Love thy neighbor.No exceptions.
Love thy neighbor.By the Rev. Nathan Empsall. Preached Wednesday, December 25, 2019, at the Episcopal Church of St. Paul & St. James (St. PJ's) in New Haven, CT.
May I speak in the name of God who is Creator, Word, and Holy Spirit.
This is a very special Christmas for me. My wife and I had our first child on November 4. She arrived at 5:05 in the morning, weighing 6 pounds and 12 ounces. She’s been a little fussy the last few days, but is otherwise healthy, happy, and absolutely beautiful.
This Christmas is special not only because it’s my baby’s first, but also because I can’t help seeing a few parallels with another newborn we all have on our minds this morning.
Raising a child, even a newborn, is not easy. The nights are long, and every simple two-minute task now takes thirty minutes -- but it’s all worth it. I’ve never minded the diaper changes or letting her spit up on my shoulder, and we’ve even gotten to a point where I actually enjoy some of the late-night feedings.
They’re good bonding time, and in those moments, nothing else matters. There is no feeling in the world like watching a fussy daughter calm down once I start singing to her in my arms.
Holding my little girl at 3 in the morning, looking into her eyes, I wonder, who will you be? What will you do in the world, and what will you do for the world? What do I need to do to help you get there?
It’s Christmas Day, so I think you all know where this is going. This baby has changed everything about my life. When God came into the world as a baby, it changed everything for everyone – and continues to change us each new day.
I look at my little girl and wonder who she will be, and what she will do. The life of Jesus Christ challenges us with some very similar questions: Who will we be? How will we show love and grace to others? What can we do to change the world for those in need?
But Jesus did not wait until he was an adult to confront us with these questions and the challenges they bring. His mission was in full force from the very beginning: Social justice begins at Christmas.
When God broke into human history, it was as the child of single teenage mother and her day-laborer fiancé, born in a barn.
God could have chosen to come as a mighty imperial Roman prince or Hebrew king, wielding power and military might over all. But instead, God chose to be born alongside farm animals in occupied territory.
In an American context, as James Cone said, Jesus is black.
Jesus is also a migrant worker, Jesus is a trans woman, and Jesus is an indigenous water protector.
From the very beginning, Jesus identified with the poor, the oppressed, the marginalized, and the suffering. That isn’t to say he loves only the outcast; remember that the three kings got to visit Christ, too. But though Jesus welcomes and loves all, he identifies first and foremost with those on the margins.
The first person Jesus met was obviously his mother, Mary. Social worker Kaitlin Hardy Shetler wrote a poem on Facebook about her this month that’s been going viral, which I’d like to share:
sometimes I wonder if Mary breastfed Jesus.
if she cried out when he bit her
or if she sobbed when he would not latch.
and sometimes I wonder
if this is all too vulgar
to ask in a church
full of men
without milk stains on their shirts
or coconut oil on their breasts
preaching from pulpits off limits to the Mother of God.
but then i think of feeding Jesus,
birthing Jesus,
the expulsion of blood
and smell of sweat,
the salt of a mother’s tears
onto the soft head of the Salt of the Earth,
feeling lonely
and tired
hungry
annoyed
overwhelmed
loving
and i think,
if the vulgarity of birth is not
honestly preached
by men who carry power but not burden,
who carry privilege but not labor,
who carry authority but not submission,
then it should not be preached at all.
because the real scandal of the Birth of God
lies in the cracked nipples of a
14 year old
and not in the sermons of ministers
who say women
are too delicate
to lead.
Mary was neither meek nor mild. Mary was strong and fierce. And from the very beginning, she sang of justice, a song Jesus heard in utero:
He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly;
he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.
I doubt Mary stopped singing that song when Jesus was born. It’s a song Christ would have heard all his life. With a mother like that, is it any wonder why Jesus subverted the patriarchy, encouraging women to learn at his feet just like men, protecting sex workers from angry crowds?
And with a mother like that, with a savior like that, it is it any wonder that Christ’s first visitors were shepherds? Smelly, sweaty, rough-around-the-edges, lonely bachelors from the edge of town, best left to their dirty flocks. But the outcasts were welcomed into the baby’s barn.
The Holy Family did not get to stay in that barn for long, though. They were soon forced to flee to Egypt when Herod – Rome’s local client king – ordered Christ’s execution. In other words, Jesus was a refugee.
Outcasts. Shepherds. Strong women at the margins. Refugees.
Social justice begins at Christmas.
Yes, the Spirit of Christmas includes gorgeous lights and trees, favorite carols and classic movies, spending time with family, and even Santa Clause and his belly like a bowl full of jelly. I love that stuff, and truth be told, I can get a little obsessive about it. I even proposed to my now-wife under a Christmas tree.
But the Spirit of Christmas also includes rejecting the president’s call for a wall on our border, rejecting his continued separation of families at the border, and rejecting the Muslim travel ban that remains our law.
The Spirit of Christmas includes fighting fossil fuels that burn creation and harm the poor and marginalized the most.
The Spirit of Christmas means opposing every rollback of LGBTQ rights, and fighting cruel cuts to food stamps and health care.
That is how we love our neighbors, and that is how we can worship a God who identified with the poor first.
I choose to get political from the pulpit, even at Christmas, because politics is just the art of living together – and how we live together was at the very heart of Christ’s birth and ministry.
In that regard, politics isn’t just about social justice; it’s also about kindness and generosity. Christmas reminds us that politics is not just national and global; it is also local and personal.
Y’all, the country is getting too angry. Liberals calling every conservative they meet stupid or racist, without stopping to notice the human in front of them first; conservatives treating politicians like religious idols, while proudly trying to “trigger” every liberal they meet.
That rage is bleeding out of politics; we start to get angrier at the little things, shorter with strangers in the grocery store, angrier at drivers on the road. Angry, we’re always angry now.
And I know that sometimes, I am part of the problem. Most of us are.
I don’t mean to go on about bad news at Christmas, but the thing is, all these challenges and problems I just listed – they’re not news. We already know about them. The news – and it is good news -- is that through all these bad headlines, injustice, and broken relationships, Christ is still named Emmanuel: God is with us.
From birth in a barn to death on a cross, Christ suffered at the margins, so that whenever we suffer, we will know: Jesus has been there too, and Jesus is still there, right there with us. God is with us.
We can face down every injustice, lift up every broken soul, and work to heal every torn relationship, because of today -- because God the Son took on human form to show us that, in suffering and in hope alike, God is always with us.
And God is always with us, God was born among the poor as a baby in a barn, for one simple reason: Our creator loves us, unconditionally. God loves us even when – especially when – we make mistakes. And that’s my very favorite thing about God: It’s okay for us to be human. It’s okay for us to fail. We always get to try again tomorrow. We can try again to right the world’s wrongs, and we can try again, and again and again and again, to right our own wrongs.
God repeatedly forgives every single one of our sins, which is a beautiful thing – but it is also a challenge.
We are forgiven, but we are thus required to pay that forgiveness forward -- always forgiven, always forgiving. Always loved, always loving.
That’s not to say that a victim of abuse should stay with their abuser, and allow him to repeat his crimes. Do not blame victims. But when possible, when perpetrators are ready and it is not a danger for us to do so, it is Christian to offer second and third and tenth chances, even when the wider society refuses to do so.
That’s why I want to end this morning by talking about two other familiar Christmas characters: Charles Dickens’ Ebeneezer Scrooge and Dr. Seuss’s Grinch.
We know what it means when someone says “Don’t be such a Scrooge,” or, “Don’t mind her, she’s just a grinch.” And that’s too bad. What does it say about our society that we focus only the flaws of these two characters, only on their first chapters, and not on the end of their stories? The names Scrooge and Grinch should be among the highest compliments we could ever pay a person, speaking to redemption, kindness, and the hard work of change.
Ebeneezer Scrooge was an old man who evicted hundreds of families and orphans, and lost his one true love along the way. He broke others and was himself broken. But even for this twisted, evil miser, it was never too late to start over.
Sure, Scrooge and the Grinch are fictional. But when we read the birth story given in the Gospel of Matthew, we see that it wasn’t fiction when Jesus’s adopted dad, Joseph, wanted to reject Mary’s pregnancy – then changed his mind, and his life, by embracing the child after all.
And it wasn’t fiction last New Year’s Day, when Diana and I toured Belfast, North Ireland, with ex-terrorists from both the IRA and Loyalists as our tour guides, men who had once killed for their politics but now preach peace and justice.
Redemption is hard, but it is possible and it is real.
Also hard is the process of accepting change and redemption in others – also hard and also necessary. Jesus taught us to pray, “forgive our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.” And Jesus said from the cross, “Father forgive them, for they don’t know what they’re doing.” This was a man who would have known Scrooge as he was at the end, a man who became “as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew.”
I hope I am a Scrooge in Christ’s eyes. I hope you’re a Grinch. And I hope my daughter turns out to be Little Cindy-Lou Who, accepting us Scrooges and Grinches for who we can become rather than who we were -- the same way another baby did and does.
“It was always said of him, that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge. May that be truly said of us, and all of us!"”
My siblings in Christ, let’s say it all year, every time we stand for justice and love: Merry Christmas.
Faithful America's campaigns director, the Rev. Nathan Empsall, is priest associate at St. PJ's, where this sermon was preached.
Have you heard a good sermon about social and economic justice or other prophetic ministry lately? Send it to [email protected], and we might share it here!