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Nativity of Our Lord / Christmas Eve

Luke 2:1–20

In those days a decree went out from Emperor Augustus that all the world should be registered. This was the first registration and was taken while Quirinius was governor of Syria. All went to their own towns to be registered. (Luke 2:1–3)

The outbreak of newness was contagious as a song

containment was unmanageable

even with the emperor’s stranglehold of peace

The first case was reported in a barn where

people and domesticated animals share germs

and misery and hunger and cold and labor

From there it was thought to spread to a small band

of sheep herders and a rustic village pub where

they drank pints and harmonized, that may have been where

the traveler was infected with the joy virus

and spread it upstate to an unsuspecting pessimist

who took drugs at first to quell the unusual feeling

From there no one is sure how it became global

other than the emperor and all inoculated like him

did their royal best to spin the good news

birthed that night, but the more they suppressed

the more it lifted up, the more they schemed

the more the glad spirit frustrated their ways

so that anywhere the ease of God disrupts dis-ease,

birth pangs of faith and love and mercy have their way

and people sing and someone catches it