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“Are You Ready for Christmas?” Text: Isaiah 61:1–4 and 8–12 Are you ready for Christmas? A couple of years ago I had the opportunity to live and work in Guatemala for six months. My job was to design and lead educational trips for church folks and students from the U.S. who came to learn about the legacy of a 36-year war in that country, and to better understand the reality of the grinding poverty in which most Guatemalans live today. On one trip that I led into the highlands of Guatemala, we visited with a small group of Mayan women in a village in the western part of the country. The women were mostly from intact families. Their husbands worked long hours as migrant laborers who followed the crop cycle from the sugar cane fields of the hot, humid coastal region, up through the coffee plantations in the foothills, and finally on into the highlands where they planted corn and beans and vegetables on the sides of the steep, volcanic mountains. The women told us that they had formed a cooperative and taken out a micro-development loan from a church-based organization that was encouraging them to grow potatoes for sale in the regional market a few kilometers away in the town of San Juan Ostuncalco. At the end of their first season, they had taken their potatoes to the market, where they sold them at a fair price to other Mayan women. They made enough money to pay back their loans and accomplish their objective, which was to pay the fees and expenses to keep their children in school the following semester. However, when they repeated the process the following year and took their potatoes to market, they discovered that someone else was selling similar potatoes for one half what the women felt they had to charge. Why? When they did some research, they discovered that the man was selling potatoes grown in Canada and shipped by boat, duty free, all the way to the Guatemalan Atlantic coast, and then put on trucks and delivered sixteen hours away to the town of San Juan Ostuncalco. Signs of the global economy. Are you ready for Christmas? About a three-hour drive southwest of where I live in Tucson, AZ, there is a small town called “Altar.” The hundred and twenty miles between the two cities are the brutal borderlands of the Sonoran desert, the no man’s land of the U.S./Mexico border. Over the last ten years, Altar has become the hot spot to begin the migrant journey across the desert. Day after day, bus after bus after bus, carrying well over a thousand people, pull up to the little plaza and unload their human cargo—men and women, teenagers and children who stand blinking in the hot sun and trying to figure out what to do next. They’re looking for the “coyotes,” the people smugglers representing shadowy cartels that have discovered it is now far more lucrative to smuggle people than it is to smuggle drugs. Within a day or two, they will have found their smuggler and headed into the desert, a walk of anywhere between 35 and 150 miles through some of the hottest and most brutal terrain our country has to offer. Last year, more than 250 people that we know of, didn’t make it. They lost their lives in that corridor of death as they headed for Maryland and Virginia to do the work that this region, like almost every other part of the country I’ve visited as Moderator of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church, is so dependent on. A few weeks ago I was in Sasabe, the little town right on the border where many begin their hike. I sat in a restaurant and watched a family—two men, a woman, a small child, and an infant—carrying a few gallons of water in plastic jugs and a couple of school knapsacks, as they walked down the street and headed for the desert. Could have been Joseph and Mary, headed for Bethlehem in this advent season. Are you ready for Christmas? Be careful how you answer. The question really is, “Are you ready to celebrate a God determined to respond to those women in the highlands or to that family on the border?”—because that’s what we’ve been told we’re going to get with this Jesus. Our Advent lectionary readings tell the story and we’ve been forewarned. Last week’s reading came from the first eight verses of the book of Mark, in which John the Baptist harkens back to Isaiah and insists that he is God’s promised messenger sent to “prepare the way of the Lord.” Mark’s gospel insists that this is the “very beginning” of the Jesus narrative, and our reading from the gospel of John this morning reconfirms it; John the Baptist—a wild man in the desert—calling people into a baptism that will renew God’s covenant with them. This is the first step on the journey toward advent. This week, we’re reminded of Isaiah’s understanding of that covenant. God is unambiguous, Isaiah insists. This God is good news for the poor and oppressed—binding the brokenhearted and disconsolate, offering liberty to the captive, and release to the imprisoned. This God is personally offended by those who would rob and steal from the poorest of the poor, and this God loves and will insist on justice. Isaiah’s message is bold, “God’s covenant is clear and God’s promise is good news for the poor. Those who are taken advantage of and who are pushed to the margins of society will find that their descendents will be known to all nations and all who see them will acknowledge that they are a people whom the Lord has blessed.” Next week, we’ll move on to Mary’s story. Just so God’s priorities cannot be missed, God chooses an unwed, teenaged, peasant girl in a small stable on the side of the hill in Bethlehem to be the mother of Jesus. This is entirely unexpected. Here we are, expecting the king of kings, and what we’re given is a poor kid, born to a peasant family and apprenticed to be a carpenter. This is hardly the kind of God that we are looking for. And finally, a few short chapters into Luke’s version of the Jesus story, Jesus turns to Isaiah, as well, to claim the authority to launch his own ministry. In a bold step, he stands in the synagogue, reads the words we heard read this morning from Isaiah 61, announces that Isaiah’s promise is now fulfilled in him, and sits down again. By the way, then he is run out of town by the religious leaders and the faithful who are enraged by his audacity. The bottom line is clear. This is the road map for the Advent journey that will carry us to Christmas. The heart of the Jesus story is the prophetic voice and call of Isaiah sixty-one. This Jesus will stay on message throughout his ministry, insisting that this God is a wild new thing: good news for the poorest of the poor, the battered women, the laborers in the global assembly line, those without documents, the folks who have no place to call home. My friends, you can’t get to the good news of Jesus Christ on Christmas morning, without being willing to embrace this kind of God and without returning over and over again to the message of Isaiah. So tell me. Are you ready for Christmas? Today is Arizona day, and those of us who live in that state would do well to ask ourselves that hard question. In the world in which we live today, no one comes closer to being the poor and the downtrodden that Isaiah describes than the undocumented migrants in our country, the ones who are excluded from the glitz and glitter of our Christmas season, the ones who don’t have the basic security and ability to survive that comes with a passport in the first world. Our state has been made the focal point for a federal policy of exclusion and death that is absolutely antithetical to the fundamental values of the Christmas story. Democratic and Republican administrations alike have embraced trade and immigration policies that make the migrant journey to the U.S./Mexico border inevitable, and ensure that the number of those dying in the desert will climb year after year after year. We’re a long way from Isaiah’s understanding of who God is and what God demands of us, aren’t we? We want the God with the bells and whistles, the God of wealth, affluence, privilege and security, the God who comes to town in royal gowns, not the one who shows up in a stable because his mother didn’t have the status or the documents to be offered a place to stay, even on the night she gave birth. Are we really ready for Christmas? In 1995, we did not have a single recorded death of a person without documents who was trying to get across our border in Arizona. For the last ten years, the number of deaths has climbed every single year. Good folks, attempting to come and do jobs that few people dispute we need them for, dying in the most brutal way imaginable in the desert. People dying in our deserts is no accident, it is the foreseeable result of an enforcement strategy designed to push them further and further into danger and make examples of them to convince others not to come. So what if our churches articulated a clear set of principles about the kind of trade, immigration and border policy we believe would reflect God’s deepest desire for us? What if we spoke to the moral bankruptcy of our political parties, both Republicans and Democrats, on this issue? What if we lived as if we really believe this Jesus story, and the strong Isaiah values in which Jesus grounded the earliest moments of his ministry? What if we held ourselves and our country to a remarkably different standard? What if we stood against the “me-firstism” that depends on the economic marginalization of 75% of the world’s population? What if we refused to be satisfied with the “that’s the way it’s always been” rationalities, and the bully-like aggression carried out in our nation’s immigration and border policies? Put another way—are we ready for Christmas? Isaiah makes the standard for the church that will follow this Jesus crystal clear. Our God insists on a new benchmark for behavior. In order to be ready for this Christmas, there is to be no kowtowing to the world’s values nor blind obedience to the values of our nation state. This Jesus insists that he has been sent to bring good news to the poor, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners: to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor, and the day of vengeance of our God. The God whom Jesus will proclaim, starting just two weeks from now in a stable in Bethlehem, is the God who loves justice and who hates robbery and wrongdoing. Sisters and brothers, we have a lot of work to do in order to be ready for the birth of this Jesus. Our churches are called to be consistent and clear and timeless with our message that God offers us a radically different set of rules. We must continually call our political leaders, whomever they may be, back to the fundamental values that offer genuine and lasting security—the kind of security that can happen only when we become the welcoming “beloved community” of God. To get ready for this Jesus, we’ll need to be bold in our call for economic policy that creates space for those Mayan women to provide for their families in the highlands of western Guatemala. To get ready for this Jesus, we’ll need an immigration policy that welcomes the stranger and offers documents and a path toward legalization for anyone willing to work in order to provide for his or her family. To get ready for this Jesus, we must insist that one cannot receive the benefits of the global economy without taking responsibility for the global community. To get ready for this Jesus, we must take death out of the border equation. If people are dying in the borderlands, church will have to go to the desert to bring good news to the poor, and to bind up the brokenhearted. For five years, Christians and Jews and people of good faith have been going to the deserts of Arizona to try to save lives. We’ve done our work openly, nonviolently and in accordance with fundamental biblical principles. We’ve put water stations in the desert where migrants are dying. We’ve done search and rescue patrols to find people in the desert and offer water, food, and emergency first aid. If it’s necessary in order to save someone’s life, we’ve offered a ride out of the desert to safety and appropriate medical care. This summer, two of our volunteers, Daniel Strauss and Shanti Sellz found a group of nine migrants hiking in an extremely dangerous part of the desert on one of the hottest days of the year. Six of the men were doing well, and they were offered food, water, and first aid for their blistered feet. Three were in serious trouble, with vomiting, and in the case of one of them, diarrhea laced with blood. Following our published protocol as they had been trained to do, Daniel and Shanti called a doctor in Tucson, described the medical situation, and were advised by the doctor to get the three men out of the desert to good medical care. They put the men in a vehicle that clearly identified them as Samaritan volunteers and headed for Tucson. En route, they were stopped and arrested by the Border Patrol. The migrants were taken into custody, and Daniel and Shanti are awaiting trial in January on felony charges of conspiracy to smuggle aliens and transport of aliens. My friends, Isaiah makes it crystal clear that we must remain solid in our commitment to the poorest and most desperate among us. If Daniel and Shanti are found guilty of breaking the law, I also will be guilty, and so will all of us who would respond to human need without asking for someone’s documents. Regardless of the outcome of the trial, I can guarantee that people of faith will continue to work openly and nonviolently to save human life and protect basic human rights in the desert. Perhaps this advent season, churches in Arizona are posing a question to all of us in our churches in communities across the country: Will we live the basic convictions of our faith? Will we welcome the stranger and offer solace to the brokenhearted? Will we stand, unmovable, with the people of God, the poor, the disconsolate, the captives and the prisoners? Are we ready for Christmas? May God bless our efforts to live faithfully this Advent season. |