343 An Irrelevant Christmas

   (Note: This blog entry is based on the text for “An Irrelevant Christmas”, originally shared on December 25, 2024. It was the 343^rd video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)

   We are celebrating a birth today that launched the most important events in human history, and it happened through a young woman whose place in human history was otherwise irrelevant. Today, we’re going to find out how that worked.

   Pastor Rick Warren once said that God doesn’t call the qualified. God qualifies the called.

   Sometimes, that happens in unexpected ways.

   I read a story the other day about a famous doctor who was being given a tour of the Tewksbury Institute, a combination physical and mental hospital, in Massachusetts.

   At one point, he bumped into an elderly floor maid and then struck up a conversation to cover his embarrassment.

   It turned out that the maid had worked there almost from the beginning.

   She took him down into the old basement and showed him some small, rusty, prison cells.

   She pointed to one and said, “That’s the cage where they used to keep Annie Sulivan.”

   “Who’s that?”, the doctor asked.

   She said that Annie was brought in as a young girl because no one could do anything with her. She’d bite people and throw her food at them. She’d thrash around and scratch, and no one could examine her.

   So, one night, the floor maid baked Annie a batch of brownies after work. She took them to Annie’s cage and left them where she could reach them. Then she said to her, “Annie, I baked these brownies just for you. I’ll put them right here on the floor and you can come and get them if you want.” Then, she said, she got out of there as fast as she could. 😊

   The maid said that Annie ate the brownies, and after that she was a little bit nicer to her. So, she would talk with her, and even got her laughing once.

   One of the nurses saw this and the medical and psychiatric staff asked the floor maid if she would help with Annie, and she did. Every time they wanted to see Annie, she would go into the cage first and explain what was happening, and why, and she would stay with Annie and hold her hand.

   That’s how they discovered that Annie was almost blind.

   After they had worked with her for a tough 12 months, the Perking Institute for the Blind opened a place for Annie and she was able to study and to learn, and eventually she became a teacher herself!

   One day, Annie came back to Tewksbury for a visit, and the director talked with her about a letter he had just received.

   A man had written to him about his daughter, who was totally out of control, almost like an animal. He wrote that she was blind and deaf and mentally ‘deranged’. He said that he didn’t know what to do, but he knew that he didn’t want to put her in an asylum. He asked if anyone at the institute knew of anyone who could come to his house and work with his daughter, Helen Keller. Annie Sullivan went to that house, and she became Helen’s lifelong teacher and companion. Her story became a Broadway play, a television production, and an award-winning movie, all called “The Miracle Worker”.

   Helen Keller attended Radcliffe College of Harvard University and in 1904 she became the first deaf and blind person in the United States to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree. She graduated cum laude. She wrote 12 books, was a prolific speechmaker, was a vigorous social activist, and received many awards. In 1999, she was  listed in Gallup's Most Widely Admired People of the 20th century and as one of Time magazine's 100 Most Important People of the 20th Century. She was a witness for a kind of broadly mystical Christianity.

   When Helen Keller was nominated to receive the Nobel Peace Prize in 1954, she was asked who had had the greatest influence on her life, and she said, “Annie Sullivan.”

   But Annie Sulivan said, “No Helen, the woman who had the greatest influence on both our lives was a floor maid at the Tewksbury Institute.” I couldn’t even find that floor maid’s name.

   That floor maid may have thought of her life as being irrelevant, but without her there would have been no Helen Keller.

   Billy Graham grew up on a dairy farm in North Carolina during the Great Depression.

   He grew into his teenage years as a popular, athletic, young man with movie star looks. He enjoyed having fun. Some might say that he was a little wild. His father was concerned about him.

   In May of 1934, a group of businessmen from nearby Charlotte, North Carolina got permission to hold a prayer meeting on the Graham farm where a prayer was offered that God would call someone from the Charlotte area to preach the Gospel to the world.

   That same year, some friends talked a reluctant 16-year-old Billy into attending a revival meeting that was being led by a travelling evangelist, Rev. Mordecai Ham. Billy Graham would later say that he became a Christian at one of the evening events during that revival.

   Billy Graham grew up to preach the Gospel on every continent and in most countries of the world. He was the friend of presidents and royalty and regular people alike. He had strict accountability requirements for his staff, and there were no scandals associated with his worldwide evangelistic mass gatherings for which he secured the cooperation of churches of all kinds. He pioneered Christian media. He founded the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and the World Emergency Fund. He founded “Christianity Today” magazine, which is still highly influential today.

   Millions of people around the world know who Rev. Billy Graham is, but Rev. Mordecai Ham is pretty much unknown today. He may have thought that his life was irrelevant to the world, but without him, there would have been no Rev. Billy Graham.

   Mary, the mother of Jesus, was a young woman, unmarried in a Patriarchal culture in an almost unknown country to the world. It was occupied by the Roman Empire, which was just the most recent of many empires that had occupied Israel for almost 1,000 years. She could have been as young as 12. Try and wrap your head around that for a minute

   Mary was pregnant, and Joseph, who had a legal relationship with Mary that was not yet marriage, knew that he was not the baby’s father. In those days, Joseph could have had Mary put to death for the shame she had brought upon them and their families. But Joseph who, like Mary, had been visited by an angel (a messenger from God) believed that Mary, a virgin, had been made pregnant by the will of God.

   Just then, everyone in the country was ordered to go to their family’s city of origin in order to be registered by the occupying Roman Empire. The Romans wanted to make sure that everyone was accounted for at tax time.

   Mary and Joseph traveled the 90 miles to Joseph’s family town of Bethlehem, by donkey and on foot, in Mary’s ninth month of pregnancy. They arrived and found that people coming into town from all over the country had taken all the rooms. It’s almost inconceivable, though, that Joseph’s relatives couldn’t have found someplace for them. But the out-of-wedlock pregnancy had shamed the family.

   It was not likely that there was no room for them at the inn, but that there was no room for THEM at the inn, or anywhere else with the family.

   They found some shelter in an enclosure for animals and, having no place to put her baby, Mary wrapped him in tight bands of cloth and laid him in the container from which the animals ate their food.

   This is how God, who created everything that exists from nothing as an act of God’s will, was born as Jesus, who was fully God and fully a human being.

   Mary the earthly mother of Jesus, is pretty well known throughout the world today.

   But she would have been utterly irrelevant to history except that she was obedient to God’s will. And that made all the difference.

   It doesn’t matter if we are irrelevant to the world.

   All that matters is that we are so relevant to God that he came from heaven to earth to be born for us, to give his life and to take it back again for us, and that he will come again to take us to be with him forever.

   Christmas is the story of the power of those who the world sees as irrelevant.

   So, this Christmas, be like the infant Jesus. Depend only upon God. Turn to Him and receive His power, for when we are weak, then we are strong.

   Tonight, we may be able to see the moon. When we see the moon, we see the same moon, in the same phase, as everyone else in the world. We see the same moon that Jesus saw when he was born over 2,000 years ago. Mary saw that same moon, and Joseph, and the shepherds. We all share that common experience.

   But the bond that we have with Jesus is even stronger, infinitely stronger, than the shared experience we have with all people of looking at that same moon.

   Today, we celebrate the common relationship we have with God, given to all who will receive it, because Jesus was born in order to restore that relationship for which we were created as an act of God’s will. The relationship that only comes from God.

   And anyone can share that good news with people they know who need to know about Jesus. We only need to listen to the voice of God and follow Jesus to do great things.

   It doesn’t matter if you think that you are irrelevant to the world.

   Let us be like the shepherds who first saw the baby Jesus. They may well have thought that they were irrelevant, but today we know their witness, as in Luke 2:20,

²⁰ The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen, as it had been told them.

   Share that same good news during this Christmas season.

   The Christmas story is filled with people who were irrelevant to the world, but the power of God enabled them to do great things.

   As Pastor Warren said, “God doesn’t call the qualified. God qualifies the called.”