by Jason Byassee
Jason Byassee
I’ve never liked the bumper sticker, “God kissed the earth and called it Boone.” Don’t get me wrong–I love Boone. But the slogan undoes one of my favorite traits of North Carolinians: we’re humble. Wataugans included! But maybe there is something to this kissing the earth thing.
The first time I saw the Church of the Nativity, 20 years ago, I was underwhelmed. It’s old, cramped, dank–while it’s cool that Christians have worshiped there since the 300s, it’s really really old. Its worshipers are mostly Eastern Orthodox, whose dark icons and drab clerical wear and overwrought decoration didn’t appeal to me spiritually. Still don’t. Being there again this time reminded me of these shortfalls. The small door to the outside I preached on Sunday is terrific. The cramped mash of people heading to the spot of Christ’s birth is claustrophobia-inducing. Some parts of the holy land are not so awesome.
But I remember seeing her: an older woman speaking a language I didn’t understand. She threw herself on the stone floor of the Nativity, arms extended in prayer, and she kissed the place where, tradition has it, Christ was born. She kissed it over and over. The place itself is a silver star with 14 points for the 14 generations mentioned in Matthew between Abraham and David, 14 more between David and the Babylonian exile, and 14 more before the birth of Christ (remember all the “begats”?). As she kissed the star, I kept wondering, do they ever clean that thing?! But I also thought something else. This woman knows how to worship. I don’t know who she was or what country she came from. And it didn’t matter. She recognized Jesus. And I look forward to learning more about her in His presence one day.
The holidays approach. We are in our standard end-of-the-year money crunch, needing a strong conclusion to the church’s financial year to meet our financial obligations for 2014. We are collecting pledge cards for 2015 giving, hoping to improve on the half million or so pledged for 2014 against a budget of $1.2 million. We are also planning to worship–we have our Thanksgiving meal on Sunday evening November 23, our Advent Festival approaches the week following, November 30. We will worship during Advent with a healing service, likely on December 21, we will worship 5 times on Christmas Eve (4 especially for small children, 6 for all ages, 8 at Blackburn’s, 8 with lessons and carols, 11 with candlelight, communion at all). School will get cancelled, family will arrive or we’ll travel, work will stop, and the earth will exhale a little. The holidays are grueling and magic both. You know what I mean.
It is all good and it all has to happen. Which leads me back to the woman kissing the ground in Bethlehem. Who knows if this is the spot? Unlike our western imagination, which has Jesus born in a wooden building like a barn, places for animals in that part of the Middle East are usually caves. We saw caves throughout Israel and these would have been used as stables. The Church of the Nativity is built on a cave, purportedly the one in which Mary bore the One who bore the universe. The woman I saw 20 years ago was bearing in her spirit the One whom Mary bore in her body.
We don’t know of course whether this was the spot. As is often said in Israel ‘If it wasn’t here, it was certainly within a few hundred yards of here!’ But this is the heart of the incarnation. God kissed the earth and called it “salvation.” And that’s not just what brings us joy at Christmas. It’s what makes it worth getting out of the bed every single day of our lives.