It’s the morning of Christmas Eve and I am indulging in a favorite holiday moment. 

I wake up early and come downstairs while everyone is still asleep. The furnace still sits dormant, but the coffee maker has just finished its first brew of the day. I turn on the Christmas lights, pour myself a cup and find a comfortable spot to take it all in. 

And for a moment, all is well as I sit in the cool, quiet twinkle. My family is safe, well fed, and warm as they sleep. I can almost feel the world holding its collective breath as expectation itself still slumbers in the last hours of Advent.

At this moment in the story we celebrate, Jesus was still in Mary’s womb, moving and shifting in preparation – but not fulfillment. Not yet. 

For now, we wait and remember the promises…

Hope – Peace – Joy – Love

For centuries, Christendom has taken the weeks before Christmas to slow down and ponder and celebrate each of them during the Advent season. I’ve been right there this year, clinging to those promises, and asking God to make them more real in my life.

I’ve wondered whether Hope, Peace, Joy, and Love came before or with the birth of our Savior. Or did the prospect of these virtues become manifest as his life and teachings unfolded? Whether it’s one or a mix of all, we are in need of them – badly.

This year, my heart breaks as I’ve come to realize the unthinkable reality of our brokenness. 

We have traded Hope in the mysterious but life-giving ways of our Creator for the certainty of crafted spaces of our own design. We curate the people we associate with and information we consume so that they confirm our personal biases and preferences.

We have rejected Peace, allowing the cynicism of politics amplified by social media to reduce multidimensional, flesh and blood children of God into bipolar camps. They are either fellow tribe members that further amplify the flawed and broken stories we tell ourselves, or they are enemies bent on destroying civilization or (more importantly) the brittle worlds we have constructed for ourselves.

We have exchanged the Joy of a deeper adventure into selflessness, openness and generosity for deeper trenches, higher walls, and the stronghold of zero-sum thinking. It demands a heavy price: to elevate ourselves, we must dehumanize and exclude the marginalized other. 

And Love? Perhaps that is the most tragic casualty of our age. 

In our fear of losing “our way of life,” we have fallen into that most deceptive and corrosive prison of “loving” our self-selected neighbors and hating our perceived enemies who pursue life differently. 

That dissonance makes us do and affirm silly things, sinking us further into a self-fulfilling loop of lizard brain thinking. As the cycle spins, it becomes plausible that people we disagree with – those who have experienced different but still very human circumstances – can be relegated to subhuman categories of “vermin“ or “the basket of deplorables.“

We even become co-conspirators in our undoing. We consume news sources motivated not by informing the electorate, but harvesting the profits of collective outrage. 

We drown ourselves in a social media algorithm that seemingly tracks hits to our amygdalae as much as ad clicks. And it all whispers the same bald-face lie:

The enemy is all around us and the certainty you crave is within reach. Just. Keep. Scrolling.

Love, this singular virtue of self-sacrifice and others-focus, defined and embodied by God, has societally atrophied. 

Love’s first step of empathy – the human superpower of connecting with others that makes communal living possible – has been widely derided as an enemy’s clever tool of coercion.

Friends, we exist in our horrific mess of our own making. Yet we are no different from any generation before us. This moment of despair is very much akin to what has been suffered by humanity for millennia. We have collectively ached for the mystery of Hope, Peace, Joy and Love – even as we reach again and again for the certainty of their cheap counterfeits. 

But thank Heaven there is a way forward. 

On a seemingly ordinary day, as the privileged were served their meals and the townsfolk opened their shops and the lowborn watched the livestock, Love personified made a manifest entrance into history. Love was born human – not in a palace, or even a respectable household; but where the lowliest might have hung out while the animals ate.

All of heaven’s fearsome and generative potential began in infancy – like the rest of us. But Jesus‘ birth wasn’t the last word in the story. It is not Jesus‘ infancy that we celebrate. It’s what unfolded out of the life that he lived.

That endless potential became kinetic thirty or more years after his birth atop a hill in the backwater district of Galilee, north of Jerusalem. There he outlined the greatest opportunity ever offered to humanity: 

Don’t wait for God‘s kingdom. Live in it now. Here’s what it looks like…

The eight assertions he shared are called The Beatitudes. In them, philosopher and theologian Henri Nouwen reflected that “Jesus is drawing a self-portrait here and inviting his disciples to become like him.”

A couple of months ago, I took up a personal challenge to consider and re-articulate those assertions in the fifth chapter of Matthew’s Gospel:

v.3 ~ Blessed are those who know their heart is ruined and simply can’t keep up, for a way toward citizenship in God‘s realm has opened for them.

v.4 ~ Blessed are those who grieve well – not just over their own shortcomings and pain, but the world’s injustice. For they will experience relief, perspective, and consolation. 

v.5 ~ Blessed are those who inform and temper their “righteous indignation“ with other perspectives to pursue gentleness and quiet, for they are in harmony with the ways of creation.  

v.6 ~ Blessed are those who pursue justice and peace in all relationships, for they will experience reconciliation.

v.7 ~ Blessed are those who could hold a grudge, but don’t. They start a chain of goodness that finds its way back to them.

v.8 ~ Blessed are those with unselfish motives, for they will see a life of abundance in God’s presence.

v.9 ~ Blessed are the de-escalators, for others will recognize them as God‘s beloved co-conspirators.

v.10 ~ Blessed are those who practice all of the above at a personal cost, for they are on their way towards citizenship in the Kingdom of the Heavens. 

The process Jesus outlines is as simple as it is countercultural, and the outcomes are frustratingly mysterious. There is a lot of personal discomfort and transformation along the way; but life at its best and most vibrant is there. Jesus himself reiterated this aspiration for us toward the end of his earthly mission:

“Now this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.“ – John 17:3

Nouwen reflects that in every one of Jesus’ assertions and the discourse that follows on that Galilean hill, “Downward mobility is the way of God.“

That is a difficult thing for our hearts that have become so hardened toward each other to take. But if there is anything I’ve realized it is this:

No government policy, no “right person“ in power, no exclusion of “the wrong people“ will save us. No movement of humanity painted with quasi-Christian symbols and slogans, but devoid of the downward mercy of Heaven will prevail. 

The world at its best begins not with power and domination, but with infant-like vulnerability. We didn’t deserve it, but on that ordinary day in the dusty funk of a farm animal’s pen, God set redemption in motion. 

With a power that unfolded out of quiet beginnings, God scooched over to make room and invited us to be with Him.

The world at its best begins with one of us believing that, because of what Jesus did for us, we are already perfectly safe. 

And out of that safety, perhaps some space can be created to extend a kind, selfless act – not to a fellow “tribe member”, but to an unexpected someone on the margins. 

Someone, in a moment of clarity, we might recognize as an enemy – but no less human than anyone else. 

And in that quiet exercise of humility, our hearts might soften a bit. 

And one kindness begets another – and eventually multiplies…

Merry Christmas, friends. And always know that there is room for you.