Have you ever received a Christmas gift, though, that’s so wonderful that it makes you feel a bit guilty to have received it? You fret, “Oh, they spent too much on me. I’m not worth all this.” Underneath today’s joy, there's a hint of this unworthiness, too, in me, when I read our first lesson. After all, Isaiah is announcing liberation for the oppressed and judgment on the oppressors. Is such a gift really meant for the likes of me? Me, whose white skin puts me on the wrong side of the history of oppression? Me, who sleeps every night in a comfy bed while others are unhoused? Me, who feasts on Christmas cookies, while children starve in Gaza and Ukraine?
“Should this text be making me tremble, rather than rejoice?” whispers a part of my soul. “From what am I being saved? What are we talking about when we talk about salvation at Christmas time?”
Barbara Brown Taylor defines salvation as “a word for the divine spaciousness that comes to human beings in all the tight places where their lives are at risk, regardless of how they got there …. [Salvation] opens a door in what look[s] for all the world like a wall.”[1]The walls that encircle us can be made of stone, or brick, or barbed wire. But they can also be made of less concrete things, like hatred, or poverty, or injustice, or loneliness. And sometimes, the walls that imprison us are multiple.
While Don and I were in San Antonio right before Thanksgiving, I attended a presentation given by three prison chaplains. Their work is—in Isaiah’s words-- to bind up the brokenhearted and to bring good news to the prisoner. They don’t see their work as “saving sinners from hellfire.” Nor is their job to break the inmates out of the prison, or to fight the authorities for their freedom. Their job—their difficult job-- is to be agents of the “divine spaciousness” that Taylor describes. These chaplains all talked about how hard it is to bring God’s love into the prison-industrial complex, without finding themselves tainted by the corrupt systems of which they’re a part.
Listening to the chaplains talk, I remembered the story of another prison chaplain, Chris Hoke, from Washington State.[2] When Hoke first started visiting prisoners, he would sit with them across a steel table. There, the prisoners would lay down their heads and weep. All their pain, all the anguish of their lives, would pour out of them, and Chris would listen and love them, through their pain. They would hug at the end of their sessions and hold hands in prayer. Through touch, the walls came down, and God’s love could begin a healing process, powerful like the touch of Jesus in the Gospels.
After a while, though, the prison authorities decided to start a “no touch policy” in the prison. There were no more hugs, no more hands held in prayer. And the prisoners suffered. Hoke says that incidents of violence actually increased, and then more clamp-down measures were enforced. The metaphorical walls were strengthened, and the men found themselves in a double-prison.
Hoke, trapped by the system, now had to speak to prisoners through a phone, separated by a thick glass wall. If the prisoners wanted to tell their stories, they knew that their words were being taped and could be made available to prosecutors. There were no more liberating confessions. The prisoners didn’t cry anymore. Their tears and their hearts dried up.
One of the men Hoke visited was languishing in solitary confinement, losing heart and losing hope. So Hoke decided to find the man’s youngest daughter—a child the man had never met--and convince the mother to let this child visit her father in prison. Sitting behind the protective glass with Hoke, the beautiful little girl beamed at her imprisoned father on the other side. She told him that she loved him, and she sang, “You are my sunshine” to him. As she sang, the father was finally able to weep. With tears falling from his face, he told his little girl that he loved her. And according to Hoke, that’s when the glass “melted away.” The man was still incarcerated, but he was saved. Saved not from hellfire or from serving his time—but set free as only love can set us free. Through Hoke’s compassion and the love of a child, God had cut a door in the wall.
In Luke's Gospel, right after Jesus' baptism and his temptation in the wilderness, he goes into the synagogue in Nazareth and unrolls the Isaiah scroll. He reads aloud the prophet’s words of release and good news for the poor, the sick, and the oppressed. “Today the Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing,” Jesus announces. And this is how Jesus' saving ministry begins.
I once attended a service in which the preacher talked about Jesus’ saving grace for us sinners. But there was something about one of his illustrations that bothered me. For a long time, I couldn’t quite figure out what wasn’t right. It was a compelling story. The preacher talked about a little toddler who’s locked in a hot car while her mother is in the store. At first, bystanders think that they can get the child to pull open the tab that’s locking the car door. They yell out instructions to her. The child, of course, can’t comply, because she’s strapped and bound in her car seat. This child is like us, said the preacher, bound by lives of sin, captive and unable to free ourselves.
Finally, in the story, a big, burly onlooker grabs a metal hammer off of a nearby truck and smashes in the glass of the car window, pulling the child to safety. That hero is like Jesus, said the preacher. Smashing sin and death and saving us in our helplessness.
In thinking about Hoke’s story, and about salvation, I finally figured out what was bothering me about that story. You see, Jesus isn’t some muscled superhero with a sledge hammer. God comes to save us in the tender flesh of a baby, a baby just as helpless as the one in that car seat, a baby just as helpless as you, and me, and the prisoner in solitary confinement. Jesus doesn’t smash the glass that walls us in, sending shards a-flying. Like the prisoner’s little daughter, Jesus penetrates the glass with powerful Love. Writes Rowan Williams: Christmas shows us that “What happens when God becomes human is not simply an emergency plan to tidy up the forgiveness of our sins, but a matter of releasing us to be what we were made to be.”[3] Beloved children of God, compassionate siblings of one another.
Even the most privileged of us here today are each held captive: Captive by the inevitability of age or by the chains of illness. Captive by shame. Captive by our own insidious doubts. Held behind walls that we erect and behind walls that others build for us. Hear the Good News of Christmas: God has come behind our walls to dwell with us, making room in the tight places and beaming love through the walls of glass, binding up the brokenhearted, proclaiming liberty to the captives, comforting all who mourn. The joy given to us in Advent is filled both with longing and with singing. It is, in one scholar’s words, “tenacious joy in the midst of struggle.”[4] We stand together in the tight places and sing of the love that melts all walls. You might remember the words of poet Maya Angelou in her famous poem, “Caged Bird:”
The caged bird sings
with a fearful trill
of things unknown
but longed for still
and his tune is heard
on the distant hill
for the caged bird
sings of freedom.
[1] Barbara Brown Taylor, from Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith.
[2] Chris Hoke, “The Day the Jail took Touch Away,” recorded on NPR’s “Snap Judgment” and found at http://chris-hoke.com/media/.
[3] Rowan Williams, “Heaven Meets Earth,” Plough Quarterly 38, December 8, 2023.
[4] Maya Angelou, “Caged Bird,” quoted in Salt, December 11, 2023. Found at https://www.saltproject.org/progressive-christian-blog/2023/12/11/caged-bird-by-maya-angelou.
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