This sermon was preached for Pageant Sunday, December 20, 2021 for a joint online service for St. Andrew's and St. Michael's. The texts for this sermon were pageant scriptures, including Luke 2:1-20 . Thank you to each and every child and teen who was part of this year’s pageant production, and for the parents behind the scenes. Your re-telling of this sacred story is a powerful witness to the ways this narrative will continue to be retold in every language and medium, in circumstances joyful and sorrowful, from generation to generation. Thank you. Perhaps because this year’s pageant was shorter than I’m used to, or perhaps because this has been a year marked by absences of all kinds, but this year I noticed the parts of the story that we often leave out of our various pageants. Mary, for instance, fast forwards from learning about her miraculous conception right to the night of the birth of her child. We get to skip over her morning sickness, the slow ballooning of her b