How to keep a fire going

 

Luke 2: 1-20
New Ark United Church of Christ, Newark, DE
December 24, 2025

Photo of two people sitting by a campfire with a flock of sheep. The smoke is rising into a dark starry night with one bright star shining in the upper left hand corner.

Back in November, a few weeks before Thanksgiving, I was thinking about Christmas Eve (as one does) and why we have two and only two different versions of the birth of Jesus. Before these two gospels were written toward the end of the first century, the only writings about Jesus were Paul’s letters and the gospel of Mark plus a handful of others that didn’t make it into the canon. Paul focused on the resurrection and the saving grace of one person willing to lay down his life for others, even those who sin against God and human beings. By the time Mark’s gospel was written, Jerusalem had been sacked and the temple destroyed. The Jewish faith no longer had a home and God’s people were on the run, including those of the Jesus movement or followers of the Way. It was a dangerous time not to be Roman, to be different, to be free.



Ten to twenty years after this, Matthew and Luke wrote their gospels but this time there were birth stories—essentially both gospels in miniature form as parables. It wasn’t enough to tell the story of the resurrection, what Jesus taught. It was a dangerous time and the Jesus movement needed hope. And hope is a fire.



A fire needs four things to keep it burning: fuel, heat, oxygen, and a spark to get it going. A movement needs a fire to keep it going. It needs heat, the warmth of community where we find hope. It needs oxygen, it needs to breathe, the peace of self-care and community care. It needs fuel, or love, which is what justice looks like in public. And it needs a spark; it needs joy which is a form of resistance.



And the Christmas stories are all of that, all of Matthew and Luke, all of what Jesus taught and lived and how he died and was raised again, all in miniature form. If we understand Christmas, we understand it all.



But we don’t really understand Christmas, not yet anyway. It’s why the Boston archdiocese called on the St. Susanna Parish in Dedham, MA to remove their display of a sign that reads “ICE was here” in place of Mary, Joseph, and baby Jesus, and in the words of the archdiocese, “the manger restored to its proper sacred purpose”. And yet the proper sacred purpose of the manger is to tell the story of a baby born under occupation, a baby whose life was threatened by empire, a baby born to his own marginalized people.



We don’t really understand Christmas, not yet anyway. The powerful still claim and hide behind their thrones and the rich reap dividends from private prison corporations. The poor are not filled with good things—if they have debt, the big idea is to have their wages withheld and the cost of their health insurance triple. The lowly continue to be trampled on rather than lifted up by those who profess this is a Christian nation. We can’t hear the angel’s words “Goodwill toward all and on earth, peace” in Bethlehem for the cries of parents over the death of their children. And in the Congo and Sudan and Ukraine, anywhere we solve our problems with violence.



If this is the Church being too political, John the Baptist would like you to hold his head. If this is the Church being too political, Mary would like you to hold her son’s body. If this is the Church being too political, Jesus would like to you to hold his cross for a while. This is not a tame story. It never has been. This is Christmas—good news to those who still suffer from state-inflicted cruelty. It’s good news because God chose to become a nobody so that the nobodies of this world would become God.

Cartoon of Pope Leo XIV facing away from the crucifix in front of a crowd of Trump supporters, saying, "If you think I'm too woke, you should talk to my boss."

And so we need to keep this fire going.


For this fire of love and justice to burn until it blazes in our hearts.


We keep this fire going to beat our swords into plowshares and our spears into pruning hooks.


We keep this fire going to bend the moral arc of the universe toward justice.


We keep this fire going so that we do not grow cold from doing this justice work.


We keep this fire going to warm us when we have compassion fatigue, to spark our imaginations, our creativity, to give us space to breathe, expanding the small spaces within us.


We keep this fire going to shine a light, until we are ready to be honest with ourselves and each other and turn again toward the path of mercy, healing, and wholeness.


We keep this fire burning until everyone, everyone, everyone has what they need to live, to love, and to be free.


Merry Christmas, Church. Amen.