Mother of God:  A Christmas Skit

Luke 2: 8-18

Shepherd:  I remember that night.  How could I forget it?  We were tending sheep in the fields.  All of a sudden the dark sky began to shine and shine and shine!

Choir:  Was it the moon breaking through the clouds?

Shepherd:  No it wasn’t the moon!

Mary:  I know, it was an angel of the Lord.  The angel visited me a while ago, but I needed to ponder his words for a while.

Shepherd:  That’s right, it was an angel of the Lord, shining and shining and shining and it scared me half to death, I feel face down in the mud.

Choir:  What happened next?

Shepherd:  The angel spoke to us!

Congregation:  Spoke to you shepherds?  Why you guys?

Shepherd:  Why not us?  I guess based on what I have heard from the angel so far, this child everyone is talking about is someone different, someone special, someone sent from God.  Remember the words from the prophet Isaiah, “the wolf shall live with the lamb… …the cow and the bear shall graze… and a little child shall lead them…”  In other words, we shepherds have the animals, so if God wanted to stick with the plan, we would be some of the first people to understand what God is trying to do.

Choir:  Well, tell us what the angel said?

Mary:  “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. 31And now, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus. 32He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his ancestor David. 33He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.”

Shepherd:  Wow, we were surrounded by angels and they didn’t say that much to us.

Choir:  Well, of course the long version of the message would be given to the woman, God knew she would remember to write it down.

Shepherd:  Well, we got the message, the nuts and bolts were for us to go to Bethlehem and look in a manger not in a palace.

Mary:  How strange!  The angel told me that he was going to be a king.  Kings don’t belong in mangers.  But we all knew that this king was not like any king the world had ever known.

Shepherd:  There was a star; there were angels; all of the animals were there and it felt like royalty coming into the world.

Mary:  Even though I was really tired, from just having a baby, all of those visitors did make it feel like something special, something of a King.

Choir:   What’s it like to be the Mother of God? 

Mary:  Well, I don’t feel like a Queen if that’s what you’re asking.  It’s pretty scary, even though the angel told me not to be afraid.  I thought long and hard about becoming a mother to the Son of the Most High, and in the end, I decided that if God saw me as someone who can handle this, then it must be true.  And then Elizabeth, my cousin,  was overcome by the Spirit and she said that I was blessed and my baby would be blessed.  After that, I was a little less scared.

Shepherd:  We brought you a lamb.  They’re soft and cute.  We thought that would help.

Mary:  Some help that was with all that baa-ing.  It was enough to wake that baby every five minutes.  After everyone went home, we were left with this baby King.  I didn’t know how to take care of a King.  He cried a lot!  People brought us gold, frankincense and myrrh, but what we really needed was clothing, diapers, a crib, and an owners’ manual!  Even a casserole would have been nice! 

Choir:  So what did you do?

Mary:  Well, we loved him.  And we fed him what we had.  We played with him and took him to Temple.  And when he got old enough, he helped his Dad in the workshop.

Shepherd: Phew!  We thought we might be crazy!   I am so glad that we didn’t imagine all those angels.  Who could have imagined such a story?

Choir:  God imagined it!  And God made it happen!  God did it for us!

Mary:  What an imagination!  And what a gift.  As scary as it was, we did get used to having him around. He had quite a sense of humor when he was little.  And boy, was he confident!  He grew up to be a teenager, and later he was an amazing preacher. Wait till you hear the rest of the story!