One of you told me last week, “I love the Christmas story – with its shifty shepherds and weird astrologer kings. The unwed pregnant teenager; a remarkably faithful husband; the overwhelmed hotelier; a frightened, murderous tinpot dictator. And the voiceless animals as the only witnesses of it all.”
“It’s just that,” my Christmas-story-lover continued, “It’s just that… how’s all that stand up to our world today where too much is going wrong?”
The Christmas Eve homily was my answer. Here’s a 1-minute recap:
Luke opens with powers and principalities wreaking havoc in the world (literally the case in Jesus’ time). The empire’s rich and powerful neither notice nor care about a pregnant teenager or a band of unwashed shepherds. Just as in our day, the loudest, most dominant voices cast their attention to and expend their most resourced effort naming the people and groups of people they are black-listing as unworthy of any consideration or care.
But Luke’s actual story, what he wants to relate is different — much narrower, closer to home, smaller. It’s about those people who are ironically unseen, disregarded AND targeted. Because incarnation means just the opposite of the Emperor’s tack. God’s love in Jesus claims no one is expendable. God won’t leave any behind. Not the deported immigrant. Nor the individual about to lose her health care. Not some transgender middle schooler. Nor the addicted. Not a young women subjected to sexual exploitation. Nor the homeless person whose mental illness is hard to manage. Not even the person whom we see as our arch enemy.
The Christian Gospel is love for us all, no exceptions. …Whether the world and its authorities (or anyone else!) deem you important, worthy, redeemable (or not), God does.
The headlines are awful; our sense of things may be worse. How does God’s message stand up to our hurting world — the authorities’ false narratives and their consequent oppressions? God’s word contradicts the contempt and condemns all the careless harm. It’s an alternative press. I’m willing to bet my life that this holy story that we’ve been telling and retelling now for 2000 years will be remembered and shared long after the cruelty, incompetence and corruption of our day are just a footnote almost forgotten in history.
May it be so.
