Small Beginnings: A Christmas Presentation

Lucy: small beginning to our family's second generation

Kelle was not quite a year old when we moved from South Florida to Rochester, NY. Soon after her first birthday we were preparing to celebrate her first Christmas--another significant event we'd observe away from my family. During that season I was invited to a Christmas event featuring a poetry reading. One poem in particular I felt I could have written myself as I experienced Christmas preparation with a very young child in need of most of my attention. The poem reaches its peak when the mother exclaims, “You put that back!” and a tiny voice responds, “But Mama, I love the baby Jesus!” Dissolving in my tears I somehow felt understood in my difficult adjustment to a new home and role at the very beginning of our small family's story. 

Many of our best-known and beloved stories grow from small beginnings--like the vine that grows from a small bean and reaches into the clouds, or the pea that is hidden beneath multiple mattresses to identify a real princess, or the small box that, when opened, releases to the ether all the troubles of the world. The story of our faith family is filled with small beginnings as well: a bite of fruit, a tiny baby in a basket, only a boy named David.

Many of our faith fathers and mothers express feelings of smallness and inadequacy when they are called to take their part in the story: consider Moses doubting his ability to communicate God's message, or Naomi returning empty from Moab, or Esther approaching her husband-king and preparing to die.

Of course the story that changed the course of the world began small: a young girl, a brief message, a newborn baby, and a few people no one would have guessed to be main actors. We’re naturally attracted to big and often ignore or overlook the small. But small beginnings don’t always remain small; the best of them spin out into greater tales and movements.

Jesus appreciates small. He loves to tell stories about small things because he loves small things. One of the small things he talks a lot about are seeds. He compares God’s word and even himself to tiny--sometimes unidentifiable-- seeds that in time and under the right conditions will grow into something the seed hardly hints at.

You might remember his parable about the sower--and if you are looking for an exciting story, this would not be the one because it's very short and by the end you don't know what kind of seeds were sown nor what became of them. We only know that some fell along the beaten path, some among weeds, some in rocky soil, and some into fertile soil; that the seeds that fell in fertile soil reproduced 30, 60, 100 times. The end.

My dad once told me a story like that. In charge of me over bedtime, I begged for a story. He must have been tired and eager for a respite because the tale he came up with took him only 15 seconds to tell. Though bearing a vague moral, the story's only character was a bubble which popped. And that's pretty much it. No conflict, no real protagonist--just "once upon a time" and "the end. Aristotle would be scandalized.

The way I felt as my dad left the room the night is how I imagine Jesus' disciples’ after hearing him tell the parable about seeds. When the crowd goes away, his friends ask him what he meant, and I'll bet there was some tone to their question. Goodness, Jesus, they may have said; you basically narrated what happens every day around here! Everyone plants fields or gardens. That! was NOT! a story! It wasn’t anything!

But Jesus doesn't apologize. Too small for you? he seems to suggest and then tells his puzzled friends that this story is key to all of his stories because it offers the best possible image the word might do to us if it lands well. So next time you plant a seed or see someone else planting, he may say to us, remember my story.

He also relates faith to seeds and says that if the tiniest of all gets planted in us, mountains will move when we tell them to. He isn’t saying that faith in its seed form will move a mountain any more than a royal newborn baby can take up the responsibilities of king or queen. That's magical thinking. A fairytale. But give that seed good, well-prepared soil, water and air, and mountains may tremble. We witness this truth when we see a tree seedling growing through the crack of of a sidewalk or too close to the foundation of a house. That kind of movement doesn't happen overnight, but over time.  Pregnancy is another way of understanding faith. What a baby can do at conception and in the process of development is a different story than when it’s born; a far different story when the child grows into maturity.

Jesus often addresses his friends as “O you of little faith” when they show fear or confusion. “Little Faith” seems to be a nickname, reflecting undeveloped and possibly fragile faith--perhaps faith that is beginning to root and sprout, but still very small. Maybe even microscopic. The seed has fallen but it has a way to go before mountains begin to move. Jesus recognizes their small faith as faith because he planted it. His great faith sees the possibilities as it lies hidden and buried.

Jesus compares his own life to a seed as he foretells his death: Unless a seed falls into the ground it remains a seed. For any seed to unfold, it must first fall into the ground.  And so, he says, must I.

Seeds play a big part in the very beginning of our human story. Rather than creating everything over and over again, God sets in place a system of recreation. Everything God creates comes with seed to make more of themselves. Fish, bird, vegetable, flower, tree, animal and human being all come with "seed." Following their disobedience and just before God sends Adam and Eve out of the garden, he relays a message to the serpent. The short riddle contains a line where God says that the seed of the serpent will be at war with the woman's seed and that one of Eve's children will crush the serpent's head! What a small beginning to the story which grows and unfolds into the world's salvation.

Our faith fathers and mothers passed that seed story along with the seed itself, down through the centuries and generations and all the way to Mary. And when the Angel Gabriel greeted her,  she seemed to understand that the seed or chosen one waited for, longed for, and hoped for through long ages would come to rest in her. Though troubled, she isn't surprised. When the angel tells her she will conceive, she has only one questions: how? She’s betrothed, but not yet with Joseph. She knows how things work.  

Many things about this particular and very special small beginning fascinate me, among them that a woman at the beginning of her young life is asked to give so much and is given so little to go on. Basically--Hello, you’re going to have a son, you will name him Jesus, he will be great, a king who will rule forever over an eternal kingdom. How? God. This child is God’s own son. And that is about the size of it. Read Luke 1.

Gabriel doesn’t give instructions about food or care. The baby will grow and develop as all babies do, his identity hidden. Most of the world won't realize its own eminent expectation--that the baby Mary carries is the one who will most matter to us all. Only Mary hears the words that reflect it's happening here. Now. You. She believes, says yes, and God plants the seed of the hope of the world into her womb. She is prepared because she knows who she is: I am the Lord’s servant, she responds. Let what you've described happen. Let it all happen as it will happen whatever will happen. Already expectant, Mary becomes even more so.

We are invited to be expectant like her, ready to receive the word God has for us. When we open our hearts to him, we will in time feel something important moving, kicking- happening-- even if  it can’t yet be seen. And Mary's "let it happen" prayer can be ours.

Long ago I gained an an appreciation for the power of small things on a Christmas Day that had every promise of being merry and warm, happy and bright.  That Christmas my mother was in her ninth month of pregnancy, expecting her fifth child. Earlier in the month my parents learned that the house in which we lived was being sold out from under us; we would have to be out soon after the holidays were over. The news was a shock, especially to my mother. The sale went through, and Christmas preparations and celebrations that year took place in the midst of pregnancy and packing.

A few weeks before Christmas my mom, enormous with child, received a second shock when a woman showed up to our front door, grasping the shoulder of my brother, then in 4th grade. The woman insisted that Mom come with her, right now! to see what had happened. Mom's clothes were her robe--possibly the only comfortable garment she owned at the time, and she begged the woman to please just tell her now and here what had happened, promising to do to Dave whatever the woman wanted her to. The woman insisted, so mom followed, all the time imagining dead dogs and torched buildings.

What had happened? Dave and his friend had lit and tossed a small lit cherry bomb into a random yard. The woman whose yard it was and who was now hustling Dave and Mom onward had been carrying a box of Christmas decorations down the staircase when the bomb went off. The concussion from the blast shattered a small pane in the front door of her house and the poor woman thought she was being shot at. Throwing the box she was carrying, Christmas balls and bows flew and tumbled down the stairs.

Dave’s friend had successfully fled the scene, but somehow Dave got caught and became the woman's prisoner. When the three--Dave, Mom and the woman-- finally arrived to the woman’s house, her husband was waiting on the front porch, clearly as much in the dark as mom. Up the steps of the porch the angry woman led her captives, pointed to the front door and the broken pane and exclaimed “This! This is what happened!!”

Dave sobbed out his 4th grade crime while the woman added her angry punctuations and Mom shivered in her robe. Though neither women nor Dave could possibly have seen a grain of humor in the event (and there truly may be no humor in the actual event)--the unfortunate bomb, the box of decorations, the tiny broken pane and the fact that two young boys were responsible for such a state of affairs --her husband did. First he snickered, then chuckled, and then broke into open laughter. The woman instantly focused her fury from Dave to her husband, and Mom, taking the opportunity, directed Dave towards the porch steps and sidewalk, promising as she left that Dave would be paying for the broken glass.

The third shock would happen after Christmas and at the end of a long moving day--the coldest day of that winter. Before Mom could spend a night in her new house and before one box would be unpacked, she would go into labor.

My brave, besieged mother.

Christmas landed between the unfortunate cherry bomb event and moving day and that morning I began to experience a raging earache that no aspirin could touch. Since an earache is not an emergency, we had to wait until morning to find a doctor. Crying made the pain worse, but as my tears flowed throughout the day and into bedtime, it was clear that there would be no sleep for me.

Sometime during the night, my mother came into my room and lay next to me on my bed. Her very ripe abdomen rested against my back as she reached to cover my ear with her hand. Lying there together in the darkness, I became aware of her baby moving against me and experienced sensations she must have been feeling for several months. As the hours passed, the baby, thinly veiled and hidden from sight, turned and kicked. Between my mother’s soothing words and tender touch and the sense of her baby’s soft, persistent activity, I was profoundly comforted.

The memory of mom’s small gesture and the presence of her baby, unborn and yet unknown, remain with me to this day, reminding me that even small realities can enter into our pain and help us endure; that when threatening things in the world are happening, some important reality may be at work even if--maybe especially if-- unseen. Jesus' cosmic prayer, your kingdom come; your will be done on earth as it is in heaven,* which may very well have grown from Mary's very personal let it happen to me, is the means by which we invite or give access to realities possessing power to impact the world for good. 

PS. My brother Dave recently shared with me how he has learned to pray Jesus' prayer in his dangers, toils and snares: Bring it on! is his surprising and bold translation, and he means it. Scary, but not really surprising. He's the one who lobbed the cherry bomb at age 10.