Repaintng Your Nativity Set

Merry Christmas everyone. As I have been sitting here and waiting for my turkey to burn I’ve also been thinking about the story of Christmas. We almost always seem to interpret the story so that Jesus comes as close to being like us as possible. Upper middle class Christians tend to talk more about the wise men than the shepherds, or interpret the shepherds as being like king David.

Other people concentrate on how Jesus came to the unfortunate and the poor in the shepherds. Some people concentrate on Mary, or interpret the angels as singing because that is such an important idea in their faith.

If you want to know how someone thinks about the birth story ask them to draw or make a nativity set, or describe their favorite one. My wife and I got a very lovely ceramic nativity set this Christmas that quite dramatically shows how much we interpret the birth of Christ. First, you might notice from the picture that this nativity is supposed to be native American. There is an eagle on a cactus, a tepee in the background, a wolf as a pet, and stereotypically-traditional clothing being worn. But there is also a shepherds crook (out of frame) and a woman with a sheep over her shoulders, which is quite odd because North America did not have sheep until quite recently, let alone shepherds canes.

You might also notice that not only are the wise men included in the birth story here (they came a year or so later) all the shepherds and wise men are women. There are no “braves” here. In fact, there is no Joseph in the nativity, nor any angels, though there are wise women. Perhaps most striking of all, however, is that everyone in this nativity is glaringly white. I am nearly clear and yet these figures make me look tan. Not one of them looks either Native Israeli or Native American.

What the maker of this nativity set did was try to make it fit another culture (Native American) without actually removing it from how it had already been affected by our own culture (they’re still white). The thing is, this isn’t that unusual of an event. We all do this quite often. We interpret the Bible and our faith in ways that make it most relevant to us, by concentrating on those few elements in every story that speak to us the loudest. That’s fine, the problem is when we think that what we concentrate on is all there is.

The maker of this nativity set seriously missed a lot of the story, and changed some more of it. But it was to make it significant to them. I’m glad they found something meaningful from the story, but we can easily see how much more there is to Jesus’ birth than just what this nativity tells us. The same is true with all of us and our faith. I might concentrate on grace, while someone else might prefer salvation, or holiness, service, love, etc.

We each find those things that matter the most to us and interpret everything else in light of those things. To put it another way, we all dress us, rearrange and color our faith nativity sets. But please, don’t think that your nativity set is the only way it can be set up.