Dec. 25th, 2022
The Rev. Jon Owens, St. Alban’s Church
The manager of a Minnesota liquor store was surprised to come back from lunch yesterday to find his counter help walking around in her socks.
That is because security camera footage revealed she had just given her favorite shoes—a pair of purple retro Jordans, to a homeless man she saw strapping boxes to his feet.
Brooklyn Center Liquor employee Ta Leia Thomas, known locally as “Ace” said the split-second act of kindness “was an easy decision.” This was from the Good News network.
In another story, In the latest CRISPR success story, a 13-year-old girl whose leukemia had not responded to other treatments now has no detectable cancer cells.
She received a dose of immune cells that were genetically edited to attack leukemia, a method that has been used with other cancers.
A form of cancer in the bone marrow tissue, leukemia is caused by mutated immune cells and is normally treated by killing all bone marrow cells in the patient’s body before receiving a transplant from a donor. If this falls, the Nobel Prize-winning CAR-T cell therapy can be used instead.
Christmas is not so much liberation yet, but it is the start of hope. It is where we come to focus on joy. Good news. Good news for the lost and forgotten. It is so easy in a world to get caught up in the negative. Ina world where new is filled with over captured billionaires with egos the size of Texas and wants the focus on to be them and their companies rather than a balance of life and family. No reason we have finally seen a rebellion of younger generations who do not want to beholden to careless corporate types that forget about the very people who make them successful.
Before Jesus was born there was a decree by who? Ah the government. Looking for the census. The government sometimes excludes people. Arguments about how you make sure people like the homeless are accounted for, the undocumented folks. And yet in the Roman Empire anyone who was perceived with status IE the taxpayers were accounted and registered, middle-class people like a carpenter. Without that being on the register it would be hard. Big government was at work.
And then the night Jesus was born, and a host of Angels appeared before who? Shepherds. Shepherds were the least of these. They were not registered by the empire because they were considered too poor. They were of no consequence. And yet they were the first to appear for the angels who said fear not, unto you birth this day in the City of David, is born a savior.
God could have chosen anyone, he could have appeared before kings, but he chose the shepherds, he chose the lost and forgotten. To God he wanted to his people to know he loved them, he remembers them, and they are his.
Who do you know this Christmas who needs to hear the good news! Who may be forgotten? Who needs to know they are loved? It is so easy to talk about those people as a category. “Those people,” but what does its men to help someone feel and know they are a human being fully loved and cared for?
Today is the time when we want to think of a silent night, where all is calm, all is bright, but I do not think it was as tranquil as we imagine. It was quite an exciting time, a joyous time, a celebratory time, where hearts and souls were filled with good things. Something that was not merely to be kept to themselves, but to be shared. There was nothing that said please keep this a secret in scripture.
The shepherds themselves had a job and that was to share what they had seen. It was me less of a silent night and more of a Go Tell it on the mountain. The rush to experience something so wonderful, something so in awe and yet something that was probably hard for others to believe because they would want to see it for themselves. And the people doing the story telling were not the big shots with power who controlled the narrative.
God has come to in the form of a Baby to announce Good News to the poor, the good news that they matter; he has sent me to proclaim freedom for the imprisoned people who are in need of forgiveness and renewed sight for the blind who often lose their way in life, to release those who have been crushed and give them hope and encouragement, to proclaim it to the glory of God. Not imply to do just do good, but to do it in the name of God, who becomes the source of wisdom and inspiration which surpasses our understanding.
My friends I ask you to Go tell it to the world, the good news we experience today.
