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The Rev. Ben Cooke is the pastor at Emmanuel Lutheran Episcopal Church in Augusta.
I’m a Christian, so for me, every year, Christmas is not about Santa Claus, Christmas trees or presents but rather about telling and retelling the story of the birth of Jesus. That story, which happened some 2,026 years ago, tells how at Christmas God chose to risk everything to show love for the world. Rather than showing God’s power, God chose to come as a weak, vulnerable baby. For vulnerability is God’s true power.
A baby was born, not to those who had power in that time and place, but to a teenage mother whose sexual morality was in question. A mother who was a displaced person and who became a refugee. Mary and her fiancé, Joseph, had to travel to Bethlehem, displaced to take part in a census.
A census was called by the emperor Tiberius for the purpose of squeezing maximum taxes out of the poor and oppressed of his empire. A census to satisfy the greed of an emperor, who was an old, rich man living on an island off the coast of Italy, where he spent his time with literal underage sex slaves. He was the leader of a society where power meant the ability to exploit others, oppressing the poor and vulnerable.
I believe God chooses to act through just such vulnerable people: the poor, repressed, the refugee and the innocent, through children. Through teenage mothers and their partners who agreed to raise children who are not their own.
When Herod, the paranoid, aged oligarch of Jesus’ corner of the empire, heard that a baby had been born who might challenge his power, Herod set out to kill all the babies of that town. Autocracy massacres the innocent in order to guarantee its faltering grip on power. Jesus only survives because his parents flee to Egypt, a place that accepts them as refugees.
This Christmas season, all Christians and all people of good will should call upon our elected representatives to allow refugees into our nation. If we seek to follow God who became a vulnerable baby in the arms of a fleeing mother, we must accept our fair share of those who war, conflict and the murder of their children make them refugees.
As long as America refuses to do so, I fear we cannot claim to be a Christian nation. We cannot claim to lead the world in the values that the baby Jesus embodied. As long as we refuse the admission of refugees, we are a nation that stands against Christ, who comes to us at Christmas as that refugee baby.