Every scripture passage we read today too, has an undertone of sorrow, a sense that the world is in dire need of saving. And it is.

In the beginning, there was complete chaos, says the book of Genesis. Isaiah says, The people walked in great darkness. The people lived in a land of deep darkness. John Calvin says we are to imagine that they “looked as if no ray of light had ever shone on them.”

Or says the Gospel of Luke, the force of empire was so intense that when Joseph took Mary to Bethlehem she had to travel against doctors’ orders at the end of her third trimester for four days on foot from Nazareth to Bethlehem, and by the time she got there, there was no room in the inn.