Euangelion
In the WaPo is my Christmas message for 2019.
The True Meaning of Christmas: Trust God, Resist Empire.
No, I haven’t gone all liberation theology, but the Infancy Narratives and Apocalypse of John, with their birth stories, are written against the backdrop of empire. Check it out!
For the faithful, Christmas is a celebration that God is for us, God is near us, because God was one of us. God comes to us, in the vulnerability of child, to save us from our sins, and to rescue us from the evil forces that oppress us.
Christmas promises us that the despots of this age, political or spiritual, are living on borrowed time. The Christmas story is God’s answer to all the evil, injustice, brutality, suffering and death that we see around us.
Christmas is not meant to be about cheap trinkets for consumer religion. Rather, it is the annual reminder that God’s liberating love will always find us in the darkest corners of the world. Christmas is intended to be a bold political profession by Christians to trust God and to resist empire.
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