Recently, in Dedham, Massachusetts, a Catholic parish put up a Christmas Nativity display that looked very different from what most of us expect. Instead of figures of the infant Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, the manger was empty. In the spot where the Holy Family would normally stand, a large sign read: “ICE was here.”
The parish’s pastor said the display was meant to reflect the fears and experiences of immigrant families in the community and to spark conversation about how people in need are treated. And it accomplished its goal.
Jenna Russell, writing for the New York Times, noted that Facebook comments were mixed, with several thanking the church for “speaking truth to power.” While another person posted that “the devil has infiltrated the church.” Elizabeth Doris-Gustin, 67, a longtime neighbor of the parish, said this: “You might not agree with everything, but it makes you think. I wish a few more churches would be this bold.”
Nativity scenes appeared across the country this year without the Holy Family. They still have a stable. There are animals. The structure looks familiar. But Mary and Joseph—and sometimes the child—are missing. Often, no explanation is offered. The scene is simply incomplete.
That image lingers, because it feels familiar.
There is a growing sense that something essential has been removed—not destroyed, just displaced and not argued away, just quietly set aside. Over the past year in particular, many have felt it: a loss of hope we once assumed would always be there.
Many of us hope that our country will mirror our values, shaped by the teachings of Christ. This is different than making Christianity a national religion, since our hopes mirror those of most of the world’s religions. It is the hope that strangers can be welcomed without fear, that truth can matter more than power, that the vulnerable are worth protecting, and that the future can be more just than the present.
Instead, something has shifted: fear has been normalized, suspicion has been rewarded, cruelty has been excused as realism, and outsiders have become convenient symbols for everything we’re anxious about. What’s been lost is not confidence or comfort—it’s moral imagination. The ability to believe that we can be better than our worst instincts.
This is the hope many feel has slipped through our fingers—not because it was weak, but because it was treated as expendable.
Matthew begins his telling of the Christmas story with people who don’t belong. And that tension feels uncomfortably familiar. They’re not neighbors. Not insiders. Not people who already belong. Nor are they shepherds from nearby fields. Neither are they neighbors from Bethlehem. And they’re certainly not faithful insiders who know the songs and the scriptures by heart. No, they’re just strangers from somewhere else.
“At least three individuals,” Matthew tells us—scholars from the East, likely Persian—make their way across borders and through uncertainty, guided by a sign they cannot fully explain. They arrive in Jerusalem with a question that unsettles everyone who hears it: Where is the child who has been born King?
They came from different customs, different food, and likely had different assumptions about how the world works and how God speaks. They dressed differently. They likely spoke an ancient Persian dialect (Iran) and also Aramaic, the language of the Holy Family. Nevertheless, they somehow show up in Matthew’s gospel as the ones paying attention.
Their journey is long, uncertain, and risky. They cross borders. They travel through unfamiliar territory. They rely on hospitality that they cannot guarantee. And when they finally arrive in Jerusalem—the religious and political center—they don’t find welcome.
They are not looking for something new. They are looking for something true. They’re looking for hope.
So they do what makes sense. They go to the palace, where they find Herod. Herod listens, but not with curiosity. He asks questions, but not because he wants to learn. He smiles, but it doesn’t reach his eyes.
This king is threatened by hope that does not originate with him. The storyteller is foreshadowing, and we know enough of the story to feel the chill. When strangers carry hope, power often responds with fear. Not optimism. Not comfort. Power is threatened by the deeper hope that strangers matter, that truth can outweigh fear, that power can be held accountable, that the future doesn’t have to mirror our worst instincts.
And this, too, feels familiar.
The Magi sense a similar loss. They have studied history. They know the stories. They have seen signs before. And something tells them that hope has surfaced again—fragile, vulnerable, and easily missed.
When people go searching today for the hope that feels lost, they often begin where the Magi did—with those in authority. With institutions. With leaders. With systems that promise security and order.
Surely someone there knows where hope is kept.
But again and again, seekers discover the same thing the Magi did: power is very good at naming hope—and very poor at trusting it.
Herod sends the strangers on their way with careful words and hidden intentions. He fakes interest, but what he wants is information. Hope, when it does not originate with power, becomes something to manage rather than receive.
And there is a quiet warning in the story Matthew tells: when fear governs us, we begin to treat outsiders not as witnesses, but as threats, not as bearers of insight, but as problems to be solved. This is where the loss of hope becomes visible. Because hope does not thrive where fear decides who belongs. Hope does not live comfortably in palaces. Hope is rarely protected by those who benefit most from the way things are.
So the Magi leave Jerusalem. They turn away from power. They keep following the light. Matthew also tells us that when the Magi leave Jerusalem, the star appears again. Not brighter. Not louder. Just present.
This is where the hope they were seeking has been hiding. The hope they find is not strength without weakness. It is not safety without cost. It is not dominance, control, or fear-driven protection. The hope they see is God choosing proximity over power.
The star leads them—not upward, but downward. Not toward strength, but toward vulnerability. Toward a house. Toward a family without status. Toward people living close to the edge of survival. To a child born into economic precarity. To people who will soon become refugees themselves. This is not accidental. It is theological.
The star went ahead of them until it stopped over the house where the child was. They went inside, and when they saw the child with His mother Mary, they knelt down and worshiped Him
Matthew 2:1–12
Matthew is preparing us for a revelation: the hope we fear we’ve lost has not disappeared. It has simply been living somewhere else.
What would it be like today for a small delegation from another country to arrive in the United States—not as tourists, not as conquerors, but as seekers? What if they came asking where hope had been born? Where was healing happening? Where truth might be found?
Would we know what to do with them?
Here’s the unsettling truth Matthew is quietly revealing: Hope doesn’t respect boundaries. God’s movement isn’t limited to familiar people or familiar places. And sometimes, the ones who recognize it first are the ones we least expect.
These strangers do not yet know the full story. They don’t understand how fragile this child is, or how costly this hope will become. But they come anyway—because hope, when it’s real, creates motion.
And maybe that’s where this story begins to press on us.
Because beneath our arguments, our fears, our labels, and our policies, there is something shared here: a longing for a world that is more whole than the one we see. A hope that things don’t have to stay the way they are. Different languages. Different cultures. Different paths. But a shared hunger for something more.
Matthew invites us to sit with that tension—not resolve it yet, just feel it. The strangers are on the road. The king is afraid. The world is about to be changed. And the question quietly forming is not just who are these strangers? It’s what do we do when hope comes to us wearing a face we don’t recognize?
The hope the Magi and most of us seek is this: That the world is not locked into the violence of its present powers. That history is capable of interruption. That God has acted before—and God will act again.
In a contemporary context, this group of hope-seekers is not seeking a newborn child. They are looking for evidence. Proof that the stories they’ve heard—about justice, dignity, shared humanity, freedom, and belonging—were not lies.
They’ve read the history. They’ve heard the testimonies. They know there have been moments when strangers were welcomed, when the poor were lifted, when power was restrained, when the vulnerable mattered. But those moments feel distant now—fragile, almost mythic.
So they take the risk to search for them again. This hope is not optimism. It is not a belief that things will naturally improve. It is the conviction that something truer than the present order exists—and can be found.
That is the hope Epiphany reveals.
But power, when threatened, does not point toward hope. When outsiders are treated as threats rather than witnesses, we are no longer just rejecting people—we are rejecting the possibility that hope might come to us from beyond our own borders.
Hope shows up among the working poor because they cannot afford the illusion that the world is already as it should be. They know the system is broken because they live inside its fractures. Among them, hope is not abstract. It is not ideological. It is embodied. Hope looks like survival. Like resilience. Like shared bread. Like faith practiced without applause.
Those we label as strangers often carry with them memories of hope forged under pressure. Not theoretical hope, but hope tested by loss, migration, endurance, and faith. They are not bringing something dangerous. They are bringing something remembered.
And the tragedy Matthew hints at—and that we are now living inside—is this: when fear governs us, we stop listening to those who have already learned how to hope without power.
Our companion book, Accidental Saints, reminds us that this is how God has always worked: not by standing above suffering, but by entering it; not by erasing difference, but by dwelling among those the world overlooks. Nadia Bolz-Weber writes, “I have come to realize that all the saints I’ve known have been accidental ones.”
Hope, in the biblical story, does not arrive armored. It arrives exposed. This is the hope we have been afraid we lost.
Over the past year, many have wondered whether compassion still has a place in public life. Whether welcome is still possible. Whether dignity can survive fear. Whether strangers can still be seen as neighbors. Matthew’s answer is quiet but firm: Yes—but not where you’ve been told to look.
Hope survives among those who live without guarantees. Among the working poor. Among families who know what it means to be one decision away from displacement. Among people who carry memory rather than control.
The Holy Family is not missing from the story. They are simply not where power expects them to be. The Magi recognize this because they are willing to kneel. They bring gifts not to secure influence, but to honor presence. And then Matthew tells us something crucial: they leave by another road.
Hope, once found, rearranges direction.
This is the work of Epiphany—not just seeing differently, but choosing differently. Recognizing that when God shows up among the vulnerable, neutrality is no longer possible. We either return to Herod, or we take another way home.
This is where the story turns toward us.
If hope has felt lost, it may be because we’ve been looking for it where it cannot live. If strangers unsettle us, it may be because they are closer to the truth than we are comfortable admitting.
Epiphany does not ask whether we believe hope exists. It asks whether we will follow it once it reveals itself. Not upward. Not inward. But outward—toward mercy, courage, and costly love. And like the Magi, we are left with a choice: to protect what makes us feel safe, or to trust that the hope found among the least is strong enough to lead us home.
Strangers rarely meet us where we are comfortable. They meet us at thresholds. At borders and doorways. At moments when we have to decide who we are and what we trust. The fear we feel at those moments is real—but it is also revealing because what unsettles us most is not the strangers themselves, but the possibility that welcoming them will change us.
Matthew shows us that God does not avoid thresholds. God enters them. The Magi stand at the threshold of a house. Joseph and Mary will soon stand at the threshold of exile. And Epiphany asks us the same question: when God shows up as a stranger, do we close the door—or do we cross over?
Thresholds are holy not because they are safe, but because they are honest. They tell us the truth about what we love, what we fear, and who we trust to guide us through change. Hope is not the absence of fear. Hope is the courage to cross a threshold anyway.
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Pastor Tommy
Nadia Bolz-Weber. Accidental Saints: Finding God in All the Wrong People. NY: Convergent Books, 2015. (ISBN 978-1-60142-755-7 ).
Jenna Russell. “Massachusetts Church Keeps Anti-ICE Nativity Scene, Defying Diocese Leaders.” © NY Times, Dec. 8, 2025. Retrieved from: link