Campbell: The locality of God

There are two passages in the Gospels, one at the beginning and one at the end, that are not often related to one another.

The first is the beautiful story of the birth of Jesus from Luke's Gospel (Luke 2:1-7). Luke does his best to record the time and place of Jesus' birth, as well as the name of his parents. It was at the time of the census required by the Roman Emperor Augustus, when Quirinius was governor of Syria. The place was Bethlehem, in Judea. The parents were named Mary and Joseph.

Jesus was a specific child born at a specific place at a specific time.

The second passage in Scripture is from the teaching of Jesus, and is represented as a final lesson at the end of Matthew's Gospel (Matthew 25:31-46). Early in his account, Matthew agrees with Luke as to the time and place of Jesus' birth, and the names of his parents. Toward the end, Matthew records Jesus' teaching about the last judgment. The fundamental criterion — the only criterion — on which a life is to be judged, Jesus says in the parable of the sheep and the goats, is on a person's relationship to the people in his or her immediate vicinity in the time of his or her own life.

Jesus was born in Bethlehem when Quirinius was governor. His parents were Mary and Joseph. Each of us is born in a particular place of particular parents. The criterion for judging our lives, Jesus said toward the end of his own life, is local — how we live where we live with the brothers and sisters whom God gives us.

The Last Judgment is a teaching about heaven and hell, but it is not what you think. The Last Judgment defines heaven and hell. Heaven is a place where people live in community, taking the lives of the others in their community as seriously as they take their own. Hell is a place where people don't care about one another.

Heaven and hell are immediately at hand. Both are experienced in daily life. Hell is always in danger of swallowing us up. Heaven is always available, in the twinkling of an eye, in the awakening of a conscience, in the opening of a mind.

Hell is local. So is heaven.

There are so many ways of saying "no," it seems, but there is always the one glorious way of saying "yes." Every citizen has a locality, and for each of us that locality is our Bethlehem. We can come to the stable to worship Jesus, or we can stay outside in the cold, attempting to insulate ourselves from the fate of others. We can hear the angels and take courage and seek peace, or we can stay on the hillside and count our sheep. We can go a long way across the desert following a star, or we can give up, tacitly helping Herod get rid of any challenge to the greed and power that make men miserable.

The most difficult thing for us, it seems, is to get out of the theory of our religion and into the specific practice in our own time and place. We did not choose the people we live among, except perhaps for a few family members or friends. We did not choose the time and place. We did not volunteer for these particular issues and this particular period in history. We do not possess any particular competence, any extraordinary vision, any secret answers to the struggles of our colleagues in this metropolitan city. We hardly know how to order our own lives, much less those of more people than ourselves.

We prefer charity to justice, not because it is more advantageous for people, but because we can understand it better and we know how to do it at least a little. At Christmastime we do what we can — Christmas baskets and angel trees and contributions to charity, if we can move ourselves in the way we should. The reasons that charity is needed seem so frequently beyond us – the mystery of the economy, the craziness of the employment picture, the struggles of race and class, the challenge of education, the bigger issues of generational privilege and family and jurisdiction and upbringing and generational trauma. We are subject to the great spiritual powers. We are near each other physically, but so vastly separated in familiarity and understanding.

Bethlehem could be an old subdivision a mile away in Southside and very few of us would even know that Jesus was being born there.

And yet the secret of Christmas is the secret of locality. It is not Bethlehem that is our concern. It is Woodlake, Wellesley, and Whitcomb Court. The commandment is not to go to the stable in the Judean village. It is to visit the manger in our own metropolitan city and see what God has brought to pass. The star is here. The wise men have arrived. The angels are singing, the shepherds worshipping. We must rediscover our own locality, before it is too late.

Can we possibly see that each effort makes a difference? We feel so helpless, but there is always a place to start. We have far more power than we know, and many of us have power that we choose not to use. We not only have money that we may give, we have the influence that money gives us. We carry our networks with us. If we isolate ourselves, the network of our lives dead-ends in our torpor.

What is most extraordinary about the birth of Jesus is that God was willing to start with one person, at one moment in time, with one mom and dad, in one place, and to build from there. It's a small start, no matter how much you ramp up the angels and magnify the shepherds, no matter how many gifts the magi bring. It's person by person, situation by situation, building up first to the great urban challenge in Jerusalem and now, 20 centuries later, to Richmond and 500 other cities of more than 1 million people.

The salvation of the world is this sweet Bethlehem moment, repeated over and over again. We take courage from that. We need only recognize it ourselves, in our own time, in our own locality. Here, we find, is the kingdom of heaven. Here, as the prophets foretold, the messiah is born. We will meet him here, if we meet him at all, as we open our eyes to those around us.