The nation is fully into the Christmas season. Our small city is decorated from one end to the other. Holiday events are stacked one on top of another. The Hallmark Channel is running nonstop Christmas movies in which love and kindness triumph over all. I am always surprised by how much people look forward to them. I think it’s more than the romance that inevitably develops between two unlikely people. It has more to do with a deep desire and abiding belief that a better way of life is possible, better than the one we experience day by day. Hallmark offers a facile facsimile of what that better life might be, but it should not be dismissed too quickly. It represents an honest and profound hunger.
That hunger is echoed in the annual stories of Jesus’ birth, repeated and performed in every church, where pews are filled with those who come once a year. Why? Because they want to hear again the promise of the Prince of Peace, born in a manger, who will deliver humanity from the trials and tribulations of this world into a new and better one. They want to hear the angels singing, “Peace on earth, goodwill to all.” I suspect many come with a wishful hope that this year it might finally be true—when 2026 dawns, the world will be set right. They will, of course, be disappointed, and I wonder if this is why many of them will not return until next Christmas.
The birth of Jesus is no facile romance produced by Hallmark. It is a real event in history. The fulfillment of its promise is sure and certain. The world was truly changed on that first Christmas Day. A new and better way of life for all humanity was born in a manger, one that would, in time, triumph over death itself, tearing down every barrier that separates the human condition from God’s redeeming and reconciling love for all eternity.
Hallmark at least gets one thing right: kindness, love, and humility do triumph over all obstacles. They cannot be defeated. The path to a better life passes through this life, with all its changes and chances, as followers of Christ proclaim and demonstrate a small portion of the kingdom of God toward which they journey. I am not persuaded everyone needs to be a Christian—nor do I think it possible—but I am persuaded that following in the way of Christ, however one may do it, is the only way humanity can live more peacefully, more harmoniously, and with greater shared prosperity. If nothing else, it would diminish the cruelty we inflict on one another.
It is that cruelty that makes this American Christmas season so difficult. What makes it more painful this year is the blatant cruelty inflicted on immigrants from non-white countries. Those familiar with the history of World War II know how appalled Americans were to discover the inhuman cruelty visited on vulnerable people by agents of the German Nazi Party. It served no purpose other than to be cruel, to inflict suffering on people who posed no threat to their oppressors.
How embarrassing and humiliating it is to discover that agents of our own government are treating equally vulnerable people with similar cruelty under the guise of law enforcement—people who pose no real threat to the nation. Their only offense is being offensive to the current president and his associates. They are the wrong color, from the wrong country, here without proper documentation. Claiming to target only “the worst of the worst,” the Gestapo of our own time rounds up immigrants who have no criminal record and who, despite lacking documentation, have proven themselves decent, law-abiding people. In the name of a war on drug traffickers they engage in extrajudicial killing, while pardoning convicted drug traffickers and “white-collar criminals” who are useful to them. They embody everything the Christ Child came to rescue us from. Equally humiliating is the degree of public complicity enabling the administration to act without fear of accountability.
May it pleaseGod, that this Christmas inspires the American people to set aside wishful hoping and turn with firm resolve to confront this offense against God and humanity—not in anger, but with determination to let the angels’ song be heard above the noise of strife and cruel hate.
As the 1849 hymn It Came Upon the Midnight Clear reminds us:
Yet with the woes of sin and strife
The world has suffered long;
Beneath the angel strain have rolled
Two thousand years of wrong;
And man, at war with man, hears not
The love-song which they bring;
Oh, hush the noise, ye men of strife,
And hear the angels sing.
Amen