NOTE: All reflections throughout the Advent and Christmas season will be available on our homepage and then archived on our Advent-Christmas 2025 webpage.
The reflection below is written by Flora x. Tang from this year’s Advent reflection booklet, Entering the night of peace: Reflections for Advent 2025.
by Flora x. Tang
Vigil: Isaiah 62: 1-5 | Acts 13:16-17, 22-25 | Matthew 1:1-25
Night: Isaiah 9:1-16 | Titus 2:11-14 | Luke 2:1-14
Dawn: Isaiah 62:11-12 | Titus 3:4-7 | Luke 2:15-20
Day: Isaiah 52:7-10 | Hebrews 1:1-6 | John 1:1-18 or 1:1-5, 9-14
Merry Christmas, my fellow peacebuilders, justice-seekers, and all who walk with me on this journey to build a better church and world!
These past several years, iconographers, preachers, and those who write from contexts of war and human suffering have helped us highlight the meaning of Christmas in our troubled world: iconographers such as Kelly Latimore have depicted the infant Jesus as a migrant child at the border today; whereas Palestinian Lutheran pastor Munther Isaac has created a nativity scene of “Christ under the Rubble,” calling the world’s attention to the Holy Land, where if Jesus was born today, he too would have been born under the rubble. Christmas — and the very image of God incarnate as an infant child — calls our attention to “make room” in our hearts and in our living spaces for those who are also the weakest among us today, because they, in a special way, bear the image of the infant Jesus Christ who has come to dwell among us.
Today, I’d love to reflect with you on a different image of the weak and vulnerable present in our Christmas gospel reading. Matthew 1:1-17 is frequently skipped over as a reading and rarely preached on. This reading marks the beginning of the New Testament and contains the genealogy of Jesus Christ, listing Jesus’s ancestors from Abraham and Isaac, to David and Solomon, to women such as Tamar and Rahab and Ruth, to lesser known figures like Jechoniah and Shealtiel, all the way to Jesus’s parents Mary and Joseph and Jesus Christ himself.
The story of Jesus Christ’s birth, Matthew 1 reminds us, did not begin on Christmas Day. It had already begun since the time of Abraham and Sarah, the very imperfect people with whom God first chose to be in covenant. These imperfect, sinful, lowly, and forgotten ancestors (all 42 generations of them!) of Jesus Christ are as much part of the Christmas story as the miraculous birth of Jesus Christ himself. This gospel reminds us by placing these stories first in the entire gospel narrative. Unless you are a scripture scholar, most of us know very little of these 42 generations of ancestors whose lives paved the way for Christ’s incarnation. We can barely pronounce their names and know little of their stories. Yet today’s gospel honors them. We, too, honor them.
The good news of Christmas is this: that all who are forgotten in the eyes of the world are remembered in the story of God.
My time as a member of Pax Christi USA has reminded me over and over again of this same good news of Christmas. The Peace Pairs program, which matches seasoned peacemakers with young adult peacemakers as a mutual co-learning program, puts into this very practice of remembering — and learning from — those who came before us in this shared work. In a society where the elderly are often cast to the side or entirely forgotten, Peace Pairs allows for their stories to be remembered and cherished by young adult peacemakers. Various memorial services of Pax Christi members who have passed, such as the one held in 2025 of Fr. Joe Nangle, OFM, similarly calls us all to remember our ancestors and the ways they have formed us as nonviolent Christian peacemakers. Pax Christi memorial services for the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki likewise call to our collective memory the people whom the United States has often intentionally forgotten.
This Christmas season, drawing from the witness of the Gospel of Matthew and of Pax Christi USA, may we, too, remember all those who are forgotten in the eyes of the world. We remember that they, in a special way, lie at the heart of the mystery of the Incarnation and of the story of God.
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