A Phenomenal Llama: A Tall Christmas Tale for Children of All Ages
Q&A; withTimothy Matthew Slemmonsregarding his new book:A Phenomenal Llama: A Tall Christmas Tale for Children of All Ages Q: What inspired you to write this book?A: It came early in my first pastorate. My first Christmas I tried preaching a Sunday morning style sermon on Christmas eve, and it was OK, but I soon realized people had come with a whole other set of expectations. The next year I decided to try something entirely different: to preach with the aim of wonder and delight. I have since thought better of conflating such fanciful material with the genre of the sermon per se, and I'll be the first to insist that a children's sermon should be more solidly scriptural than this "tall tale," but this story -- and it is a fiction, not a sermon -- was successful in achieving that sense of wonder at which it was aiming. So, sermon or no, it was to a large degree a success.Q: What made you decide on the llama as the spokesperson in this story?  A: A couple of things. I like llamas; they seem smart, friendly, homey, and practical. At the time, they had not had a great deal of exposure in children's literature, at least not that I knew of, so it seemed a fresh angle. Also, the story really was inspired by a trip to the zoo; the first pages emerge out of that trip, right up to the layout of the domestic animal shed. But the sight of an Indian family looking at polar bears really sparked me thinking about a collision of worlds, or at least of continents and geographic climes. Here it was Christmas. There was a camel to my right, so one thinks of the traveling magi on the "ships of the desert." To my left, some reindeer, and "you know who" we associate with them. But here, right before me: a llama. So I thought: Where were the llamas that first Christmas? No mention of them. No doubt in South America. If I can just get the llamas from Peru, I've got a story. What about this collision of continents? Were they not all one at one time? I think that's roughly the route my thinking took, as I mulled it over.Q: You spoke of aiming at wonder. Was that your main purpose in writing this book?A: Well, there are several aims, I suppose. Wonder as such was not my aim, but wonder directed to God: now, that is worship. It really was the pastor's crisis of ministering to people amidst the trappings of the secularized holidays that drove me to say, we need a new story to redirect our attention to the Christ of Christmas. If we must have the mythical motif of talking animals -- and the Bible itself would not rule out that motif; just consider Balaam's donkey! -- at least let's have them point us to Jesus, whose birth we are celebrating.Q: What do you think your chances are of unseating Santa Claus?A: Well, that is not among my primary aims, but with God anything is possible. Saint Nicholas was, at his best and truest, a saint of the church and a servant of Jesus, and that is where his legacy should remain. The popularizing of the Santa story is quite a recent development, historically speaking. So everything new has to begin sometime, even those new things that return us to our old roots. But there is one other aim that I should mention, and that is where the llama's tale takes the reader. As I often tell my preaching and worship students: "O" is not just a letter or someone's initial. It is a word, a word for worship; it is a deepening word, and if the preacher and the people of God will learn to use it again, and use it aright, without embarrassment, I think we would be a deeper church with deeper faith and deeper devotion. We would know well what the Psalmist means when he says, "Deep calls unto deep."