Once upon a time, back in the 50s it was – not the 1950s, but the 0050s – in the fall of the year 57, as near as the scholars can make out, Paul the Apostle left Corinth and began to make his way back to Jerusalem. He was a man on a mission. He had urged the churches of Greece and Macedonia to take up an offering, to help feed the hungry children of Jerusalem: and he was on his way to deliver that help.

There was a famine going on in Judea. In the history of the world there is almost always a famine going on somewhere. There are bumper crops and bountiful harvests in some places, and deep hunger in other places. The challenge is always to get the abundant food to the places where the hungry people are. Of course, when food is scarce the prices always go up. So while the famine was harsh in Jerusalem and the surrounding areas, there was food in other places, in Persia, in Egypt, and caravans would bring in food along the trade routes. But the prices were high. To paint the picture in present-day terms: you used to be able to buy a loaf of bread for a dollar, but now the price keeps going up, to three dollars, to five dollars, to ten dollars. Still, as long as you had a ten dollar bill, you could buy a loaf of bread. But what about when you ran out of ten dollar bills? Your children are sitting around the kitchen table, with nothing to eat: and all you can do is look at them. You spent your last ten dollar bill yesterday, buying one last loaf of bread. What now?

The churches of Greece and Macedonia had responded well to Paul’s invitation. They had raised significant money. Paul was going to take this money to Jerusalem, to help the people there buy bread. But there was a problem. Many of the people of Jerusalem didn’t trust Paul. They were mad at him because he believed in Jesus. Earlier in his life he had not believed in Jesus. Maybe you remember that part of the story, how vehement Paul had been about not believing in Jesus. He had been angry at the people who did believe in Jesus. And then one day he himself had a vision where Jesus spoke to him, and this encounter changed his life: he became a believer, and an apostle, and was out to tell the world about the difference Jesus made in his life. And that made his old friends feel like Paul was a traitor. “He used to be on our side,” they said. “Now he’s gone over to the other side. Now he is our enemy.”

Paul knew they felt that way about him. He knew he might get arrested, if he went back to Jerusalem. When people are really angry at you, when they think you’re a traitor, they might get violent: they might get murderous. But he also knew that the people of Jerusalem were going hungry, barely scraping by. He knew that many of those who were suffering were his old friends. He knew that many of the hungry children of Jerusalem were the children of his old friends. And so he wanted to bring this offering, gathered up by Christians in Greece and Macedonia who had no personal connection to people in Jerusalem. Paul wanted to bring this tangible expression of the love of Jesus from a thousand miles away, as people in Philippi and Thessalonika and Corinth and Berea and other towns were moved by the love of Jesus to do something to help hungry people, people they had never met, all they knew about them was that they were suffering in a famine, and the love of Jesus had moved them to put something aside, a ten dollar bill here, a couple of ten dollar bills there, family after family gathering up this money, with the resolve that they would send this money with Paul to help the people of Jerusalem. So that the hungry children of Jerusalem would have bread to eat. The love of Jesus had created that compassion in people’s hearts.

So Paul began the voyage back to the Holy Land, four or five days of sailing if the winds were fair and you were traveling in a straight line: but it would actually take several weeks of traveling, because Paul wanted to do part of the journey on foot so that he could visit with various fledgling churches along the way, and several times they stopped in one town for several days, and then caught the next ship that happened to be going in the right direction. Eventually they landed in the port of Caesarea, and from there they went on by land to Jerusalem.

Paul was not alone on this journey. There were several people who traveled with him. One of them was named Luke. He is sometimes called Luke the Beloved Physician: a doctor who helped to take care of Paul, who sometimes was troubled by various ailments. He is sometimes called Luke the Evangelist, because he was the writer of one of the Evangels, one of the messages of good news, one of the four gospels that begin the New Testament. And some people have called him Luke the Historian, because of the way that he wrote. Some of the other gospel writers wrote more topically, like how Matthew stacks the parables of Jesus into several collections, and puts his instructions for Christian mission work in another collection: doing it that way makes it easier for the student to study and then memorize what Jesus said about those topics. Luke, in contrast, decided he wanted to put things in an orderly arrangement: he decided to do his best to set all the incidents in chronological order.

Paul and Luke and the other members of the group made it to Jerusalem. And within just a few days of their arrival, there was a riot, as the people who hated Paul came together in fury. Paul was arrested, and put into prison: first in the jail in Jerusalem, and then he was moved to the prison in Caesarea, on the Mediterranean coast. In the end, he would be kept in prison there for about two years.

It has never been a pleasant thing, to be in a prison cell. In ancient times it was often cold, and damp, and the rations were very poor. But you could have visitors, who could bring you a warm blanket, or better food. That was Luke’s job: to do his best to make sure Paul had hot soup and fresh bread most days, and maybe some fruit from time to time. It was expensive. But the authorities were not going to waste money making sure the prisoners had three square meals a day, with a nutritionally well-balanced FDA-approved diet.

And so Luke was there, in the Holy Land, for those two years. Much of that time he had to stay in the town of Caesarea, so that he could go and see Paul every day. But the book of Philippians tells us how Epaphroditus, one of the elders of the congregation in Philippi in Macedonia, had traveled from Philippi to Caesarea, bringing material supplies like a warm blanket and maybe a wool jacket for Paul, plus money for groceries, and himself to serve as a helper and visitor. So Luke thought about how he wanted to write an account about Jesus, and now he was just a couple of days southwest of Galilee, the same place that most of the ministry of Jesus had taken place. Luke had not been there, when Jesus did the miracle of feeding the multitude with just five loaves and two fish. He had not been there, when Jesus healed the lame and the blind, when he cleansed the lepers, when he raised the dead. But now he was so close to Galilee, where these things had happened. It was about thirty years after these things had happened. And some of the people who were there were still alive. And Luke could talk to these people. And so with Epaphroditus in Caesarea to see to Paul’s day to day needs, Luke took some time to travel to Galilee, to visit with the people there, to hear from their personal experience what it was like, when Jesus said and did all those things.

And then, I think, someone must have told him that Mary the mother of Jesus was still alive. What would his reaction have been? I think we can all imagine how much Luke the Historian would have wanted to talk to her.

We all remember the part of the story about how Mary was a young teenager, engaged to marry Joseph, and how the angel Gabriel appeared to her and explained that she had been chosen to be the mother of the Messiah. But wait: how do we know about that? The only people who were there were Mary and Gabriel. The source for that story had to be Mary herself. Of course, she could have told Joseph, and her mother and her sister and her best friend, and half a dozen other individuals as well, and then those people could have told many others, and so on. But I suspect it did not happen that way. I think it more likely that Mary did not tell many people about this at all. I suppose she knew that when she started showing as a pregnant unmarried girl, the gossips were going to gossip about her, no matter what she said. There was no way to keep that from happening. Objecting that the gossips were wrong, insisting that it was a miracle, explaining about what the angel had said – all of that would only make it worse: the gossips would not be persuaded at all, they would think she was making up a wild tale, and they would gossip ten times as much, not only about her pregnancy, but about the lies she was telling about it. And so I suppose that it might have happened that Mary told Joseph, but she decided she would not tell anyone else. And I suppose that Joseph may well have been skeptical at first, but then decided he would believe her when he had his own vision about it: and I suppose that maybe he, too, decided he would not tell anyone else.

Back in Bible times nearly all marriages were arranged marriages. After all, everyone knew that the decision to get married was too important a decision to be left to the wisdom of a couple of teenagers. And so nearly all the time the parents would consult with a matchmaker and they would figure out that this girl and this boy would be a good match for each other, and when the boy was about 16 or 17, and the girl was about 13 or 14, the two would be wed. That’s too young to get married, we would say today. And certainly there were unhappy marriages that resulted from that system. On the other hand, our system today results in lots of unhappy marriages as well. Getting married and living happily ever after has never been automatic or easy.

So it’s likely that Mary was 13 or 14 when she and Joseph were betrothed, so let’s say she was 14 or 15 when Jesus was born, in 4 BC as the scholars have figured out – not in the year 1, because of details about how the modern calendar came to be – that’s a long story that we’ll save for another time. Then if we accept the date for the crucifixion in the year 30, again going with the scholarly consensus, then that would mean that Mary was about 47 or 48 when Jesus died. And so in the years 59 and 60, when Paul was in prison in Caesarea and Luke was doing his in-person interviews in Galilee, Mary would have been 77 or 78 years of age. Not so very old, by our standards today, now that people frequently live into their nineties, and living to 100 is noteworthy but no longer rare. In Bible times, though, that was quite uncommon. So many babies died in their first year of life, and of those who survived that, so many more died in their first five years of life. So many died from accidents on the farm, from injuries that got infected. So many young mothers died in childbirth. Out of those who survived all of those challenges, many died in their thirties and forties and fifties. Some people made it to three score years and ten, and some even to four score, as Psalm 90 says; but most of them did not.

So here is old Mary, about 77 years old, and Luke has learned that she is still alive, and he thinks, “I’ve got to speak to her. I need to ask her to tell me what she remembers.”

As it turns out, she remembered quite a lot.

Almost the very first thing in the gospel of Luke is the story of Elizabeth and Zechariah, the parents of John the Baptist, and how the angel Gabriel announced to Zechariah that in their old age they would have a son, who would turn out to be John the Baptist. Maybe you remember how Elizabeth had stayed in seclusion for many months, deliberately keeping her pregnancy a secret; but she had told the whole story to Mary, when Mary had come to visit her; and Mary remembered that, and told that story to Luke, and he wrote it down, and because Mary told that story to Luke, that’s how we are able to know, twenty centuries later, anything at all about Elizabeth and Zechariah and how they became the parents of John the Baptist. And while she was telling their story to Luke, her own story started to come out, too, about how the angel Gabriel had visited her, too, and announced that God had chosen her to become the mother of the Messiah, and how she had considered this calling, and how she had bowed her head in acceptance, saying “I am the servant of the Lord. Let it be for me as you have said.”

And more than sixty years later, she remembered how things had gone from there: she remembered the decree, it had created such a stir in every little town as the news came in, the decree that said it wasn’t enough that the tax collectors came to the village and made every family pay taxes: now they wanted to write down everyone’s name on an official scroll, so that if the tax people came to town and you weren’t home that day, they’d still know who you were, and they could come back as many times at it took until they had collected every penny. Mary remembered that. And she remembered how she and Joseph had to travel all the way to Bethlehem to get registered there, a four day journey, traveling along the road that followed the Jordan River all the way to Jericho, and then up into the hills to Jerusalem, and on south another few miles to Bethlehem.

The birth of her first-born son. The visit of the shepherds. The presentation of the baby in the temple. The words of the prophet Simeon, there in the temple. And the words of the prophet Anna, so devout, she had been 86 that year, a woman of great age, and great wisdom, and great piety. Mary remembered all of this. Simeon was long dead, of course, and Anna was long dead, and hardly anyone was still alive who might have remembered them at this point. But Mary remembered. And those shepherds, so excited, so lively, crowding in and telling the wonderful vision of angels they had seen, how those angels had sung “Glory to God!” The shepherds had to come see, and sure enough, it was just as the angel had told them. Now all those shepherds were long dead, too. But Mary had treasured all these things, and pondered them in her heart. And because Luke had come to see her, she told Luke. And Luke wrote it down, and these stories became part of the gospel of Luke.

Now, let’s speak plainly about this. The Christmas story is about Jesus. We remember this story, and we tell this story and retell this story, because it is about Jesus. The story touches on the shepherds, for example, and I’m glad that it does, because that’s an interesting part of the story: but the shepherds are not the center of the story, they are not the focus of the story. The story is about Jesus. The gospel of Luke, and the other gospels, they are all about Jesus. The story isn’t about Zechariah and Elizabeth. The story isn’t about Luke; it isn’t about Paul. The story isn’t about Mary. And the story isn’t about me, and it isn’t about you. This story is about Jesus, God the Son, the second person of the Trinity, who comes to be born as a human child, to grow up in a human family, to learn and to teach, to work the miracles of God Almighty! And then to accept the due penalty of all human sin, and to lay down his life to pay that penalty. And then to rise from the dead, so that we might know that death does not get the last word, because death is not the end of the story.

That’s what this story is about. I have emphasized that the story is not about Elizabeth and Zechariah: but let me also emphasize this: they are in this story, yes they are! The story is not about Luke, taking his notes as he interviews people; it’s not about Paul, starting churches in one town after another, or sitting in his prison cell; but they are in this story, yes indeed. The story isn’t about Simeon or Anna, but they get to be part of this story: they do! It’s not about Joseph, it’s not about Mary: yet they sure get to play an important part in this story, don’t they?

And the story isn’t about me, even though I’m the one telling you this part of the story right now. And the story isn’t about you, either. Many of us find that the hardest part to accept. From time to time all of us find ourselves thinking of ourselves as the hero, the central character around which everything else revolves. Most of the time we all recognize that our role is indeed smaller than that; and sometimes that realization makes us suppose that we’re not really part of the story at all: we’re not even unnamed background characters that could only be referenced as “student number four” or “juror number ten.”

One Friday evening when I was a child, maybe 8 or 9 years old, my parents took me and my two sisters to a play at the local theater. I do not remember the name of the play. I do not know the plot of the play. I do not know who was the main character of the play. I only know that there was one scene in the play where a great mob of people runs madly across the stage from one side to the other, and when they are done the audience can see that the main character got caught in the stampede and got knocked down and trampled by the crowd, as the man crawls onto the stage with his clothes torn and dirt on his face, and painfully staggers back to his feet.

The director of the play had recruited many people to be part of that mob, including my family. All in all there were maybe sixty or seventy-five of us mob participants. The director decided that wasn’t enough, for the size of the effect he wanted. And so after we exited the stage, we had to go around again, behind the scenery, back to the entrance and run across again: thus creating the feel of a mob of well over one hundred people. We charged across the stage, yelling YAAAH!! And we circled around and charged across the stage again: YAAAAH!!

That’s what we did, that Friday evening. We came in the back door of the theater and stood around waiting for ten or fifteen minutes. Then came the actual action, which took less than a minute. Then we went back out to the parking lot and drove home. The next day, Saturday, we went back and did it again.

Now, I want you to know that I am aware that I was not the hero of that play. Nor was I a minor character in that play. I doubt my name would have been listed in the program at all: but I never saw the program for that play, so maybe there was a section labeled “the mob” listing all the names and maybe they had my name there, identifying me as “face-in-the-crowd-number-62.” Nah. Probably not.

So I said there are two opposite ways of thinking about the great story of the redemption of the world through the death and resurrection of Jesus – sometimes we live as though we think we are the most important part of the story, and sometimes we recognize that can’t be right, so we live as though we think we’re not any part of the story at all. But both of those opposites are wrong. We are not the main character. We are also not nobody at all. It may turn out that in today’s episode within that great story we have been cast as “student number four” or “face in the crowd number 62.” Or as Anna or Simeon – both of them prophets of the Lord, old people not far from leaving this world, speaking the word of the Lord to young Mary: and then remembered more than sixty years later by old Mary, who shared this story with Luke.

Old Mary. She had played an important role, many years earlier. She had listened to the voice of the angel, and had stepped up and fulfilled the will of the Lord. But that was a long time ago. Now she was an old woman, probably living in the home of one of her sons or grandsons. And maybe she could still get around a bit, walking the two blocks to the house where they had church on Sundays? Or maybe she mostly stayed at home now, because her joints hurt so much when she walked any distance? Luke didn’t write down anything about what her health was like in her old age.

But even though Old Mary was indeed old, she still had a role to play. She remembered. And she shared those memories. She told Luke about what had happened with the angel Gabriel, and with Zechariah and Elizabeth, leading up to the birth of Jesus. And about what happened that night with the shepherds, and about what happened in the temple afterwards.

The traditional Christmas story in Luke is twenty verses long, Luke 2:1-20. Almost at the end, in verse 19, it says, “Mary treasured all these things, and pondered them in her heart.” Mary had kept on treasuring and pondering these events, all her life. And because she did that, she was able to tell Luke this part of the story of Jesus, and Luke was able to write it down, and you and I are able to read it. These memories that Mary treasured and pondered: they still touch our lives, twenty centuries later.

Your part in the story of Jesus, and my part in the story of Jesus: twenty centuries from now, people will not be reflecting on how we treasured and pondered these things, and shared them with others. Even just a century from now: probably not. No, the difference we make will come much sooner than that. The stories we tell of how Jesus has touched our lives will be part of how Jesus touches the lives of other people, too. Your choice to tell someone about how Jesus helps in the ordinary struggles of your real life experience: that can make a difference for someone you talk to. Go ahead: do that this week.