CBS won the ratings war this week in part by airing an old standby of Christmas TV--”Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer”--a stop action animation feature that has lasted against all odds for over forty years. Maybe like “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” it taps far deeper into our collective psyche than we wish to admit.

A song that ties together the various plot themes is about misfits, and all of the lead characters take a spin with it. Then, completely without irony, they wind up stranded on the Island of Misfit Toys. These toys don’t fit. A train has square wheels. A Charlie-in-the-Box (rather than a Jack) guards the gate. A cowboy rides an ostrich. A lion with wings rules over the island. Herbie, the elf who wants to be a dentist, and Rudolph begin an exile there.

Believe it or not, there are real echoes here of the story of the prophet Jonah. Jonah was a misfit. God called him to be a prophet, but Jonah did not want to go, namely because God had no sense of character. God wants to redeem an entire kingdom of misfits, Nineveh, the very city responsible for the Exile of the Jews! In running away, Jonah becomes a misfit, nearly causing the drowning of a ship’s crew, spending a long weekend in the belly of a whale, and then befriending a tree while awaiting God’s judgment of Nineveh. Nothing really fits together the way it should.

But then again, that is true of much of the faith.

Luke, in telling the story of Jesus’ birth, writes an account for the misfits among us. He takes great pains to be sure everyone--meaning everyone--knows that this story is their story. He tells the story of a Messiah who knows what it is to be a misfit. His mother, simply by her circumstance, will be seen as being of dubious character. His father is portrayed as a poor laborer, albeit with a golden secret in the family tree. He cannot even find shelter for his pregnant wife in his own hometown--his own family could not find room for him! Jesus’ first cradle will be an animal trough. The first witnesses of the birth are the dirty, drunken shepherds no respectable community would ever allow inside. The point is clear-a misfit Messiah has come for all the misfits of the world.

We love Luke’s story just as we love Jonah’s. We turn them both into innocent children’s stories, but the reality is they are children’s stories only in the same way the stories of the Brothers Grimm are children’s tales--there is a real bite hidden within these lines.

But then the truth of all of us is that we are not quite as clean and pure as we would like to be. We all have our secrets and we all have our moments when we can identify completely with being a misfit. As a kid, our clothes, our hair, our music, could all lead to finding ourselves alone. As an adult, we can all have moments where we know we don’t fit, suddenly lost among a crowd of people to whom we have no real connection. Sometimes it is of our own making. We isolate ourselves by making ourselves hard to love, by sticking to a principle no one else shares, or something else. Either way, we wind up alone, humming along the tune of the misfit song.

Here is the moment to ponder the grace carried by the prophet Jonah, both in himself and in his story.

God never leaves Jonah even though Jonah does all in his power to leave the presence of God. God abides tenaciously. Jonah first complains bitterly about God’s tenacity. One gets the feeling that Jonah welcomes being pitched overboard by the terrified sailors who realize that Jonah is in the boat against God’s will. Jonah feels escape lies within the depths.

Sometimes human beings simply do not want to be found. I was struck by a story out of England this week. It appears a man has come back from the dead. He disappeared five years ago in a boating accident and was declared dead by the authorities. Well, just a few weeks ago, he walked into a police station. He claimed he had no memory of the last few years and had no idea who he was. At first, there was great rejoicing, but then things began to seep out--he disappeared while heavily in debt; he was seen in Panama in the interim; and so on. It appears the English Lazarus may have had good reason to vanish!

But God abides. Even in the depths of the great fish, God is present. Jonah is redeemed and he is grateful--some periods of exile really aren’t worth it when all is said and done.

Moreover, God never abandons the world. Nineveh, “that great city,” as Jonah refers to it, should by all accounts be turned to a cinder. But it isn’t. They hear the voice of God in Jonah and they turn to God. God abides tenaciously. God insists on being with Nineveh. Jonah is angry all over again. You can feel his disappointment when the city and even its livestock repent. God will let them off. Jonah suddenly learns the depth and power of grace whether he likes it or not. God will redeem all whom he seeks to redeem.

Jonah is rarely, if ever, invoked as a Christmas prophet, but he is. Without the message carried within this quirky little story, there comes no real insight into what is going on within Luke’s Nativity. God abides tenaciously.

One gets the feeling that Luke is saying that over and over to his readers. His Nativity is not at all what anyone with a lick of understanding of the prophets, King David, and the promised Messiah would have composed. Nothing fits, not the setting, not the characters, nor even the child himself. Yet, God is present with grace and redemption for all who hear this story. And that is the point. No misfit need be in exile. God enters every imaginable exile there is to end them.

Back on the Island of Misfit Toys, redemption comes through a red-nosed reindeer and pint-sized dentist who refuse to abandon their friends to isolation. Here is the subtle power of a truly cheesy TV program--it captures the heart of the matter. No one needs to be left alone. No one needs to be abandoned.

In a truly bizarre way, the TV show gives us within the Church our marching orders for Christmas. We are to be for the world what Herbie and Rudolph are for the toys. We are to be about the reclamation of the misfits. No one truly is a misfit. Oh we may have our differences, very real and very powerful differences at that, but no one is so different as to be outside the realm of God’s grace.

Now Jonah levels at us the real power of such thinking--some are misfits because we cannot co-exist with them. They are enemies. Jonah is told to go and pronounce judgment on the greatest enemy Israel had. He thinks he knows why, but it doesn’t work that way. Rather than fire and brimstone, Jonah witnesses a dawn of grace.

This is the extent to which we are to go in our reclamation of the misfit.

This is incredibly hard to do. We can all think of people who are beyond the pale of our ability to be with, yet God sees differently. There is a path to reconciliation. There is hope. We simply have to learn to see properly.

Jonah ends up under a shade tree. God kills the shade tree. Jonah is angry because it seems so frivolous, so mean-spirited on God‘s part, but God confronts him in that very moment--you love the tree, but why do you not love the people of Nineveh? They are human beings, after all. You are angry that God would destroy a tree, yet upset that God would spare human beings, God’s own image and creation.

That challenge hangs over the Nativity. God rewrote the story of how the Messiah would enter the world. God did so to free the Messiah from the confines of dogma and dictum that made the range of the Messiah’s power far narrower than God’s grace. That would never do. So God changed it.

What are we doing about it?