On Youtube, there is a video of a camel falling into a crowd of people during a church Christmas production. It is in turns hilarious and terrifying to watch, as the huge beast stumbles and sits down on a section of pews. Thankfully, the crowd moved out of the way quickly and no one was hurt, including “Lula Bell” the camel.
Here it is in all its glory:
What makes this video special to me is that I once served that very church and led that Christmas program. No, this didn’t happen when I was there. I said no to the camel for my productions, but it was later reinstated after I left.
But nevertheless, that camel taught me a lesson or two.
I served for two years as the music minister for that south Florida church where their big tradition was a huge annual Christmas spectacular. They hired a 25 piece orchestra and had professional arrangers orchestrate music just for them. They made tons of costumes and had Broadway-caliber set designers. They brought in professional lighting designers, and rented state-of-the-art lights that would have made most rock concerts envious. The whole thing cost almost $200,000, though they charged people who attended the 11 or so performances they did each year.
You might be thinking $200,000 is more than the entire budgets for some churches, and you’d be right. You also may remember that whole “misunderstanding” when Jesus tipped the money tables over in the temple. So you might be wondering how Jesus would feel about charging people to enter a church.
Actually, that’s a pretty good question. We’ll come back to that later…
As the new guy they’d just hired, I naturally wanted to make some changes. There were several things about the production I thought could be better.
For one thing, they did about an hour and a half of secular Christmas music and then spent only 30 to 40 minutes on the life of Christ. That’s right, they boiled down everything from the Nativity to the Ascension into the same time as a TV sitcom.
Though I like Jingle Bells as much as the next guy, I immediately switched the emphasis. The secular program would go down to around 45 minutes, and the Life of Christ section would expand to 90 minutes.
My next problem was Jesus. Not the actual Jesus, but the guy who played our “Jesus”. First, through no fault of his own, he was getting old. And bald. Sure, his hair was still long, but he was balding on top because that’s what older guys often do. He kind of looked like Riff Raff from Rocky Horror Picture Show. But instead of asking him to step down, year after year they keep letting him play the part.
Without an intervention soon, I imagined a day coming when people would have to help “Jesus” navigate his way out of the tomb. Not much of a resurrection when your Messiah needs a chair lift.
The second problem was my script. When I handed it out to the cast, the eyes of “Old Jesus” glazed over and he turned pale. Why? The Jesus in my script actually spoke words straight from Scripture. But “Old Jesus” had only stood around with his arms outstretched onstage and hugged the occasional child. In the crowd scenes from previous years, he looked like a political candidate “working the room” and kissing babies.
After some quick deliberations, “Old Jesus” bowed out of the production and we cast a young college actor. Where “Old Jesus” actually had dishwater blonde hair and Nordic features, our new “Young Jesus” looked like might actually be Jewish. I was thrilled.
In the midst of all these major revisions to the program, there was one more minor change I wanted to make. And that one probably was my death sentence.
I nixed the camel coming down the aisle for the big Nativity scene.
My thinking was two-fold. First, the camel was a huge expense. Probably $10,000 to $15,000 would end up being spent to rent and house a camel on our property for the 2 to 3 weeks of our show. That seemed like a ridiculous amount of money for a production I already felt uncomfortable with fiscally.
Second, camels are disgusting, mercurial animals that can get very moody very quickly. We would be bringing her down an aisle surrounded by pews filled with people. The camel could get spooked by all the flashing lights and the noise of a hundred-voice choir plus orchestra. A child could easily dart out into the aisle and be trampled. With all of these factors weighed together, along with the lingering smell of poop we’d have in the sanctuary for weeks, I told the crew we would be skipping the camel this year.
Switching Jesus’s was one thing. But messing with the camel in that manger scene was literally “the last straw”.
People hated me. No, REALLY hated me. I was not only the new upstart Music Minister who’d replaced the guy who retired after 30+ years. Now I was the Grinch who stole the Christmas camel! And this time, the Whos in Whoville were not holding hands and singing.
They were cursing the day I’d ever darkened their $200,000 doors.
I made it about another year and a half at that church before both they and I had finally had enough of each other. But I learned several lessons there that have stuck with me through the years.
One is found in the wisdom of Proverbs 22:28:
“Remove not the ancient landmark, which thy fathers have set.”
In other words, don’t rush in and start moving things around before you understand why someone else put them there. Though all my changes were well-intentioned, I would have been wise to shift things more incrementally over time. All those changes in one year were too much for a traditional church to swallow. It didn’t matter if they were the right changes. The rapidity of the changes made them intolerable for the people, no matter how right I may have been.
The most important lesson involves just how well we can rationalize anything as “God’s will” for us, if we want it enough.
As excessive as that production’s expenses were, the church defended the cost by saying it was a tool to bring people to faith in Christ. We would draw them in with the entertaining spectacle, and then slip in a message of believing in Jesus. As many of the production’s defenders would say to me, “If even one person comes to faith in Christ as a result, it was worth every penny!”
But here’s the funny thing about that. About a month after the production was over, I did an audit of the spiritual results. I looked at the commitment cards people were asked to fill out if they’d made a decision for Christ. I also checked to see how many of those people had actually followed up and become a member of our church as a result.
Zero. Not one person. In the two years I did that overblown production, my professional Captain Ahab experience, I could not verify one person who actually started living for Jesus and joined our church as a result.
Hmmm. Maybe it was because the camel stayed home?
Surely I wasn’t the first person to discover we were not getting any spiritual results for our investment. Someone decided along the way that even if no one was coming to Christ, it was still worth it to spend all that money. Just like Mickey and Judy putting on a production in their barn, we just wanted to put on a show! And it was worth any amount of money so each year we could all sing, dance, and wear Dickensian costumes while singing “Carol of the Bells”!
Seriously, we tell ourselves lies all the time about why we do things. Not only in church, but in life. We say we’re giving gifts to kids at Christmas because we want to help. But a lot of times we don’t really care about those kids and their day to day lives. We manage to ignore them the rest of the year. We’re just giving to feel good about ourselves. You can tell that especially when we do the easy thing by giving a gift or money, but refuse to ever invest our time in helping others on any consistent basis.
But we’re in such denial and so focused on getting our way, we end up saying, “Here’s what I’m doing, Lord. Now I want you to bless it!”
Rarely are we saying, “Tell me what YOU are doing Lord, so all I do will be blessed.”
Jesus found it problematic when the priests at the temple mixed their own motives with worship. They started a racket where they rejected the animal sacrifices people brought and then sold them new animals at a much greater cost. They said they were just helping people’s sacrifices be acceptable to God. But what they were really doing was making a fast buck, and that’s what ticked Jesus off. It wasn’t that money changed hands in church, it was that people had to endure extortion to worship in God’s House.
That’s just how easy it is to mix your own selfish motives with God’s. That’s how rulers for centuries have done atrocities in the name of God. God never told them to do those things. God’s will was irrelevant because they never bothered to ask Him what He wanted!
God will let us do our own thing if we demand it. We may actually succeed by the world’s standards. Most of the greatest pastors I’ve known looked like failures compared to the guys with the multimillion dollar budgets and huge congregations. Lots of pastors become successful because they know how to put on a good show. If the show is good enough, thousands of people will want to come see their great spectacles.
But the hand of God will not be in it if the voice of God never initiated it. Our greatest efforts will only sentence us to be yet another Sisyphus, rolling our dumb rocks up a hill only to watch them roll back down on us in the end.
Or maybe a better analogy would be a camel toppling over on us. Each to his own destruction.
I’d never blame it on Him per se, but I’ve always wondered something. Maybe it was Jesus who tipped the camel over that day at my old church in Florida, just to make a point?
“Surely, Jesus wouldn’t do anything that outrageous”, you say. But to predict future events, it’s always best to observe past performance.
And whether it’s money tables or camels, we’re smart to stay out of Jesus’ way and do what He wants instead.
