Cyndi Lauper, best known for her hits in the middle eighties, “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” and “True Colors,” but now she is best known for her Cosentyx commercials. She talks about the anguish of appearing on stage with psoriasis, of having it cover her arms in embarrassment. And the commercial goes on to talk about other people who suffer from psoriasis and also from psoriatic arthritis which is not only embarrassing, itchy, and painful, but also a very serious disease. And yet, she was able to continue making a living and now the residuals from those commercials will guarantee that she continues to make a very nice living.

If Cyndi Lauper had lived in time of Jesus that would not have been true, because all skin diseases that cause any kind of eruption were all called leprosy, and all of them equally make a person unclean. And so she would have been ostracized. She would have been required by law, under pain of death, to call out before herself, anytime she got near another person, ”Unclean, unclean,” because, as the first reading said, she was, in fact, unclean. Nowadays, with medical science, we know the difference between Hansen's disease and psoriasis, or acne, or some other fairly benign skin eruption, but back then they didn’t know that.

In our country’s contentious relationship with Iran, there’s been a little bit of saber-rattling just recently. The Iranians, perhaps understandably, are angry because of our black ops operation that took out one of their major military leaders in the recent past. And President Trump has been tweeting ugly things about any possibility that they might try to retaliate. But one of our major military commanders has tried to damp down the conflict by moving one of our major aircraft carriers out of the Persian Gulf. This is nothing new. This has been going on between ourselves and Iran since we helped to dethrone the Shah of Iran way back when I was a youngster. We thought we were doing the right thing, saving the world from a despot. We played ourselves right into the hands of insurgents, who eventually developed into what people now refer to as ISIS.

But that part of the world has been in conflict for a long, long time. In fact, over four thousand years, there has been furor in what historians call “The Fertile Crescent,” the land between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. In biblical times, the main participants were one nation, referred to in the Bible as Assyrians. Take off the first two letters, AS, and you have Syria. Back then Assyria combined all of today’s Syria, plus bits and pieces of other land around it. They were in conflict with another group of people called the Babylonians, or the Persians. Right now, what’s left of ancient Persia is basically Iran, with a little bit of the land around it; what’s left of ancient Assyria is present day Iraq and some of the land around it.

I’m sure you heard it. Father Mathias actually emphasized it in the way he proclaimed the gospel. The first story ends with the shepherds going home. The first story begins with, “When the eighth day came for the circumcision.” And the story continues with the Presentation in the temple, which is the gospel we read last Sunday. Why was it done that way?

The scriptures that we have at Mass are placed there for the purpose of worship, not for the purpose of teaching or learning. And so they’re frequently edited in ways that we would not think about if we picked up our bible to read them. Very frequently there are lines left out of the scriptures we read at Mass on Sunday, because the people who composed our Masses did not want to distract people from the main point they wanted them to get out of the reading for the purpose of that Sunday’s worship. Many of these readings have been the same for centuries.

When I was studying this one, for this Mass, I discovered that this reading has been the same since Henry the 8th had one of his henchmen recompose the Book of Common Prayer. It’s been every Christian church’s reading ever since then. How come? Because there are several things that the church wants us to call to mind as we pray this morning.

Some longtime friends of mine sent me a Christmas card. On the front of the card was your typical picture of Mary and Joseph and the baby, and the shepherds in the stable. The bottom of the front of the card said “Remember the Miracle.” Remember the Miracle. I opened up the card, and the wife had written on the top, “Yeah, like you would forget it,” which I thought was really a kind of comment on a whole bunch of things. But it got me thinking about what we remember, what we remember.

I already mentioned once or twice during this Advent/Christmas season that St. Luke has constructed the first two chapters of his gospel in a very precise way, and he has several points that he makes over and over again in his gospel. One of them is that Jesus comes for all people. Glory for Israel, revelation for the gentiles, for the pagans. So Luke is all- inclusive in his message about salvation - Jesus comes for everyone; no one is left out.

At one point in my life, I collected crèche sets. I must have wound up, at some point, with about 10 or 15 of them. All very different, one from another. Over the years I either gave them away or put them out in yard sales until, now, I have only three left. They’re all on display in the rectory. One of them is just three statues of a Native American man, a Native American woman, and a Native American papoose - the Holy Family as envisioned by the First People. Then I have a set that’s only about an inch high. They’re perfect replicas of the very famous Italian set, made in resin which, for a while, was very popular as an alternative to plastic. But, on the buffet in the dining room, I have the set that my family had when I was a child growing up. They were very cheap. We bought them a piece at a time in the five and dime store. But I still have them all. Some of them I repainted when I was a teenager because they were chipped and cracked. When I put them out each year, I get very nostalgic as I place them all in place where they belong, where they always go. But this year, something else happened to me as I put them in place. I want to share that with you.

When we hear the story of the Annunciation, our minds are trained to go immediately toward the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. This is where, in scripture, the roots are found of that doctrine. But that’s not the way it was at the beginning.

The doctrine of the Immaculate Conception was a legitimate progression from something else. What was the something else? It was the doctrine of original sin. The words “original sin” do not appear anyplace in the entire scripture, from beginning to end. Saint Paul, in his letters, frequently talks about the sin of the first Adam and the salvation brought by the second Adam. That’s as close as we get. But the question arises then, for Christians, “saved from what?”