For People with Bishop Rob Wright
For People with Bishop Rob Wright
Born Beneath the Headlines // Bishop Wright's Christmas Sermon 2025
"In the Christmas story, God slips through a birth canal underneath the empire. This star child is born in a borrowed room and takes his first rest in a feeding trough. God chooses vulnerability over visibility and humility over dominance. Christmas helps us to know who God is through God's choices. The child we say we love tonight but are afraid to love too much is born on the underside of history. No status, no security. So if you're looking for God, you can always find God where the world least expects God to be. So if we're only watching the Empire's headlines, we may be missing the holy things that are being born right in front of us. Christmas is God's graceful and gentle refusal of the Empire's terms and methods. In God's Christmas story, domination is overthrown by incarnation and love."
Excerpt from Bishop Wright's Christmas Sermon "Born Beneath the Headlines"
Hi listeners, I'm your producer Easton Davis, and thank you for listening to For People. This week's episode is Bishop Wright's Christmas Eve sermon titled "Born Beneath the Headlines", given at the Cathedral of St. Philip on December 24th, 2025.
Bishop Wright:Good evening. Merry Christmas. Greetings to you in the name of Jesus, whose birth we celebrate tonight. The Christmas story, according to Luke's account, opens with breaking news from the government. Caesar, the Roman Empire, has called for a census, which means people from all over the empire have to scratch together enough to travel and to be registered. The story starts this way not because Caesar and his decrees matter the most, but because Caesar thinks he matters the most. In a funny and oblique way, the Christmas story opens as a cautionary tale about arrogance. Arrogance, that tragic failing of all Caesars, past, present, and future. Because, well, arrogance is blindness, and arrogance is deafness, and arrogance is numbness. So while Caesar is issuing decrees, while the empire is anxious to measure, control, and secure the world through force, while some are attempting to run the world, God is busy redeeming the world. Christmas is the celebration of God sublimely and subversively being active in the world. Christmas is God working quietly and decisively despite the arrogance and blind spots of earthly power. God doesn't confront the empire head on here like God did when God toppled Egypt through Moses. In the Christmas story, God slips through a birth canal underneath the empire. This star child is born in a borrowed room and takes his first rest in a feeding trough. God chooses vulnerability over visibility and humility over dominance. Christmas helps us to know who God is through God's choices. The child we say we love tonight but are afraid to love too much is born on the underside of history. No status, no security. So if you're looking for God, you can always find God where the world least expects God to be. So if we're only watching the Empire's headlines, we may be missing the holy things that are being born right in front of us. Christmas is God's graceful and gentle refusal of the Empire's terms and methods. In God's Christmas story, domination is overthrown by incarnation and love. Love is revolting against everything that is not love. And while we are paying attention to a starry night in Palestine long ago, don't you just love God's flair for the dramatic? I mean, out in a field among the day laborers, the uncredentialed, the regularly suspect, the unhoused, the barely religious, and the economically precarious. This is where God chooses to put on a light show. God and glory break out. And suddenly an angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them. And then the Bible tells us that one angel turned into a magnificent multitudinous angel choir. See if you can imagine that with me. One thousand Mormon tabernacle choirs, all singing praises to God with one voice. Spectacular. But when the glory of God shows up, it's never just to impress. Glory shows up to enlist. When God's glory shows up, it gathers and it forms and it encourages a community to be witnesses, to be dangerously odd. I call it vertical assurance for horizontal endurance. Glory is more than breathtaking brilliance or shimmering spirituality, whatever that is. Glory is the essence of God. It's transnational, it's transpolitical, can't be controlled by any earthly decrees. God's glory is unique in weight and density and peerless in importance, which means glory replaces fear with worship, which means glory unsettles selfishness and substitutes it with an other centeredness. When the glory of the Lord shows up, it embarrasses all divisions and especially the divisions that the empire depends on. Why? Good question. Because God's glory reveals God's imagination. God's glory is more than we can imagine. I heard a young person say to me the other day that they were deleting their Instagram and TikTok and Facebook accounts. An unusual thing these days. And when I asked him why, he paused a moment and said this. Out beyond what the market economy can imagine for us. Christmas invites us to be to be disenthralled with the dominant order and its narrow and limited menu of possibilities for us. It just may be that the ruts we find ourselves in are because we have outsourced too much of our imaginations to the empire. Since the shepherds with their flocks live at the edges of the empire, they're not invested in maintaining the status quo, which means they're available to hear a new word for living. Christmas is the perfect gift for those who need a new word for their life. For those who may have their backs against the wall tonight, for those who don't have too much to lose and everything to hope for.