This Christmas Eve at the Cathedral Church of St. Luke and St. Paul in mid-town Charleston, as in other parishes across our diocese and nation, children and their families will gather for the annual Christmas Pageant. Scripts that have been more or less memorized and rehearsed will be played out before the admiring eyes of family and friends. Performances will lurch forward in the usual manner. Archangels with wings and halos will stand in pulpits or announce with trembling voices from the lectern microphones: “Be not afraid, Behold I bring you good news of a great joy that will come to all the people”¦.” Shepherds will arrive at makeshift stables where the Holy Family gathers ”˜round a manger. Perhaps Shepherd #1 will speak his lines boldly and clearly; Shepherd #2’s muttered words will hardly be heard past the second pew; and Shepherd #3 will too obviously read his part from a page taped to the back of the stuffed lamb he nervously clutches to his chest. Of course there will be the normal missed lines”¦as well as the directions uttered from off stage. But there will also be those electrifying and unscripted moments that bring surprised laughter and joyous tears that every mother and father and grandparent cherishes””the unscripted and electrifying moments when grace and candlelight abounds.
There were such moments of course two thousand years ago when the interplay between God’s script and the unscripted response of his people played itself out on the world’s stage occurring as it did in a minor country, among a seemingly unimportant tribe; and yet with electrifying purpose (as astonishing as it may seem to the eyes of the skeptical) God through the incarnation and atoning work of Jesus Christ brought salvation for all people (Titus 2:11).
One scripted and yet unrehearsed moment was after the Angel Gabriel sent from God proclaimed to Mary the God-scripted-lines, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you: therefore, the child to be born will be holy””the Son of God.” And then the entire unseen heavenly host and all the rest of the created order of the universe held their collective breath and waited for Mary’s unscripted and unrehearsed lines which her few but godly years had been preparing her to speak: “Behold, I am the bondservant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word.”