The Christmas Story that We Carry

In the Dixon House Library at St. Paul's is Tim O’Brien’s Vietnam testament, the book: The Things They Carried. In addition to food and the materiel of warfare, soldiers carried their stories. “That’s what stories are for,” O’Brien writes. “Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can’t remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.”

Picking up this book the other day got me to thinking what is it that Christians carry? Certainly our story is one of the most important things we pack. Our Christmas story is among the greatest in the world (second perhaps only to the resurrection). Someone commented that this story is “so beautiful it must be true.”

Stories have a sense of place and character and a crisis that builds to resolution. The Christmas story has all of this. The story is a celebration and joy. Party atmosphere would be to take the story too lightly. This Christmas story that we carry is one that changes lives!

When someone is shown this story, and is captivated by it, then, like the court official in the Book of Acts, they want to understand it and be guided to its meaning for them. The next step is to enter into the story through the community of the church. For the court official in Acts 8, this means to be baptized. For others who are already baptized, it means to come to worship where the story is preached and explained, where the Holy Spirit inspires, and communion is experienced. This is more than being shown the story, it is becoming a participant in this story that is so beautiful it must be true. Then our lives become whole, despite life’s risk – our past is joined to our future. When we are lost, when we can hardly remember what got us to where we are, we are recollected. We take the bread with the words, “Do this in remembrance of me.” When all else is gone it is the story that remains and is sufficient. So says Tim O’Brien. It is one of the things we carry that is most precious.