Bucky in the Christmas Tree

Nobody has ever explained to me how Bucky got into the parlor on Christmas Eve, and I have asked several times.

The parlor is the room we do not go in. It has the good chairs in it and it smells like a church, and it is where the tree goes, and the tree is not a small tree because my dad has ideas about trees. It was up. It had everything on it. There were things on that tree that my great grandmother put on trees.

At about eight at night we heard the noise, and it was one long noise rather than a crash, which I have thought about since, because it means the tree went slowly. It went over and it took the little table with it, and the little table had a lamp on it, and Bucky came out of the parlor at a walk with a piece of tinsel on his head and went and stood in the kitchen doorway looking at us.

My dad did not say Tobias. That is how I knew it was serious. He walked past me into the parlor and he stood in the door of it for a good long time.

Most of it was fine. That is the thing about a slow fall. Two things broke, and one of them was a bauble nobody liked, and the other one was a glass bird that my mother's mother had, and my dad picked up both halves of that bird and put them in his shirt pocket and did not say anything about it at all.

And under the little table, at the back, where it had been since before I was born, there was a shoebox.

It had my grandfather's letters in it. Not important letters. Letters from when he was nineteen and doing his service, to his mother, about the weather and the food and a man in his unit called Cushing who could not stop laughing at things. Nineteen years that box had been under there and nobody knew.

We read them on Christmas Day instead of doing the other things. My dad read them out loud and he had to stop twice. And at one point he looked up over the top of a page and said that his father had been very funny and that he had forgotten it, and that is a sentence I am going to keep.

Look around at who got called

Paul says something to a church that would be rude if it were not true, and he says it as an argument rather than an insult.

For ye see your calling, brethren, how that not many wise men after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble, are called. (1 Corinthians 1:26)

He is telling them to look around the room. Count the important people. There are not many, and he is not apologizing for it, he is using it as evidence.

The evidence is for a claim about God rather than a claim about them. If the church had filled up with the wise and the mighty and the noble, the thing it was would be explainable, and Paul's whole point is that it is not.

You are inside the pattern rather than an exception to it. 1 Corinthians 1:26 tells a whole congregation to look around and see who did not get called, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that read as belonging instead of as a slight.

There is a particular kind of arithmetic a child does about their own family, and it is quiet and it is quick and it is usually settled by about seven. Who is the clever one. Who is the funny one. Who is the one people are proud of out loud.

You have not been slotted into an order that God is obliged to respect. The written word says not many noble are called and treats that as the point rather than the problem, and His Spirit is what makes that arrive in somebody who has already done the arithmetic.

Who got told first

The most important announcement in the history of the world was made at night, in a field, to men who were at work.

And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. (Luke 2:8)

There were priests that night. There was a temple. There were scholars who had spent their lives on exactly this question, and one of them, later, could tell Herod the correct town off the top of his head, which means the information was there and the men who held it were not the men who got told.

The angels went to the field. To men who smelled of sheep and were not going to be believed by anybody.

And the sign they were given is the strangest part of it: ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger. The confirming detail is a feed trough. If you are looking for a king, that is the last thing you check.

You are being told things directly rather than through the people with the titles. Luke 2:8 puts the announcement in a field at night, and the Spirit of God is what makes that pattern read as deliberate rather than as an accident of the story.

You have been included in the way God has always included people. That is what Luke reports rather than argues, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moves it from a Christmas reading into a claim about a particular child on a particular rug.