The following is post from a series called Nativity I'm doing on another blog. It has nothing to do with teaching and everything to do with teaching as well. 

Blame it on the season. A broken, tilted earth dances drunkenly away from the sun until it begins to seem like light itself has died completely. I know the sun is hiding on the other side. I know that summer still exists somewhere. And I know we're lucky, because we don't have to shovel sunshine and an icy desert morning isn't all that cold in comparison.

But I'm cold and it's dark and the world seems broken beyond repair.

I'm forced to slow down to a near-stop near the bus stop, where a kid is getting blazed, right there in the open air, oblivious to the man who is pointing his finger and shouting at a woman cowering on the bus stop bench. The kid inhabits his own private escape, lonely and distant from the context. And here I am, cradling my coffee, getting high on liquid happiness, inhabiting my own private escape, lonely and distant from the context.

My soundtrack is a tinny radio, where two men banter loudly about injured quarterbacks and playoff games and how-did-that-look-for-Fantasy-Football and it strikes me as bizarre that a man's fantasy would revolve around grown men playing a game. It's too superficial, but the other option is an NPR report on global unrest and nationwide unemployment.

A woman runs across the road, pushing a stroller into the oncoming traffic, because there's a bus to catch and the drivers stop to sustain life, but in a choral unison, they flip her off and hurl gigantic curses.  And I'm thinking of our debt and how we'll pull out of it when my salary is frozen and food is getting more expensive and nothing we are doing seems to be working.

A man in a neon jacket holds a steamy cup of coffee while his crew picks up the shards of plastic from the wreck. I grow infuriated as cars rush forward, refusing to respect the line of drivers waiting for their shot at the solitary lane.

"You're not that important! We all have places to go," I yell at the F-150 that edges his way in front of me. It's a game of chicken and it looks like I'm chicken and though the gesture is small and impersonal, it feels like an attack on my dignity and my humanity. It's not a truck that cut me off. It's a man, wielding a ton of machinery like a child's toy and although I know I'm taking it way too personal, I can't simply turn off how I feel. I'm crushed by a simple act of selfishness.

There's nothing tragic about this morning. I get it. These are first-world problems. Tiny tragedies. Globally, I'm part of the one percent. I have it pretty good. Still, there's something in the season that suggests I'm supposed to chase perfection. I'm supposed to smile more. I'm supposed to be a little less anti-social when I purchase a pack of Pull-Ups from the grocery store. And it's supposed to be slower, more reflective, what with the calls for silent nights and remember the reason for the season and . . . God, I'm so tired right now.

*     *     *

Political tumult, economic uncertainty, broken people in a broken world: This is precisely the context into which Jesus was born: an angry tyrant trying to hold onto power, so scared about losing it to a political Messiah that he orders the murders thousands of babies; a crowded city or perhaps just a crowded family with no place for a woman in labor to find rest; shallow rumors about the young couple that just couldn't embrace True Love Waits; a family too poor to pay the temple sacrifice.

Emmanuel.

God-with-us.

This was the context of chaos. This was the selfish, busy, caustic human story that God entered into. The moment was so quiet, so small, that it's no wonder people missed it - a fetus developing inside a marginalized woman in a marginalized culture.

Hope is the absurd idea that redemption happens here, in a broken world, among broken people, where debt swallows families and cars crash and busses leave two minutes too early and family members refuse to speak to one another because of something said a few years back. Hope is the insane resolution that happens at the end of the most tragic human story. It isn't a comic sans clip art reminder that things will be okay. No, it's a bold-faced, all-caps message across a gritty, horrific picture at a bus stop or an intersection or a war zone.

I miss hope when I miss the tragedy. I miss it when I build a Fantasy Land for a Magical Kingdom. I miss it when I cradle my coffee and I buy into the lie that this world isn't all that bad or when I caustically move toward a dark determinist idea that redemption is impossible.