I always enjoy reading Private Eye and I was particularly amused by the cover of this year’s Christmas issue. It carries the headline “The Xmas Factor” and in a traditional depiction of the annunciation, the angel Gabriel leans down to Mary and says, “You’re going to be a celebrity”.
Celebrity is the way in which our mass-media culture identifies the people who really matter in the world. It seems as if there are two sorts of people: those who feature in the glossy magazines and free newspapers and those who are insignificant. And programmes like X factor and Big Brother become so popular because they give the unimportant the opportunity to enter this important world of glamour.
I began this year working in a primary school on an estate on the outskirts of Cambridge and when I asked the children what they wanted to do when they grow up they didn’t say “I want to be a fireman or a ballet dancer”, they just said “I want to be famous”. Particularly for these children, this was how they thought they could become important and significant.
But this distinction between people who matter and people who don’t is nothing new. The same distinction was made in the time of Jesus. First century Palestine had its own kind of “celebrity culture” and the writer of the Gospel we just heard, Luke, was quite interested in it. He begins the first chapter of his book by putting the story in the context of one celebrity “King Herod of Judea” and then he begins the second chapter with the passage we just heard referring to Emperor Augustus and Quirinius the Governor of Syria.
But the odd thing is after mentioning these celebrities, the story he tells seems to have absolutely nothing to do with them. He talks about very different people altogether – a childless ageing couple and an unmarried pregnant village girl. Then in this passage he talks about a host of angels appearing to, not to any of these celebrities, but to a bunch of farm workers – people whose occupation was not only decidedly unglamorous, but in the context of that culture was stigmatised and regarded by purists as making them unable to fulfil the requirements of the religious Law.
And then by the time we get to chapter three of his book, it really does seem as if Luke’s trying to make a point. “In the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was the governor of Judea, and Herod was the ruler of Galilee and his brother Philip ruler of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias ruler of Abilene [wherever that is!], the word of God came to John, son of Zechariah, in the wilderness”!!! And John who was Jesus’ cousin was just about as unimportant, unglamorous and frankly odd as you can possibly imagine.
We always read the Bible so seriously, but this is actually irony, to be read with your tongue firmly in your cheek. In his satire on celebrity culture, Luke is hammering home his liberating message that the Christmas story is not about the kind of people the world considers important. It is about those who are dismissed as insignificant. And that point is as important to us today as it was to Luke.
The Christmas message is really about shifting our attention from the glitzy celebrity world that we are bombarded with on television toward things that are more mundane and ordinary. And that’s not just because we should think compassionately at Christmas about those who are poor and homeless and so on. But actually we turn our attention to the unglamorous world because it is more likely to be within this ordinariness that God is at work or rather where God finds the opportunities that God is looking for.
What Luke is really trying to say is that God has special purposes for all of us. There are particular things that God is calling each one of us to do to make this world more as he intended. And if we spend our lives trying to become important in the world’s eyes, then we will probably be, like Augustus and Quirinius, and all the other celebrities Luke mentions, less able to hear what the angels are telling us about God’s purposes for our lives.
Only the ordinary shepherds were able to hear that extraordinary choir of angels. And at Christmas, we shouldn’t be surprised at that, because God’s very self has become present in our world in the most ordinary and fragile of things: a tiny baby born in a cattle shed.
There can only be one winner of the X Factor, one person who will ascend out of ordinariness into the glamorous world of celebrity in the way that so many seem to aspire. But the message of the Christ child is that God is at work in the ordinary, God values those on the margins of whatever kind and God has purposes that will be realised not by the rich and powerful, but by ordinary folk who don’t consider themselves to be very pious or holy, or don’t even have a very high opinion of themselves at all. So this Christmas lets be open to hearing what that may be within the ordinariness of our lives, and with Mary and Joseph and the Shepherds, lets respond to God.