Here in the United States, Christmas has become the ‘go to’ way of coercing us to buy things that we don’t need and cannot afford in an attempt to fill a hole in ourselves that stuff can never fill so that corporations can end each year in the black.

Our current festival of capitalistic consumerism that the powerful have created for their profit is the antithesis of the Christmas spirit of God working through and with the vulnerable and the downtrodden to bring good news for the poor and liberation for the oppressed. What we often celebrate in churches and a culture coopted by empire is the anti-Christmas.

The idea of Christmas as the incarnation of God’s liberative power of love and justice for the poor and oppressed is terrifying for the powerful and unjust, which is why churches that are coopted by empire don’t talk much about those things during Christmas.

Everything about the Christmas story is a direct rebuke of those who use their power and privilege to bring suffering, oppression, and violence to the poor and oppressed. The power for liberation and justice does not come from the lavish palaces of a king or from the throne of empire. Love and justice come into the world through the humble and vulnerable, through the ones for whom the powers of this world have no room. Good news for the poor and liberation for the oppressed come from people, not from those who profit and maintain their power through the exploitation of others.

The Christmas that turns the world upside down is the Christmas that the powers and principalities don’t want us to celebrate. They want the Christmas that turns the world upside down to be lost in the rush of consumerism and the bright lights of empire. They don’t want us to see that the way of love and justice does not lead to consumeristic frenzy but rather to solidarity with all persons who are being oppressed and who are suffering. They do not want us to look at the baby in the manger and see thousands of babies and children gasping for their last breaths under piles of rubble while their families weep for them without consolation because if we did, we could not ignore the reality that the meaning of Christmas is that the world needs to be turned upside down.