Let us pray: O God, fill my words that they may swell with the power of your presence, fill the spaces between them, that they may remind us that you are with us everywhere and always, fill this time that it may bring heart and mind to fathom what it means to say Emmanuel – you God, are with us. Amen.

Thomas shuffled into the church sanctuary, the hesitation in his step betraying the hesitation he was feeling in his heart and thinking with his mind. He loved coming home at Christmas. Many of the traditions that had developed in his family – as a mix of those passed down from his mother's family and his father's family, along with some they had created on their own – some intentionally and some by circumstance – were a special part of the joy he felt at Christmas. Going to church on Christmas Eve was not one of them. It's not that he was a grinch about Christmas, it was just that ever since he had started to think critically about things, especially as his schooling had taught him, to say nothing of his two school teacher parents, the Christmas story, which was always a part of the Christmas Eve tradition of going to church, did little for him. As far as Thomas was concerned, the story of the first Christmas was an anachronistic fabrication that seemed to require him to set all reason aside and he just wasn't prepared to do that. There was lots to believe in in this world, but as far as Thomas was concerned it didn't include a story about a virgin giving birth, choirs of angels and some kind of star that traveled across the sky, leading people to a non-descript stable in the back of some ancient hostelry.

So, as had happened on other recent Christmas Eves he did his duty by going to church with his family, while suspending his thoughts about how relevant it all was in his life and the life of most people in the modern world. Singing the Christmas carols was a difficult dilemma. The tunes were so familiar from his close to thirty years of singing them, but the message they would have you believe was no better than the story that he had such trouble with, and in fact some of them were either too obscure in wording to even fully understand or too set in the past and imbued with unhelpful language and perspective to have any relevance at all. It's no wonder that the churches are continuing to see attendance drop he thought, if this is what you had to believe and endure.

While it was good to see some familiar faces at this Christmas Eve service and while it was good to sit surrounded by his family – his brother and sister, his parents and his grandmother, it was also a bit of a tedious obligation.

As a result he was only about half tuned in when it came time for the minister's Christmas Eve reflection. He didn't know this minister all that well, but from the little bit he did know, and from what his parents had mentioned, this pastor was a pretty good guy. His parents found him engaging and they would sometimes mention in phone calls something that had come up that helped them to see things from a different perspective and consider new insights into issues of faith. It was enough for Thomas not to be completely tuned out as the preacher began.

He perked up a bit when he heard the opening words of the reflection: “Two tales. That's what we have. Two tales written long after the events they want to describe. Too long given the passing years, the fleetingness of human memory, and the lack of eyewitnesses, to reliably expect the tales to tell us what it was like, where and when. But that is not what these tales are about.”

Hey, he thought, that's not all that different from what he thought about them, and his interest was piqued even further by that little comment at the end - “but that's not what these tales are about....”. Thomas sat up a little straighter in the pew, and wondered where the preacher was going with this....

The birth narrative from Luke's gospel had been read earlier in the story, and now the minister was referring to it, but not from the perspective that what was written there had actually happened, but that the story was a parable, a teaching story, a story within a story was the way the minister described it.

Okay, thought Thomas, he could accept some of that. In fact, hadn't those courses in English literature he had taken in university taught him something like that. That stories had power to change lives because of the messages they contained, because of the moral and ethical concepts that were embedded in the plots and story lines. A story doesn't have to be true to tell the truth was something he remembered from either his high school or early university learning. He remembered hearing once the way an aboriginal elder would begin his stories. The elder would say, “I don't know whether this story happened or not, but I know that it is true.”

Now Thomas was listening just a bit more intently.

The minister continued, explaining that Luke had written this account of Jesus' life many years after Jesus' time on earth. Historical fact would have been hard to determine, but that was not the point of Luke's story anyway. Luke had written this, the preacher continued, to convey a message to the people of his time, a message about why Jesus was important to them. But, and this was the thing that started to grab Thomas, it turned out to be important to the people of Luke's time, but for all time – like any good parable should be.

Now Thomas was really listening because this minister, this person who until now was only someone he knew mostly through his parents, was starting to say things that touched him and his life. Thomas listened as the Christmas Eve message told of how Luke was writing in the context of the Roman Empire. It didn't take much, although Thomas wondered how it could have slipped by him all these years, to get that Luke had begun the story of Jesus' birth by making sure that everyone knew he was in charge. Right away he told who the emperor was – Caesar Augustus and the governor. Luke's own listeners would have knowingly nodded their heads – yes the dreaded Roman empire – and all the ways it impacted their lives. But then Thomas heard the zinger, the thing that clinched it for him, probably in the same way that Luke's first audience had been captured by the message. Luke was writing for his people and as it turned out – being the parable it was – for people in every time including this one and he was writing about Empire and how Jesus came to subvert empire.

Thomas could not believe how he had missed it all these years. He knew in his heart that this was the compelling, redeeming thing about the story of Jesus – that Jesus had upset the apple cart so to speak in terms of the way to understand God and God's divine presence in people. There were enough stories about Jesus lifting up the little ones – whether they were outcasts because of age – young or old, infirmity (blind, disabled, ill) or life circumstance (prostitutes, tax collectors) to get the idea that Jesus was showing a new way, but Thomas had never thought about how the story of Jesus' birth was a kind of object lesson in all of this. But as the minister continued – describing how the virgin birth was a challenge to the Roman establishment because they had their own stories of divinely conceived birth for their emperor. Roman literature was full of stories of how Roman gods had children with human beings. In other words, Luke was saying to the Roman empire that was all around them – take that Romans, we have our own Son of God. And of course it would be shepherds who were the first to hear of this birth – because Luke was clear that Jesus came to bring a message of peace through justice – the leveling of society, the raising up of the marginalized. This was a direct contradiction to the Pax Romana – peace through violence, suppress all your opposition so that everyone could live in peace, but of course only until the next insurrection, the next rising up of people in response to this oppression and repression. Luke's story made it clear that Jesus had come to show another way, a more just way, a more equitable way.

Thomas practically tingled with excitement if you could call it that and moved right to the edge of his seat in order to catch every word when the minister's message concluded with a connection between the things that Luke was writing for the first century Christian community and present day society. The minister told how Luke's anti-empire parable was about most of the same things that the occupy movement had been protesting throughout the fall. He then went on to talk about the psalm which had the words “Let the heavens be glad and the earth rejoice” and made a connection between justice for the earth – treading lightly, treating the resources of the earth more as stewards than masters. There was a connection the preacher said between the occupy movement, the environmental movement, the call for climate justice and global action to curtail the destruction of the fossil layer of the earth. In twenty-first century terms this is how the minister saw the heavens being glad – and the earth rejoicing, hoping to be given time to breathe so to speak.

Thomas had taken part in those occupy marches. He was involved in the fight to bring sanity back to the way we use resources. He had protested the disparity between the rich who were getting richer and the poor who not only were getting poorer but who were increasingly more powerless to do anything about it. Thomas resonated with the message of many others who had been caught up in the excitement, possibility and hope for change that the occupy movement had offered. While most of the protests had been quelled, and encampments dispersed, Thomas knew it was not over. The movement had gone underground for a time, but it would come back, too many nerves had been touched, too many angers about injustice had been stirred up for the movement to go quietly away.

All of a sudden the Christmas story was relevant. It's about justice. It's about saying “no” to empire whether it's based in Rome or in multi-national corporations and global boardrooms.

Wow, thought Thomas, wow. He wasn't sure that Merry was the way to describe how he felt about Christmas, but it sure was something different and better than when he had shuffled in here. It was like he had just discovered divine blessing to keep working against all the things that bothered him and spiritual affirmation that this was about the things that really count.

“Let the heavens be glad, let the earth rejoice”. Thomas really hoped it could happen. Thomas really hoped it would be true. Amen.