A Down East Christmas Manger
for December 25, 2013


small pastel on cotton, available to frame
click here for a larger image


Merry Christmas!

I've been holding off on showing my Christmas Tobacco Barn Manger. Some friends have seen similar compositions of mine before. I've made several such images for churches where I preached while drawing the barn/manger. This is a nice little drawing that conveys the same idea (but smaller), which is that the Lord Jesus arrived among us and no one was paying attention. The baby Jesus was born in a barn! We have told that part of the story so much it has lost meaning for us. It was a barn!

I lived in eastern North Carolina for a few decades. All around us off just about any highway one could see abandoned tobacco barns. These were wooden barns used to cure or dry tobacco leaves. Those that still grow tobacco are now using custom metal sheds as barns fueled by propane or natural gas, but years ago they looked like this above and had wood burning heaters. As the leaves of tobacco were picked they were speared onto long sticks that were then hung and racked by people that climbed up inside the barns. It was tough work, and many people in the south experienced 'barnin tobacco' at some point in their life. They all say it was miserable, sticky, exhausting work but many are almost nostalgic for the simpler times that 'barnin' represents.




Most of these type of barns are now abandoned. Sometimes they have porches or awnings and serve as a covered parking spot for a tractor or piece of equipment.  And it is in a place like that where I imagine our Lord found his first shelter --a place no one cared about -- it was just good enough for these late-comers, these out of town-ers.

We miss the aspect of the lack of hospitality extended to Joseph and Mary. It has become such a quaint picture of a cute barn that we forget the basic offer of hospitality that was a part of the ancient world and how it grossly failed these people. This narrative points that out quite clearly in the case of Jesus's birth, which we will find to be a repeated theme throughout Jesus's life and ultimately seen in the rejection of him and execution. He came to his own and they didn't receive him --starting here.  Too bad!

But that seems to be the way of God --to surprise us with totally different ways of operating --doing what is least expected as some struggle against light and life. The barn is a symbol of God overcoming inhospitable human beings but while actually joining the human race. Jesus, we will see, will run the race in a much better way. From the inside. Working his way up.

--Pastor Jack