My brothers and sisters in Christ, let us pray. Eternal God of our expectant bodies, minds, hearts and spirits, may the words of my mouth and the meditation of all of our hearts always be acceptable in Your sight.  Our strength and our redeemer, Amen.

“The Spirit of the Lord is Upon Me”, Isaiah begins in our scripture today.  “Because the Lord has annointed me to preach the good news to the poor”.

We get fooled into thinking that Christmas is about getting stuff that makes our lives easier and fulfills OUR wants and desires.  We think that it’s the fulfillment of our wish lists that will affect our lives that is the Spirit of Christmas, as commercials tell us to, heck, buy the new Playstation 5, or I-phone 14, or heck, even purchase a new truck for each other to spread joy to the world.  And some of us take time to donate to Toys for Tots as our Christmas tithe to make us feel better about caring about the poor, or as we say in polite society, “those less fortunate than us”.  As if we gauge our lives, and those of others, on who has the most stuff crossed off on our wish lists of stuff to have.

Way before Jesus said anything in the beatitudes about the poor, the brokenhearted, the disinherited, Isaiah says that God’s light shines brightest when we live righteous lives as God’s people.  Ones that take what God has given each of us—and all of us—and re-prioritizes what and where we should be.   And it’s not about confusing gift-giving and what’s happening around you Christmas morning with what is bestowed on us because of God’s grace.  Joy isn’t based on stuff.  It’s based on something else.

Poverty has more to do with relationships than resources, with power than possessions.  The human avarice for classifying each other based on stuff has distorted our relationships and led to conflict, apathy, isolation, prejudice, and deprivation which we call poverty for those trapped at the very bottom and oppression for those at the top. For the rest of us, it’s moral confusion.  So let’s talk about poverty and the right relationship issues we should be thinking about.

Power elites limit the options of the poor and oppressed, and don’t recognize that their wealth has been created on the backs of workers who just want to feed their families.  But in the absence of a working minimum wage, that’s tough to do.  And without basic healthcare that’s affordable, poverty means that poor folks in America can expect to live 14 years less than the most affluent.  Most of society’s mainstream view the poor as non-factors that can’t influence social change, and as advocates for ourselves and our lives, we forget that God calls us beyond our own souls and troubles to help those who suffer.

The poor also live in places and circumstances that isolate them from the rest of society.  Think inner-city multifamily housing units.  Ramshackle trailers in the flood plains, under high-voltage power lines, near oil refineries and smelters, or near waste-dumps that the government long-ago declared dangerous but never cleaned up.

The poor are given distorted images of history by the powerful. Economic opportunity comes in the form of firms which will create jobs, but they don’t tell say will kill the workers from unsafe working conditions or lack of protective equipment.  Think of immigrants working in the meat-packing plants, and when things are going well are arrested by ICE.  Or the workers who are here on a work visa, without hope of citizenship, and asked to risk their lives in health care and assisted living facilities that expose them to COVID-19.

The poor falsely believe there is no hope for meaningful change as economic and political forces combine to keep hope from being actionable.  As long as there is no legislation or activism, poverty can become a legacy that passes from generation to generation, and they keep a safe distance from the powerful to prevent further oppression rather than gather to activate for real change of circumstance.

And yet.  In the Bible, God comes again and again to the poor and disinherited.  Moses the murderer.  Joseph sold into slavery.  Gideon the peasant farmer.  David the shepherd-boy.  And we await God now to come in what guise into our lives?  What is God’s choice by being given to a young, unwed girl?  God doesn’t come to kings.  God comes to bring joy in unexpected places and persons—to the poor, the disinherited, the brokenhearted, where they live.  Joy is based in God, not what’s happening around us.

The year of God’s favor is called the Jubilee year.  It’s where all debts are wiped clean, all relationships are put back, there are no slaves and plantation owners, but all have the opportunity to live with equanimity in God’s new world.  And yet there is no evidence in human history that despite God having ordained this, it was ever done by any society.  We spend oodles of time arguing over the Bible that says this or that, and how we should follow God’s Word to be faithful.  What about the Jubilee year?  Isn’t it convenient the powerful fundamentalists never talk about it or why they’re ignoring it’s principles?

Joy must come from where and how we find it, but moreover, how we create it in our understanding of God’s full breadth and dimensions in a preference for the poor.  We are blessed here in Greenland that most of us don’t truly understand the depth of what poverty entails.  We may not have all we want.  But desperation is not all that visible here.  So we have to seek it out to live our faith.  And I am honored to be part of a church that not only sees the poor but actively re-imagines its mission to do what is required according to God’s promises as recorded by Isaiah.  Let me tell you about some of the things we’re doing in our Missions team.

After the Scouting food drive this last November, our food pantry is fully stocked.  So we’re seeking to see how we can expand our outreach to Seacoast Family Promise to help them get more food secure for the holidays and beyond, because the food stamps allowance doesn’t feed a family adequately.  We’re going to be having some evening hours, maybe even weekends, for our food pantry and see how we can partner with ones in other towns around us to give away all we have.

We’re involved in multi-church effort to help an asylum refugee currently seeking to remain here in the U.S.  That person was threatened to be killed in their home country, and came here only to be arrested by ICE and incarcerated for a few years awaiting deportation while their hearings made their way through the courts.  Through prayers and the intervention of many persons, we continue to support their effort to fight deportation to almost certain death in their home country and to remain in the U.S. reclassified as a refugee.  The poor are too often branded by the powerful through the false narrative of criminal trespass by the American government, and unable to muster the resources to have even basic representation or legal advice.

We can help by gaining understanding of our place of privilege through reading, discussion, and education, and then talking to others.  Our missions group and book group has tackled books on white supremacy, racism, the history of slavery, and the spiritual and ethical dimensions of these issues in today’s American society.  Read books like Ralph Ellison’s “The Invisible Man”.  Or join the missions group in their next reading, “Uncomfortable Conversations with a Black Man”.  We need these perspectives to remind us that maybe we, too, are the powerful in Isaiah’s exhortations.

Let me leave you with these final thoughts.

We started out saying that Christmas was too much about getting stuff with the resulting happy feeling for joy.  But joy is God-given, like grace.  Grace.  We don’t earn it or deserve it.  It’s not merited and we can’t give it.  But it’s the free and benevolent favor of God bestowed in blessing.

Joy.  It’s not earned or deserved.  But we can feel it when we take God’s promises less solemnly and more seriously and begin to live them out in this world.  We do this already.  But we need more of us to start to understand where it comes from and the well that feeds it.  So let’s re-imagine our lives as missions to the poor based on not what we think and feel, but for what is needed.  This Christmas, get educated and get out there to serve beyond quaint, white Greenland.  And begin to understand who Isaiah is calling into Jubilee.  And how we can each be a part of fulfilling that promise.

Thanks be to God, Amen.