On the Nativity of the Lord

Oh Poverty
Source of Riches
Jesus, Son of God
Born in Bethlehem

I live and move and have my being in a world where deconstruction is a hobby, and for some a way of life. Of late, this amusement has moved beyond the considered nuance of the Ivory Tower and the careful consideration of the Chancel into the wider world of the Learning Channel, and/or very late-night TV. In such a context I was recently soberly informed that Joseph (and later his son, Jesus) could not have been a carpenter but had to have been a skilled stone mason. Joseph and Sons were probably independent contractors of some means who were working for King Herod. In almost the same breath I was assured that the Nativity, it just couldn't have happened.

It seems to me that there would be nothing for our post-moderns to deconstruct if two millennia ago—give or take the odd decade—a little boy had not been born in an inconvenient address and placed in an unconventional crib by exhausted, harried, and at least slightly displaced parents. Maybe there was no star, no Magi, no gold, frankincense, or myrrh. Maybe there were no Angels (because Angels don't exist) and even fewer shepherds. Maybe that Ox and Ass did not speak in the cozy midnight of the stable, and maybe Hump-Bump the Camel got stuck in the Eye of the Needle and never made it to Bethlehem. Yet, we have heard tell of each of these characters, events, actions, even if they are new to the story, peripheral or imagined, because of this small boy having come once, amid all this deconstructable fanfare—this silence, onto the stage of our world.

Through the long winter of our waiting, our wondering, our doubt, our hope, and in the midst of our present distress let us sing the song that the Angels undoubtedly never sang, in joyful memory of his coming and until he comes again to deconstruct our deconstructedness and make right the discombobulated horizon of our world.

Gloria in excelsis Deo!