Throughout my tenure as pastor of the First Congregational Church of Coventry, I loved presiding at the Christmas Eve Service of Lessons, Carols and Candlelight. We always gathered at 11:00 pm and welcomed Christmas Day and the good news of great joy, the birth of Christ, by candlelight. The congregation sang all the beloved carols, and the chancel choir sang special holiday anthems they had rehearsed for weeks. The diaconate positioned the Advent wreath in the center of the chancel, with an unlit Christ Candle awaiting its time of joyful significance. My favorite carol was then and remains today, “O Little Town of Bethlehem.” While singing, we all created within our hearts the image of the original nativity, with the baby Jesus in the cradle, Mary, and Joseph, shepherds and Wisemen and animals gathered in adoration. There was always a sense of profound poignancy to the moment, especially while singing the fourth verse:
O holy Child of Bethlehem,
Descend to us, we pray;
Cast out our sins and enter in,
Be born to us today.
We hear the Christmas angels
The great glad tidings tell:
Oh, come to us, abide with us,
Our Lord Emmanuel!
That verse is meant to be sung as a deeply personal petitionary prayer. “Descend to us, be born to us, come to us and abide with us” are its key phrases and capture the core Christmas hope. Jesus is our Lord Emmanuel.
A Massachusetts church, though not the only church in states across the country, is causing controversy with what’s missing from its annual Nativity scene.
St. Susanna, a Catholic church in the Boston suburb of Dedham, displayed a Nativity scene outside the church with an empty manger and a sign that reads, “ICE was here,” followed by contact information for a group that monitors immigration operations in the state.
Father Stephen Josoma, the pastor at St. Susanna, said the church’s peace and justice group organizes a display annually. Josoma explained to Fox News that they “try to see what it would be like if Christ was born into the context of the world today, what would He be facing?” (Fox News)
Predictably, the display is not without its critics. C.J. Doyle, executive director of the Catholic Action League of Massachusetts, said he was called by a parishioner upset by the display missing the Holy Family — Jesus, Mary and Joseph.
“I think it’s very offensive,” Doyle told Fox News Digital. “Josoma is politicizing Christmas, he’s exploiting and trivializing the Holy Family, and he’s using his Catholic parish as a platform to promote his left-winged ideology.”
Yesterday, I listened to a podcast featuring MS NOW’s Rachel Maddow and Timothy Synder, an American historian who was, from 2017 to 2025, the Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale University and is presently Professor of History at the University of Toronto. The conversation took place in Chicago after the Trump administration’s unsuccessful deployment of National Guard troops and ICE agents to the city’s neighborhoods, eliciting resistance by the residents using green whistles. The purpose of the podcast, conversations and questions was to offer insights on how best to “save our nation’s humanity.” While listening, I could not help but think of Father Josoma who said that his peace and justice group’s display simply wanted to challenge people to “try to see what it would be like if Christ was born into the context of the world today, what He would be facing.” Each of us should ask these questions: Were He to descend and enter in, were He to be born to us, and abide among us, what would He be facing, here and the world over?
Another significant part of the Maddow/Snyder conversation involved Snyder encouraging the gathering to develop a strategy that does not politicize a situation but moralizes it. Is it right or wrong? Is it moral or immoral? At the conclusion of the podcast, Snyder opined: A society cannot do democracy without a moral language.
Thomas L. Friedman, a three-time Pulitzer Prize winner and a weekly writer for The New York Times, wrote an opinion column last month, which began with the following statement:
I write today about an epidemic. It is not biological. It’s an epidemic of cowardly, immoral and unprincipled decisions by leaders across the political spectrum. Our last biological epidemic – COVID-19 - was a tiny invisible pathogen that made us physically sick. This epidemic of moral cowardice is right in everyone’s face, and it’s eating away at the civic bonds that hold societies together. (NYT, November 18, 2025)
Indeed, a society cannot do democracy, and I would add, the church cannot be the church without a strong moral compass and language that confronts the inequities and the injustices of the day, and indeed, those who use them to oppress the weak and vulnerable.
I beg to differ with the parishioner from St. Susanna who thought that Father Josoma was politicizing Christmas. This was not politics or evidence of a left-wing ideology. He was bravely identifying one of the most pressing moral challenges of our time, and his committee said that Jesus experiences and faces it with us.
Palestinian theologians John and Samuel Munayer wrote a deeply moving article in the December issue of Sojourner’s Magazine, titled Christmas is for the Oppressed: A Palestinian Reflection on Entering Advent.
The Nativity story is one of a family forced to flee massacres and of a child laid in a manger because there was no room in the inn. In our land, where space is denied and belonging is contested, this story is not remote history. Instead, it mirrors our present reality. Christmas is not a shallow festivity, nor a consumer spectacle, but a hope born in the very midst of instability, insecurity, and suffering.
Christmas is for the oppressed. It is for those who know exile and the bitterness of hunger. The angels’ song of peace was not first heard in royal palaces or halls of government power, but in the shepherds’ fields.
The Incarnation, the birth of God among us, is not an idea, not a distant abstraction. It is held in the reality of flesh and blood. It is the embodiment of God as a Palestinian Jew under Roman occupation, sharing the identity of the oppressed and living among them. Jesus is born into poverty, a child of an oppressed people.
The good news of Christmas proclaims that the savior of the world is also the companion of the crucified peoples of history. (Sojourners Magazine, December 2025)
The line that stands out for me is:
Christmas is not a shallow festivity, nor a consumer spectacle, but a hope born in the very midst of instability, insecurity, and suffering. (I would add, more importantly, amid the abhorrent cowardice shown repeatedly by the powerful in the immoral and inhuman treatment of the vulnerable in this country and abroad.)
We relive the original narrative as contemporary history when on Christmas Eve, amid the darkness, real and spiritual, we create in our hearts a nativity for today knowing that this Christ child bravely faced and confronted the inequalities, injustices, evils and immorality of His time and circumstance.
We relive the original narrative as contemporary history when in our time and circumstance, we bravely face and challenge with Jesus the abuses of violence and bigotry, of hateful rhetoric and mean acts of retribution, of the cold-hearted absence of generosity toward the hungry, homeless, hopeless, and hurting. Truly, the good news of Christmas proclaims that the savior of the world is also the companion of the crucified peoples of history, then and now.
For all those years in Coventry, I prefaced the lighting of the Christ Candle of the Advent wreath with the words of the prophet Isaiah:
[a]The people who walked in darkness
have seen a great light;
those who lived in a land of deep darkness—
on them light has shined. (Isaiah 9: 2-3, NRSVUE)
During Advent we wait, watch, and prepare. At Christmas, we see and experience the light God brings to us in a baby born in the little town of Bethlehem. It descends to us, casts out sin, and enters in. It comes to us and abides with us; this is because He is our Lord Emanuel, and with Him as our companion we live with Christmas bravery.