Retelling the Christmas Story
I don’t know about you, but when I think of the Christmas story, I think of, well, the Christmas story. There’s a kind of seamless whole that I have in my head made up of angels and shepherds and Mary and Joseph and the baby in the manger and the stable animals and the star and magi and all the rest.
What I don’t think about is how I learned this story; how, that is, it was told to me. Certainly I learned a lot of it from the Bible, hearing the various – and distinct – portions of the story read from Matthew and Luke. But I also learned it from the Christmas carols. And from the manifold crèches in all shapes and sizes that I’ve seen over the years. And from the holiday specials, some of which, like “The Little Drummer Boy,” build on the core story and many others that refer to it tangentially. And then there’s the history of artistic depictions of Christmas, from the countless Old Masters’ renditions to more contemporary paintings, many of which I’ve been exposed to, truth be told, via Christmas cards. And it doesn’t stop there: store windows and commercials and family Christmas traditions and bulletin covers and the vast and extraordinary collection of music for the season that goes way beyond carols.
My point in all this is to recognize that we are constantly and variously telling and retelling the Christmas story and that’s why we each have a pretty seamless sense of its integrity and beauty. It’s a story that we care enough about to keep telling, and because we keep telling it we continue to care.
Which means we need to keep telling it as well. Each age has found ways to give voice to this “timeless” story in a way that has power and meaning. So we need also, I think, to tell and retell the story, both traditional ways – biblical readings and carols – and in modern ones as well. In fact, it’s quite fun to think about how we might tell the story today given just how many communicative tools are at our disposal. Video, graphic design, animation, and more, and all available to us instantly via the web.
All those devices, I suspect, are part of the reason we know fewer and fewer of the biblical stories in quite the same way we know the Christmas story. There’s almost too much “narrative competition” out there. At the same time, we might also harness the media around us to teach and tell both familiar and foreign biblical stories with new power. In fact, maybe the narrative competition itself will force us to evaluate which of these stories are most important to us and force us to focus our creative energies there. Who knows?
Well, to stimulate conversation about how to tell the old, old story in new ways, over the next week or two I’m going to pick a couple of videos that I think tell and retell the Christmas story well. (Plus, it just gives me a chance to share and watch some favorite videos! ☺) The first gets to the heart of the matter by not just using the latest media to tell the story, but to imagine what the story would be like if its characters lived in the same media-saturated world we do. What if Gabriel sent Mary a text, for instance, and Joseph updated the family on the baby via Facebook? It’s quite fun, and kind of gets you thinking as well. Enjoy (and share, as that’s one way we retell the story as well).
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I enjoyed the video clip, and I might show it to the confirmation class to see what they think.
I wonder, though, whether anyone who didn’t already know the story would “get” the story. I only saw one reference to who Jesus is for us (he’s called Son of God in Gabriel’s announcement to Mary), and that seems like it would be pretty hard to unpack in the brief segments modern technology favors.
Maybe, though, it just takes time to master the medium so that we can convey the story more fully. Web sites and video clips in worship have come an awfully long way in a relatively short period of time.
I think that’s a great question, Jane, just the kind of thing we need to be asking. I wonder, also, if each telling needs to tell the whole story or if some can be invitational. Some media, perhaps, lends itself to piquing interest, others to unpacking in more depth, etc. When I think of the variety of media that have shaped me over the years, they have played different roles. Perhaps the same is still true.
Thanks so much for writing!
I have seen a similar digital Facebook vignette that focused on the relationship between Mary and Joseph that was quit good too.