The late Dr. Charles Allen wrote of a man who, trying to remain unnoticed, would slip quietly onto the back pew of his church in Houston for Sunday night worship. The man endeavored not to be seen because he knew he didn’t fit in with the others who were there – many of them among the most powerful and elite individuals in that city. They were members of what was then the largest United Methodist congregation in America. The man who came late, left early, and sat at the very rear was neither powerful nor elite. He was a person whose life had been damaged due to the disease of alcoholism. He had lost a job, a family, and a home – not to mention such other key losses as self-respect and a sense of being welcome or wanted. Most nights he slept in shelters. Sometimes, weather permitting, he slept in a local park that had available benches. He was gentle-natured, beaten-down, and weary. He was embarrassed by his station in life. Aware of all he had lost, he was perpetually sad. Dr. Allen said that he would see him come in a few minutes after the service began. He would watch as the man quietly slipped into a seat on the least occupied pew in the sanctuary, always near a rear exit. And Dr. Allen would think to himself: “There has to be a heaven for someone like him. A place where he doesn’t have to sneak in unnoticed and unwelcome. A place where neither drink nor memories hold him captive and break his heart. He clearly wants to believe in that kind of place, or he wouldn’t keep coming to this place. How unfair life would be if it all ended here. There simply has to be a heaven for someone whose life so far has been hell.”
I remembered that story as I drove yesterday, listening to Christmas music on Pandora. There are conflicts in the way the New Testament tells the Birth Narrative. Mark doesn’t mention it at all. John writes only with theological concepts, but no biographical information whatsoever. And Matthew and Luke clearly vary in their details. Furthermore, we know from Luke’s account, at least, that the Birth would not have occurred in December but, in all likelihood, sometime in the spring. That led me to wonder how many people, knowing those facts, perhaps decide that the Christmas Story didn’t even occur at all. Maybe it was all myth or fantasy, like Kris Kringle in a manger rather than a sleigh. Maybe there was no Holy Child who grew into “the Truth that sets us free.” All of that is what brought me to Dr. Allen’s story. I found myself thinking: “There had to be a Birth, a sacred invasion of unsacred turf, because of people like that broken man on the back pew.”
There had to be a Child in the dark and cold who knew what rejection felt like (“no room in the inn,” “his own received him not”). For all those who are lonely, for all those who are turned away, for all those who feel like outsiders or outliers, for all those who seek kindness or long simply to be noticed, there has to be the arrival of One who sees them and identifies with them and cares about them. If that is not the case, then what a cruel and pointless place this would be.
There has to be a Child who would come to know what grief feels like (weeping for Lazarus and for his cousin, John, and, we imagine, for his father, Joseph, years before most of his own story was written). How else do we survive hearing the words, “There’s nothing else we can do”? How else do we find the strength to sit on a pew during a memorial service when we feel like we simply cannot breathe or to walk away from a cemetery while leaving part of our very soul there? There has to be One who sits and walks with us.
There has to be a Child who knew what it feels like to be poor (at the beginning of his life he slept in an oxen stall and then became an immigrant, and at the end of his life he was jobless, homeless, and didn’t even own a change of clothes). Those who sleep beneath bridges or rummage through garbage cans searching for food that someone else threw out or hold cardboard signs at streets corners (“Homeless,” “Wounded veteran,” “Hungry,” “God bless you for helping”) need to have someone who understands and will wrap unseen arms around them.
There has to be a Child who knew what pain felt like (the flogging, the crown of thorns, the spikes breaking through his wrists and ankles). Those who are confined to beds or wheelchairs, who receive ongoing treatments and live in fear that those treatments won’t work, who look at the world through windows but are not strong enough to be out there in the world, need someone who says, “I get it. I’ve been there. And, I’ll continue to be here with you, for you.”
For the persecuted from Ukraine to Sudan to some who live in our own country … for abused spouses or children or elderly … for the depressed or despondent … for “the least of these,” whoever they (or we) may be … there had to be a Birth. There has to be a Life that sees and hears and understands our own lives and makes room for us and loves us, no matter what. As Kristina sang in the modern opera Kristina fran Duvemala:
You have to be there, You have to.
Without You I’d drown in the deep.
Too far, too far, from land.
The waters drag me down.
I reach for Your hand.
“There simply has to be a heaven for someone whose life so far has been hell,” wrote Charles Allen. There has to be a manger for the same reason. Without that, greed and lies and lust for power and incivility and narcissism and hatred and corruption win. There has to be something, Someone, who lifts the fallen and loves the lonely and points out the foolishness of hatred and hubris. There has to be Someone who sees and cares about the broken little man who quietly slips onto the back pew.
You have to be there, You have to.
Without You I’d drown in the deep.
Too far, too far, from land.
The waters drag me down.
I reach for Your hand.