Hearing from the people at or near Jesus’ birth

The Rev. Dr. Ruth L. Boling, author of ‘Season’s Greetings,’ discusses how she gave voice to people we think we know well

by Mike Ferguson | Presbyterian News Service

“Season’s Greetings,” a new book by the Rev. Dr. Ruth L. Boling, is a collection of letters from the people at or near the birth of Christ.

LOUISVILLE — An accomplished storyteller, the Rev. Dr. Ruth L. Boling returned last week to the place she earned her doctorate — Pittsburgh Theological Seminary — for an engaging hybrid discussion on “Season’s Greetings,” her book published ahead of Advent that features letters to modern readers from some of the biblical characters at or near Jesus’ birth, including the Lord himself.

Boling sat for an hour-long interview with the Rev. Dr. Donna Giver-Johnston, director of the seminary’s Doctor of Ministry Program. The 12 letters in Boling’s book began as a sermon series at the church she serves, Bloomfield Presbyterian Church on the Green in Bloomfield, New Jersey. A sabbatical allowed Boling to finish the book while also completing her doctoral work, which Giver-Johnston helped supervise.

Asked why she took the approach she did — for her book, Boling penned letters from, among others, King Herod, Elizabeth, John the Baptist, Zechariah, the midwife, a shepherd, Joseph, Mary and a Magi — Boling said the book is her attempt “to engage the Scripture stories and move beyond sentimentality and cliches” to “engage the congregation.”

The inspiration for her initial sermon series was reaching “the people who come to church at Christmastime who don’t come throughout the year,” she said. “We have four weeks to touch their hearts. What can we possibly do?”

Boling said she went down every rabbit hole she could find researching the biblical characters, including the innkeeper, who’s not even mentioned in the gospels. “I learned so much about all of them” even though “they are all very familiar,” she told Giver-Johnston. “You go through the exercises and the characters start to show themselves in different ways.”

The Rev. Dr. Donna Giver-Johnston

Mary, for example, is far from the demure, kneeling, serene and peaceful character many people learned about in Sunday school. “In the story, she’s saying yes to the crazy stuff she’s being asked to do, changing her plans on a moment’s notice,” Boling said. “I saw her as an agent,” someone who’s “making her choices and choosing to participate in what God was asking her to do. It was astonishing. That letter almost wrote itself.”

In the letter from Elizabeth, “the spotlight is on the women” who are “doing all the talking and the blessing and the singing,” Boling said. Elizabeth and Mary “are having all the fun and they are interpreting in real time what is happening in their pregnancies.”

“As many times as I have preached on these stories, I’m not sure I noticed all these clusters of details,” Boling said. “Working on the book was very rich, showing me things I hadn’t seen before.”

As part of earning their Doctor of Ministry degree, PTS students must write a piece of creative writing and a theological essay that explains the theology at work in their creative writing. At one point during her discussion with Giver-Johnston, Boling held her own essay over her head, calling it “easily the most difficult part of the DMin program.”

“In all 12 chapters, each letter has a different theology going on,” Boling said. “Everybody brings a different perspective,” including liberation theology, feminist theology and others. “The book ends up as a theological conversation, and that’s on purpose,” she said. “We can’t say, ‘The meaning of Christmas is this.’ It’s a conversation. We learn like Zechariah did by being quiet for a while and letting somebody else have a turn.”

The Rev. Dr. Ruth L. Boling

The theology behind each letter explores “the incarnation as the event itself, the holy moment of the birth of Jesus, and also the ongoing aspects of the incarnation. The Word became flesh. Jesus was born, grew, served, died and rose again,” Boling said. “If we are the body of Christ, the incarnation is still going on.”

That divine presence impacts each of the characters. For Herod, the divine presence overpowers tyranny. For John the Baptist, the divine presence “shapes public life to embody divine love,” Boling said. For the shepherd, the divine presence “revolutionizes his view of himself. You can see that in Mary and Elizabeth as well.”

“What I wanted to do with the book was not to try to explain Christmas. Who can do that?” she said. Instead, she tried to “create Christmas moments — possibilities to have an epiphany of understanding, to experience the divine presence through the voices of these different characters.”

In the next-to-last chapter, Jesus writes the world a love letter. The final chapter is an invitation to write back, answering the same question each of the characters answered: What is Christmas to me?

“I tried to write about the incarnation as a deeply holy, religious thing without using religious language. I don’t want this to be read just by church Bible study groups,” Boling said. “I deeply hope it’s a book for the spiritually curious, for people who don’t feel connected to the church.”

“There is a kind of presumed intimacy in reading a letter. You read it as if it’s written to you, because it is,” Boling said. “My hope is that people will say, ‘This is a book that understands and respects me.’”

“I hope it will lead people to understand Jesus Christ in a new way, but what I’m doing is giving people voices and then giving it over to the reader and saying. ‘What do you make of this? You sort it out.’”