Sermon: The View from Our Bubbles

Isaiah 9:2-7

The View from Our Bubbles

James Sledge                                                                                       December 24, 2017

Recently I was talking with someone about how we American increasingly live in little bubbles of our own making. Our Facebook and Twitter accounts are often echo chambers of like-minded people passing around articles and statements that nearly everyone there already agrees with. Because of the high cost of housing around here, many of our children attend schools filled with people just like them.

Churches often reflect these bubbles. Martin Luther King once said that 11:00 on Sunday mornings was the most segregated place in America. It’s changed, but only a little. And in the identity driven politics of our time, churches are increasingly segregated by where members fall on the political spectrum. One more echo chamber. We also tend to be financially homogeneous. Even churches that do a lot of social justice work and advocacy on behalf of the poor often have no poor members. They just don’t fit into the church’s bubble.

Many of us spend much of our time in an affluent, privileged bubble. We have contact with people who aren’t part of our bubble, but it tends to be sporadic and at the edges of our lives. We can volunteer at our Welcome Table meal program and spend part of our afternoon with people from a different world, but we can step back into our bubble whenever we wish.

Our Welcome Table guests aren’t part of our world, and can be easy to imagine that the bubble they occupy is at least partly of their own choosing. So too, we like to think we earned a spot in our comfortable, well-off bubble, our bubble that insulates us and makes it easier to ignore those outside it.

Inside our cozy, comfortable bubble, I wonder if we can really hear the Christmas story, hear it in the way the author intended. Neither the Christmas story nor our Isaiah prophecy are written for comfortable, secure people. Only shepherds attend Jesus’ birth. If these shepherds lived in our time, they would occupy a very different bubble from ours. Some of us would likely joke about their being from West Virginia or living in a double-wide. They would probably like hunting, love their guns, and consider us snobby elites.

And the people promised a Wonderful Counselor, Prince of Peace, were not citizens of a superpower. Instead they lived in a tiny nation harassed and threatened by the larger powers around them. In Isaiah’s time, a treaty required them to send tribute and offer military support to the Assyrian Empire, and on those occasions when they sought to assert some independence, retribution was swift. At one point, Assyria laid waste to much of Judah.

In many ways, Judah was like some small, Latin American country in the mid-20^th century, experiencing the boots of tramping American Marines any time it failed to do US bidding. And the prophecy that all the boots of the tramping warriors and all their garments rolled in blood shall be burned as fuel for the fire, was a promise that they would no longer be kicked around and abused by larger, wealthier, more powerful nations.

African Americans, especially those who lived in the time of slavery or Jim Crow, no doubt heard Isaiah’s prophecies and the Christmas story very differently than we in our bubble do. You can sometimes hear that difference reflected in African American spirituals, although we sometimes domesticate those when we appropriate them for our bubble.

How many of you have ever sung Kum Ba Yah? The song was popularized during the folk music revival of the 1950s and 60s, acquiring a group hug sort of vibe. A “Kum Ba Yah moment” describes everyone coming together and being in harmony. But the original song wasn’t about such moments at all. It was a cry of distress, pleading for God’s help.

The song did not originally have set words and could be adapted to different situations. The constant was the chorus, a cry for God to kum ba yah or “Come by here.” Someone is hurting, Lord, kum ba yah. Someone’s in danger, Lord, kum ba yah. Someone’s starving Lord, kum ba yah. People are oppressed and exploited, Lord. Rouse yourself and come down. Kum ba yah!

Our prophecy from Isaiah and the Christmas story in Luke are addressed to those longing for God to come and save. They are promises that God will stir, will to lift up the poor and the oppressed, will come and save the weak, will come and rescue those in despair. They are spoken to people who live far removed from our comfortable bubble, and I wonder if we aren’t likely to misappropriate both prophecy and Christmas story, in the same way we do “Kum Ba Yah,” if we do not learn to hear them as they are heard by those who despair, who are in danger, who are poor or hungry.

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I assume most of you are familiar with Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. If you haven’t read it you’ve likely seen a film or cartoon adaptation of it. Scrooge lives in his own bubble, oblivious to everything other than profit and money. Insulated by his privilege, he cannot see the plight of his employee Bob Cratchit and his family. It is invisible to him.

I recently saw a Facebook post that said, “A Christmas Carol is the heartwarming tale of how rich people must be supernaturally terrorized into sharing.” Our bubbles can insulate and blind us, but I hope most of us don’t need to be so terrorized. I do wonder if some of our political leaders don’t need a visit from ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future. Perhaps then they would renew CHIP, the Children’s Health Insurance Program.

But if most of us don’t need a paranormal threatening, we do need to remember that Isaiah’s prophecy and the Christmas story were not original meant for people like us. And we need to do the best we can to identify with the poor, oppressed, broken, powerless, hungry, defeated, frightened people to whom these words are meant to give hope.

This new day that the prophet promises, that Jesus says he fulfills, will be, says Isaiah, upheld with justice and with righteousness… He isn’t talking about justice and fairness for those who can afford the best attorney or pay for lobbyists, but for those who have suffered under the status quo, those whose plight is easy to miss or overlook from inside our bubbles.

Christ the Savior is born! Let us leave our bubbles and be found among those for whom he comes.