Everything in our society teaches us to move away from suffering, to move out of neighborhoods where there is high crime, to move away from people who don’t look like us. But the gospel calls us to something altogether different. We are to laugh at fear, to lean into suffering, to open ourselves to the stranger. Advent is the season when we remember that Jesus put on flesh and moved into the neighborhood. God’s getting born in a barn reminds us that God shows up even in the forsaken corners of the earth.
From: Shane Claiborne, Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove and Enuma Okoro in Common Prayer: A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals
