Room at the Bottom

Luke 1:38 "I am the Lord's servant," Mary answered. "May it be to me as you have said." Then the angel left her.

This little, five word declaration from Mary goes right to the heart of the Gospel story. She is a servant of the Lord.

Service is the hardest lesson in life, but I don’t think we’re entirely to blame. I mean, it all starts off in such a misleading way. We come into the world unable to do anything, and people wait on us hand and foot. If we lift an eyebrow or the corners of our mouth, everyone is rapt in ecstasy. No wonder we think we’re the centre of the universe; for the first year or so we are. In time, if we’re lucky, another child will show up and we’ll move down a notch on the road to becoming an adult, perhaps even a mother or father, at the bottom of the pile. When they asked Jesus who was the greatest in his new corporation he pointed to a child. If, by “greatest”, they mean the one who’s the centre of attention and gets his or her needs met first, those folks are in the nursery, not in the board room. What a concept!

Apart from Luke and Matthew, I think Dickens wrote the best Christmas story ever. Ebenezer Scrooge sits in the centre of his cold, lonely world, like a spoiled child who must have everything: “a squeezing, wrenching grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner!” By the end of the story, however, he has learned the lesson of service that Mary seems to know already. To Bob Cratchit he declares, “I'll raise your salary, and endeavor to assist your struggling family,…” Scrooge was better than his word. He did it all, and infinitely more; and to Tiny Tim, who did not die, he was a second father.

Joni Mitchell’s Christmas song, River, captures the lesson poignantly. We all know that feeling of wanting to skate away at Christmas. Is it just the pressure of a season that’s been so twisted and commercialized? Perhaps. But maybe it also has something to do with being caught up in ourselves, staying somewhere we don’t belong just for the money, and being hard to handle and selfish. Maybe what we really need is some beginning skater we can lace up and prop up. Perhaps, if we can skate that far away, we don’t really need to skate away at all, but to someone who’d like to skate too.