Rev. Nancy S. Taylor

“Now, the birth of Jesus took place in this way …” so writes Matthew. And what we have here, is the beginning, the tease, the dangling of a story yet to be unfurled.

“Now, the birth of Jesus took place in this way” … and Matthew – pen poised above parchment – signals to us something is coming, some events or happenstances, some proceedings, something worthy of the telling, worthy of your time is in the offing.

Matthew writes: “Now, the birth of Jesus took place in this way …” And we sit up, asking: Which way? What happened? What makes this birth different from others?

You know how caterpillars become butterflies . . . the progress and metamorphoses from egg, to caterpillar, to chrysalis to a butterfly?  A process that is both beautiful and staggering.

I want to be utterly honest with you from the outset: that's not what we're talking about today, in church, on Easter Sunday. It's nothing like that. Not even close.

You know how a tiny seed, pushed underground begins to grow? With a little water and sun, it emerges from the earth and unfolds into a glorious and fragrant bloom. Good stuff, eh? You go, God!

He is dragging himself through the Market Place. He is weighed down by cares, by endless days of work, by the prices of the goods in the stalls and by this … most of all by this:by his inability to bring home to his family what he would dearly love to give them: tender cuts of meat, and exotic spices and yummy sweets.

You could be a faithful, practicing, every-Sunday Christian your entire life and never have run across the 25th chapter of the Book of Leviticus.

How many of you earned Sunday School Attendance Pins when you were little? If you lived a hundred years and never once missed Sunday worship in those years, and if you earned 100 years of Sunday School Attendance Pins, for attendance at 5200 Sunday worship services, you could be forgiven if you still knew nothing of Leviticus 25.

Headline: Otter mistaken for drowning snowmobiler. True story. It came over the wires yesterday.

Here's what happened: Three people on the shore of Moosehead Lake in Greenville, Maine saw a drowning snowmobiler, struggling far out on the ice.  They called it in.

Park Rangers sprang into action. For two days they searched. They flew over the lake by plane and used an airboat on the water.  They found no evidence anyone had fallen through the ice; no evidence of snowmobile tracks in the vicinity. In addition, no one has been reported missing.