ADVENTIST REVIEW ONLINE

F E A T U R E

BY KENT SELTMAN

Twas in the moon of winter-time when all the birds had fled,
That mighty Gitchi Manitou sent angel choirs instead.
Before their light the stars grew dim,
And wand'ring hunters heard the hymn:

"Jesus, your King, is born. Jesus is born. In excelsis gloria!"
Within a lodge of broken bark the tender Babe was found,
A ragged robe of rabbit skin enwrapped His beauty round.
And as the hunter braves drew nigh,
The angel song rang loud and high:

"Jesus, your King, is born. Jesus is born. In excelsis gloria!"
The earliest moon of wintertime is not so round and fair,
As was the ring of glory on the helpless Infant there.
While Chiefs from far before Him knelt,
With gifts of fox and beaver pelt.

"Jesus, your King, is born. Jesus is born. In excelsis gloria!"
O children of the forest free, O sons of Manitou,
The Holy Child of earth and heav'n is born today for you.
Come, kneel before the radiant Boy
Who brings you beauty, peace and joy.

"Jesus, your King, is born. Jesus is born. In excelsis gloria!"*

This poem is an English translation of a Christmas carol written in the language of the Huron Indians by a missionary, Father Jean de Brebeuf, in the seventeenth century_more than 300 years ago. Father Brebeuf wrote his answer to a question that each of us faces: How do we do justice to a story remote in time, place, and culture from our lives today?

Unlike the Huron Indians, we come to the Christmas story with some understanding of biblical archaeology, biblical history, and the texts of ancient writers, so it would seem that on this historical frame we could place the events of 2,000 years ago. Still, for those of us living in the dimension of human life--threescore and ten--even a span of 2,000 years is a difficult leap. A birth 2,000 years ago can be understood intellectually, but it is difficult to imagine the reality of life at that distance in time.

We may think that Father Brebeuf inappropriately stretched the details--from shepherds to braves, from kings to chiefs, from gold, frankincense, and myrrh to pelts of fox and beaver skin. But that stretch is really nothing compared to the stretch that God our Father made in the gift of Christmas when the Word--the abstract--was made flesh--the concrete--and dwelt among us. While the dimension of 2,000 years of time is a challenge for us, it is a greater challenge to think of God, who does not even live in the dimension of time--from everlasting to everlasting. This is even more abstract than the theory of relativity, which few of us can really comprehend. The story of Christmas is a great oversimplification of God; it was told 2,000 years ago so that we might catch a glimpse of the greater glory and story of God.

A birth in a stable, a Baby cradled in hay, is very quaint. In our imaginations we romanticize the scene at Christmas. Hundreds of reenactments are staged each December--live crèche scenes with real sheep, donkeys, cows, actors dressed in period garb, and a plastic Jesus doll. Each Christmas these scenes across the nation create traffic jams of curious and, perhaps, devoted Christmas onlookers. But the reality of a lived-in stable is quite remote from the romantic reenactment on a clean church lawn. A lived-in stable is not even the cattle barn at the state fair where young 4-H'ers sleep in fresh straw beside their "baby beef." When we retell the story of Christmas we sanitize it, we romanticize it to meet our own image of what we would like it to be.

Without a vigorous exercise of our imagination, we retell the story of Christmas to ourselves as if it is set in the world of peace and prosperity in which we live. But the reality is that it was a hostile world into which this Baby came--probably more like being born in a stable in Sarajevo in 1994 than in a stable on the lawn of a church in an American city today. Almost immediately there was a price on the Christ child's head. Even the act of taxation--the purpose of the journey to Bethlehem--is not quite a friendly, voluntary act.

We retell the Christmas story each year, but even out of the King James translation it is, for all its glory and wonder, only a poor humble symbolic hint of the real story of God. The words of the King James translation are, after all, only linguistic symbols--we provide the images based on our previous experience with those words. The Christmas season crèche scenes are only visual symbols of the real Bethlehem stable, the real living animals, and the real Mary cradling Jesus--God in the flesh--in her arms of flesh. That scene, however, symbolizes a larger and greater Christmas story that centers on the love of a God who, because of our limitations, gave us the story in the flesh of a child that we might see beyond to understand Him better.

Like the Huron Indians, we too are limited in our ability to understand. But we should pray that we can retell the Christmas story to ourselves in a way that will penetrate the reality of the God behind the Baby in a manger. Then we can have a grand celebration of Christmas and more fully comprehend the Christmas message:

"Jesus, your King, is born. Jesus is born. In excelsis gloria!"

*Walter Ehret and George K. Evans, The International Book of Christmas Carols (Engle-wood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1963).

Kent Seltman is director of marketing for the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.