Opinion editor’s note: Strib Voices publishes a mix of material from 11 contributing columnists, along with other commentary online and in print each day. To contribute, click here.
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For me, this time of year used to mean standing before a crowded church, preaching about the good news of Christmas to pews packed with good, wholesome, Bible-believing American Christians.
On more than one occasion on those Christmas Eve’s past, I stood desperately (if not literally) in the pulpit, clinging to it like a port in the storm, trying to claim some semblance of a message for Christmas that wasn’t weighed down by the commercialism, capitalism and gross inequality that hampers our holiday season.
Again and again, from the coast of California to the prairies of Minnesota, I preached some version of this message: that Christmas was not ultimately about the presents but about the presence, that somehow being together in a holy space and bearing witness to a God who gave much more than God ever received, would counteract all the ways in which we too as church leaders — and me, as a parent of young kids — fed into the idea that the meaning of the season was he who dies with the most toys wins, a theme, by the way, that fits pretty well with our current political discourse and winner-takes-all mentality.
This Christmas, I was not preaching. And so, five days before Christmas Eve, I tried to find that message of presence over presents in a place far from the bustling gaiety and consumer cheer of our packed local shopping malls and churches. On Dec. 19 in Stillwater, I sought the presence of Christmas in prison.
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In one of his most-famous and most strident parables, Jesus told his disciples that they would be judged not upon how ardently they believed, or the purity of their religious doctrine — but instead on how they treated their fellow humans. He told them that the Son of Man would remind people that they’d met God before, in unexpected places, such as in people who are poor, hungry, thirsty, naked and, yes, in prison. Jesus says the righteous ones are those who visited people in prison, a theme picked up later in the Bible, including by the Apostle Paul, who wrote much of the New Testament while imprisoned himself.