born this day in Bethlehem of Judea, a Savior who is Christ the Lord.” One of the shepherds loudly responded, “Let us go unto Bethlehem to see this thing that has happened.” And the two-year-old in my arms, in a voice as clear as a bell on a cold winter night, announced, “OK! Let’s go!”

And so, in one way or another millions of us will go to Bethlehem to see. The late Frederick Buechner, novelist and theologian, reminds us that the mystery of Christmas reaches beyond the specifics of the Christian religion.  The whole world stops on Christmas Eve, Buechner wrote, to listen to a story it already knows, believers and non-believers alike listen to a story, which if it is true, is the most important story in the world.

There are many reasons the ancient story gets to so many of us. I think it is mostly about hope, hopefulness, hope in the future as a realistic possibility. The three Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Islam and Christianity, are religions of hope, each looking forward to a time of peace, reconciliation, and justice. Muslims, Jews and Christians revere the same ancient promise:

“The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad,
the desert shall rejoice and blossom,
like the crocus it shall blossom abundantly….
“Strengthen the weak hands 
and make firm the wobbly knees.
Say to those who are of a fearful heart,
‘Be strong, do not fear!’”
The eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the death unstopped:
The lame shall leap like a deer, 
and the tongues of the speechless shall sing for joy.
For waters shall break forth in the wilderness
and streams in the desert…..”  Psalm 35

And yet, it is a challenge to remain hopeful and realistic these days. The news is so grim that some of us are swearing off reading about it or watching television news… wars continue to destroy cities and towns and kill innocent civilians, many of them children in the Middle East, Ukraine, Russia, several African nations. We Chicagoans are in the midst of an epidemic of gun violence and the continuing reality of generation after generation of political corruption. At the same time Americans face a national political transition that promises the dismantling of many of the policies and programs that made us grateful and proud of our country in the past.

It is truly a challenge to remain hopeful these days. And yet there seems to be something in us that stubbornly refuses to give up hope.

The ancient story, after all, takes place in a context that is anything but hopeful: a heavily pregnant woman and her husband caught up in a situation totally out of their control: a census that requires them to travel many miles from their home to the town where they are to be registered: the onset of labor and the birth in a cattle stall because there were no available accommodations. Not long after the birth the couple and their newborn infant become refugees, political refugees fleeing a murderous regime. In all it is not very promising, not at all hopeful.

And yet the story has inspired hope down through the centuries as no other story has. My favorite image of the entire project is light shining in the darkness. And my hope is that it will be a light shining in the darkness to all of us again this year.

The story has inspired hope in every circumstance down through history. It has inspired some of the most sublime art and music humans have ever produced. The story has inspired efforts to relieve human suffering for two thousand years. It has been the impetus behind the establishment of hospitals and clinics in even the most remote and difficult situations. It has comforted and strengthened and encouraged political dissidents in oppressive political situations down through the centuries right up to the present. In every age, including the present one, it has inspired men and women to hope and strive for a time of peace and justice when all are valued and respected and protected and regarded as equals.

My favorite image and metaphor of Christmas is light shining in the darkness. And it is my particular hope that it will be like a light shining in the darkness for all of us this year.