Our lost lambs

I remember the Christmas my brother Isaac and I lost the sheep. One was small and white, a tiny plastic lamb no bigger than the baby Jesus figurine. The other was larger, uglier, brownish, with a grouchy face like that one nun in Sister Act. They came with a passel of others—the thoughtful Mary, the bearded Joseph, the tiny strutting chickens, a long-necked goose. And, of course, the angel who came with a tiny hook embedded in the back of its head so you could hang it from the ceiling.

To tell the truth, we lost the sheep because we were young and full of vinegar. We hurled them into the Christmas tree as hard and high as we could. We wanted to see how they did as ornaments, whether they could make a home in the elevated, well-lit, friendly forest of spruce. They did not do well, and as far as we knew they did not build a new home. They got lost among the spruce branches and were never seen again, not even in January when Dad hauled the tree out of the living room into the front yard. There was no plastic clatter of sheep on the floor in the pine needle parade. Just the needles that hung around for weeks, finding their pokey way into our socks.

My parents acquired the full nativity scene during their engagement, a wedding gift from the youth group they led at the time. Its annual unpacking sparked our jubilation and also minor skirmishes about which wise man should stand where. I, particularly, was a fiend about rearranging the domestic scene in the stable. I adjusted Mary’s precise angle to the child, trying to fit as many gawkers inside as possible and excommunicating everyone else to the lawn outside. The angel always provoked us, because the hook on his head had broken and could abide no string. But instead of leaving him prone, we threaded dental floss around his neck and hung him above the town so his “Gloria” banner could unfurl itself before all. I do not recall whether the horror of this image occurred to us at the time.

It was many years before the population of the nativity set escaped their plasticity and came into my heart as living people of importance. I did not understand, yet, that Elizabeth and Mary’s pregnancies were a beautiful primer about the way God uses the personal in the cosmic. Before the cousins’ reunion in Luke—which I would have gladly reenacted, had Elizabeth been included in the set—Elizabeth and Mary share the most private and yet most historically public news in world history. The shepherd in the set, impossibly slender with a wee lamb draped over his shoulders, stood as a marker for a truth that would transform my later life: God’s glittering, good message appeared not to the kingly but to the humbled. And as for the good shepherd in the manger—He would never lose a lamb, not even a little one.