“The Emperor and the Baby: A Clash of Narratives”

Christmas Eve Service

Monday, December 24, 2007

Isaiah 9: 2, 6-7

Psalm 96

So, what’s your story?

It is a common enough question to ask someone, particularly when we first meet them. 

To put it in a bit less casual terms, by what narrative are you living your life?

A number of modern philosophies suggest that we all have certain stories by which we live our lives.   These narratives give us the lenses through which we interpret reality and construct our understanding of the world. 

Over the next few days, as we gather with friends and family members, many of us will be telling stories about past Christmases and about the past year.  In so doing, we will continue to build the narratives of our lives and our families.  

But this story-telling tendency is not limited to our own personal lives.  We tell stories about our religious traditions and faith communities; about our country and its history; about our culture and our civilization; even about the ways that we believe that the universe might have come into being.  Philosophers refer to the stories which have the greatest influence on us as our ‘dominant narratives’.  By this, they mean that in a world of competing narratives and competing explanations of reality, there are certain stories that come to exert the greatest influence on our understandings of our families, our country, our culture, and our understanding of human existence.  These are the dominant narratives of our lives.

It is interesting to notice that at the very heart of our Christmas celebrations is not some arid doctrinal statement, but rather a story, a narrative.

In those days a decree went out from Emperor Augustus that all the world should be registered. 

So often, we pay very little, if any, attention to these words at the beginning of this famous reading from Luke chapter 2.

But they offer a powerful opening to this story. 

By mentioning the Emperor, even in passing, the author of Luke is introducing a striking contrast into this text –that is, the contrast between the narrative of the Emperor and the narrative of the baby.

And what was it that the first of these two characters was doing when the other was about to be born?

The Emperor was calling for a census. 

At first glance, these words do not seem particularly significant. Emperors did that sort of thing.  But there is, in fact, a profound complexity to these opening words.

This complexity is revealed when we realize that historians and biblical scholars have found it quite difficult to establish when – and even if – such a census took place.  Moreover, ‘when Quirinius was governor of Syria’ does not seem to easily line up with the other historical details that we can establish about the life of Jesus of Nazareth. 

So why, we might ask, does this reference to the emperor’s census have such a central place in Luke’s story? What narrative of reality might such an event represent?

We might explore these questions by considering why an emperor would call for such a census.

First and foremost, a census was a way of counting the people in the empire.  A census would tell the imperial authorities how many people were under their control; it would help to keep the empire organized; and, perhaps most importantly, it would serve as a way of figuring out how much money could be raised in taxes.  Once that census data had been compiled, the emperors and the imperial authorities would know how large an army they could raise to control their populace, fight their wars and serve their need or desire for imperial expansion. 

The logic of a census, the narrative of the emperor, was this -- count, measure, quantify and control – and you will know how important, how valuable and how powerful you are.

The knowledge that would be compiled, from that census, would strengthen the imperial narrative.  It would help the emperor to ensure that the structures of society would be maintained, and it would help the imperial authorities to guard against the anarchy and chaos that would ensue if the Pax Romana was upset. God forbid that such anarchy ever be unleashed – since those in power, including the emperor himself, might be thrown down.  And God forbid that anyone should even pray that One might come whose arrival would lead to the powerful being brought down from their thrones, the lowly lifted up, the hungry filled with good things and the rich sent away empty.

We continue to live in a world in which the narratives of empire exert a powerful influence. Such narratives suggest that true power is still able to be counted and measured. If one can measure the size of a nation’s military, one can know how important and powerful that nation is. Or if a country can count up its money and post a budgetary surplus or boast a strong currency, then that country must be in powerful and valuable shape, regardless of whether or not there are poor, mentally ill and homeless citizens sleeping on the streets of its most affluent cities.  The narratives of empire suggest that certain nations have the right to exploit the world’s resources and exert either real or hegemonic control over other nations, if such actions are deemed to be necessary for the economic and social stability of the nation.  In the name of the Empire – or in the name of King and Country – atrocities can be committed, and excused, if they are shown to be in the defense of the imperial narrative.  The empire functions as long as its noble story, its dominant narrative, is defended and safeguarded.

And what is equally significant is that the noble imperial narrative also has a story to tell about the ways that critics of that empire are to be treated.  That is, anyone who calls for a different type of community, or kingdom, or who threatens the assumptions of the imperial narrative is viewed as a dangerous subversive who must be defeated and destroyed – perhaps even crucified.  

But, in spite of that threat, dominant narratives do get challenged. In the past few years, a number of our culture’s dominant narratives have been overturned.  The two great wars of the last century were, at their very heart, conflicts which erupted from the clash between those whose narratives gave them imperial aspirations and those who wanted to stop them.  By the end of those two terrible conflicts, the dominant narratives of those empires had been so overwhelmingly challenged that many powerful global empires which existed one hundred years ago today no longer even exist.

Subsequently, the clash between the imperial narratives of Western capitalism and Soviet communism resulted in the costly and destructive violence of the supposedly Cold War.  We are still, in some ways, waiting to see what new narratives will emerge from those formerly feuding empires.  

But it is not just the narratives of empire that are being questioned and challenged.  Science has changed the dominant narratives about the origin of the universe; the native people of our country have challenged the dominant narratives of Canadian history; women have critiqued the patriarchal narratives of Western culture – both outside of and within the church; the formerly colonized nations of the earth have challenged the triumphant narratives of the imperial colonialism; the poor are challenging the economic narratives about the unquestioned goodness of the free market system; and, perhaps most significantly, the changing environment is challenging our materialistic narratives that have lulled us into thinking that we are free to live lives of unchecked consumption.  We are living in a time when so many of the narratives by which we have structured our understanding of reality are being overturned.

But this is not the first era in history when the dominant narratives of this world have been challenged.

In those days, a decree went out from Emperor Augustus that all the world should be registered.

And at that moment, even as the Emperor was collecting the information so that the narrative of the empire could be strengthened, a tiny infant was born.  And, with the birth of that baby, a new story was unleashed on human history. 

Into this world of kings and imperial narratives came the story of a different kind of king – a king who was not interested in domination, but in servanthood; a king who was not interested in drawing people to himself in order to rule over them, but rather to give his life for them; a king who did not use his power to satisfy his own desires, but used his power to feed the hungry, to heal the sick and to restore the marginalized to community. 

The story of that baby challenged – and challenges – the story of the emperor. 

But the clash of narratives between the emperor and the baby is not yet fully resolved.  Rather, it has implications in every one of our lives.

After all, within every one of us, there is an ongoing competition between the ways of the emperor and those of the baby. Within each one of us, there continues to be a narrative which suggests that our life’s true measure will be determined by some personal census – by counting, measuring, quantifying and controlling things.  We count up how much money we have, or how many people we control in the workplace, or how many people love us.  We even speak of a person’s ‘net worth’ purely in relation to a measurable number in a bankbook, and have accepted the strange – and perhaps blasphemous – idea that some human beings have a greater net worth than others.  We try to measure how beautiful we are by looking at a number on a bathroom scale, or how popular we are by the number of friends that we have on facebook, or how loveable we are by the number of Christmas cards that we receive.

Such is the narrative of the emperor. Take a census of your life; count, measure, quantify and control – and you will know how important, how valuable and how powerful you are.

But, on this night of all nights, we are reminded that there is another narrative, another story that is waiting to be born in us.

It is the story of a small, innocent, powerless, vulnerable baby – who had no net worth, who had no measurable qualities – but who was born to help us to realize that life’s true measure is not discovered in how much we have, but in whose we are. 

The narrative of the baby invites us to realize that we are loved, by God, with the same unconditional, grace-filled, exuberant love that a mother or father has for a helpless, vulnerable newborn baby.  And the narrative of the baby invites us into this story by simply asking us to allow that same unconditional, grace-filled, exuberant love to be born in us, even this night. 

May God grant us the faith to allow our lives to be liberated from the narrative of the emperor.  Instead, may it be our prayer that God will allow the story of the baby to be born in us, this night, and forever.

Amen.