Towards Sunday, November 20, 2016 (Reign of Christ Sunday)

Reading: Jeremiah 23:1-6 

Looking at the people in exile, having lost their kingdom to barbarians and other powers, Jeremiah says:

Woe to the leaders who have not taken care of the flock! says God.
It's the old leaders who are to blame, for not taking care of all the flock.
So I will take care of them! says God.

And then I will gather together all the bits of the flock they didn't take care of;
I will bring them together, and I will give them new leaders who will listen to them
and take care of them better than the old leaders did, says God.

Wow!  So easy to imagine Donald Trump and the alt-right interpreting these verses as divine justification -- even premonition, of their electoral win, and the defeat of Hilary Clinton and the old political establishment.

I think it just goes to show, though, how dangerous Bible proof-texting can be.  Because the next verses go on to describe the new leaders (or leader?) that God will provide:

I will cause a righteous branch to grow up from the stump of what they have become, God says;
a leader who will deal wisely,
who will execute justice in the land, fairly giving all, all that they need;
who will cause righteousness and right relations to flourish;
who will save all the people, by helping them live in harmony with God's good will for all.

Okay, so the old leaders and the establishment had their (severe) faults -- including corruption, but also in the way they did not listen to, or execute real care for those who were left behind in the globalization of the last decades and who still resisted and felt betrayed by the progressive reforms of those same decades.  And there is something right about those leaders finally being brought up short, for their short-comings and sins.

But the new leaders -- in the way they have managed to normalize hate, greed, lies and untruth, and disregard for -- even attack against, anyone who is "other" to them, cannot be God's promised shepherds either.

All of which seems to make Christmas and maybe especially Advent all the more significant this year as celebrations of faith -- of faith in a particular incarnation of God and God's promised way of wholeness and healing in history and among us.

As we think of our current political and cultural climate, what really does it mean this year to celebrate the birth of Jesus of Nazareth as the incarnation of God and of God's good will?