We are used to dividing time into two different eons: “B.C.” and “A.D.” or as the secular world now calls them, “BCE” and “CE.” To say we live in 2009 A.D. or C.E. gives us a sense of the passage of time, a feeling of where we stand in the flow of events. But such designations don’t distinguish much else about the changes the centuries have brought.

After a fearsome November storm season across North America it seems one designation that might help describe the changes time has brought is to divide life “B.E.” and “A.E.” — “Before Electricity” and “After Electricity.” There is nothing like an extended power outage to remind us just how dependent we are on the power grid for our life-styles and livelihoods.

When the power goes out everything is work. Making a cup of coffee requires a fire, a cast iron kettle, a lot of time, and gives sad, gritty results. Creating a whole meal can take a whole day.

But there are other changes that occur when the power is out that aren’t all bad. Without the TV, computer, video games, and music downloads, families who are hunkered down against a storm have to find something else to do. Off-the-grid days are the days when we drag out the old board games, find a deck of cards, start a giant jigsaw puzzle. As soon as the batteries run out on the iPod and the cell phone, talking to each other are the only voices that we have to listen to.

That is why in “B.E.” time the most important members of a community were the storytellers. The storytellers were revered for their wisdom and honored for their knowledge. The storytellers were responsible for telling people who they were, where they stood in the world, how they came to be, and what they should be doing.

Even in these “A.E.” days, the things we learn as stories stick with us become a part of us, far more than any lesson we learn by rote. Read a paragraph about unemployment and poverty rates and you might nod off. Hear the story of “The Grasshopper and the Ant,” and you never forget why we all must work for a living.

But stories only live on when they are told and re-told. Each new generation must learn the stories of its people, its family, its nation, and its faith, or the stories are lost forever.

Just inside the main entrance to Harrods, the great London department store, there is a statue of Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed (whose father owns Harrods). As my twelve-year-old daughter and I stood in front of it, Soren innocently asked, “Who is Princess Diana?” The woman who had been the most recognized icon of the eighties and nineties was a complete mystery, an unknown nobody, because Soren had never heard her story.

In the same way all of the Christian faith is always just one generation away from extinction unless we tell our stories. No one is “born” a Christian. Christians can only be “born again” after they hear and inhabit the stories that tell of God’s love for the world. Each new generation of Christians must pass on the story to the next, or Christianity will become something learned form history books but no longer lived out in a life of faith.

That is why Paul longed to return to Thessalonia and spend some serious “face time” with that fledgling Christian community. Paul had stories to tell. He had faith stories, prayers, and parables that needed to be communicated to that first, most crucial generation. If the first generation, which for Christians is every generation, doesn’t “get it right,” doesn’t hear the message, then there will be no more. Some sort of belief system might endure for a while, watered down and without roots, an air fern faith. But the heart of the story the “God the Father,” “Jesus the Lord,” “love one another” center of our faith would eventually be lost.

The Season of Advent begins today, and Advent is prime storytelling time. In preparation for the celebration of Christ’s birth we have important, beloved stories we all know by heart and we love to hear again. This is the time of year our kids get to dress up in bathrobes, transform themselves into camels or sheep or donkeys, and even sprout angel wings, in order to participate in our faith story.

But like any good, truly living story, the Nativity narrative has taken on a life of its own. The Christmas story our children perform is a kind of mish-mash of events and individuals taken from several gospels and some details are just plain made up. Yet just because something is not a fact, doesn’t make it untrue. The greatest truth is in the telling of the story itself.

Nevertheless during this Advent season each week we are going to look at some of the parts of the Christmas story that we haven’t told quite right over the years. But these new facts might just give our story some deeper roots, even as our children’s portrayals of innkeepers and angels continue to give our hearts wings.

In Luke 2:1-7 the gospel writer tells a simple story. Joseph and Mary travel from Nazareth to Bethlehem to register in the Roman-ordered census because Joseph “was descended from the house and family of David.” After that journey of some seventy miles “it came time for (Mary) to deliver her child.”

The image we all take home from Luke’s version and that generations of children have re-enacted is in v.7: “And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in bands of cloth, and laid him in a manger because there was no place for them in the inn.”

The first problem with Luke’s story is that there is no consensus on this census. Herod died in 4 BCE, Quirinius was governor of Syria from 6-7 CE, so putting them down as actors on the same stage just doesn’t work out. And while Luke uses the event of the census-taking to move Joseph and Mary from Nazareth to Bethlehem, the fact is that according to Roman law people were registered in their current place of residence, not the location of the their ancestral roots.

But Luke’s text firmly locates Joseph and Mary in Bethlehem, the royal city of David. Then where do they go? Thanks to a million productions of Christmas plays we envision the couple seeking shelter in a separate building set up for the purpose of offering rooms for travelers — a kind of first century “Best Eastern.”

In his birth narrative Luke uses the term “kataluma” to describe the place Mary and Joseph find already filled up. The only other time Luke uses “kataluma” it is to describe the “upper room” where Jesus and his disciples gathered for their Passover feast which become the Last Supper (Luke 22:11). Jesus sent out Peter and John to secure this space, telling them to ask their would-be host for him, “Where is the guest room (“kataluma”) where I might eat the Passover with my disciples?” The “kataluma” Peter and John are shown is “a large upstairs room furnished with couches” (Luke 22:12).

When Luke does mean to indicate an “inn,” a rooming house for travelers, he uses a different term, “pandocheion.” In the parable of the Good Samaritan the badly beaten man is taken by the compassionate Samaritan to a “pandocheoin,” an “inn” to recover.

So it would seem that what Luke is saying in his Nativity story is that the “guest room” was already occupied. If Joseph did indeed have family roots in Bethlehem it would be only natural that he and Mary would stay with those relatives. Does this mean that having arrived too late to lay claim to the guest room Mary and Joseph moved out to some separate stable — a building for animals? Luke’s text doesn’t say. The gospel writer’s only hint at the actual birthplace for the baby is that Jesus was laid in “a manger” after he was born.

The most common design for simple homes of first century peasants consisted of two levels. The upper floor would be where the family slept and where a “guest room” might be available. The lower floor was used for ordinary daytime living and where the animals were kept at night. A separate stable for livestock would only be found among the more well-heeled elite. With the animals down below the heat from their bodies would warm the air, which would then rise to the upper sleeping quarters. Think of it as a very early form of “radiant floor heating.”

So it was probably into the lower level of a relative’s home, a house already over-full with family, that Jesus was born. There was no cozy stable with well-tended stalls and lots of fresh straw on the ground. What was on the floor was waiting to be shoveled out in the morning so it could be dried out and then burned as fuel in the cooking fire. The poor didn’t have dinette sets and there was no spacious living room with overstuffed couches and chairs. The lower level was a simple open space where people could gather during the day and where the animals could be gathered at night. The only “furniture” available for the new mother to use for her baby was the feeding trough used by the animals, “a manger.”

When you tell the story this way it makes Jesus’ arrival much more ordinary, and much more extraordinary. Bethlehem might have had a history connecting it to King David. But both Bethlehem and David’s kingdom had long been in eclipse. Bethlehem was a wide spot in the road somewhere south of Jerusalem. Nobody important lived there. Nobody important went there. Until that night. Until in the ordinary overcrowded Bethlehem house of some distant relative Joseph and Mary brought into this world a new life, a life that had not walked the earth since the days of Adam and Eve in the Garden.

There is nothing more miraculous than the story of the Incarnation of the Divine. It is the story we must tell and retell every year, giving living details to the Living God who came to be in our midst.

Let us make this advent season a time of story-telling, when we tell the stories of Jesus with new passion and purpose. In early America, the Native Americans, when presented with “legal” documents that said the white man now “owned” the land, had this simple response: “If this is your land, tell me your stories.”

Advent asks the same question: If this is your faith, if Christianity is your religion, tell me your stories.

It’s story-telling time. “This is my story, this is my song.” Jesus is my story, Jesus is my song.”

This is my story. And I’m sticking to it.