3 Questions

with Doug Swagerty

Cigar-smoking, wine-quaffing, shoplifting children who attend church for free food are center at Christ Church's weekend and Christmas Eve performances of The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, a play based on a book by Barbara Robinson. Executive Pastor Doug Swagerty explains what drew him to the seasonal comedy.

What made you choose this production?

It's a classic Christmas book about a church putting on a pageant that's kind of hijacked by the local kids that don't know the story or really done anything religious in their life. The magic of the story is you get to see these kids hearing the Christmas story for the first time. We're doing a three-part [sermon] series on it. We did the first one this past Sunday, and we're doing the second one this coming Sunday and then the wrap-up will be at our Christmas Eve service.

What are the worst things the kids do in this play?

The older daughter in the Herdman family was quite the schoolyard bully, in the sense that she would sneak into the nurse's office and find out the weight of all the kids and then tease the ones who were overweight and tell them they needed to go to fat camp. And if anyone ever had lice, you know, she would make sure everyone knew about it. She got the part to be Mary in the play, the mother of Jesus, and the girl who played Mary in all the subsequent years did not volunteer because Imogene Herdman threatened to stick a pussy willow down in her ear, and it was going to sprout and grow out of her ear for years and years.

What are the lessons people can derive from the play?

We're all kind of inured to the Christmas story because we've heard it so often and so many years. It's just the idea of these kids hearing it for the first time and being amazed by all the things that over the years that we tend to take for granted about the story…Part of our emphasis this last week was that the Christmas story only is amazing to us if we each see ourselves as one of the Herdmans. They stand out in relief because they're so different than the other kids, but the point I was trying to make this past Sunday is that we all have that in us, and we're kind of humbled by the story. Because we think sometimes that we're not the ones that Jesus needed to come for. But we all are.

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