Biography
The Rev. Joy E. Rogers is Associate Rector at St. Luke's Episcopal Church in Evanston, Illinois. Born and raised in Philadelphia, she has lived most of her adult life in the midwest. Her first careers were as a teacher and a critical care nurse, but in 1985 she graduated from Seabury Western Seminary and was ordained a priest. Mother Rogers is a very effective parish priest in a thriving, vibrant parish. In addition to her duties at St. Luke's, she conducts workshops and conferences on women's spirituality and the role of women in the Church. [Biographical information is correct as of the broadcast date noted above.]

"The Stable Fable" 
“The stable fable.” That is what my poet friend has called it. The familiar story, this New Testament genesis, "In the beginning a decree went out from Caesar Augustus, that all the world was to be taxed." The stable fable. Has any story in two thousand years so captured human imagination and moved men, women and children more powerfully with a longing to recreate, represent, re-enter that genesis moment?

This is not a tale full of surprises for us much any more. Familiarity has made it comfortable, and soothing, if essential. But by the time they got to Bethlehem, even Mary and Joseph shouldn't have been surprised.

There is a wonderful scene in a Dorothy Sayers radio play about the Nativity. The inn is a crowded, busy place, filled with all kinds of travelers: Jewish merchants, Greek intellectuals, Roman soldiers, Hebrew families, and aloof Pharisees. The landlady, harried and frantic, responds to Joseph's urgent plea for assistance for his laboring wife in the best stereotypical fashion. She ejects him from the stable, and sends him out to the courtyard to wait. The gathering of men there, drinking and bantering around a fire, finds common ground in his plight of father-to-be, and some of them offer their best attempts to comfort and distract.

"I remember what it is like," said one kindly soul, "when my first was born, wondering whether it will be a boy or a girl."

"It's a boy," said Joseph.

"That's right," said the merchant. "Every new father is sure his first born will be a son."

"And," added the Roman, with some condescension, "every Hebrew mother in these days is sure her first-born will be the Messiah."

"Yes," said Joseph, "that too." No surprises here, just Truth.

The stable fable—with a creating power that has moved poets, artists, and music makers to a lavish outpouring in the service of beauty.

The stable fable—with a redeeming power that moves soldiers to cease fire, merchants to cease trading, and moves ordinary folk like you and me to cease our ordinary lives for a time, and pour ourselves out in the service of love.

The stable fable—with a sustaining power that moves all manner of people to acts of generosity and hospitality in the service of a perfect homecoming.

And if there is a broken side to this story, of crass exploitation, of conspicuous consumption, of silly sentimentality, then that, too, is part of its power to intrude, to move human beings to respond.

Has it always been so? Has the lovely tale always had such power to tantalize us with angelic annunciations that fill the night sky with humanity's fondest hopes; "Peace to God's people on earth;" to pierce our complicated heady existences with the simple earthy intimacy of a woman giving birth; to allay our suspicions that all Saviors will turn out to be tyrants, by giving us a King in diapers surrounded by his court of shepherds?

Our world's need for Christmas may well be greater than the Church's need for it. And perhaps that is what has always been so.

The first Christians showed little desire to celebrate this beginning; they were occupied with preparing for the End. St. Paul's depiction of Nativity is succinct. "When the time had fully come, God sent forth his Son, born of a woman." Not much to inspire the children's pageants, there. Luke's genius became a gift to a people who were in danger of losing sight of that end, for the church of his day was beginning to settle in for the long haul. The evangelist gave us the story of beginning, a Gospel genesis for Christians to cling to, when last judgments and cosmic consummations lost their power to grasp them.

Western Roman Christianity in those early centuries, gave the world a Christian Feast of light and beauty and love, of the coming of the Son of God, to challenge the rule of pagan sun gods. The Roman empire fell and the world entered the dark ages, but she carried into that darkness the stable fable, and its message of light.

St. Francis gave us our Christmas crêche. His medieval world could still hear the music of the spheres, but God's glory and majesty had outdistanced human reach. The Christmas that world needed was found in simple poverty, as close, as gentle, as fragile as a baby.

The Victorians made our Christmas pretty and warm; they gave us a domestic ritual that brought humanity and God home again. Their world needed a Christmas that fed the hungers left when industrial and technological progress became substitutes for salvation.

And so we prepare for Christmas, 1990, and ponder, like Mary, what it all must yet mean. Our world still needs Christmas, for people still desire peace and salvation, intimacy and wholeness, light and truth, even when we go about finding them in the wrong places, in so many wrong ways. The Church must make for the world and for ourselves a Christmas in the image of our creating, redeeming, sustaining God, a Christmas that incarnates that God in ways this world might see and hear and touch and know.

What we must give now is this Christmas present. We live in a world that has regained some forceful if ominous sense of the End. We live in a world so interconnected and interdependent that it is impossible to hide for long from that reality. The destruction of far away tropical rain forests will alter my existence on this planet. The scarcity of particular resources will affect my life, my livelihood. My claim to them will affect others in radical ways. Was it only Christmas last that new freedoms in Eastern Europe had brought the world to the brink of peace; and yet we find ourselves again in the familiar toleration of life at the brink of war. Technology has outdistanced human imagination, and unbounded progress has failed to save us, or even to feed, clothe, and shelter so many of us. Many women are too frightened, or too shamed, or too alienated to dare to bring new life to birth. Spirituality without God has issued in a "New Age."

How can we ever begin to show this world a Christmas that speaks to its fears and sins and yearnings, that touches us in our failed assurances of progress, and in the broken promises of peace, in the dashed expectations of our relationships? What can make a Christmas that is a genesis moment, a chance to begin again, like a new born Babe?

Ursula Leguin writes: "There is a certain bleakness that comes from finding hope where one expected certainty."

A confusing and troubled present dashes many certainties, but so too does God.

If bleakness sounds a somber note amid our joyful, holiday preparations, it has always been among the signs that herald God's arrival. That is the witness of two testaments: bleakness in the impossible possibilities of barrenness through which Abraham and Sarah fathered and mothered a people into being; bleakness in the dangerous moments of Exodus when fleeing slaves found themselves at the water's edge with the oppressors hot on their heels; bleakness in the desperate circumstances of an exile when a dispossessed people met their God far from home.

The newer testament this holy season pursues the theme. We have heard the bleak voice of the Baptist crying in the wilderness, "prepare the way of the Lord." We wonder at the bleakness of virginity that has no reasonable hope of pregnancy. And one day this beginning will move to the bleakness of a Cross and an empty tomb, to proclaim that death itself is a profound ground for hope.

That certain bleakness that comes from finding hope where one had expected certainty may be the space where God has always entered, where God enters still. It is precisely the bleakness that we cherish, preserve and protest in the stable fable: the homeless couple, the rude manger, the suspect shepherds, and the naked newborn. Out of their poverty, their frailty, their fragility, they give us yet a moment of birthing and of beauty, a night of mystery and wonder, an interlude of light and of peace.

Every Christmas since the first one has been about hope, not certainty. God has given us his Son, and we have shared with our world the Feast that celebrates that love. We cannot take it back, for God will not. The witness of Christians is that of a Body which still gives birth to newness among us by the power of God. The Church and her people make our Christmas celebration in hope, re-entering, then re-presenting in our churches, our homes and for our world, the beauty, the mystery, the light, as full as we are able. We do so in remembrance of the One who still comes, amidst bleakness—perhaps for you in the simplicity of a familiar carol, or in the chill of a December street corner inhabited by a Salvation Army Santa, in an uneasy truce or an awkward embrace, even in such bleakness as a piece of bread and a cup of wine.

May the God of hope fill you this holy season with all joy and peace in believing through the power of the Spirit.

Interview with Joy Rogers

David Hardin: In the midst of all this celebration, not everybody celebrates. Do you find that is true in your church?

Joy Rogers: Christmas is a hard time of year for lots of people, I think. I was a nurse before I went to seminary. If somebody is in the hospital at Christmas time, they must be terribly ill. In the parishes, our expectations of what Christmas is supposed to be are very high. It is a very difficult time for people who are alone, who are unemployed, and people whose relationships are in trouble.

Hardin: As Christians, how can we help? What can we do about all that?

Rogers: I think it is a wonderful time of year and Christians really do engage in a kind of outpouring of generosity and hospitality to the less fortunate among us. But, it is our churches and Christmas liturgies that can help people touch into a real sense of Christmas in ways they have no resources for in their own lives.

Hardin: I have heard loneliness called the worst disease of all. How good a job are we doing in the church to really deal with loneliness?

Rogers: I'm not sure. I think every Christian community has a responsibility as a community to be a place of hospitality; to be a community where people do touch each other.

Hardin: We have that chance. Sometimes the very people who are loneliest haven't quite got the energy to get at the problem. We need to think about those people; maybe we need to call them.

Rogers: It is a question of how well we issue the invitation.

Hardin: How did you decide to be a priest?

Rogers: I suppose I've always thought that's the direction where I wanted to head. I was a teacher, then a nurse and now a priest. It seems like I've gone from one sort of teaching-healing profession to another. My nursing career moved nicely into this kind of work.

Hardin: These are helping professions and places where we have a chance to be there for people.

Rogers: Life and death professions.

Hardin: They really are. And hectic professions.

Rogers: Oh, yes, especially this part of the year.

Hardin: Thank you so much for being with us. It's been great.