The year was 1990. We’d moved to Taiwan in February. Happened to arrive on one of the noisiest and brightest of holiday nights – Lantern Festival. I came to love that festival as one of my favorites, but it wasn’t so that first night as we tried to sleep through our jetlag, the sights and sounds of fireworks bursting all around. All night long, or so it seemed.
I learned that first year that being called to a place doesn’t guarantee you feel at home in that place, at least not at first. Traditional holiday times can be the worst for newcomers. That first Christmas in Taichung felt strange to us indeed. Yet in the midst of all the adjustments, I discovered that God was still speaking to me – the Familiar found in unfamiliar settings. And this time, God spoke through a manger scene.
That first Christmas in Asia, our greatest joy came gift-wrapped in our own two boys, the second one, Stephen, just 3 months old. Babies have a way of breaking down so many barriers and so it was with our boys who opened doors in our crowded neighborhood, in the marketplaces, and in our Taiwanese church across town. The local people were ever so caring. Unlike the closed doors Joseph and Mary experienced, we found open, welcome ones as aliens in a strange land.
But what I knew of Christmas felt awkward in that as yet unfamiliar setting. The oh-so-familiar story of the Christ Child was wrapped in new languages – the Taiwanese and Hakka I didn’t understand, the Mandarin I was only beginning to recognize.
Sometimes bare context, often nonverbal, was all we could grasp for meaning. And in such context, the trappings around Jesus’ birthday had a strangely recognizable feel to them. Take, for example, the red-and-white-dressed and live, skinny Chinese Santa bearing gifts to kids at church. As I said, it was at once all strange and recognizable.
It was the manger that struck me most peculiarly that first Christmas, as incongruous in Taiwan’s cities as it is in American suburbs. Only the holiday makes sense of its annual appearance in either space.
As I saw the life-sized, albeit white, baby Jesus doll lying in the simply-crafted manger, I reflected on how recognizable that manger scene was to the shepherds who came seeking the infant Savior in Bethlehem village. Like fish out of water, those shepherds found themselves suddenly surrounded by a massive heavenly host singing in the brilliant night.
Such shepherds had no business trooping into nearby Bethlehem looking for a newborn baby, but that is exactly what the angel told them to do. They were told to look for a child lying in a manger, of all things. And yet, what must have made them feel most at home was the familiar sight of that animal feed trough. “How practical!” they could have said, if they hadn’t already been so gobsmacked by the whole situation.
Years later living in another Chinese city far inland from the island of Taiwan, we invited friends who ran a fruit stand in the local outdoor market to our house for dinner. Immediately I was aware of how uncomfortable they were feeling, entering our home and sitting at our dinner table. They didn’t even belong in the city – as countryfolk they had no legal permit to be there – let alone in the house of foreigners.
We may have lived a mere few hundred yards from each other, but the distance might as well have been measured in light years. My attempts at connecting that evening went south all too quickly. There was nothing familiar for them to latch onto. Not even the food, as they didn’t eat meat, and certainly not the way we, to the best of our ability, had presented it.
So too was that scene of God Incarnate for those shepherds – if it hadn’t been for that manger. Note the specific words the angel used to communicate with the shepherds. “This will be a sign to you: you will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger” (Luke 2:12, NIV). It wasn’t just any old sign. It was a sign written in the everyday language of sheep keepers.
They were to look for a baby (familiar enough) – in a manger (oddly mixed, but even more familiar). Anyone who has experienced a Christmas pageant knows what a manger is. It’s a baby crib for baby Jesus, of course! But outside of Christmas nativity sets, few of us in our modern, cosmopolitan world see any significance in a manger – least not its original purpose. Back then in that ancient, agrarian society, the lowly feed trough was meaningful most of all to shepherds.
To be a sign, something has to have directional meaning. It has to point to or represent something else. The angel was telling the shepherds, you are going to look for something you know and when you find it, it will point to something you’ve never seen before. That’s the way signs work.
Where one person sees a sign, another doesn’t see anything, for the object bears little connection to their life. Compare this shepherd story with that of the wise men, strangers who came much later to visit the Christ Child. The wise men, or magi, did not come looking for a manger. They looked for a star in the night sky – an object they were keenly familiar with as astrologers. In contrast, for magi, mangers were beneath their station in life.
Like the magi, the shepherds also spent a lot of time gazing at the night sky. They could probably identify any number of stars. But the importance of stars to magi was of a far greater magnitude. On the night the Christ Child was born, the manger was the sign of greatest magnitude for the shepherds.
Of all the people in Judea, who would think a manger as something significant enough to look for? Why shepherds, of course. To these commonest of animal caregivers, there were but a few things of value in their lives. They had their shepherd’s staffs for guiding the sheep. They had their slingshots for warding off predators. They knew what sheep and pens and grass and water were. And they knew what a manger was. All these objects held value to them.
But they had never encountered a Savior, a Messiah, and wouldn’t know one if they saw it. So, the angel used the familiar to speak to them of unfamiliar things.
Once traveling with a friend on the high Tibetan plateau, I bought a slingshot off a young Tibetan sheepherder as a souvenir for my kids. My friend and translator, David Plymire, had grown up in those very highlands. He told me to make it worth the young man’s while because that slingshot represented his whole livelihood. So, with relatively little expense to me, I blessed that sheepherder beyond measure. Such is the focused life of a shepherd that slingshots and mangers carry great significance.
Jesus’ whole birth experience was arranged so that these shepherds would know what to look for. It was a sign specifically for them. When God spoke for all the ages, He spoke in a way that shepherds could understand. He spoke to them in the most familiar of terms.
I thought about all that there in Taichung, our first of many Christmases in Asia. Christmas nativity scenes were the only places where I saw mangers my entire time in Taiwan. I’m sure I could have found animal feed troughs in the rural communities, but for me they were most easily found in the wooden, hand-carved sets sold to Western tourists or set up in churches as holiday decorations, as out of place there as they were in churches back in the U.S., only the season giving them meaning to urban sensibilities.
But then and there in Taichung, the sight of a manger in a nativity scene became a sign to me, a sign that God the Familiar was coming to me in an as-yet unfamiliar place to let me know He was and is – and ever will be – with me. Immanuel, God with us.
So God comes to us. He moves in our lives in unfamiliar settings, and yet in ways that seem ever so recognizable. He speaks to us in our own vernacular – in our everyday understanding.
One day in college, a fellow student told our Greek professor that another prof he was taking classes from was really, really brilliant. Dr. Cutter asked the student why he thought that other prof was so smart, apparently smarter than our very own Greek professor standing before us. The student replied, “Because he’s so hard to understand.”
Dr. Cutter shot back in his usual acerbic manner. “If he were so brilliant, he’d be able to explain his material to the simplest of minds like yours.”
Jesus, who became God with us here on earth, was so brilliant he could explain the mysteries of the universe to the commonest of people. Yet, often the learned, the high and mighty, those who lacked for nothing could make neither heads nor tails of it all. If it hit them in the face, they would miss it. And when it came to seeing God in Jesus, they did – miss it, that is.
But to the lowly, the truth was revealed in everyday language. And they received it gladly. In that baby Jesus lying in a manger, God has come to be with us.
God can make himself understood to anyone willing to listen. He, who used a manger to guide shepherds to the Christ Child, can reveal Himself even to you and me.
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Photo: the Tibetan sheepherder who sold me his slingshot
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