Friends, can we talk about Christmas? Not the sanitized, mall-Santa version, but the wild, beautiful mess of what actually happens?
You know what’s opening my heart right now? This story called The Best Christmas Pageant Ever (or as they brilliantly call it down under, The Worst Kids in the World). It’s like God took my favorite themes of radical inclusion and divine disruption and turned them into a movie!
Here’s the thing about transformation, my friends – it usually comes through the people and places we least expect. Enter the Herdman children: society’s outcasts, troublemakers, the ones we’ve collectively decided don’t belong in our neat spiritual boxes. But – and this is where it gets so good – these kids encounter the Christmas story with absolutely no preconceptions, no religious baggage, no “proper” way of doing things!
And you know what? They get it in a way that should humble all of us jaded religious (or post-religious) folks. When they hear about Mary and Joseph being turned away from appropriate lodging, about Jesus being born among animals – their hearts break in recognition. Because they know what it means to be the ones society pushes to the margins.
This is the essence of “beginner’s mind” – these beautiful chaos agents crash into our comfortable religious traditions and show us what we’ve been missing! The Divine Mystery loves to work through holy disruption of our calcified expectations.
And now? This transformative story is coming back to us as a new film with the incredible Judy Greer, Lauren Graham, and (yes) Pete Holmes! It’s like a sacred reminder saying, “Hey, remember that thing about Spirit showing up in unexpected places? Still true!”
Listen, in these times when we’re all carrying so much heaviness, maybe we need this reminder that grace often comes wearing mismatched socks and a slightly singed attitude. This isn’t just a Christmas pageant – it’s a revolution of the heart, showing us that the most authentic expressions of divine love often come from the most unexpected messengers.
Don’t wait until December – this holy disruption arrives November 8th! Let’s allow these “worst kids in the world” to teach us, once again, about the upside-down, inside-out nature of Divine love that keeps showing up in all the wrong people, all the right ways.
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