Story Time
Note: The following is a sermon delivered on December 15, 2024, at Holy Trinity Episcopal Church in Fayetteville, North Carolina, based on readings from Christmas 1, Year C. An audio version is found above.
The baby invites us to tell stories.
When our eldest child was a baby, they screamed and screamed. All the time. Writhing in discomfort. Always restless. Unable to be comforted for what seemed like interminable stretches. They were loud. You can imagine holding this being, holding it as best you can, as it’s always moving, never satisfied, quicker than you are at displaying that something’s wrong in the world. They say: I am hungry. I am cold. I am startled. I am sick. I am bothered. The crying alarm goes off at 1am. 4am. It may be more accurate to say the alarm never turns off.
Parents, you know, keep vigils about this sort of thing. They are who we sing about when we sing about the weary world.
Two things tended to work in those days. First, one of us would swaddle the child up tightly and we’d blast classical music or jazz over the speakers in our house, and we would walk and walk. Up and down the hallways. In circles around the little rooms of that apartment. Everywhere.
The other thing that worked, over time, was stories. Prop the baby up, half on yourself and half nuzzled against the arm of the comfy chair. Crack open a cardboard book or, in this season, my childhood favorite, Goodnight Moon. And for a time, sometimes a long enough time, the baby would stop fussing.
They got used to this after a while, and eventually, they’d bring the book to you and insist you read it to them. And of course, you would. It is tough to say no to a baby.
Time tended to slow down in these moments. Breathing slows. Panic subsides. Systems regulate. And we can feel the heartbeat of the creation fluttering right there and hear the vibrations of the story radiating outward from the voice of the reader.
This is, I think, how God works. And I hope that we can understand it whether we are parents or not, in part because, for years now, some of us have shown up every few days, or at least at this part of the year, for our own kind of storytime. For time slowed down. The radiating voices and vibrations work on and through us, all the way down into our cells and synapses, reminding us to stop fussing.
These moments are little containers of time and space. Swaddling clothes. Cosmic music playing in the background. Story time.
It is almost as if we require this kind of confinement to appreciate what’s going on at all. The world beyond has an endless supply of stimuli: deadlines and headlines, ping, ping, ping. Each is upsetting in its own way. But in these moments, cozied up to the heart of God, something else is going on. Time expands. Life takes on a different quality, more spacious. Inside these little containers, strangely, is everything that matters.
Poets and artists know about these kinds of containers. Within the bounds of a picture frame or the confines of a block of marble or even the edges of the page, they express infinities. Back when I studied Shakespeare, we talked about this a lot: how genius emerges when there are limits. Ten or eleven syllables in a single line of poetry, when contained, prompt the creator to become more creative. More resourceful. Within the bounds of a single line of verse, and sometimes even a single word, enshrouded by enough context, we can see the possibilities erupt into double and triple meanings.
In this way of thinking, the baby is not merely a baby, but us. We’re fussy, too, and restless. Picky and unsatisfied. Longing, maybe, for tidings of comfort. In this way, we see ourselves as part of the story. This is also how I think God works.
The opening of John’s Gospel is the kind of container I’m talking about. Matthew and Luke have accounts that read like they’re written, in part, by accountants: prescriptive, all spelled out for us, even legalistic. But the writers of John are a community of poets, maybe, or at least really good Christmas carol writers, contemplating the same circumstance and responding altogether differently. In John, we need not be concerned with whether Quirinius is the Governor of Syria or if Bethlehem is the critical spot on the map. We don’t even need the baby in this telling.
Just The Word. Small, specific. Now in flesh appearing.
For those who first heard the Gospel of John, they’d have understood that word “Word” as “Logos,” which is a way of talking about the principles that knit together the cosmic story. The Word – the cosmic language of being – becomes small. Soft. Fragile. Contained. And something to be fussed over. In this way, the Word, like the Baby in the story, also means more than one thing.
When I listen to these opening lines of John, I do not fully understand them. They are abstract. Poetic. Lyrical. My brain is not yet processing the words, even as I hear them. It is almost as though they are there simply to create music and to convey some sense of the vibration at play in the world. The Word has a cradling effect. Soothing. Swaddling. I’m not ready for the legal briefs or the fact-based testimony. I just want you to read to me. With music playing in the background, like heaven and nature singing.
We’ve walked and walked for years through my fussing. In my unsettledness. In my distress. Now, say the writers of this hymn at the start of the Gospel, I’ll quiet down for a time if you’ll just let the vibrations hum. This, too, is how God works, in the patient, steady voice of a narrator or in the endless number of creative voicings that every character in the story has when the story has to come alive for the one being read to.
The story may be important sometimes. For now, I just need you to read to me. Use the funny voices. Make me laugh. Let’s make things small so I can see how big and how full of possibility they are.
The Word invites us to hear the infinite in the ordinary. Like a plain old song that resurfaces now and again in our throats. Or like a wardrobe to Narnia. Or like the living sound of the ocean in a conch shell that once contained an organism. Cosmic principles in a container. The Word, imprinted everywhere, eager to be read. Meek souls will receive it still.
Over time, we who are read to are called to become readers. Some of us will pick up the same books read when we were young. Some will invent stories creatively in the way our loved ones might have. Some will read the Word in the pages of the world, in the billions of stars that illuminate our reading, or by leafing through trees or examining the prints of fingers. Not everyone who encounters the story will understand its particulars. But perhaps they will understand what is underneath the telling: the voice of love that goes deep down, even beyond where we can understand it. In the heartbeats that go pah rum pah pum pum. The infinities of time and space set out in tiny packages arrayed before us beneath those sparkling trees. In traditions. In stories. In the holiday recipes for bread and wine.
For every minute in the lap of the storyteller, there are thousands of fleeting, seemingly disconnected seconds later when you’re in a rush and don’t hear all the details. Where things are never quiet. But even in these fractured pieces, you might catch a glimpse of the old story being told in a way that you know contains the DNA of the original narrative.
One day, not too long ago, the baby grew up all of a sudden and stood in line at the DMV, waiting for a little plastic card that says you can drive. A container if ever there was one. A little signpost that points us to a future of possibility. The man behind the desk asks a question I did not expect. The response?
“Yes, I’d like to be an organ donor.”
The invitation is for the Word to become flesh.
It is not always the baby crying.
In the poetry of the world, there are double and triple and infinite meanings, all available to us in the smallest and simplest of things.
Go and tell the story.