Christmas has passed, along with the hustle and hurry of all the preparations. A lull has arrived, inviting us to rest.
This week’s scriptures,* however, recount a very different experience of the first Christmas. Soon after Jesus is born, he and his parents become refugees, fleeing to Egypt. Jesus enters the world not through safety, but through vulnerability, displacement, and fear.
Yesterday the paper reported that a prominent leader is portraying not just migrants, but even their children, as dangers to be managed, burdens to be expelled, or problems that persist “through generations.” It dawns on me that, compared to my own, the Christmas experience of migrants today is much closer to the Christmas story of Jesus. Jesus survived his first Christmas not because the world welcomed him, but because his parents trusted God enough to leave what they knew behind.
From his very birth, Jesus shows us a path of letting go of the familiar and embarking on a journey of faith. In our church community, we have learned that to follow God is to open ourselves to discovering who we truly are and what we are called to be. That journey inevitably asks us to let go of the familiar and step into the unknown, where certainty dissolves and trust in God must deepen. In In Search for Silence, Elizabeth O’Connor writes: “When we get right down to it, none of us wants to remain where we are. We are not awake until there stirs in us the possibility of what we can become. Then, and only then, can we begin a journey and belong to the migrant people of God.”
In these few days of lull after Christmas, this is the question I invite us to consider: are we ready to be transformed? Are we prepared to move from comfort into courage, from fear into faith, from staying put into becoming the migrant people God is calling us to be?
