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It's become a tradition at Dismas Fellowship to put on a skit at our Christmas celebration. The Christmas story always comes across in a loving though somewhat "twisted" way as some have called it. We like to have as many people involved as possible and to act like kids again.If your memories of Christmas include your father pulling down the Christmas tree in a drunken rage, this may be the first time you've ever acted in a Christmas pageant and who cares if you're entering middle age.
This year Marie suggested we give the Dismas twist to the Huron Christmas Carol. Some of the guys at Keele got busy making angels wings and a portable moon. We bought plastic bows and arrows at the Dollar Store for the "wandering hunters (who) heard the hymn". We scrounged some fur coats for rabbit skin and then we looked for people to play the holy family.
We asked Dawn if she would be Mary and Keith to be Joseph and then we asked Joe if he would be the "radiant boy" Baby Jesus. We wanted Keith a.k.a. Joseph to carry him into the room and place him on Mary's lap with the angels and the hunters looking on.I admit that in the picture he may look more like a corpse than a bouncing and messianic baby boy, but his entrance in Keith's sturdy arms was the hilarious high point of the play.
It was a comment though, that Joe made when we first asked him to be Baby Jesus that has stuck with me this Christmas. Without missing a beat he quipped, "My name is Jesus, and I'm an alcoholic."
Joe is full of quips but this off the cuff comment had bite. I sensed that he had struck the essential reality of Christmas.
This Christmas Day as we do every Christmas we will read from the Gospel of John "and the Word became flesh and lived among us".
We give this truth a fancy name - incarnation, "embodied in flesh", but when Joe puts it in the classic words of AA, "My name is Jesus and I'm an alcoholic", he startles me with a new picture of God's acceptance of our humanity.
Not even dying between two convicts lies outside the circle of his love.
Not even our half-baked skits can diminish its power.
