And isn’t that what they saw, when they got to Bethlehem, a family like theirs trying to get through the first night after a hard birth. This was the sign God offered to people walking in the dark of night. God has entered human experience the same way each one of us did, cold and small, fragile and dependent. God has not picked some other, better, life to inhabit. God has chosen your life.
If we allow ourselves to get lost in the question of who is the mighty on their throne, we will stay trapped in justifications for violence. Nations will legitimate their use of drones and terrorists their use of suicide bombers. But, if we focus on unseating violence itself then we are truly getting to the heart of the matter. We stop playing musical chairs, replacing one violent power with another, and we begin building the world from the bottom up, from the vantage point of the lowly, through the eyes of the unarmed Black teenager, the Pakistani school girl, the hungry day laborer. We begin building a world where the good things of God — food, shelter, family, love, education, community, justice and peace — are shared among us all.
This is the starting place. This is the beginning of a new year, which comes weeks before the new year as marked by the empires of this world because God is already moving while we are still waiting. God is moving in the souls of people who know that nothing is hopeless, who cry out to heaven because they still expect God to answer, who can acknowledge their own complicity in the systems that oppress them but long to be free so that all can be free. God is moving in you.
By Proclamation 