Christmas Come Home
Illustration
Stories
Contents
“Christmas Come Home” by John Sumwalt
“No Problem” by Frank Ramirez
Christmas Come Home
by John Sumwalt
Isaiah 62:6-12
“The Lord has proclaimed
to the end of the earth:
Say to daughter Zion,
“See, your salvation comes;
his reward is with him,
and his recompense before him.” (v. 11)
There was once an old man who had a little brown dog. The dog's name was Christmas.
Christmas came to live at "Old Jake's" house at Christmas time almost a year after his dear wife Margaret died, the day before last Christmas. The strange thing was Jake had never liked dogs. Margaret had always wanted to get a dog and Jake had always said, "No! We don’t need a dog. Dogs are too much trouble.”
As Christmas approached that first year without Margaret, Old Jake didn't know how he was going to bear it. He and Margaret hadn't had any children. The house seemed so bare and empty. Margaret had always done all the decorating. Jake would put up the tree in the living room and a few lights on the bushes in the front yard --- and Margaret did all the rest, wreaths on the doors, candles in the windows, a manger scene on the mantle over the fireplace, and angels and garlands all over the place.
What Jake missed most though was Margaret's baking. The house was always full of good smells in the weeks before Christmas: candy, cookies of all kinds, and fruit cake, her specialty. It wasn't going to be the same.
As December rolled around, Jake decided that he couldn't face the Christmas season alone. He shocked himself. Jake decided to get a dog.
Maybe he did it because he felt guilty about never letting Margaret have a dog. Maybe it was because he was desperately lonely. Maybe Margaret was watching over him.
Whatever it was, the first thing Monday morning on the sixth day of December, Jake found himself down at the humane society. And there among all the cute terriers and beagles and miniature poodles and Shi Tzus and Pekinese, was the ugliest dog he had ever seen. The sign beneath his kennel read Miniature Bull Terrier, but Jake was certain that there must have been a lot of other breeds mixed in there as well.
He had a brownish, mud colored coat with a dark spot that surrounded one eye. His nose looked like a combination of a bulldog and a boxer, there was a scar across his belly and half of his tail was missing. It looked like it had been chewed off in a fight.
"That's my dog," thought Jake. "Nobody else is going to take that dog home."
When they let the dog out of the kennel, he came right up to Jake, licked his hand, and rolled over with his feet in the air. It was like he had been waiting for Jake all of his life. "Hello, little fella. You and I are going to be good friends. I'm going to call you Christmas because you and I are going to get through Christmas together."
He got Christmas into the car and took him home to the big empty house. Jake showed Christmas his bowl of water and the bowl of dog food beside the refrigerator just a few feet from the kitchen table. Then he took Christmas upstairs and showed him the big comfy doggie bed he had found at Wal-Mart. Beside the bed was a raw hide bone and a couple of chewy toys.
Jake had more toys in the closet all wrapped up to go under the tree on Christmas Eve. He would keep those a secret. No sense spoiling the surprise. Jake knew this was all silly for a man his age, but it made him happy. He had feared that he would never be happy again.
Jake and Christmas hit it off immediately, although there was a little trouble that first night. Christmas didn't want to sleep in his comfy Wal-Mart bed. He wanted to sleep on the end of Jake's bed. Jake finally gave in and when he woke up in the middle of the night, he found Christmas nestled up against his feet with his little doggie paw in his mouth. Jake smiled and went back to sleep. He slept more soundly that night than he had since, well since Margaret had died.
In the days that followed, Christmas went with Jake everywhere. They took the garbage out together, cleaned the basement, put up the tree in the living room, arranged the manger scene on the mantle and put all of Margaret's other favorite decorations in their assigned places. Jake did the heavy lifting and Christmas lay in front of the fireplace taking it all in as he wagged the stump of his tail.
Jake even took a shot at baking cookies using a couple of Margaret's easiest recipes. They didn't turn out very good, but Christmas loved them. What did he know? He had probably never had good Christmas cookies.
Things went along very well until about eight days before Christmas. Jake was out in the yard changing a bulb on a string of lights that had gone out. Christmas was following a squirrel trail over by the curb. A garbage truck pulled up and stopped at the end of the driveway. Just as that great gaping back door of the truck was opening with a big screech Christmas took off like a shot. Jake called out for him and ran after him, but he couldn't catch him. Jake looked everywhere around the house, around all the neighbor's houses and eventually throughout the whole town. Christmas was nowhere to be found.
Jake kept looking every day and part of every night after that, calling out the little dog's name wherever he went. "Here Christmas! Here Christmas!
He called and called until he was hoarse. A lot of people would have given up but not Jake. He kept looking and calling. Here Christmas! Here Christmas!
Jake couldn't understand it ---- and he couldn't bring himself to accept that Christmas might be gone forever. He put up posters all over town and he kept making the rounds looking for Christmas everywhere he could think of that a little dog might have gone.
Just as dusk approached on Christmas Eve Jake headed for home, his head down, still calling out for Christmas. His heart was aching and his voice breaking as he stepped up onto the front porch still calling for Christmas, his voice barely audible like a prayer whispered into the emerging darkness. Here Christmas...
And then he saw him, Christmas, bounding over a snowbank in the back of the garage. Christmas came straight toward Jake running with all his little dog might. He leaped up the steps onto the porch and into Jake's weary old arms. Tears poured from Jake's eyes as Christmas licked his face with a barrage of doggie kisses.
Something inside of Jake changed in that moment. It was something more than a feeling, though his heart was bursting with joy and love. It was more like a deep knowing, a seminal awareness of the rightness of things. Margaret was dead and yet it seemed she was fully with him as she had been in all their years together. Christmas had come home.
* * *
No Problem
by Frank Ramirez
Luke 2:1-14 (15-20)
In those days a decree went out from Emperor Augustus that all the world should be registered. This was the first registration and was taken while Quirinius was governor of Syria. (Luke 2:1-2)
The ancient Roman historian Tacitus interrupted his account of the political and military intrigues of the year 20 AD to dish about a salacious divorce trial that transfixed all of Rome. Aemilia Lepeda, a member of one of the great noble houses, was sued for divorce by her husband Publius Sulpicius Quirinius. He was a high-ranking official who had distinguished himself as a procurator, governor, protector, and for his military exploits, but though he had three names, befitting one of high rank, he was really a commoner.
And yes — this is the same Quirinius mentioned in Luke 2:2 at the opening of the famous nativity story!
He was “a childless old millionaire” (113) according to Tacitus. There were accusations of adultery, and charges he hired astrologers to get dirt on the imperial family. Aemilia’s brother took up her defense, and at first gained his sister great sympathy through the way he portrayed her, while heaping scorn on her accuser.
At one point, the trial was interrupted by public games. Aemilia used the occasion to weep and wail, protesting her innocence in public, causing the crowd, in the words of the historian, to insult Quirinius as “a dirty, low-class, childless, old man….” (114) while lamenting that Aemilia should have been married to Lucius Caesar and become the daughter-in-law of Augustus Caesar instead of getting stuck with Quirinius!
Alas, further investigation revealed that Aemilia had tried to poison her husband. Public opinion turned on a dime, as did the scales of justice, and although she was not stripped of her possessions, she did lose out in both the courts of law and public opinion.
Not much later Quirinius died, having lived a full life of seventy-two years. Tiberius Caesar requested that the senate accord him all the honors of a state funeral. As Tacitus pointed out, “This man had no connection with the ancient and noble family of the Suliicii…” even though he had the name of that prestigious clan, having come from bourgeois stock in Lanuvium, but he was a good general, and a distinguished record of service under Augustine and won him the consulship and an honorary triumph in capturing the fortresses of the Homonadenses in Cilicia.” The latter victory settled a decades-long score with the people of that region, who had driven out the Romans in a rare, humiliating defeat. And though there were those who still thought of him as “an avaricious old man who wielded more power than he should, and who still favored his ex-wife, his service in the Syria Province and Judea was not forgotten.” (126)
One of the events of his reign which is alluded to in the Bible was chronicled by the Jewish historian Josephus who recalled that when Quirinius was governor of the Syrian province, a census was held, military zealots had rebelled, and their rebellion was quelled by this same Quirinius. This event was recalled by the famed teacher of the law, Gamaliel, under whom Paul learned Torah. In Acts 5:37, while recounting failed Messiahs, Gamaliel said, “…Judas the Galilean rose up at the time of the census and got people to follow him; he also perished, and all who followed him were scattered.”
This has caused biblical historians some problems. Quirinius was governor of Syria, which included Judea and therefore Bethlehem, from 6 to 12 AD. However, we’re told by Matthew that Jesus was born during the reign of Herod the Great, and he is thought to have died in 4 BC. That’s a big chronological gap.
Some have wondered if Quirinius had served twice as governor. Others think Luke is mistaken about Quirinius.
In her 2019 book Papyri and the Social World of the New Testament Sabine R. Heuber makes an interesting suggestion. After giving several examples of actual census forms preserved in Egypt of the Roman census, she points out that only early Christian writers from the second century mention the census held at the time of the birth of Jesus. Both had Roman connections, and both could have checked official records. Justin Martyr, writing to a Roman skeptic, points out the census took place under the administration of the procurator (Latin, duumvir) Quirinius. Tertullian says that the census took place under the governor Saturnius, who reigned over the Syrian province from 8 to 6 BC, just about the right time.
That means that Saturnius may have been the governor while Quirinus was the procurator, which meant the latter had financial responsibility during those years. The words in Luke bear this out. Hegemon, the Greek word translated now as governor, meant procurator. Elsewhere in the New Testament the real Greek word for Governor is Strategus.
No problem after all!
(Quotations from Tacitus come from “The Annals of Tacitus: A Modern New Translation by Donald R. Dudley,” New American Library, 1966, with reference to “Tacitus: The Annals,” translated by Alfred John Church and William Jackson Brodgribb, The University of Chicago Great Books, 1952. “Papyri and the Social World of the New Testament,” by Sabine R. Huebner was published by Cambridge University Press in 2019.
*****************************************
StoryShare, December 24/25, 2021 issue.
Copyright 2021 by CSS Publishing Company, Inc., Lima, Ohio.
All rights reserved. Subscribers to the StoryShare service may print and use this material as it was intended in sermons, in worship and classroom settings, in brief devotions, in radio spots, and as newsletter fillers. No additional permission is required from the publisher for such use by subscribers only. Inquiries should be addressed to permissions@csspub.com or to Permissions, CSS Publishing Company, Inc., 5450 N. Dixie Highway, Lima, Ohio 45807.
“Christmas Come Home” by John Sumwalt
“No Problem” by Frank Ramirez
Christmas Come Home
by John Sumwalt
Isaiah 62:6-12
“The Lord has proclaimed
to the end of the earth:
Say to daughter Zion,
“See, your salvation comes;
his reward is with him,
and his recompense before him.” (v. 11)
There was once an old man who had a little brown dog. The dog's name was Christmas.
Christmas came to live at "Old Jake's" house at Christmas time almost a year after his dear wife Margaret died, the day before last Christmas. The strange thing was Jake had never liked dogs. Margaret had always wanted to get a dog and Jake had always said, "No! We don’t need a dog. Dogs are too much trouble.”
As Christmas approached that first year without Margaret, Old Jake didn't know how he was going to bear it. He and Margaret hadn't had any children. The house seemed so bare and empty. Margaret had always done all the decorating. Jake would put up the tree in the living room and a few lights on the bushes in the front yard --- and Margaret did all the rest, wreaths on the doors, candles in the windows, a manger scene on the mantle over the fireplace, and angels and garlands all over the place.
What Jake missed most though was Margaret's baking. The house was always full of good smells in the weeks before Christmas: candy, cookies of all kinds, and fruit cake, her specialty. It wasn't going to be the same.
As December rolled around, Jake decided that he couldn't face the Christmas season alone. He shocked himself. Jake decided to get a dog.
Maybe he did it because he felt guilty about never letting Margaret have a dog. Maybe it was because he was desperately lonely. Maybe Margaret was watching over him.
Whatever it was, the first thing Monday morning on the sixth day of December, Jake found himself down at the humane society. And there among all the cute terriers and beagles and miniature poodles and Shi Tzus and Pekinese, was the ugliest dog he had ever seen. The sign beneath his kennel read Miniature Bull Terrier, but Jake was certain that there must have been a lot of other breeds mixed in there as well.
He had a brownish, mud colored coat with a dark spot that surrounded one eye. His nose looked like a combination of a bulldog and a boxer, there was a scar across his belly and half of his tail was missing. It looked like it had been chewed off in a fight.
"That's my dog," thought Jake. "Nobody else is going to take that dog home."
When they let the dog out of the kennel, he came right up to Jake, licked his hand, and rolled over with his feet in the air. It was like he had been waiting for Jake all of his life. "Hello, little fella. You and I are going to be good friends. I'm going to call you Christmas because you and I are going to get through Christmas together."
He got Christmas into the car and took him home to the big empty house. Jake showed Christmas his bowl of water and the bowl of dog food beside the refrigerator just a few feet from the kitchen table. Then he took Christmas upstairs and showed him the big comfy doggie bed he had found at Wal-Mart. Beside the bed was a raw hide bone and a couple of chewy toys.
Jake had more toys in the closet all wrapped up to go under the tree on Christmas Eve. He would keep those a secret. No sense spoiling the surprise. Jake knew this was all silly for a man his age, but it made him happy. He had feared that he would never be happy again.
Jake and Christmas hit it off immediately, although there was a little trouble that first night. Christmas didn't want to sleep in his comfy Wal-Mart bed. He wanted to sleep on the end of Jake's bed. Jake finally gave in and when he woke up in the middle of the night, he found Christmas nestled up against his feet with his little doggie paw in his mouth. Jake smiled and went back to sleep. He slept more soundly that night than he had since, well since Margaret had died.
In the days that followed, Christmas went with Jake everywhere. They took the garbage out together, cleaned the basement, put up the tree in the living room, arranged the manger scene on the mantle and put all of Margaret's other favorite decorations in their assigned places. Jake did the heavy lifting and Christmas lay in front of the fireplace taking it all in as he wagged the stump of his tail.
Jake even took a shot at baking cookies using a couple of Margaret's easiest recipes. They didn't turn out very good, but Christmas loved them. What did he know? He had probably never had good Christmas cookies.
Things went along very well until about eight days before Christmas. Jake was out in the yard changing a bulb on a string of lights that had gone out. Christmas was following a squirrel trail over by the curb. A garbage truck pulled up and stopped at the end of the driveway. Just as that great gaping back door of the truck was opening with a big screech Christmas took off like a shot. Jake called out for him and ran after him, but he couldn't catch him. Jake looked everywhere around the house, around all the neighbor's houses and eventually throughout the whole town. Christmas was nowhere to be found.
Jake kept looking every day and part of every night after that, calling out the little dog's name wherever he went. "Here Christmas! Here Christmas!
He called and called until he was hoarse. A lot of people would have given up but not Jake. He kept looking and calling. Here Christmas! Here Christmas!
Jake couldn't understand it ---- and he couldn't bring himself to accept that Christmas might be gone forever. He put up posters all over town and he kept making the rounds looking for Christmas everywhere he could think of that a little dog might have gone.
Just as dusk approached on Christmas Eve Jake headed for home, his head down, still calling out for Christmas. His heart was aching and his voice breaking as he stepped up onto the front porch still calling for Christmas, his voice barely audible like a prayer whispered into the emerging darkness. Here Christmas...
And then he saw him, Christmas, bounding over a snowbank in the back of the garage. Christmas came straight toward Jake running with all his little dog might. He leaped up the steps onto the porch and into Jake's weary old arms. Tears poured from Jake's eyes as Christmas licked his face with a barrage of doggie kisses.
Something inside of Jake changed in that moment. It was something more than a feeling, though his heart was bursting with joy and love. It was more like a deep knowing, a seminal awareness of the rightness of things. Margaret was dead and yet it seemed she was fully with him as she had been in all their years together. Christmas had come home.
* * *
No Problem
by Frank Ramirez
Luke 2:1-14 (15-20)
In those days a decree went out from Emperor Augustus that all the world should be registered. This was the first registration and was taken while Quirinius was governor of Syria. (Luke 2:1-2)
The ancient Roman historian Tacitus interrupted his account of the political and military intrigues of the year 20 AD to dish about a salacious divorce trial that transfixed all of Rome. Aemilia Lepeda, a member of one of the great noble houses, was sued for divorce by her husband Publius Sulpicius Quirinius. He was a high-ranking official who had distinguished himself as a procurator, governor, protector, and for his military exploits, but though he had three names, befitting one of high rank, he was really a commoner.
And yes — this is the same Quirinius mentioned in Luke 2:2 at the opening of the famous nativity story!
He was “a childless old millionaire” (113) according to Tacitus. There were accusations of adultery, and charges he hired astrologers to get dirt on the imperial family. Aemilia’s brother took up her defense, and at first gained his sister great sympathy through the way he portrayed her, while heaping scorn on her accuser.
At one point, the trial was interrupted by public games. Aemilia used the occasion to weep and wail, protesting her innocence in public, causing the crowd, in the words of the historian, to insult Quirinius as “a dirty, low-class, childless, old man….” (114) while lamenting that Aemilia should have been married to Lucius Caesar and become the daughter-in-law of Augustus Caesar instead of getting stuck with Quirinius!
Alas, further investigation revealed that Aemilia had tried to poison her husband. Public opinion turned on a dime, as did the scales of justice, and although she was not stripped of her possessions, she did lose out in both the courts of law and public opinion.
Not much later Quirinius died, having lived a full life of seventy-two years. Tiberius Caesar requested that the senate accord him all the honors of a state funeral. As Tacitus pointed out, “This man had no connection with the ancient and noble family of the Suliicii…” even though he had the name of that prestigious clan, having come from bourgeois stock in Lanuvium, but he was a good general, and a distinguished record of service under Augustine and won him the consulship and an honorary triumph in capturing the fortresses of the Homonadenses in Cilicia.” The latter victory settled a decades-long score with the people of that region, who had driven out the Romans in a rare, humiliating defeat. And though there were those who still thought of him as “an avaricious old man who wielded more power than he should, and who still favored his ex-wife, his service in the Syria Province and Judea was not forgotten.” (126)
One of the events of his reign which is alluded to in the Bible was chronicled by the Jewish historian Josephus who recalled that when Quirinius was governor of the Syrian province, a census was held, military zealots had rebelled, and their rebellion was quelled by this same Quirinius. This event was recalled by the famed teacher of the law, Gamaliel, under whom Paul learned Torah. In Acts 5:37, while recounting failed Messiahs, Gamaliel said, “…Judas the Galilean rose up at the time of the census and got people to follow him; he also perished, and all who followed him were scattered.”
This has caused biblical historians some problems. Quirinius was governor of Syria, which included Judea and therefore Bethlehem, from 6 to 12 AD. However, we’re told by Matthew that Jesus was born during the reign of Herod the Great, and he is thought to have died in 4 BC. That’s a big chronological gap.
Some have wondered if Quirinius had served twice as governor. Others think Luke is mistaken about Quirinius.
In her 2019 book Papyri and the Social World of the New Testament Sabine R. Heuber makes an interesting suggestion. After giving several examples of actual census forms preserved in Egypt of the Roman census, she points out that only early Christian writers from the second century mention the census held at the time of the birth of Jesus. Both had Roman connections, and both could have checked official records. Justin Martyr, writing to a Roman skeptic, points out the census took place under the administration of the procurator (Latin, duumvir) Quirinius. Tertullian says that the census took place under the governor Saturnius, who reigned over the Syrian province from 8 to 6 BC, just about the right time.
That means that Saturnius may have been the governor while Quirinus was the procurator, which meant the latter had financial responsibility during those years. The words in Luke bear this out. Hegemon, the Greek word translated now as governor, meant procurator. Elsewhere in the New Testament the real Greek word for Governor is Strategus.
No problem after all!
(Quotations from Tacitus come from “The Annals of Tacitus: A Modern New Translation by Donald R. Dudley,” New American Library, 1966, with reference to “Tacitus: The Annals,” translated by Alfred John Church and William Jackson Brodgribb, The University of Chicago Great Books, 1952. “Papyri and the Social World of the New Testament,” by Sabine R. Huebner was published by Cambridge University Press in 2019.
*****************************************
StoryShare, December 24/25, 2021 issue.
Copyright 2021 by CSS Publishing Company, Inc., Lima, Ohio.
All rights reserved. Subscribers to the StoryShare service may print and use this material as it was intended in sermons, in worship and classroom settings, in brief devotions, in radio spots, and as newsletter fillers. No additional permission is required from the publisher for such use by subscribers only. Inquiries should be addressed to permissions@csspub.com or to Permissions, CSS Publishing Company, Inc., 5450 N. Dixie Highway, Lima, Ohio 45807.
