I like poking around in the threads of Reddit. It’s like having a roomful of annoyingly opinionated friends at the ready to validate my frustration and to consult with me about random life issues. Why the parental controls on my kid’s iPad keep malfunctioning, for example. Working on tonight’s service, I googled “how far is it from Nazareth to Bethlehem?” Up popped a reddit thread on the subject of atheism with this gem of a comment: “The [nativity] story has more holes than the world’s annual production of Swiss cheese.” This person went on to argue a number of historical points. The most compelling of them revolves around the census. Historians doubt that a census happened at the time and in the way Luke describes. It was definitely not the sweeping migration the Gospel imagines.
I’m not here tonight to debate skeptics or bash atheists. It’s truly Ok with me if you don’t believe in God or it you think Jesus was only human. If you are here for the community or the values or the music, you are most welcome! I’m grateful, actually, for the reminder that the meaning of tonight’s story is not found in its factual accuracy. We don’t have to throw out this story because it has holes. That would miss the whole point of telling stories. Now I’m not saying the Bible is only a work of fiction. For me, it’s an inspired and beloved text. And yet it was written by people who had a very different understanding of history, of science, of fact, really of everything.
Tonight, I invite you to approach Luke’s account of Jesus’ birth the same way you would absorb a good novel. With imagination. With eagerness to enter the world of the story. With a keen eye toward how the story speaks to the actual world we live in. And with an unguarded willingness to let the story change you.
One thing I hear prominently in this familiar chapter from Luke is the juxtaposition of two dramas, two worldviews, two sets of values. On the one hand, we have the Roman empire, and its figureheads—Ceasar Augustus and governor Quirinius. These men were wealthy and powerful, almost unimaginably so; they were the Elon Musks and the Jeff Bezos’s of their time. Ceasar presented himself as a divine figure, a savior, a son of god. In this story, we encounter the tools of empire— the census, the forced migration, the heavy taxation, employed for the dual purposes of weakening and silencing ordinary people while also building infrastructure for conquest and domination. And the story alludes to the propaganda of empire—official proclamations of the so-called good news and the false “peace of Rome”, a silence and calm maintained through brutal violence.
On the other side of things, we have a poor, peasant family. In the last days of pregnancy, authorities forced Mary, Joseph and the coming child to journey approximately 90 miles on foot. Knowing what travel was like in those days, I imagine them braving rocky, winding roads, coping with inadequate food, water and shelter, encountering bandits and wild animals. And when they reached their destination, bustling with visitors for the census, they were embraced by a family – relatives? strangers? Contrary to popular understanding, they were likely brought inside the home of their hosts, since, in those days, the animals typically lived under one roof with the humans. At this crucial moment of vulnerability and need, they received the gift of abundant hospitality and community. And all this matters, because when the story makes the claim that this child shows us what God is like, well, what kind of God comes as a helpless baby, wrapped in rags and kept warm with the breath of animals? What kind of God heralds a field of sheep and lowly shepherds with a message of peace on earth, and good news of great joy for all creation?
Perhaps it goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway. The holy infant God of Luke’s Gospel is not showing up in the streets of our city with masked agents in unmarked cars. He is asleep in the arms of his immigrant mother; he is in hiding with the families locked in their homes, afraid to go out; he is one of those being arrested and detained while attending Christmas eve worship tonight, or during this Friday’s prayers at the mosque; he is a scared child whose parents disappeared while he was at school. It’s our modern day Ceasar’s ICE force terrorizing our neighbors. In Ceasar’s world, due process doesn’t matter. The law and the constitution don’t matter. According to Ceasar’s plan, if you have brown or black skin, if you speak up or push back, then you deserve to disappear. And Ceasar can get all this paid for by stealing our health care and making life’s basics unaffordable.
Self-aggrandizement, cruelty, theft and gaslighting are the patterns of empires past and empires present. The nativity sets an entirely different scene. The Christmas story reveals a God whose only power is vulnerable love. This story sings of a peasant deity who sides with ordinary people, and empowers everyone to live with dignity and connection. Luke’s gripping novel imagines how the holy child will conspire with us to mend this world with peace that is deep and justice that is real. May it be so. Amen.