The Spider's Christmas

by Dan Peeler
Minister for Children and Families, Cathedral of Hope
Devotion for Tuesday, December 14, 2004

Yesterday in Children's Church, we had a guest storyteller/puppeteer who delighted our group with a retelling of an old German Fairy tale, The Spider's Christmas. Sandy Shrout, a colleague in the Puppeteers of America, expertly wove the spider's tale with the aid of a variety of hand puppets, wind chimes, spray smoke and a "magic" Christmas tree, but mostly through her own incredible range of voices and vocal sound effects. The storytelling technique was definitely presented to please young audiences, yet like most fairy tales, had a message for all of us.

It was about a woman who yearly practiced the tradition of inviting her farm animals into the house to share in the holiday festivities; the logic being that there would certainly have been a number of animals present in the stable on that first Christmas night. She welcomes a variety of animals, including chickens and cattle, which she tolerates to the point that they begin to soil the place, at which point, they are unceremoniously escorted out.

She draws the line, however, on inviting the spider, voicing her loathing of having her obsessively tidy home covered with its webs. The disappointed little creature still manages to slip in after the woman has gone to bed and does indeed cover her tree with the dreaded webs, but through a little seasonal fairy tale magic, the webs are transformed into glistening tinsel, which is why we are told, that we have tinsel on our trees to this day.

The story made me ponder many parallels in our own society, the most publicized at the moment being those national television networks' refusal to air the current United Church of Christ commercial of Christmas time inclusion, portraying a gay couple, a Hispanic man, a black woman and a man in a wheelchair being pushed back from the doors of a church by two bouncers.

The commercial's rejection comes as no shock in an era when high ratings are scored from the glut of "reality" fare that much prefers to portray our fellow humans being humiliated or degraded rather than welcomed. Of course, it is all about economic survival in the network world; the horror of losing sponsors or viewers over the depiction of something deemed unpopular or controversial. Certainly, there will be petitions filed and these high profile controversies will continue, but like the woman in the fairy tale, no real change will occur until we each decide to change our individual attitudes about our own tidy little homes.

This is a good time of year to ask ourselves exactly who the "spiders" are that we systematically exclude from our own lives. And likewise, who are the ones privileged enough among the marginalized to be invited in once a year as long as they don't stay long enough to make us feel too uncomfortable? We all have them; the children's charities whose mailers get trashed, unopened, for the other eleven months of the year, or maybe that person next to us in the pew, the one we somehow judge as socially unacceptable, to whom we extend a holiday greeting, secretly knowing we won't have to face that reality again for another year.

If Jesus was actually born in a stable, he was probably surrounded by a lot more spiders than by fluffy little lambs. Then, he spent every day of his entire ministry not just refusing to avoid "spiders", but by actively seeking them out. That is the challenge he left for us and that's no Christmas fairy tale.

Prayer: God of all Creation, open our eyes to recognize the ones who need us the most and help us to turn the compassion we so often find within ourselves during this season into an embedded daily lifestyle. In the name of Jesus, AMEN.

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