So we step into Story and they call us the tribe of Zebulun, all eight of us, and my Mama too.
A centurion takes us back light years, to the time before the Light had come again, 2000 years ago, before He had pulled up the transparent skin and blazoned into time.
They call it the Marketplace: An Advent Journey.
First in the story, it’s Isaiah who speaks of His coming, and he tells us that a virgin, a never been known one, will cup the seed and God will slip forth in the gauzy vernix, Omnipotent one curled into the infant fist.
Who can say these things and not tremble?
When we meet her, there at the bench, needle and thread in hand, we’re sedate, thinking we smugly know this part, so ready for the Voice that’s about to penetrate her ordinary time.
But when her cochlear reverberates with the bass of His voice and she startles at Words ex nihilo, Word that created whole worlds ex nihilo, and He speaks of the Holy Spirit coming upon her small frame, of the Most High embracing her in the gentle immensity of shadow, we know how little we know of miracle.
We approach Bethlehem swollen with miracle.
And in the marketplace of David’s town, it swirls with the sights and sounds of a census and the crush of the crowd and we enter the story and barter for morsels of bread, handfuls of grapes, a dreidel, our names written in Hebrew, a weaving of strings, a memory of a night strung together and held.
Everywhere shepherds, all a murmur of a rumor of a sky on fire and of winds singing songs and of the whole of the hills wildy electrified.
I can’t take my eyes off the potter spinning clay.
When we had entered the marketplace, the centurion had handed out our money bag of coins (pennies, fify, for each), had barked out that we, the tribe of Zebulun, would only have 15 minutes to buy our needs at each of the stalls, before moving on, and so the children scatter, boys directly to the booth hawking chunks of chocolate fudge.
But I give all my tinkling possiblities to the beggar, tattered and crutch-clinging, (for really, even in stories, what do I really need?) and yes, I just sit and watch the Potter spin, spin, spin.
Farmer Husband, he leads the two youngest, shy and unsure, through the milling faces to the tanners for leather bookmarks, the spice shop for cinnamon sticks, and it’s only after a while that I become aware that that is his voice behind me, speaking long to the beggar.
“You knew the beggar?” I lean up towards him when the centurion calls for us, tribe of Zebulun, to gather, children with their hands full of hard-bartered for prizes.
“No, don’t know him all,” Farmer Husband chuckles. “He knew me. We were passing by and he just said, “You must be a Voskamp.”
I laugh and he blushes, shakes his head. It’s the same everywhere he goes, every cashier in town, every service technician, every single event. Someone somewhere recognizes that Dutch face, that same distinct Dutch face that all eight of his siblings wear.
“Said he last saw me when I was three– when I was playing in the sandbox!” We’re both laughing, the laugh of lovers who know souls and stories — apparently a three-year-old Dutch face doesn’t change much in over thirty years! Except for the whiskers and the receding hair line?
“Who was that man you were talking to, Dad?” Malakai pats his dad’s leg, looks up into our laughing faces.
“That man who is pretending to be the beggar over there?” Farmer Husband points and Malakai follows the invisible finger line.
“He said that in 1976, he drove feed truck and he delivered feed for the cows all that summer to my Dad, your Opa Voskamp.” Farmer Husband kneels down, eye level with Malakai, puts his one arm around his shoulder.
“And he had to sit there in his cab for an hour, waiting for the truck to unload the feed into the bin. That man says he can remember that my Dad, your Opa, would stop working in the barn, or come in off the tractor, just to sit with him and tell him the story of Jesus.”
Farmer Husband looks up at me and smiles. “That’s over thirty years ago and he still remembers.”
I swallow hard and the room blurs.
Yes. The man remembers and will never forget. Because Opa staying in the Jesus story is why the man is now living the Jesus story.
“What else did he say, Dad?” Malakai’s tapping his Dad’s cheek.
“He just said that he knew that Opa was a farmer with a lot of work to be done in the middle of summer, and God must have been very real for a farmer to stop working and talk about every week. He said Opa taught him all about what it meant to live for Jesus and really love Him and those conversations changed that man’s life.”
I turn to look for the beggar in the crowd again, find him through this surge of emotion.
“What else?” Malakai’s immersed in story.
“Oh,” Farmer Husband chuckles again. “And while they talked in the truck, I played in the sandbox with my tractors.”
Malakai grins.
And before we can say more, the centurion calls us out of the marketplace, to the still quiet where shepherds speak of a glory that came down and shone all around and permeated the pores. We follow their wonder worship.
Straight to the manger.
And by a pen of sheep bedded down in the straw, beside a donkey soundlessly witnessing, we gather with families and light the flame before the creche. A shadow falls a Cross over the feed trough.
Joseph, he stands and tells of it, what this shadow Cross will mean, and invites us into the story, to the foot of Jesus, salvation, and he invites us to take the Light with us into the world, an offer of salvation.
He’s asking us to take the Light out into the Dark, into the every day marketplace of truckdrivers and mailmen and hairdressers, and stay in the strangest story. To make our lives living natitivies, like Opa Voskamp who never left the Jesus story.
To stay in that strangest, truest Jesus story, a story that is worth dropping everything else for, that is the Good News worth telling, that is worth the sharing because it is the only story that can change the orbit of a soul.
We step out into the cold of a night 2000 years later.
But do we ever step out of the nativity story?
Or do we live our lives in the nativity? Do we become the nativity, telling again and again, the strangest of stories, carrying it’s light out to the soul beggars like us?
In the chill of the night air, I hold my candle and remember my one line in living the nativity, the hope to take out into the world:
Behold, I bring you good news of great joy which will be for all the people; for today in the city of David there has been born for you a Savior, who is Christ the Lord.
Lord God, today might You show me one person with whom I could share my one glorious line?
Behold, I bring you Good News!
How can we not tell the wondrous Story?
On Christmas Eve, I long to enter into the Story.
To become a living nativity.
Photos: scenes from our stepping into the nativity story
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