This week has been school nativity play week.
It’s reassuring to see that successive generations are involved at an early age in hearing, discovering and participating in the Christmas story and the school my children attend is unashamedly Christian.

One thing I’ve observed is that between my generation and my children’s generation there has been a shift in how nativity plays are done, not only in new creative ways of reframing the same story but also in the area of costumes.
As a child, being a shepherd consisted of wearing a tea towel on your head and wearing your dressing gown to look like 1st Century robes. Hold a stuffed sheep under your arm and you’re done.
Today what you see are a group of shepherds all dressed in the same costume purchased from the supermarket for a few pounds. The same applies to the angels, and the ‘kings’.
There’s nothing wrong with the costumes; they look good, are low cost and an easy option for those responsible for preparing the costumes.

But at the same time… they’re all the same.
What has inadvertently happened is that the nativity play has started to look very uniform. Characters merge into the group which all look the same and there’s very little uniqueness on show.

Last year my 8 year old daughter was in a play which had all the different traditional icons of Christmas woven into the story culminating in the true meaning of Christmas with Mary, Joseph and Jesus.
She played the part of a mince pie representing the kind of food that is eaten at Christmas.
Supermarkets don’t do mince pie costumes and so one of her uncles made her a spectacular – and very large! – mince pie costume.

It wasn’t that it was home-made (albeit professionally so) that made it memorable, nor was it the huge size of it either. It was that during the performance the braces holding it up came unclipped and the pie had to be dropped for the dance scene.
At the crucial moment in the performance for my daughter she experienced a costume fail, but she took it in her stride and carried on as if nothing had happened. More memorable still was that after the performance the head teacher made a special point of recognising that it hadn’t gone to plan but that she had responded brilliantly. The head teacher made sure that the mishap was redeemed.

For those watching the performance, it was not the nice uniform costumes that stood out, or the story itself, but a moment when a home-made, oversized, unique mince pie costume didn’t work out as planned.

This is the message of Christmas.
God did not create us all uniformly. He built into us huge diversity and gave us all the tools we need to create our own ‘home-made’ lives. He did this knowing that we’d all have our moments when our plans and costumes would fail us and we’d be left exposed.
And inasmuch as we all have our own unique story and our own unique failures we also have a unique saviour in Jesus.

In his gospel, John says these words in the first chapter:
“No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father’s side, he has made him known.” (John 1:18 ESV)
The Greek behind the English words “the only God” says “monogenēs theos”. More literally this means ‘unique child of God’.
Jesus is the unique child of God and he has come to make God known to the rest of us who are also children of God.
Our uniqueness comes from being created as individuals whereas his uniqueness comes from being of the Father and having the perfect union relationship with the Father that we all need. Jesus is uniquely able to form a relationship between us and the Father and he does this person-by-person, situation-by-situation, moment-by-moment.
To Jesus, the ‘mince pie costume fail’ is not a problem; it’s the unique place of meeting where we can both know that it didn’t work out as planned but it’s not spoiled the show. In fact it’s added to the colour and texture of it as he redeems it and values us in it.

This Advent may you know that you are unique and that there is nothing uniform about you.
May you know that the unique Son of God has come into the world to meet you in your uniqueness and redeem you, encourage you and make you shine.
May you be set free from the fear of life’s ‘costume fails’ and rejoice with Jesus in whom he made you to be.