The Christmas Pageant
My flight leaving Cape Town was cancelled due to bad weather in Europe. So I got to stay for the rehearsal of the Christmas Pageant at St. Mark’s Anglican Church.
My flight leaving Cape Town was cancelled due to bad weather in Europe. So I got to stay for the rehearsal of the Christmas Pageant at St. Mark’s Anglican Church.
The scene opens on a hotel filled with World Cup visitors. Late at night, a knock on the door brings a man and a pregnant woman, but no room. Finally the hotel manager offers a shed in the parking lot. With no medical assistance but lots of angels, the woman gives birth to a child. An angel sang:
“Mary, did you know that your baby boy would give sight to a blind man?
Mary, did you know that your baby boy would calm a storm by his hand?
Did you know that your baby boy has walked where angels trod?
When you’ve kissed your little baby, then you’ve kissed the face of God.”
An angel appears to a group of soccer players telling them to go to this hotel and find the new baby. Three wise men follow a star that brings them there and they give gifts. There is much dancing and rejoicing all around.
So there in the organized chaos of the pageant’s rehearsal, kids from ages 3-13, black, white, and every shade in between were celebrating Christmas.
I had been worried about being here during Advent. In the southern hemisphere, we are in summer with long days, warm sun, and short nights. A few of the usual Christmas trappings but the juxtaposition is all wrong. School is out and everyone is on holiday from early December to mid January and most families spend the time at the beach. But it doesn’t seem like Christmas and I didn’t get to put up the outdoor lights on our house in Seattle.
Yet what I found in spending Advent here was a deeper sense of Christmas than usual. As a Christian, I have experienced the incarnation, the coming of God among the people, on a whole new level. The people who have taken me into their homes and hearts; the acts of love and justice, large and small, that I have seen every day. SAFFI Director, Elizabeth Peterson’s 72-year-old father serves soup to his neighbors every Thursday from his home; faith leaders are working to try to prevent the demolition of small church structures in the townships before Christmas; the AIDS orphans are cared for next door to Elizabeth’s SAFFI office; faith leaders marched on December 16 to celebrate Reconciliation Day. This particular holiday formerly was a celebration of an Afrikaan’s victory in battle--But no more. It is now a national holiday to celebrate the reconciliation of all South African people.
I now know that I came here to experience Christmas and to be reminded that God is with us, Emmanuel. The beautiful beaches, 80-degree weather, and palm trees don’t distract me now. Indeed there is nothing about snow that guarantees the Christian experience of Emmanuel, God with us.
Rev. Dr. Marie M. Fortune
FaithTrust Institute
www.faithtrustinstitute.org
Christmas in Africa
I loved the contemporary setting of the angels and the soccer players!
Lynda