God's choice

Christmas 2011
Isaiah 9: 2-7; Ps 96; Titus 2: 11-14; Luke 2: 1-20


We stood in the middle of the street and watched the fire consume the house.

My wife Diane and I spent our first four years together in Pilsen, a working-class neighborhood on Chicago’s West Side. Pilsen folks were old working-class Polish turned to working-class Latino with a small sprinkling of white-Anglo idealists. We had been happy there—Diane had grown up 25 blocks away and I was comfortable with Spanish-speaking folks. The down-to-earth sense of community and cultural richness was delightful and the challenges seemed capable of being handled.

One of the challenges was street gangs. Each block was divided up into the “turf” of its respective gangs. Reports of violence and occasional gunshots in the night were frequent. Non-combatants were almost never targeted—in fact the major danger was that frequently gunshots went wild and would go through the window of a house.

When our son was born, suddenly things did not feel like they could be handled anymore.

Earlier that year our street’s gang provoked a war with the 21st Street guys. Our kids were really kids, high school aged. The 21st Street guys were hard cases, experienced criminals in their 20’s. By late May when our son was born, they had already killed three of our street’s kids.

Two weeks later, in order to drive home the point of their dominance, the 21st Street guys torched a house across the street from our building. The flames rose high in the night, stopping trains on the elevated tracks above it.

A number of us stood in the street watching. The light from the flames played across the face of my wife and across the blanketed form of our three-week old son wrapped sleeping in her arms. I stood looking at them and vowed silently, “I’ve got to get them out of here.”

It was a natural response, understandable and responsible. It was the instinct of every parent whose very being twitches in response to a threat posed to their children.

But God made a different choice with his Son.

Isaiah wonders at it. Isaiah marvels at the strangeness of the God who chooses a radically different response to the flame and smoke of a world in crisis. The Judea of Isaiah’s time was locked in fear and betrayal, struggling under the yoke of powerful nations like the Assyrians, divided and dispirited and tasting despair. There was no one to turn to on earth, there was no hope in sight. The Kingdom of Judah seemed about to fail.

People fled. Folks seeking life and freedom and security for their children scattered to other lands. Any parent would.

But God made a different choice with his Son. He chose that moment to move into the neighborhood.

“For a child has been born for us,
a son given to us;
authority rests upon his shoulders;
and he is named
Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,
Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.
His authority shall grow continually,
and there shall be endless peace
for the throne of David and his kingdom.”

God made a different choice with his Son. Into this time and place of tension and terror, the promised Deliverer is born. Because God made a different choice, we can make different choices too—choices for freedom not fear, choices for unity not division, choices for hope not despair.

At Christmas, we remember how God really moved into the neighborhood.

“The Christmas story” has a lot more to do with Pilsen’s gangs and fires and poverty than pretty Sunday pageants. The census that put Mary and Joseph on the road to Bethlehem was a demonstration of Roman power and Roman greed. A census was all about gathering taxes from people who could barely afford to live as it was. Like the poor of every land, the Holy Family huddled together with other poor folk with whom they shared blood and history.

God could have chosen to be born in a place of power and influence. God could have picked a more peaceful time. But God chose to move into that neighborhood. God made a different choice with his Son.

There, in the space where guests and animals would be gathered out of the cold, the true Son of God was born. The great Emperor, whose official titles were “Savior of the World” and “Son of the Gods” and “Peace-Maker”, did not know and did not hear. His great generals and noble courtiers did not know and did not hear. Nothing happened that night in the great palace in Rome. The shepherds in the fields heard the good news, not of Caesar’s messengers boasting of Caesar’s most recent battle, but from angels from the true Court speaking of the true Peace-maker. The poor shepherds make up this new Savior’s court as they speak with one another as equals and come, the new community already forming, to the place which was Nowhere and now is the only Somewhere that there is.

For God made a different choice with his Son. Into the teeming furnace of the world, into a world of power and cruelty and greed and violence, God chooses to come with his Son. There is no fleeing to a garden of paradise, no refuge seeking security and peace. The choice of God is to move into a neighborhood filled with tension and fear and threat and the damage done by the powerful and the cold-hearted rich. On this street of broken longing hearts that have forgotten how to hope or to believe, God chooses to come with his Son.

That is why we gather tonight. That is why we sing our Glorias and our Noels and our praises in the night. That is why our hearts are lit even if we struggle with doubt and uncertainty and despair. “For the grace of God has appeared…” There are many sensible choices to be made in the world. But God made a different choice with his Son. When we turn our eyes to right or left, when we gaze into the silence of our hearts or outward into the face of those in need or in pain, there we see him. We see the hope that is unconquered, the hope born when God made a different choice with his Son.