Christmas Stories - “Mary & Joseph”

This is the last Sunday before Christmas, which means right now some of you are in full Hallmark Movie mode… and some of you are in full Die Hard mode. (Ya’ll know Die Hard is a Christmas Movie… Right?) You’ve got Amazon boxes stacked in the entry way by the door, you’ve wrapped exactly three gifts, and you’ve eaten enough Christmas cookies to require a New Year’s resolution you have no intention of keeping.

And somewhere in the middle of the shopping, school parties, office parties, band concerts, Christmas pageants, ugly sweater nights, and “Pastor, are y’all doing Christmas Eve services?”…

Two Identical Services… 3 & 5 PM. We all tend to do something I find kind of funny…

We turn the people of the Christmas story into figurines.

Neat. Clean. Painted.

Notice, they are all White people… except for one Wise Man… Not 1st Century Middle Eastern Jew among them.

Mary is always looking like she just stepped out of a Christian magazine photo shoot:

Perfect robe, perfect posture, not a hair out of place.

Joseph’s standing there like a calm, holy lumberjack.

Baby Jesus looks like He’s 18 months old and is already sleeping through the night.

No one looks tired. No one looks stressed. No one looks like they’ve been riding a donkey while nine months pregnant.

But the real Mary and Joseph?

They were not the figures in the Manger scene you have set up on your entertainment center.