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. 

None of us will ever be perfect Christians. We just keep doing those things that we feel God calls us to do as followers of Jesus. To be a saint is not to be a perfect or a super-Christian but to let the love of God move through us so that we make some small difference in the lives of the people around us and so that we might, like the big Saints-with-a-capital S, point to God. 

The shadow side of being a Pharisee was a tendency to be too scrupulous, to get fussy about things related to religion that are peripheral to God’s love and God’s call to us. I don’t think it’s possible to be Episcopalian without a bit of pharisee in each of us. But I think it’s always important to ask ourselves: are we intentional Christians or habitual Christians? Our habits tend to attach to the forms of worship, the trappings, rather than to God who is the object of our worship. 

Persistence means remembering our baptismal promise to strive for justice and peace and respect the dignity of every human being every day. We live in a time when our capacity to keep this promise is constantly under threat. But living in the kind of persistence and hope we see in Jacob and in the widow means keeping these promises.