Peter and the other disciples have been expecting something glorious as they’ve been following Jesus around, watching him teach, preach, and perform miracles. Now they must turn around the big ship of their own expectations of what a Messiah might look like and consider instead what it means to have a Messiah who suffers and dies. 

Letting our light shine is not about evangelism as we think of it (another dubious gift of the Enlightment), cornering people to persuade them to believe in the afterlife. Evangelism is about seeking out the last, the least, and the lost and letting them know they are loved.

The “Where” questions in Genesis uncover human sin. Not just Eve’s sin or Adam’s sin or Cain’s sin, but the sin of the human condition whenever we separate ourselves from God. Separation from God, and the invitation to return, is at the core of all the scripture stories from the story of Cain right up to John the Baptist standing in the middle of the road saying: “Look, here is the Lamb of God!” 

When God moves into the neighborhood, God dwells in our individual and corporate humanity. God infuses us with divine life. God moves into our arena, pitches a tent in our midst. Not only does God go with us wherever we go, God who dwells among us as flesh is us wherever we go. Us, not me or you, not some but not others, all of us. From God’s fullness, as the gospel says, we have all received grace upon grace. 

Nowhere is the co-existence of human and divine, mystery and homeliness, more evident than in the shepherds’ experience on Christmas Eve. And nowhere are the implications of this co-existence of human and divine more needed than in our lives today. 

Jesus’ found family is a family of patriarchs and kings but also a family of vulnerability and scandal. It has been said that Jesus was born “not for himself but for humanity.” Jesus was born into a complicated and imperfect family that is no less desperately dependent upon the grace of God than we are.

We have all had our time in the wilderness. Perhaps over and over again. Sometimes our wilderness seems silent. Other times there’s a voice crying out. Or several. Sometimes the voice in the wilderness is ours. Sometimes the voice should be ours. 

In the Kingdom, wealth is not to be stored but used to care for the poor and to spread about as much as possible, as a sign of God’s extravagant grace. When we worship Christ the King, we worship a God who dies a miserable death while forgiving and welcoming sinners. 

To be part of the resistance movement that is Christianity is to protect victims of hatred with love. This protection has nothing to do with politics, nothing to do with how we vote or what news outlets we choose to follow, but everything to do with what it means to be a follower of Jesus.