I am partial to storytelling and storytellers, since I am one. But in no place more than the birth story of Jesus does this reality hit home.  The more rational types are always trying to turn Christianity into a series of propositions which only succeeds in rendering the most thrilling narrative ever to grace a mind into propositions and abstractions that could be used as sleep aids.

No, when God set out to save humanity in the Christian telling, it was in stories. The smallest elements of a story. There’s a subject. There is a verb. And you have a story underway. A young woman with a problem pregnancy. An occupied country in despair. A local ruler determined to kill her child.

          Some critical scholars have been dismissive of the birth stories of the New Testament. They aren’t as lofty as healings and demons cast into swine and all the intrigue of the Passion. Some have even suggested that they are little fables tacked on later to explain Jesus’ divinity and humanity. The real theology, they say, comes later—the good stuff.

          I want to humbly argue, though, that these stories are powerful on their own and tell us a lot. Someone does something or sees something and the story unfolds. “And there appeared to the Old Priest Zechariah an angel,” “Joseph had a dream, and an angel warned him not to go home.” and they went to Egypt, fleeing from old Herod.”  “And Mary set out to go see Elizabeth.”

          We have babies leaping in wombs, an old woman bearing a baby after all those years, her deaf and mute husband, silenced by an angel, getting his voice back, astrologers following stars. It’s a pretty good story, deep and rich and true about the way God chooses to work.

          A true story told me by Fisher Humphreys. At Duke University Chapel one year they had a nativity play with little children, towel-wrapped and acting out the story, as it will be a million times this year, too. One little boy was picked to be the cruel innkeeper, but he was not satisfied with his lines. “But I don’t want to turn them away. She has to have baby Jesus,” he explained.

          The director would go over it and over it again to help him understand that this was the story, and he had to deliver the lines accurately. Finally he seemed persuaded. The night came, the chapel was full, and there came the climactic moment as his parents watched and video ro. d. There was a knock at the door, and the boy came forth. Joseph inquired for some room, and the lad said, “I’m sorry, there’s no room in the inn, but won’t you at least come in for some drinks?”

          Can’t fault the little guy. The story has some hard edges. We are tempted to soften the pain of slaughtered babies and jealous rulers and terrified immigrants. It was a desperate time. You might even say the worst of times. And the story plainly says that while we were still lost in the tragedy called sin, God showed up, as Forrest Gump said once.

The word became flesh. It was the right time, Paul said. When people were hopeless, and Rome ran the world. You might even say it was the best of times.

          That’s our story. Jim McClendon, the late Baptist theologian, said, “The Bible is the church’s book, we are the people of that book.”  That is our story. I heard Wendy Wright once say that there are really three stories we deal with in the Christian faith. There is THE story—the one in the Bible, God’s story. It’s about how things got the way they did and what God did about it. It is a strange, scary, exciting story.

          Then there is the story of the church, OUR story, the one we share. That story is the story of this gospel as it has lived out in the tragedies and joy of life through history.  We ask, “What does it mean to be the church now?  No one else has ever done it in this time before.”

          Then there is my story, unique and distinctive. And your story, unique and one-of-a-kind.  No one has ever lived the journey you are one.

          But here is the amazing part—somehow, these three stories are linked, one, connected. That story and our story can be my story, too.

          The story of Christmas is about shepherds and wise men. And it is about murder and power, too. It’s about poverty and wealth. And d. air and hope. All the things we are living in these stories of ours.

It is about women and children in rusty old cars and addicts swearing for the thousandth time that this time they mean it. It’s about pain and brokenness and family dysfunctions and having children anyway even if the world IS going to hell in a lead-weighted handbasket.

          This is the story, and it is our story. The story of Christmas. The story of all human beings. There is an army everywhere and God sends a baby. There’s a war in Ukraine, but refugees survive. . ’s hard to figure out down on the ground. You just live it and see where it goes.

We are still writing this chapter of ours. You do not know how you get there, but if God is in it, you will. And God promises it will be great. That’s what we say. And it’s a story for everyone, not just the oligarchs and billionaires, not merely middle-class churchy people. It is for humanity itself.

          That is our story.  The story of love made flesh, living on in us until the great resolution of all things.

          It might be good to remember when other stories are crowding our minds these days. Stories about gloom and despair. Stories about corruption in high places and tragedy in the smallest town. Sometimes you need to lay down the device and pick up a book, get a different frame to get you through.