What reward is there for staying in our small worlds? Have our small worlds liberated us yet? If not, we have to make our worlds bigger. And the best place and time to start is always right here and right now. So I’m going to ask you, in just a moment, to get up, to find someone you don’t know very well, and to tell them about something or someone you love.

We are called to do this work—the hard work of radical, threatening love. We are to remember that the Spirit of God has already anointed us, already sent us to proclaim this gospel with our words and with our lives. We, you and me, have a role to play in binding up the broken-hearted, preaching liberty, freedom and release to captives and prisoners, ending the systems that perpetuate racism. We are to proclaim God’s love made flesh in Jesus. God’s response to the brokenness of this world is divine love, not a warm, fuzzy feeling, but living, breathing, redeeming, transforming love active in the world; a radical, threatening love.

The bad news Isaiah is delivering is that the people of Israel are doing it all wrong. They still – after God has sent them so many messengers – still don’t seem to know how to walk in the ways of God. And for many of us, not a whole lot seems to have changed since then. Because looking at our society and our political landscape right now, we also seem pretty collectively confused about how to walk in the ways of God in our own time and place.

And I think the progressive church is just as confused as just about everyone else.

Many of us feel as if we’ve been teaching and preaching and living an inclusive, loving form of Christianity for quite a long time. So we’re confused about why so few of our fellow Americans seem to have heard our message. We’re confused about why our culture’s understanding of Christian values often seems so very different than our own.

I believe the beatitudes are heard as judgment or blessing not in the way they are constructed or pronounced, but in the way they are heard. I can guarantee you that people in a refugee camp or stranded in detention at Philadelphia Airport hear the beatitudes differently than we do, than an all-black congregation in Mississippi or west Philadelphia hears them. They sound differently from on top than from underneath.

God saves. God saves by loving. And in order to show the incredible depth and width of this love, God came to be with us, came to be with us to teach us our true names. Beloved. The name that changes everything. The name that tells us who we really are. The name that creates lives and worlds anew.

No matter what sort of a mess we have made of our world, of our lives, God is in the center of it, loving us. Christmas assures us that God became flesh and still becomes flesh. Assures us that there is nowhere God will not go to reach us. Assures us that God doesn’t need a perfect world or a perfect place to be born, God is born anywhere, anywhere we can make a baby-sized manger in our lives. If ever there was a Christmas, at least in my lifetime, that it is clear we need to make room so the Christ Child can be born in us, it is now. If ever the world needed people who strive to live God’s love, justice, and peace, it is now.

Joy is a spiritual reality, Isaiah seems to be saying, that is always and everywhere with us. It’s not something we have to go looking for. It’s not something we have to struggle to obtain. And yet, joy can still often feel so distant, particularly in a world that feels

filled to the brim with strife, and hate, and violence...as well as the pain that so many of us experience in our personal lives.

For many in this congregation, we seem to suddenly be facing a world where our notions about inevitable, steady progress toward justice and equality are crumbling. A world where the very ground under our feet feels as if it’s crumbling. We don’t quite know where to stand anymore. We have no idea where or in whom to place our faith. Many of us are flailing, confused, and experiencing chaos in our souls. We’re just not used to not-knowing what to do next.

Into the very midst of our anxiety, fear, and frustration, then the Gospel of John makes this announcement: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

I am not sure there has ever been a time in my life when I have been so clearly reminded that we live in a broken and hurting world. Nor has there been a time when it is so clear that we who follow Jesus need to remember and act on our call to serve the poor and the vulnerable, to loudly and clearly insist on justice, for all people. Nor a time more important to remember that as Christians, we believe in the sure and certain hope of resurrection. Of new life.

We are natural creature—cousins to rhinos, hippos, and slime mold. We are not independent of creation, we are dependent on creation. Humankind is embedded in nature and nature is embedded in human beings. We are children of the universe, governed by the laws of life and growth and death—as are fish, and birds, and the grass of the field. We thrive in the warmth of the sun as does every other living being. We come from the earth as from a mother, and we are nourished from this same source of life. Yes, we each have intrinsic value, but so does everything that God made and makes.