What Can't Wait | Courage (Love) Can’t Wait

The Christmas story is often treated as gentle and sentimental, but it emerges from a world marked by occupation, fear, and deep injustice. When Mary, Joseph, and Bethlehem are understood within the harsh realities of the Roman Empire, Matthew 1:18-25 reveals how power and exploitation shaped their lives and continue to shape our own world through violence, exclusion, and systemic harm, especially toward those pushed to the margins. Yet the story does not end there. It offers courage and hope, inviting people of faith to confront what is unloving, stand alongside those who suffer, and live into the transforming power of love.

Hopefully you are beginning to hear this story that is so familiar in a slightly different way. My hope is that as you hear the voices of singing, of instruments, of a voice speaking to us from a world of experience, that you begin to enter into this scripture text, realizing just how subversive it is, how it tries to get under all of the things that are going on inside of us. All the various narratives and stories that happen in and from society, that you begin to enter into this world of the first century and begin to realize just how dangerous this whole thing was.

In the first century, as the Roman Empire was occupying this land, these people decided to come up with the brilliant idea of doing a census of everyone and making them all relocate back to the places that are considered to be part of their tribal name. So when you hear a phrase like Joseph, son of David, may you realize that’s not only an identity tied to prophecy, but it’s also a locator. That means he and his family must go to the place of their forefathers, in this case, Bethlehem.

Bethlehem, as much as we sing about it in our songs and imagine it as nice and quaint, is anything but. Imagine the chaos created in the midst of these situations. Imagine if you’re a resident of Bethlehem and your family has lived there for generation after generation. You are known as that town, that city of David. And now thousands of your family members, third cousins once removed and many times removed, are pouring into your town. Imagine living in an occupied land where Roman soldiers are garrisoned all over the countryside. Think about that ancient world and what those soldiers did to all kinds of people, particularly women and young girls. Think about the exploitation taking place in this story.

As we begin to think about that, we bring it back home to our own century and the amount of injustice, oppression, and exploitation happening in and around the world by the powerful. Think about what you’ve seen on the news just this week. Think about lists, about powerful people who gather together, who move through systems that protect them. It is not just one person or one party, but an entire class of people participating in exploitative systems and structures.

At the heart of this story is a young girl named Mary and the reality of gender injustice that still exists in our world. We live in a world more apt to side with perpetrators than with victims. Think about color and race, ethnicity and culture, sexuality and gender, and the exploitation and injustice that still takes place right now. When I pray through requests during the week, I think about the number of people in this congregation who have experienced injustice simply because of who they love.

Think about friends and community, neighbors and strangers, immigrants and foreigners. These stories in this book hold all of that. We come in saying Merry Christmas, full of cheer and happiness, and we should be, because this story is what gives us the power and transformation to make the world truly merry, joyful, and whole. This story gives us the courage we need to walk out into the world and love humanity the way it needs to be loved.

The end of the story is not injustice, exploitation, or oppression. The end of the story is you and me being inspired to transform the world. This story raises up more Josephs, more Marys, more people willing to stand up against what harms others. What can’t wait is the courage to love. People suffering from injustice need a person, a community, someone who will stand with them and speak up in a culture that says no to them again and again.

When people of faith say they love God, love their neighbor, and love their enemy, and when that message sinks deep, then we can truly offer the greeting we share this time of year. Merry Christmas and a happy new year, because we have confronted and resisted all that is unloving in the world. Will you have the courage to love in this season? Will you hear the story anew and enter into all the drama it holds? Will you have the courage to love?