A Less Familiar Advent

By Pastor Don Shrumm

I’ve got my congregation reading an unfamiliar text this Advent; The Infancy Gospel of James. This “alternate version” of the start of the Greatest Story Ever Told is fun to read; more human and emotional, yet also more supernatural, than the Luke and Matthew passages we are usually celebrating this time of year.

In this Christmas story, one almost as old as our more orthodox gospels, there is great drama around Mary, Joseph and family. It has not been anywhere nearly as widely read nor as influential. It is fun to imagine and guess why our early church councils decided it wasn’t up to being included in the canon we know and love.

But the Mary emerging from Infancy James is extraordinary and divinely touched. Compared to the more silent woman of Luke “keeping all these things to herself” and “pondering this in her heart,” Infancy James has a more fleshed out young woman, with an amazingly supernatural childhood and who is even more demonstrative and poetically outspoken at the announcement of Jesus’ impending birth.

There is a stronger sense of extended clan around Mary, and a bigger role for the temple and the priests. The writer of Infancy James labors to put this extraordinary 16 year-old (!) in the context of a faithful but also skeptical community eager to cast lots and carry out weird tests to discern where God fits into the miraculous conception claims.

It’s all a good reminder for our own explorations in imagination and faith this Advent. We should be more skeptical too. We should do more testing too. Stretching to read anew for God’s word in an ancient text that didn’t quite make the cut before the second century church editors, we might, in honor of His expected coming this month, also listen in ways we haven’t before.

Where is the Good News of Jesus evident in a manner unfamiliar to you? 

What art, movies or music might you (re)discover that could put a fresh and illuminating spin on what can become a tired and too-familiar story? 

What friends, or even extended clan around have you never mentioned any Reason for the Season to until Advent 2014?

A chance to interact with the Christmas Story anew might well begin with a comment you make this week sitting at

Starbucks.

Prayer: Help us take a chance on seeing and hearing you in unexpected ways this week God. Help us be brazen enough like our sister and mother Mary to know you at work far beyond conventional means. May the coming of your son transform our whole world; beginning with transforming our conventional ways of experiencing you in our own lives. Amen.

Don Shrumm is the Pastor at Genesis Presbyterian Church in Littleton, Colorado.