I.

When I was about thirteen I happened to be just sort of randomly rummaging through the back of my parents’ closet one December day, when I found all of our Christmas presents. They were not yet wrapped, but just tucked away in shopping bags. In my excitement, I carefully examined this stash of goods, and even more carefully put everything back exactly the way I found it, so it looked utterly undisturbed. And I proceeded through the rest of the month unencumbered by a sense of mystery about what would be found under the tree on Christmas morning.

This knowledge did not diminish my heightened sense of anticipation. If anything, it made my eagerness more acute. I had no lingering doubts about what I would receive. Like a person who had already seen the movie and knew the happy ending, I knew what was coming. And I approached the holiday with confidence and glee, as well as anticipation.

That Christmas I awoke long before dawn and stayed in my room for agonizing minutes until I heard my sister and brother stirring. Only then could I make my own falsely nonchalant entrance to find what I knew I would find.

But this knowledge also made me feel somewhat defiled, like I had lost yet another sliver of childhood innocence. Like I had slouched deeper into a jaded adulthood, devoid of mystery, wonder, surprise, and hope. Now I was conscious of playing, of acting a part, of pretending to be surprised. And I was aware of a kind of deep loneliness, generated by the burden of this knowledge. It was knowledge that I sensed could not be shared.

And this was not just because I had robbed myself of the surprise or because I would be disappointing people I loved. But I was also ashamed that I couldn’t keep the fairy-tale going. I couldn’t believe. I couldn’t, in a sense, trust.

This was, you recall, around 1968. Iconoclasm was in the air. Myths were dropping like pheasants in a hail of buckshot. Our generation was reveling in exposing the little, flawed, confused "man behind the curtain," who was pretending to be a great and fearsome wizard. We were finding pathetic and corrupt men behind every curtain in those days.

Indeed, it was our mission to find them and reveal the "truth" about them, like snooping through our parents’ closets to find the presents and receipts that proved that they were lying when they credited it all to miracles and fairy tales. No one was going to pull one over on us, least of all our clueless parents.

The Bible was not exempt from this wall-to-wall critique of everything that smacked of convenient mythology. And the more outrageous elements of this story, like the virgin birth and the ubiquity of angels, were dismissed, even by many pastors back then, as quaint, obsolete, infantile, and unnecessary.

I’m sure many went through the motions of Christmas with their tongues in their cheeks, burdened with the knowledge that they had seen the packages in the back of the closet, they had seen the man behind the curtain... but would play along anyway with the credulous folks in the pews who still seemed to actually believe all this.

It’s no wonder so many of my father’s friends left the ministry to find some work that didn’t involve trying to do life support on some dead fairy-tales.

II.

But the real tragedy is that we think we have to keep what we know a secret, so there develops this ragged gash between what we know and what we feel we can say. And what gets lost in the shuffle is the fact that what I found in the closet that day were gifts. They were presents for me, and my sister and brother, expressions of parental love and joy at my presence.

We have to be careful that in exposing the so-called myths we don’t miss the very truths these stories were originally constructed to communicate. Because the truth is an even greater miracle than the mythology surrounding it.

In The Wizard of Oz, the wizard is exposed... by a dog, no less. Even he admits that while he may be a very good man... he is a very bad wizard. And it’s when he, the ordinary man and not the wizard, gives the travelers some recognition and certification of the virtues they already had inside them, that the miracle happens. Because the real miracle is when we come to see what’s really there! The real miracle is when we see what had been there with us and within us all along!

Then, instead of being dazzled by the smoke and fire and projected glory of the special effects, we see just a good man. And that’s enough to open up all the possibilities that a wizard would have been powerless to even show us, much less take us into.

Behind the curtain and deep in the closet of this story from Luke’s gospel, we find just a baby. We read the story and we follow the homeless couple, jerked around by government tax policy, rejected from an over-booked local inn, landing in the municipal garage, as it were, trying to make a nest in a corner where the woman could have a baby. Contrary to the mythology, this baby looks, sounds, smells, and feels like any other baby, as he is flushed into the humid and smelly air of a barn, wrapped in his mother’s shredded undergarments, and laid in an animal feed-trough.

This story has become too sanitized, too overlaid with interpretation and imagination, too familiar to us. We think we know what it’s about. And when someone digs into the back of the closet of Christmas and finds there only a baby, maybe we are offended.

But listen: there’s no such thing as "only" a baby. A baby is the fulfillment of 15 billion years of evolution! A baby, every baby, is a transcendent miracle, an incredibly complicated bundle of potential, the distilled essence of the universe’s collected wisdom. Each and every baby carries humanity’s greatest potential, which is union with God the Creator. We are each equipped to finish the journey of creation, and launch into the final stage in which creation returns to the Creator in love.

III.

This particular baby, squirming in the straw, has come to show us ourselves. Every baby does that, I think. Seen with the poetic eyes of faith, we see in an infant the hope of our race and planet. And we also see ourselves. Each infant is like that wizard who reveals to us who we already are.

But this baby was different; he was fully human like us, but he was also much, much more. Because from the very first moment of his conception, he changes and transforms those who come in contact with him. He needed only to stir in the womb for his mother burst into song, and that song would be sung generation after generation forever in praise of God. This baby was not just showing people their true selves; he was also showing them God’s saving Presence among us.

But you have to come into some kind of contact with him, and all the things he did, and even the stories and legends that have sprouted up around him, are supposed to make it easier for us to experience his Presence among us. Just like we hide our children’s gifts through December so they can be revealed almost magically on December 25^th. We shroud the experience in mystery and ritual, intending to heighten it and underscore it and interpret its specialness. The rituals and mystery and stories are not the point, however. The point is the experience of giving and receiving as an expression of love.

If you understand and accept this core thing, then the rituals and stories have served their purpose for you. Then you can choose freely to participate in them because of the way they express and manifest the deeper truth.

Listen: it doesn’t matter how you find him. It doesn’t matter if you find him buried in the back of your parents’ closet, or under the tree on Christmas morning. It doesn’t matter if you find him in a careful exegesis of the infancy narratives in Matthew and Luke, or in singing Christmas carols, or in the eyes of a homeless child. As long as you find him, and in so doing find yourself in him, and therefore find God’s Presence in your own heart.

On the one hand, he’s just another baby. But on the other hand, he is the living God, the eternal One who reveals and embodies God’s saving Presence with and within us! We know that because of the way he shows us who we are and whose we are. We know that because he shows us our future and destiny. We know that because here we are, two-thousand, and five years later, and he still touches us. He still lives with and within us, showing us our own blessings, revealing our own goodness, bringing us into touch, into relationship, with the One who made all things.

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