Arlena and I had a great Christmas this year, probably our best ever, but we didn’t celebrate it yesterday. We celebrated it two weeks ago over the course of eight days and almost 2700 miles of driving. Thanks to my wonderful Staff, Arlena and I were able to get away to travel to Ohio, Pennsylvania, Maryland and North Carolina to visit with our mothers, brothers and sisters, nieces and nephews, children and grandchildren. The visits were all too short but all very wonderful.

Before we left for the trip, my wife informed me that we were going to start a new tradition now that the grandchildren are getting older. I was going to sit down with them each year and tell them the Christmas story. We purchased a nativity scene with Joseph and Mary and the baby Jesus in the crib, the camels and sheep and cows and the three kings. We even bought a little stable to be the centerpiece.

Then when the day came for our Christmas celebration, I gathered our two Baltimore grandsons around me and began telling them the Christmas story using the figurines and stable to try to make it come alive. Zachary, who is seven, was enthralled. I kept two-year-old Tyler’s attention for about ten seconds. When we celebrated Christmas in Raleigh, I didn’t bother with the story. Kayleigh is only 15 months old and Evan is four weeks old. They will have to wait a few more years, I guess.

There are lots of ways to tell the Christmas story. My way was one of those ways. Last Sunday our children retold the story in their own way. It was wonderful. The story has been told and retold in countless ways over the centuries. The Gospel of Matthew has one version of the story and Luke another. Mark does not tell the story at all, and the Gospel of John, which we just heard, simply says that "the Word became flesh and lived among us." Eight words: the Word became flesh and lived among us.

Each one of us can tell the Christmas story in our own words. We do not even have to mention Jesus and Mary and Joseph to tell the story. Charles Dickens tells the Christmas story using characters like Scrooge and Tiny Tim. The film classic It’s a Wonderful Life is another version of the Christmas story. The list is endless. For the story of Christmas is told whenever the real meaning of Christmas is recounted.

A favorite story of mine may be one with which you are familiar. It is about a family preparing to go to the midnight service at their church. Mom and the two kids are getting ready but Dad is sitting in his easy chair reading the paper. He’s not going. Church is okay for women and children, and besides, he doesn’t believe in this God-stuff anyway. He certainly does not believe that God became a human being. To believe in this incarnation stuff is just a little too much to ask. He doesn’t stand in the way of his family and what they believe; but he is not going to compromise on his beliefs for the sake of the family.

So as his wife and children head off for church, he heads to the kitchen to make a cup of hot chocolate. As he does so, he notices that it has started to snow and snow very heavily. He begins to worry that by the time church is over, the snow may be very deep and travel will be treacherous. Unbeliever that he is, he still mutters a silent prayer that everyone will have safe travel. He grabs his cup of hot chocolate and goes back to his easy chair, turns on the television and waits for the family to come home.

Suddenly he hears a thump on the widow next to his chair, and then another and then another. He gets up out of his chair to investigate and notices that a flock of birds, obviously lost in what now has turned into a blizzard, mistakenly think they can fly through his window for safety from the storm. He puts on his coat, hat, gloves and boots and goes outside to see if he can do anything to help.

He has a big barn on the property and thinks that perhaps he can lure the birds into the barn where they can be safe from the snow. He trudges through the snow, opens the barn door and whistles, hoping they will get the message. They don’t. He then gathers some seeds and starts to sprinkle a path to the barn door hoping them will eat their way inside. They don’t. He is getting desperate. He doesn’t know what to do. He says to himself, "They’re going to die if I don’t get them out of this snow. But it seems the only way I can get them to follow me is to become one of them." Just them he hears the church bells peal off in the distance. And he believed.

"The Word became flesh and lived among us." That, in eight short words, is truly the Christmas story. It can’t be said any better, can it? Yet that is not the end of the story. It is only the beginning. And the truth is, it can be said better than that. It must be said better than that. For the Christmas story is told and retold day after day after day by you and by me. It is told not with figurines we purchase from WalMart or by reading the Gospels or watching parables like A Christmas Carol or It’s a Wonderful Life that are based on the story and meaning of Christmas.

No, the Christmas story is told as we live our lives and by the way we live our lives each day. It is a very earthy story, just like the first Christmas. It’s a story of people tired from a journey they would rather not have made but did so because they were obedient citizens. It is the story of a birth in a smelly barn that barely covered the smell and the mess of childbirth. It’s the story of doing the best we can with what we have knowing that is all we can do at the moment. It is the story of life lived in a world where not all is wonderful and beautiful and well.

The Christmas story is our story, yours and mine. Over the years we have sanitized that story so much that it almost becomes unreal, too difficult to believe. When we do that, we do the story a disservice. God became flesh in Jesus: in a barn amid stench and dirt, in a world where people used and abused one another for their own good, in a world where might made right and privilege and power and prestige ruled. Jesus came into that world to help change that world.

But Jesus failed. Well, that is not exactly true. Jesus didn’t fail. We have failed Jesus, you and I who call ourselves Christians, who claim we follow Jesus’ teaching. The world is not any better than it was when the Word became flesh and lived among us that first Christmas. It is not any better because Christians over the centuries have failed to make it better. We have failed Jesus. We may not like to hear that, but it is the truth.

Two weeks ago I told my grandson Zachary a version of the Christmas story. I can do better. I can do better by living the Christmas story. I can do better by being the best grandfather I can be, by being the best Christian I can be, by letting the Word who became flesh that Christmas day live in and through me today and every day. And so can you. You see, we tell the Christmas story by our lives, by the way we live our lives day in and day out.

May we tell that story today and tomorrow and the tomorrows to come in the same way the Word who became flesh and lived among us told that story by living our lives as Jesus would have us live them – as we would have us live them.