Icon by by Ivanka Demchuk UBP

The story of the world—the story we just heard read in the church as our gospel for Christmas, the world’s true story from which all true stories are told—happened in a world exactly like our world.

It was as is ours a world of emperors and governors, of trade routes and ships, of armies and (less deadly) missiles, of wheat, wine, and oil, of palaces and hovels, of well-appointed houses and simple shacks, of swords and spears, of pubs and caves and lean-tos, of banquets and famines, of night, stars, cold, and sheep…same world.

A person that humans allowed to be important, Augustus, with a big made-up title—“Caesar” (if that sounds ancient, try ones we make up like czar, prime minister, führer, or president [persons who are here today and gone tomorrow, whose power is illusory—it’s not ultimately real and it doesn’t last])—wanted a head count of his conquered masses. And everyone had to go out of their way to appease the bully.

The government order causes hardship for a lot of people. The most trouble (as in our present pandemic moment) is visited on the poor who are made to travel long distances on meager resources to the place of their birth for the census because that’s what Caesar’s order dictates.

The world’s truest story is the story of one such family, a pregnant mother, and her rough-handed carpenter fiancé, who could find no room, out in all of that cold and all of that dark, for the God she bore and the God he protected.

They had both in their own ways made room for God. Mary had said yes to the divine invitation to bear God in her womb. Joseph had heeded the Angel and shielded Mary, his betrothed, had loved her as he had been loved.

They had made room for God but the world had no room for them or for God—you see, it’s the same world as our world—even though she was pregnant and in labor. But such is God’s way in this world, homeless and with no place to lay his head.

The first Christians tell us that the couple found space with the animals in a cave among shit and straw. And then she gave birth like all mothers do: it was painful, and there was blood and sweat and serum, and cords to cut, and a cry from the human God split their ears and their silent night.