My mother’s birthday is December 23rd. I remember, as
a child, watching my father, a busy pastor in the most
hectic time of the year, pause the chaos of Christmas
preparation to celebrate her. Every year. No exceptions.
The sermon could wait. Mom deserved her day. All of
you with late December birthdays know this tension
quite well.
I thought about that as I returned to the opening verses
of the Gospel of John. It is striking that John doesn’t
seem interested in Jesus’ birthday at all. There are
no angels. No shepherds. No star. No little town of
Bethlehem. No little Lord Jesus asleep on the hay. No
wisemen bring elaborate gifts to the Christ child. John
skips the pageantry, and I think I know why.
For John, Christmas is not Jesus’ birthday. It’s ours. To
all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave
power to become children of God. Only in John do we
get our own verse. We are celebrated. Remade. Claimed
as children of God. Only then the Word became flesh
and lived among us.
That is Christmas. God close enough to touch. God near
enough to make us new.
But John is not looking back at Bethlehem. He’s looking
at you—announcing your birth. Declaring that we are
not without hope. That the powers of this world are not
permanent. That another way, a truer way, is possible.
At my childhood church, Christmas didn’t truly arrive
until Gladys Yarborough stood in the choir loft to sing O
Holy Night. When she began, my father, seated behind
the pulpit, would close his eyes and smile. I remember
how her voice carried the weight of words that made
each soul feel its worth. A thrill of hope, the weary world
rejoices; for yonder breaks a new and glorious morn.
When Ms. Gladys died in 2011, her Christmas Eve solo
was the highlight of her obituary. I teared up when I read
it. Some moments will never really leave us.
The poem that became that Christmas carol was written
in 1843, the same year that Charles Dickens published
his A Christmas Carol and the same weary world.
Dickens wrote in a London ravaged by poverty, harsh
child labor, and the brutal inequities of industrialism.
He wrote out of moral outrage and Christian hope. He
believed that stories had the power to wake people
up. He believed that Christmas, the greatest story of
all, demanded a response. A thrill of hope, the weary
world rejoices.
And our world is weary. Exhausted. Drained.
Community in all its forms unraveling. Hatred now
open and unapologetic. Violence senseless and
unending. Grief upon grief upon grief. And John is
perfectly clear that God comes in the middle of it all.
This is not a safe story. He came to what was his own,
and his own people did not accept him. God showed
up anyway. In the flesh. In the danger. In the mess.
Unwelcome by even those who most hoped he would
come. He was in the world—the world that came into
being through him. Yet that very world, his world, did not
know him. Did not recognize him. Did not acknowledge
him. Did not listen to him. Did not follow him.
Incarnation is an invasion. Now, we’ve heard “invasion”
aimed at those seeking safety, those seeking home.
But in scripture, the invader is God. God crossed
every border. God comes uninvited. Unwanted. Utterly
vulnerable. The Holy One shows up not as Caesar, but
as the threatened. Not as Herod, but as the hunted.
Within days of his birth, Mary and Joseph will wrap their
newborn baby in the night and run for Egypt, crossing
borders to save his life, becoming refugees in a foreign
land where they speak a different language, where
they are religious and ethnic minorities, where they are
unwelcome strangers.
The King of Kings entered the world as one of the least
of these. You see, the holy family was the invasion Herod
most feared.
In our city, people who gathered to celebrate a new
beginning, who had done everything our system
demanded, who had waited years, passed every test,
paid every fee—came to take an oath and were turned
away at the door. A ritual of rejection rooted in fear.
Friends, we who celebrate God’s coming in human form
must never forget: the birth happened under the threat
of slaughter. This is not a safe story.
As my professor Shirley Guthrie wrote, “It happened at a
particular time, in a particular place, in connection with
a particular mother. It happened ‘in the days of Herod’ …
‘In the town of Bethlehem’ … ‘of his mother, Mary.’”
Herod. The anxious king who ruled by fear. Herod.
The one who would hunt down innocent children to
eliminate a perceived threat. Fear was Herod’s currency.
And it worked.
Until God invaded his world. Right there. In the teeth
of empire. Under the shadow of the very violence that
would later take his life. The Word became flesh and
lived among us. This is what incarnation means: The
God of the universe needed the protection of human
parents. God as bone and blood and breath. Subject to
Herod’s violence and Caesar’s census and the brutality
of empire. God, rejected. God, acquainted with sorrow.
God chose flesh.
If God could not love this world from a distance,
neither can we. Over Thanksgiving, we took our boys
to see A Christmas Carol at the Indianapolis Repertory
Theatre. Our boys had never seen it. When Marley’s
ghost appears with those heavy chains dragging, face
twisted with regret, voice echoing throughout the
room, I felt my eight-year-old’s hand grip my arm. He
clamped on and would not let go. He didn’t look away.
He barely breathed.
Dickens wanted to awaken the human spirit. He
asked hard questions of a culture. When Scrooge is
told the destitute would prefer death to the horrific
workhouses, he replies, “If they would rather die, they
had better do it and decrease the surplus population.”
The efficiency of evil.
But you know the moment when Ben grabbed my arm.
Scrooge tries to comfort his old partner. “But, Jacob, you
were always a good man of business.”
And Marley, from beyond the grave, cries out, rattling
those chains. “Mankind was my business! The common
welfare was my business! Charity, mercy, forbearance,
benevolence—these were all my business!”
And with that, Dickens holds a mirror before a nation
drifting toward cruelty by convenience. A world where it
was easier to manage ledgers than see suffering. Where
it was possible to walk past need every single day and
never stop. A world not so different from our own.
Jacob Marley missed the incarnation. He lived an
entirely disembodied life; he was untouched, untroubled,
uninvolved, unbothered while the world ached around
him. Now he carries chains forged link by link from
every single opportunity he missed. And my eight-year-
old got that immediately.
But there is still time. The call is clear. Love—if it is
God’s love—demands flesh. Your hands. Your time. Your
presence in the rooms you’ve been avoiding. Your voice
in the places where silence hurts the vulnerable. Your
humanity. Not in theory, but in person.
The Word became flesh and lived among us. With us.
Beside us.
And this same God stays because the work begun is
not yet complete. We still see the destructive force
of evil. The cruelty. The greed. The indifference to
suffering. We see strangers unwelcomed and the
innocent slaughtered. We see the vulnerable crushed,
and the darkness still suffocates.
But listen to this. An occupation has begun that
promises to overturn it all. God’s occupation of this
broken world. God’s love invading every corner, crossing
every border, refusing to be kept out or kept at bay.
And what of us? We have been deployed. Not as
conquerors, but carriers of love. People who know
that mankind is our business. Compassion, mercy, the
common welfare—all our business.
Somehow John knows that light burns on through the
darkest days. Tonight is the longest night of the year.
We are in the absolute depth of darkness. As dark as
it gets. Which means—listen to this from the poet Jan
Richardson—”This is the night when you can trust
that any direction you go, you will be walking toward
the dawn.”
The darkness has crested. From here, every step is
toward light. The invasion we are waiting for. Not
agents of violence. Not earthly emperors. Not another
reason to be afraid.
But light. Light. Light in every direction. Love. Love.
Love. Vulnerable, persistent, and disruptive. Love born in
empire, born to refugees, born to break every chain and
set us free. Love that will not stop until the world that is
becomes the world that ought to be.
It’s time. Everything is broken. The world weary to
the bone. Cynicism seeps into every soul. And John
announces a birth. So close to Christmas. Most will miss
it. Many will reject it.
But, it will come as it always has: God’s immense power
distilled to its very essence. A baby. A cry in the night.
Flesh and bone and breath.
The invasion has already begun.
Do you remember Scrooge waking on Christmas
morning? Disoriented, giddy. He says, “I feel like a baby.”
Born again.
He doesn’t know what day it is. You know what day it
is. This is your birthday. God showed up in the flesh. It’s
your turn.