The Historical Timeline of the Nativity

Or, How Are Parents Supposed to Know all this Stuff?

A new tradition for the Long family is watching the feature length live-action film The Nativity somewhere around Christmas each year. It's a great film for giving kids a visual on the Lukan birth narratives.

We watched it last night and somewhere around two thirds of the way through the Younger Sister asked, "Was the Ice Age before this, Daddy?"

I stifled my giggle and replied as flatly as possible, "Why, yes, it was."

She's seven now, so the question didn't really surprise me. It was cute that she knows enough history to ask the question, but not enough to place the two pieces in a contextual time line. You child development specialists could have a field day on that. But I think the more telling part of the story is not her question, but me stifling my giggle.

Why did I do that?

I didn't think long about that question. I know. She's the youngest of the three, and she's not acting like a little kid much these days. I stifled the giggle in the same way I push down on top of her head teasingly and say, "Stop growing up!" I stifled the giggle - probably mistakenly - because I like that fact that she knows some things but still needs me to place them in context for her. I stifled the giggle because of my own need to be needed.

I suppose we spend much of our parenting years in this important work of contextualizing life: helping kids make sense out of pain, plugging the holes in the meta-narratives, and answering those most important questions about love, sex, faith, power, and, yes, even where the Ice Age falls on the timeline relative to the birth of Christ.

Two Kinds of Waiting

You just wait 'til your father gets home!"  

Bill Cosby in a stand-up routine once told about coming home from work only to be greeted by his wife with the words, "I want you to go upstairs and kill that boy."  I've waited in my room, nervously knowing that my posterior was going to meet an inanimate object at the end of my father's arm.  I usually deserved it, too. 

That's one type of waiting.

There's another type of waiting, a glad kind.  It's what I experienced when my father took a business trip.  He'd be gone for several days but upon returning, he almost always bore a souvenir of some sort.   One time it was a piece of petrified tree from California, another time a perpetual calendar from Niagara, a pencil sharpener in the base of the Empire State Building, or a bag of volcano ash from Mt. Saint Helen.  No matter where he went or how long he stayed, I knew my dad would return to his family bearing gifts.  Those gifts were neat, but the real power was in how they conveyed a deeper truth:  He'd been thinking of us while he was gone, and had definite plans to return.

We Christians wait similarly.  We've been taught that though Jesus ascended to heaven, he is planning a return, and at that return he will bring about justice and restore God's rule.  That's a heck of a gift to bring your children after a celestial business trip.  Chapter three of a letter in the Bible entitled 2 Peter deals with how it is that we are to be found waiting.  Again we have two types of waiting - as those who live with no regard to holiness and may expect punishment for our deeds, or as those who pursue holiness and can expect to take part in God's great kingdom.  

In Advent, we celebrate the first arrival of Jesus by celebrating his birth.  But we also celebrate his impending return.  Peter suggests that as we await that return we should "...strive to be found by him at peace, without spot or blemish...and forewarned."  The promise of Jesus' return is good, but there is a darker, nearly foreboding side to the promise:  How we wait matters. 

I'll be talking about this further in a sermon this Sunday(12/7) at Willow Meadows Baptist Church.  If you're in Houston I hope you'll join us for worship at either 10:45 or 11:45 that morning and see what all this "waiting hype" is about.  In the mean time, me and Richard Marx will be - 

Right Here Waiting For You,

Pastor Gary

And no, Richard Marx will not be singing at our church this Sunday - that was my attempt at humor involving a rocker from the 1980's - although it's debatable if Richard Marx could be accurately called a "rocker."  

For the Record

Rich Cizik's forced resignation as director of the National Association of Evangelicals was just plain wrong.