by Ken Sehested

“Concealment makes the soul a swamp.
Confession is how you drain it.”
—Charles M. Blow

They have treated the wound of my people carelessly.
They acted shamefully, they committed abomination,
yet they did not know how to blush.
—Jeremiah 6:14-15

As it is frequently proclaimed, particularly during Lent, you would think the church’s call to penitence, and its assurance of pardon, assumes that God — in classic passive-aggressive behavior — desires to offer grace but only if we submit to humiliation. A web search for images of “penance” reveals many photos of people beating themselves.

So let’s be clear about this from the beginning: God is not a sadist in need of compliant masochists.

Moreover, the community of faith needs to relearn the means of speaking this word in the public arena and not simply behind sanctuary doors and in Sunday school rooms.

Our recent national history is replete with apologies of the “mistakes were made” variety that deny responsibility, offering vague, scattershot “I apologize if I offended anyone” excuses for bad behavior or abusive speech. Such comments actually mean, “I’m sorry you took my [comment or behavior] the wrong way; I hope you get better,” putting the onus of recovery on the offended.

It’s easy to understand public disdain for any sort of penitential language. If absolution comes with no resolution — to live differently, in whatever small and incremental way — confession has been emptied of all meaning. And worse, it has become religious armor for infamy.

Mercy opens a portal to repentance, characterized not so much by apologetic expression as by the hard work of repairing the damage, of reestablishing trustworthy relations.

If we are to envision anything other than a dystopian future, we must recover language for what the Greek New Testament calls metanoia, “to turn around, to change one’s life,” usually translated as “repentance.”

To get there involves attention to seven precepts.

First, distinguish between shame and guilt. Insidiously, in our culture guilt is confused with shame, which is actually a form of self-preoccupation that engenders paralysis and passivity, an escape — knowingly or not — from response-ability. Shame removes agency, whereas the proper function of guilt is to identify transgression and mobilize the work of restoration.

Second, recognize such penance as a public and relational process, not just a private and solitary event. Spirituality always is personal but never merely private. While Jesus spoke in a more intimate tone concerning relations with the Abba than does much of Hebrew Scripture, his is a distinctive word, not a different one. One of our greatest rhetorical needs is learning to announce the gospel word (which is always both a gift and a demand) in the public sphere and not just to isolated souls. Furthermore, the purpose of penitential life is not to wallow in the prospect of loss, but to bask in the prospect of gain—not to dwell in the land of accusation, but to move forward to the land of shared bounty.

Third, comprehend the purpose of judgment as restoration, not retaliation. See it as the reclamation of virtue, not the authorization of vengeance. This framework has ancient antecedents in the Hebrew phrase tikkun olam (repair of the world) from the Jewish Talmud. The new criminal justice paradigm known as “restorative justice,” as an alternative to the retributive justice model, also has insight for the church. Where the demand of retribution is “Who is to blame and how should they be punished?” the restorative principle asks, “Who has been harmed and who is responsible (and how) for repairing the injury?”

Fourth, acknowledge that the process of restoration is often discomforting, frightening, and strenuous. Often, what passes for reconciliation is the desire to “make nice,” to promote “civility” and suppress conflict prior to unearthing root causes of injustice. Peace is confused with order, when in fact the order is structured repression. Truth telling about suppressed history is essential. When accused of fomenting conflict, Dr. King rightly responded that he was simply bringing underlying conflict to the surface. As has been said, when you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression. Peace is not the absence of conflict but the presence of justice. Which is why peacemakers, who know that justice is at stake, are sometimes considered troublemakers.

Fifth, resolve no longer to be silent in the face of abuse. Among the many memorable lines from King’s bold and dangerous speech critiquing the Vietnam War is this: “A time comes when silence is betrayal.” The #MeToo movement recent years features courageous women coming forward, risking reputations and careers and even retaliation, calling to account the abusive sexual behavior of men. It represents a profoundly healing turn in our culture. This turn also is stressful and disquieting. As has been said, “You shall know the truth, and the truth will make you odd; but first it will make you miserable.” The refusal to be silent in the face of bullying—of every sort—is the first step in flipping that script.

Sixth, ending silence in the face of abuse begins with the ritual work of lament, itself a form of penitence. This precept is among many things to be learned from African American communities of faith. The articulation of grief — whether in speech or music or dance or moaning — contains in its very performance the generative power of assurance that siphons away the power of fear. Our capacity to grieve and lament are directly related to our capacity for hope, much like the circumference of a tree’s canopy is proportionate to its root system.

Seventh, the penitential life, which begins in disillusionment and grief, pushes toward clarity, which leads toward a kind of hope that is more than daydreaming. To hope for something is not a wouldn’t-it-be-nice sentiment. Hope hitches us to a process designed to overcome injustice by forging equitable relations. This final precept is drawn from Rebecca Solnit’s amazing book Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities, and it brings us back to where we began. Solnit writes, “Hope is not like a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. Hope is an ax you break down doors with in the case of emergency. … The future is dark, with a darkness as much of the womb as of the grave.”

Conflict mediation specialist Byron Bland has written that two truths make healthy community difficult: That the past cannot be undone, and that the future cannot be controlled. However, two counterforces are available to address these: The practice of forgiveness, which has the power to change the logic of the past; and covenant-making, which creates islands of stability and reliability in a faithless, sometimes ruthless world.

The awareness that we have been culpable in harm is indeed painful, but the pain’s purpose is not punishment but a penitence that generates the resolve to engage the difficult work of reconciliation.

As King wrote in his anguished essay “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.” These cords neither smother nor strangle. Such covenants are essential both for human and ecological flourishing. And this is what it means to be righteous in the eyes of God.

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This essay is excerpted and adapted from a longer 2018 article, “The Ties that Bind: The Integrity of Penitence, on the 50th Anniversary of the Massacre at My Lai,” https://prayerandpolitiks.org/articles-essays-sermons/the-ties-that-bind/ as a resource for faith communities marking the 50th anniversary of the massacre in My Lai, Vietnam. The resource was commissioned by the Vietnam Peace Commission, a broad coalition of organizations to encourage commemoration of the 50^th anniversary of the 16 March 1968 massacre by US troops of more than 500 civilians in My Lai, Vietnam.

by Ken Sehested

I can almost smell the acrid, thick smoke of diesel engines powering Russian tanks, personnel carriers, and trucks hauling heavy artillery into two eastern provinces of Ukraine’s border with Russia. This afternoon Russian President Vladimir Putin declared the two provinces as “independent states,” and that he was sending in “peacekeeper” troops to protect ethnic Russians in the region.

It’s likely the halls of the White House, the State Department, and the Pentagon will stay on all night with a company of aides following up-to-the-minute news and crafting President Biden’s response. The same goes for European and Russian leaders. Dawn is already breaking for many of them.

Ash Wednesday came early for the Roman Catholics in Ukraine. Most Orthodox communions do not observe Ash Wednesday. Their Lenten season, starting this year with a “Forgiveness” vesper service on Sunday evening, 6 March, which is followed by “Clean Monday,” whose liturgical functions is similar to Ash Wednesday.

The Scriptural text for Clean Monday is the memorable lines from Isaiah 1, which begins with YAHWEH’s denouncing religious posturing. “I have had enough of burnt offerings . . . your incense is an abomination to me . . . . I cannot endure your solemn assemblies . . . even though you say many prayers.”

Why? Because “your hands are full of blood.”

Those of vigorous piety love verse 18 of this chapter: “Come, let us reason together, says the Lord. Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be white as snow.” Growing up I never heard the preceding lines: “Cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, plead for the widow.”

The prelude to God’s beautiful salvific offer is ignored.

So, yet again the elaborate rituals inaugurating Lent will be staged with bloody hands. The penitential promise will again be ignored. Sacred music will compete with the loud recoil of guns. Sackcloth and ashes will be replaced with body armor. Ukrainian and Russians will offer competing prayers for safety and victory. The gods of redemptive violence will receive all the offerings.

Who indeed can save us from this body of death?

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by Ken Sehested

The Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe, commonly referred to as Christ the King Sunday (aka Reign of Christ Sunday) is among the newer observances in the church’s lectionary calendar. It was promulgated by Roman Catholic Pope Pius XI in 1925, as a reaction to the perceived growth of secularism, escalating nationalism, and surging anti-clericalism. As it now stands, it is the final Sunday in the lectionary calendar, ushering in a new “year” beginning with Advent.

Numerous other denominations, which follow the Revised Common Lectionary, also observe the day as the culmination of the annual narrative of Jesus’ birth, life, death, and resurrection.

As is the case with most every liturgical observance, this Sunday’s focus has both redemptive and reactionary overtones and implications.

Obviously, all kingly and lordly language is problematic because of inherent misogyny, upholding the historic subjugation of and indignity toward women. In addition, such language upholds the legitimacy of feudal rule in human affairs. The absolute rule of kings and assorted other potentates is said to be divinely patterned and codified according to heavenly precedent.

As in heaven, so on earth. By implication, the notion that “outside the church there is no salvation” became sanction for the church’s exclusive, domineering authority.

This intertwining of heavenly and earthly rule is explicitly asserted by Scottish-English King James I when, in responding to dissident pastor Thomas Helwys’ rejection of the royal religious authority, the king responded “It would be only half a king who controlled his subjects’ bodies but not their souls.”

It would take many generations of discrimination, oppression, exile, torture, and martyrdom to bring about a democratizing of access to the Holy.

Nevertheless, Pius XI’s stipulation of a “Christ the King” observance can also be interpreted in a way that bolsters, rather than hinders, resistance to monarchal privilege and virulent nationalisms of every kind. We can rightfully say that Jesus’ “lordship” undermines and destabilizes every form of lording. And the nature of such lordship highlights the Gospel of nonviolent resistance to all oligarchic pretenders.

In her recent article in Sojourners magazine, T. Denise Anderson reminds that in 1925, Adolf Hitler published the first volume of his manifesto, Mein Kampf, where he lays the foundation of his racially supremacist views. Also in 1925, 40,000 members of the Ku Klux Klan marched in Washington, DC. Thought at that time to be the largest fraternal organization in the country, they were already using their “America First” slogan.

In this same period Benito Mussolini assumed power as the fascist dictator of Italy. Joseph Stalin had succeeded Vladimir Lenin’s Bolshevik revolution in the Soviet Union. Francisco Franco was rising through the ranks of the Spanish military, on his way to establishing his militaristic dictatorship.

Nationalism was contagious, and authoritarian leadership was in epidemic, prompted in part by the chaos and industrialized belligerence of World War I.

In John’s Gospel, when Pilate asks him about his kingship, Jesus replies “My kingdom is not of this world” (18:36). The “world” to which he referred was not the earth. Rather, the world is that complex web of relationships built on exploitation, jealousy, fraud, and violence. Adding, if it were (based on this world order), “my followers would fight” and violently resist arrest.

A few verses prior, Jesus rebukes Peter’s act of violent resistance. In Matthew’s telling of Peter’s impulsive reaction and Jesus’ rebuke, Jesus says he could, if he chose, easily mobilize 12 legions of angels to assure his rescue.

The rejection of every myth of redemptive violence is already underscored in this Sunday’s lectionary reading from Psalms, including the claim that God breaks bows, shatters spears, and makes wars to cease,(46); and in Luke’s testimony, redemption comes by way of mercy rather than martial prowess, to “guide our feet into the path of peace” (1:77-79).

“In him,” the author of Colossians insists, “all things hold together” (1:17). Only under the Way of Jesus/Sway of Christ and its beatific vision of a Beloved Community can the grisly rule of imperial power and dynastic reign be rescinded and displaced. Such is our eschatological confession over the coherence of all creation: no sovereign but the Abba of Jesus.

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by Ken Sehested

At sunset tonight, Muslims around the world begin their observance of Ramadan, the ninth month in the Islamic calendar, which entails fasting (during daylight hours), a renewed focus on prayer and meditation on the Qur’an, and communal generosity. These behavioral admonitions broadly resemble the Christian emphases of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving during Lent.

Such ascetic practices are sometimes understood as a condemnation of all human desiring, as if “spiritual” life and “fleshly” are polar opposites.

Such is not the case. What is the case is that human desiring often disorients and confuses spiritual life. Instead of fostering neighborliness, disorderly desires encourage antagonism, greed, and acrimony.

Creation’s abundant blessing—”May God give you of the dew of heaven and of the fatness of the earth, and plenty of grain and wine” (Genesis 27:28)—devolves into a curse—”[P]ride is the necklace [of the wicked]; violence covers them as a garment. Their eyes swell out with fatness, their hearts overflow with follies. They scoff and speak with malice; loftily they threaten oppression (Psalm 73:6-8).

Yes, ascetic practices can themselves become twisted and tortuous. As if God is a sadist and in need of appeasement by means of masochistic acts of human self-denial. As if faith is a surrender to torture. As if spiritual growth is accomplished by bodily distress. As if penitence is reduced to self-flagellation.

In the end, it is a party, not a purge, to which we are oriented. Doing so requires that we humans regularly find ways to check our appetites. In the end, none of us enter Paradise alone but only in the company of those previously deemed unwelcomed or unworthy to sit at the Table of Plenty.

Gloria Dei est vivens homo! (“The glory of God is the human fully alive.”) —St. Irenaeus, 2nd century church leader, in “Against Heresies, c. 185 CE

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by Ken Sehested

Advent is the Christian season when the threat of terror and the prospect of trust collide, both competing for our attention regarding prospects for the future. Will it be more of the same; only intensified?

In all times and places the dominant cultural voices (secular and religious) have denied that history will ever break free of its orbit of pain, suffering, and loss—as if history has its own unbreakable sway of gravity. They are called the “realists,” and they champion charity to suppress the demands of justice. Though the church will occasionally read the Beatitudes in public, few put much stock in such a future.

There’s no better summary of such popular wisdom than by the cheeky comment of Countess Violet Crawly (played by Maggie Smith) in the television show, “Downton Abby.”

“Hope,” the Countess insisted, “is a tease to keep us from accepting reality.”

Famously, the Apostle Paul confronted what the realists called “foolishness” with his affirmation that God’s foolishness can be trusted. According to him (cf. 1 Corinthians 1:18-30), the Gospel announcement is that another world is not only possible but is in fact on its way—present already in those with open rather than grasping hands—as the aperitif of an era beyond scorched time.

In Latin, there are two words for the future. Futurus suggests a future constructed out of the past and present. Futurologists are those who rely on extrapolations from present trends, indicators that lean toward sustaining present patterns of power and suppressing alternative visions.

The word adventus, on the other hand, suggests the arrival of the new. Certainly for Christians, the season of Advent brings us to the edge of our chairs, straining for the sound of the announcement of annulment for earth’s agony. This waiting and watching is neither neutral nor passive. It is sustained by a bias, one that governing authorities fear, who want only futurus, more of the same.

Advent is the seasonal marking of adventus faith, formed by the beatific vision of a future beyond all currently available calculations, one that can be receiving only by those with unclenched fists and unclasped hearts, one that does not obliterate creatureliness but arises from its compost.

The stories we tell and songs we sing in our sanctuaries remind us that buoyancy emerges from unseen places, at unknowing moments, in unpredictable ways, beyond present reckoning and prognostication.

The present world’s futurus rulers always want to limit what is possible to what is available. Adventus people instinctively know that reality will not be bridled by apparent history and its imperial champions.

Advent is the invitation to attentiveness even when the sap isn’t running, in the face of a howling cold wind and the frightful dark night.

So, kindred, carpe noctem—sieze the night.

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by Ken Sehested

Easter is God’s resurrection moment; Pentecost is God’s resurrection movement, the birthday of the church, the shock troops of the Kingdom. On Easter God declares divine intention; on Pentecost God deploys divine insurgents. On Easter God announces the invasion; Pentecost is when God establishes a beachhead. At Easter God announces, “I Have a Dream.” On Pentecost Sunday, the marchers line up, the police close in, the first tear gas canisters fly, the first arrests are made. But the people of God keep on marching, heading for the courthouse, headed for the White House, headed for the jail house, headed for the school house, headed for the big house. Headed for every house that’s not built on the solid rock of God’s righteousness, God’s justice; headed for every house that’s been stolen from the hands that built it; headed for every house in every segregated neighborhood; headed for every house that shelters oppression, every house that welcomes bigotry, every house that schemes violence.

“For the vineyard of the Lord of hosts is the house of Israel,” said Isaiah, “and the Lord looked for justice, but behold, bloodshed; for righteousness, but behold, a cry! Woe to those who join house to house, who add field to field, until there is no more room, and you are made to dwell alone in the midst of the land” (5:7-8).

“Therefore,” says Amos, “because you trample upon the poor and take from them exactions of wheat, you have built houses of hewn stone, but you shall not dwell in them” (5:11)

“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!” Jesus warned, “for you devour widows houses and for a pretense you make long prayers” (Matt. 23:14).

But at Pentecost, the stolen house, the segregated housed, the house of oppression, even the big house is slated for redemption. Recall this description of the houses of the first Pentecostal powered community: “There was not a needy person among them, for as many as were possessors of lands or houses sold them, and brought the proceeds of what was sold and laid it at the apostles’ feet; and distribution was made to each as any had need” (Acts 4:34).

Pentecostal power is an assault on segregation; Pentecostal power is antagonistic to apartheid; Pentecostal power extinguishes ethnic cleansing; Pentecostal power negates nationalism; Pentecostal power wreaks havoc on racism; Pentecostal power triumphs over tribalisms of every kind.

Now, notice here—and this is very important—the Pentecost story in Acts doesn’t say everyone suddenly started speaking the same language. Pentecost does not destroy the various distinctives between and among people. But the story does affirm that these differences are brought under the binding power of the Holy Spirit. They can no longer claim autonomy. They are no longer barriers to community. They are now in the service of God—the very God who repeatedly, time after time after time, has acted to nudge creation back to its purpose in Genesis.

Pentecostal power is the power to overcome ancient hostility, to gather the excluded, to scale the walls of social, racial, even class divisions. Between gay and straight.

I’m convinced that Pentecost is now the most important season for us as Christians. The true energy of Easter is more than, is fundamentally different from the “sugar high” you get from eating chocolate Easter bunnies. That kind of energy burns off within hours, leaving us weary, exhausted. That kind of energy is quickly dissipated. Within a week the Body of Christ is dragging its sparse remnants to a half-hearted post-Easter Sunday service. The resurrection moment is producing very little movement.

A cynical journalist once wrote that a conservative is someone who worships a dead radical. Dead radicals can’t bother us anymore. We quickly domesticate their memories, kind of like the way we do with Dr. King. Of course, we don’t think of Jesus as dead; but he does seem to be safely tucked away in heaven. And from a lot of the preaching I hear, you’d think our job is simply to convince people they need to start making payments on a ticket to join him there when they die. No threatening movement seems to occur when Pentecostal power is preached from our pulpits.

By and large the believing community has become strangers to the power Jesus promised. The subversive character of his life has been entombed in memorial societies we call churches. We revere his memory but we renege on his mission. The proclamation of the Gospel no longer threatens the new world order our leaders envision for us. The erupting, disrupting flow of Pentecostal power has been pacified, rendered harmless, packaged for television broadcast.

There was a time when the redemptive power activated at Pentecost was the power to mend the rips within our social fabric, to restore splintered relationships, to repair broken communities. Pentecostal power once indicated the power to stand in the cracks, to face the hostilities without fear, to confess, repent and repair.

Among the names for God in Scripture is one that means “Advocate.” Or, you could say, “Counsel for the Defense.” In other words, someone who is For Us, a Divine Protagonist—not to get us or trap us or force us into embrace. But One who is in the process of turning us all toward each other, even to our enemies. A Protagonist who lets us in on the divine secret: the world is headed for a party, not a purge. A Protagonist who assures us that we can risk much because we are safe, that nothing—not even death—can forestall the divine purpose of redemption.

This Protagonist, the Holy Spirit, this wind and fire, is taking us into the very heart of God’s and God’s purposes, aligning us with divine intention for creation. In the Pentecostal movement, God is pitching a tent in our midst.

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by Ken Sehested

There was a period of years, decades ago, when I experienced a crippling sense of personal shame and social despair when realizing my own complicity in systemic racism. The shame wasn’t because I had enslaved anyone; or had committed blatant acts of discrimination.

It was because I realized how clueless I was. And if I was this clueless in this regard, chances were I was equally clueless about a whole range of other forms of unconscious bias.

Simultaneously I feared that the same applied to larger society, that we as a people were also structurally complicit, trapped in a naiveté that prevented us seeing the truth about our wounded history that continues to color current behavior.

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In the Bible the word “sin” has multiple synonyms, nuances, and associations. In modern English, I think the best synonym for sin is “cluelessness.” This variant is the most serious simply because it is the hardest to expose and thus the most resilient. It has survived all manner of legislative proscription, social sanction, and moral exhortation. It is instructive, I think, that Jesus’ final petition is that such receive Heaven’s most merciful response because “they know not what they do.”

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There came a time, though, when, in quick succession, I came across quotes from three of my heroes that bore me up from the sloughs of shame and despair. Not to make me innocent, but to allow me to be responsible, able-to-respond, freed from humiliation’s disabling power to move forward with courage and perseverance for the work of repair.

The first liberating quote is from James Baldwin, writing in “My Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation.”

“There is no reason for you to try to become like white people and there is no basis whatever for their impertinent assumption that they must accept you. The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them. And I mean that very seriously. You must accept them and accept them with love. For those innocent people have no other hope. They are, in effect, still trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it.”

The second quote is from Maya Angelou.

“Forgive yourself for not knowing what you didn’t know before you learned it,” and “Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.”

Finally, one from Malcolm X himself.

“Don’t be in such a hurry to condemn a person because he doesn’t do what you do, or think as you think. There was a time when you didn’t know what you know today.”

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Each of these are grace notes, hopeful disclosures, stemming from the pivotal word embraced by people of faith: Repentance is not for punishment but for the power of beginning again. Not with a clean slate—we will ever bear our scars. And certainly not as a one-off occasion: Penitential living is a daily commitment and a life long process.

It won’t always be pleasant. As Baldwin notes in “No Name in the Street,” after quoting the text from John where Jesus says, “Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free,” Baldwin writes:

“The truth which frees black people will also free white people, but this is a truth which white people find very difficult to swallow.” Or, as in another take on the “truth will set you free” aphorism: You shall know the truth, and the truth will set you free. But first it will make you miserable.

For people of every ruling caste, there is a certain misery to be endured on the way to freedom, as we become aware of the unconscious privileges to which we have been accustomed.

There is a needed relinquishment, a penitential posture, an unflinching recognition of our blinkered, myopic view of our place in our properly situated place in the eye of God’s delight.

A blessed absolution is available as sustenance on this rough journey—a beatific vision, a being lovingly gripped by the anticipation of a New Heaven and a New Earth, like an aperitif which whets our thoughts and deeds, our longings and desires, toward the coming feast of the Beloved’s consummation of history when “all shall sit ’neath their own vine and fig tree, and none shall be afraid” (Micah 4:4).

We recognize that our destiny is not a purge but a party, a Spirit-drenched fiesta. The goodness of the Good News is that we can begin again, we can orient ourselves and our society toward the holiness which radiates neighborliness, restoring right relations and just kinship and social policies, knitting together the warp of Heaven with the woof of Earth.

Only by such grace-impelled, hope-provoked work—and it is laborious, sometimes sweaty, difficult, persevering, frustrating work—can we be saved.

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by Ken Sehested

 Advent is a season of great longing, specifically for those longing “from below” of history’s malignant dominion.

The longing is a revolutionary one, however, and frightening to those in charge, who have much to lose if existing hierarchies are breached. Such anxiety is what fueled Herod’s terror against male infants in and around Bethlehem.

This narrative parallels the ancient scene in Egypt when Pharaoh, sensing an internal threat, orders the Hebrew midwives to kill Israelite baby boys.

That narrative is the first case of civil disobedience recorded in Scripture, though the names of the two who conned Pharaoh – Shiphrah and Puah – are rarely invoked.

Those in power long for continuity; and, given the current state of the U.S., that longing is more like an anxiety.

Yet, the promise is made specifically and only to “those that sit in darkness.”

Both Herod, and previously Pharaoh, were terrified by this longing, as were all who aligned with their respective regimes.

In 2020, the U.S. admitted only 12,000 refugees, down from 207,000 welcomed in 1980, when the formal U.S. Refugee Act was initially approved.

To those in power now, undocumented immigrants are the ones to fear; though large sectors of our economy are dependent on immigrants’ cheap labor.

I spent several years laboring as a stonemason, for $10 per hour doing very strenuous work. Then my boss found out he could hire an undocumented laborer from Mexico for $8 per hour.

“Nothing personal,” he told me.

Foreign governments haven’t stolen our jobs. Business leaders in the U.S. have simply obeyed the logic of predatory capitalism.

I recently purchased new undergarments manufactured by a major U.S. brand name. The briefs were made in Vietnam; the t-shirts, in Haiti.

And I finally joined the cellphone age, with an iPhone assembled in China. Much of the world knows that much of the cobalt needed for lithium batteries is mined under harsh conditions in war-torn parts of Africa.

The Christmas story in the Gospels is a story of terrorism. And the Gospel authors are clear that competing claims are being made.

Consider this background to the language surrounding Jesus’ birth, which describes the ideological conflict being played out.

We sometimes forget the backdrop to the nativity story, particularly of the great Caesar Augustus who ruled much of the known world. Many inscriptions describing Caesar’s divine status can still be found.

There you can read about the “gospel” – literally, euangelion, the same root word in Greek we Christians use when we speak of evangelism.

In Rome’s imperial world, gospel was the good news of Caesar’s having established “peace and security for the world.”

Before Jesus, Caesar was described as a “savior” who brought “salvation” to the world. Because of this, citizens were to have “faith” in their “lord.” The words “faith” and “lord” are the same ones in the Jesus story.

Elsewhere, Caesar is referred to as the “redeemer” who has “saved the world” from war and established “peace on the earth.”

Do you see where this is going? Can you feel the sharp relief of those nativity stories rising from the ornamental rendering we give them each Christmas?

The birth narratives are more than sweet lullabies. These are incendiary stories. They are bold contradictions to Roman imperial authority.

No wonder Herod was troubled when the magi told him of the birth of a new king!

All of which is to say, Advent and Christmas are dangerous seasons, when competing visions and loyalties go head-to-head.

Jesus’ birth was considered a subversion of present arrangements. It is no less so now — though Christmas itself has been thoroughly domesticated to serve reigning economic and political purposes.

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