Christmas 1997. Metropolitan Memorial National United Methodist Church, Washington DC. A contemporary Sunday morning service. Bill Anderson, guitarist and songwriter, had written these words and sang them for us that morning. As he began, I found myself wondering . . . what would happen in our world IF we looked at each child with such reverence, wonder, and promised care? As the song progressed and it was clearly focused on Jesus, the son of God, I wondered further . . . what would happen in our world IF each child was seen as so precious?

Who Is This Child? (Bill Anderson, 1997)**

Joseph:
who is this staring from the face of my child
barely born, yet those eyes have seen a thousand lives
wise men bring gifts from strange places
shepherds say the angels sing
Mary my love our child is a king

Mary:
who is he this mystery I hold in my hands
wonder child do you think he understands
will he bring peace to our nation
or will he tear it apart
Joseph my love, keep him from harm (I’ll keep him from harm)

Both:
messiah and savior, (Joseph) the angels sing songs,
(Mary) the angel told me
he’s just a baby, could he be the one
God’s only son

tell me who is this, this infant that the prophets foretold
king of kings, or just a little one for us to hold
will you be ours for a lifetime
or must we give you to God
Joseph/Mary my love who is this child

will he bring peace to our nation (Joseph)
or will he die in my arms (Mary)
tell me my love who is this child
Joseph/Mary my love, who is our child

A story of a child, a child’s birth. A Christmas story we hear over and over again. Whether we are Christian or not does not much matter. A story woven into the fabric of our lives. Somewhere, sometime . . . long ago, just yesterday . . . a child was born in Bethlehem. Of this child, the angels sang. To this child, wise men brought gifts. A child conceived by a woman. A father called God. Foretold by the Hebrew prophets of old . . . Isaiah, Micah to name a couple. And he shall be the one of peace. (Micah 5:5)

A child in the womb recognized by another child in the womb. (Luke 1:41) One woman (Elizabeth) embracing another woman (Mary) and celebrating the impending birth of their sons. Blessed among women. Exalted among men.
Everywhere we look this time of year, this story is present. The beauty of it. The contortions and distortions of it as well. Who is this child?

Is there anything more precious than the birth of a baby? A hope and a promise lives in the eyes of each newborn. And in the hearts of the parents who celebrate the birth. Wars can be raging. And somehow, this little one offers the possible in the midst of the impossible. Likewise, there is no greater sadness than the birth of a child into impending death from hunger and disease. Look into the eyes of a mother with AIDS . . . a mother with no milk for her child and no food for herself. Such despair in the face of such promise.

What power there is in the stories of a child’s birth.

“The idea that our well-being depended on the truth of the stories we heard fascinated me . . . how much stories shape all of our lives. (14, The Stories That Shape Us: Contemporary Women Write about the West, editor, Teresa Jordan) . . . how much we are the stories we tell about ourselves . . . often measuring ourselves and each other against someone who had never existed . . . (17) sometimes the stories of one culture can heal the wounds inflicted by another . . . other times stories translate in less benevolent ways and they can travel a long way (20) As we approach the dawn of a new millennium, the challenges that greet us seem almost overwhelming. Our population keeps increasing, even as we deplete the earth that supports us. We must live together in new ways if we are to live at all, shaped by stories of nurture and interdependence rather than conquest. When shifting paradigms, the historian Patricia Nelson Limerick has quipped, it is important to remember to put in the clutch. Stories ease our passage from one way of seeing ourselves to another.” (21)
We have also talked about David Korten’s view of rewriting our stories to embrace community rather than Empire in his book, The Great Turning.

And yet, what does this rewriting mean? To throw out the babies with the bath water? To find the ways to write anew from the traditions, and in so doing to transform both the stories and ourselves in ways that are creative and healing rather than destructive and disease-producing?

As Unitarian Universalists, we come from a rich tradition of questioning, rewriting, and questioning some more. We have created rituals like the Flower and Water Communions which rewrite themselves each time they are celebrated. We have discarded creeds that bound us in unhealthy ways, and written the Seven Principles that open doorways to creative thought each time they are studied. What better group than us to rewrite some of the most profoundly shaping stories of our lives, beginning with the Christmas Story.

Who IS this child?

We are scientists, poets, thinkers and artists. Let’s put our heads and hearts together on this one and see what we design, create, live!

Why might embryos in two wombs recognize each other? Do we truly think communication is limited to people we see walking around us? More and more medicine unfolds the wonders of what the embryo in the womb can hear, sense, know. In this frenetic, loud and crazy world we’ve created, I wonder if the unborn embryo does not have the best sense of hearing? Listening? Knowing of life?

Why might each child hold the promise of the universe? We don’t have to be ethereal here. Are we not each one of us, designed from the very fabric of the universe in which we live?

Who Is this child?

And more than just the child born . . . what about the child in each of us? The one who sings in the shower, gazes at the stars, stamps a foot in anger, knows – deep down knows what is enough and what is not? What about those children? The ones we hide, denigrate, forget, destroy.

The very source of creative promise, living and breathing in the child. Who IS this child?

A very wise Hebrew prophet tells us “the wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them.” (Isaiah 11:6)

Certainly the world as we often like it ordered turns upside down in the presence of a child. Ask any new parent . . . life is never quite the same again. Children touch our hearts, drive us crazy, and generally turn us upside down IF we open our hearts to them and don’t seek to control every move they make.

The same holds true with each creative spark igniting and dancing its way into our existence. Some of those creative sparks nurture us. Some are used to control us. The choice is ours. What we cannot control is the change each creative spark, each child brings. Only how that change is manifested day to day. Did the creative genius of nuclear fission have to lead to the nuclear bomb? Does the use of tests and inventories have to lead to the lifelong labeling of a child?
Does the Christmas story and the birth of baby Jesus have to push our own humanity aside? Can this story celebrate our humanity, and the birth of each new baby as miraculous as the one we sing about this time of year?!

When we dismiss this story, what exactly do we dismiss? Do we win the struggle with what we call religious fundamentalism, or do we lose something very precious to us?

We don’t need psychiatrists to tell us that an infant loved deeply, cared for wisely, grows to be different from an infant discarded, abused. The same holds true for each creative spark embraced with love and wisdom rather than with fear and greed. We DO know all of this to be true, don’t we?

The baby we throw out with the bath water is not some limp doll used in a Christian nativity scene. The child is the creative spark in each one of us . . . the light in the dark of each newborn baby’s eyes.

Let us listen to this song . . . it’s words and music offering us a place to ponder and begin to write the story anew.

How will each of us rewrite this blessed story? How will we describe the child? How will we teach our children about the child?

Who is this child? Could this child be each and all of us ? ? ? Most blessed be . . .

Wanda Daniel
Consulting Minister

** Special note. Bill Anderson’s music is copyrighted. He has given churches permission to use his work, but churches only! Thanks for honoring his wishes.