I sometimes joke that I’ve held nearly every job in a church that doesn’t involve playing the organ. In roughly reverse chronological order, I’ve been something like: rector, assistant rector, curate; Godly Play teacher, seminarian, wedding coordinator; administrative assistant, campus minister, summer assistant sexton/floor-waxer, and (this one was unpaid) Christmas pageant spotlight operator.

This was one of the highlights of my (in retrospect, extremely churchy) youth. For a few years during high school, my friend Tom and I would sit up in the church balcony and act as a very minimal crew. One of us would handle sound effects: rhythm sticks for Mary and Joseph’s knocks on the hotel doors, jingle bells for the appearance of the angels, and so on. The other, trying not to burn himself as our decades-old spotlight overheated, would point the spotlight here and there and flip the switches for a variety of tinted and opaque shutters, trying and inevitably failing to highlight Gabriel’s radiant splendor at precisely the right moment.

It was a significantly less-polished production than some (I could name more than one parish pageant that involves live-animal rentals and/or competitive auditions!), but still more involved than most.

Whatever the nature of the Christmas pageant, though—whether the costumes are simple or ornate, whether the words are a memorized script or a read narrative, whether there’s a menagerie of live animals or simply a bunch of kids making animal noises—every Christmas pageant does the same exact thing. It reenacts the story first told by an angel to the shepherds long ago: “Behold, I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord.” (Luke 2:10-11)

It’s a story so familiar and yet so strange that the differences between our many pageants and retellings barely matter. However cute or serious the actors, however shoddy or precise the lighting, however real or imaginary the animals, the story remains the same: a Savior wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger; a God made flesh in a child’s vulnerable form; a holy family exhausted at the end of a long journey, only just beginning their season of exhaustion.

It’s a story that’s simple but enigmatic, familiar but bizarre, unnoticed but world-transforming; a story that reaches us in very different ways in very different circumstances and at very different times of our lives. It’s a story, in other words, that’s better suited to a pageant than to a sermon, to an enactment rather than an exegesis!

So “let us now go even unto Bethlehem, and see this thing which is come to pass.” Let us return, as we do every year, to the scene of Jesus’ birth, to a family who are poor, and tired, and looking for a place to stay. And let us prepare ourselves to greet him, whenever and wherever we find him in our world.

This year’s Christmas Pageant will be held on Sunday, December 19, the Fourth Sunday of Advent, during the 10am service.