By Lee Van Ham
Christmas can bring beauty, romance, arousal of tender feelings, and new-found love. Yet, how much conversion to shared, OneEarth living happens. How many people left the systems oppressing life and ran to the systems of the evolving new creation that are regenerating life? The birth story of Jesus can do this. But Christmas? Not likely.
When Matthew and Luke wrote about the birth of Jesus over 80 years after it happened, it was about new systems that people were creating and reshaping their lives around. Jesus Followers had organized themselves into small communities where they were liberated from Rome’s oppression and the Temple’s regulations. Jews and Gentiles were meeting together and sharing the sacred ritual of wine and bread. Africans and Arabs, blacks and browns joined in. Rich and poor, women and men—all had equal access to leadership. Never had Matthew and Luke experienced such equality in diversity anywhere else in the empire of Rome. This was, indeed, a new creation.
But today the thinking is widespread that this new creation ended about as quickly as it began. Not so. The new creation has persisted for two millennia amid imperial domination propelled in endless ads that economic growth and the quest for power is the only story worth living by. Today, China, the U.S., transnational corporations, financial institutions, and much of the media and many movies embody imperial rule—like a global, modern day Rome. That’s why it is so important that we recognize the new creation as a continuing reality and as a story to live by. Media sources rarely report on the new creation. For that check sources like YES! magazine. Also this website on OneEarth Jubilee.
