“It’s the most important story ever told,” Pastor Ken Schmidt said of the live nativity that Our Savior’s Lutheran held outside recently to retell the story of Christ’s birth. With a brown tarp providing the backdrop and both young kids (as angels) and older performers (as Joseph, Mary, the shepherds, Herod and the Wise Men) were present along with a donkey and two sheep on Christmas Eve, a stuffed bear took the place of baby Jesus in the manger, located in the gazebo

See NATIVITY, Page 2

In this photo taken by Casey Koepl, Mary and Joseph travel to Bethlehem where they found a cave to lodge. Five performances were held in total, three on Christymas Eve and two on Christmas Day. Different actors were used throughout.

FROM Page 1

between Our Savior’s the Home Place just off Fourth Avenue.

The temperature was in the single digits before windchill

was added in, and having a live infant would have been dangerous.

Not less dangerous than it might have been approximately 2,020 years ago though. With Christ born six months after John the Baptist by traditional calendar reckoning, the “star” the Wise Men saw is thought to have been a conjunction of stars and/or planets, to which the ancients attached stories

and in_uence. And while no record of Herod the Great slaughtering infants is known outside of Matthew’s Gospel, Josephus the Historian tells us that the same Herod ordered the killing of elders in Judea upon his death, in order that there be mourning instead of rejoicing when he passed from this life. In other words, not a great or nice guy. But while death eventually comes to us all, the story of Christ’s birth is meant to provide hope, and life—not least of all depicted as a live nativity scene.

Combining the accounts as told in Matthew (written to a Jewish audience) and Luke (written for Gentile converts), the congregation of Our Savior’s Lutheran gathered Christmas Eve outside the brick church building in the parking lot it ordinarily uses for

Sunday services. With three separate retellings of the Christmas story at 3:30, 4:30, 5:30 p.m. respectively, options for listening to Pastor Ken narrate the story by microphone included standing in the cold, sitting on hay bales, and listening by radio channel

on 87.9 in their vehicles, the last understandable with a temperature that registered below zero when the windchill was factored

in, and dropping with sunset. But while Christmas Eve marks the birth of Christ and life, that wasn’t the end of the story. Included in the Wise Men’s gifts was a foretelling of future events.

The _rst gift, gold, was for royalty, and Christ the King. The second, Frankincense, was incense free of impurities, meant for Christ the Priest. The last, Myrrh, was an expensive perfume for burial, with Christ the Prophet being misunderstood and put to death as a blasphemer, as had (and has) often been the case with authentic teachers sent from God. The chief teaching as narrated by Pastor Ken on Christmas Eve, though, had to do with the Incarnation, Jesus Christ as God in the _esh, Emmanuel and God with us.” This, more than anything, is the true meaning of Advent and of Christmas, “the most important story ever told.”

Many came out both young and old to see the live nativity put on by Our Savior’s Lutheran this Christmas season in the gazebo by the Homplace on Fourth Avenue. A community effort, the hay bales were provided by Bob Peterson of Boyd, while Mindy Miland of Stanley provided the donkey and Jerry Micke of Stanley provided two sheep.