Believers and nonbelievers alike can find meaning in the Christmas story.

Believers and non-believers alike can find purpose and meaning in the Christmas story.

The chronicler of the ancient tale doesn’t reveal whether the Bethlehem innkeeper proclaimed his gilded brand in block letters above the entrance to his establishment. We don’t know whether he left the torch-light burning for weary travelers arriving at his front door deep into a cold, dark night.

What we must surmise about the innkeeper is that neither his heart nor his hostelry had room for an impoverished young couple traveling that night, the woman within minutes of giving birth. Perhaps as a salve to his curdled conscience, he directs them to a dirty stable housing goats and donkeys, where the woman soon delivers a son. Wrapping the fragile infant in a cloth to ward off the cold, she lays him in a straw-filled feed trough.

What’s remarkable about the old story — for Christian and nonChristian alike — is its outlandish theological claim that God enters history, not as a king, a conquering general or a swaggering head of state, but in the form of a vulnerable infant born to a poor teenaged mother sheltering from the cold in a ramshackle animal hut or perhaps a shallow cave in the side of a rocky hill. According to the story, Mary was homeless at the time, traveling with her husband Joseph to be taxed by Rome, their people subject to the grinding and oppressive rule of an occupying power.

Sound familiar? Today’s Mary is in a Houston homeless shelter. Or she’s trudging through the cactus and mesquite of the South Texas brush country, her weary feet pointed north toward what she hopes is a better life for her children in a land increasingly reluctant to take them in. Today’s Mary, exhausted and fearful, with a cold and hungry child in her arms, is fleeing the horrors of Aleppo. Her drawn face is the face of Christmas.

The essential Christmas story is not narrowly political. And yet in this country it has to give us pause that Mary’s son, a child born into the most humble circumstance, will in years to come announce his mission at Nazareth as “bringing good news to the poor,” not to the wealthy and well-born. He will remind his followers that our treatment of “the least of these,” not our obeisance to the rich and famous, is our true measure of selfworth.

Believers and non-believers alike can find purpose and meaning in the Christmas story. Transcending the literal, bypassing the foggy facts of history — the gospels don’t mention an innkeeper, for example — it is a useful standard by which we assess and reassess our priorities, particularly at a time when this nation has just elected a president whose bombast and divisiveness would seem to be the story’s antithesis. In the halls of Congress and around the dinner table, we can debate what form our attention to the least among us should take — private charity, government programs, some workable combination — but we cannot ignore our obligation. It’s particularly urgent when our own innkeeper-in-chief, with support from millions of Christians, prepares to deliver the nation to a gaggle of billionaires for whom money and power, not justice and compassion, would seem to be the measure of all things. As always, the arrival of Christmas brings us into direct and often uneasy confrontation with our ideals, this election year more starkly than ever.

“At Christmastide,” historian Penne L. Restad has written, “we must, directly or even by omission, set our priorities, establish our tolerances and square our hopes with reality.”

Our Christmas hope on this special day is that we remain a nation whose arms and hearts are open to the homeless, to the downtrodden, to wayfarers wandering in the cold and dark. May that openness be our abiding reality.

The essential Christmas story is not narrowly political.