What Does the Christmas Story Mean for Black Christians?

The Christmas story belongs to Black Christians as something to stand on, because it shows where God chose to arrive. He came through a young woman with no standing. He announced the birth to shepherds working the night shift. He grew up first in a family running from a violent king. Dr. Esau McCaulley reads these scenes as hope that does not wait on the news to improve. This guide helps you take that hope in slowly, using an old pattern of Christian teaching: know it, see it, rest in it.

Catechesis is the practice of saying true things back until they become yours. Here that means three movements. First you learn a short set of questions and answers about the nativity. Then you read the actual scenes closely enough to check those answers against the text. Then you spend a week letting the story set the order of your days. You can work through it alone in one sitting followed by a week of practice. A group can meet twice: once for knowing and seeing, and once, a week later, to compare what the practice did.

Know it: a short Christmas catechism

Read each question, then the answer. On a second pass, cover the answers and try to give them from memory. They are written in plain words so they can be spoken aloud at a kitchen table or on a bus. Each one rests on a passage you will read in the next section.

1. Whom did God choose to carry his Son? A young woman the world did not count. Mary praises God because “he hath regarded the low estate of his handmaiden” (Luke 1:48). McCaulley puts her situation bluntly: “She had no social, cultural, political power.”
2. What did Mary sing that God had done? He reversed the order of the powerful. “He hath put down the mighty from their seats, and exalted them of low degree” (Luke 1:52).
3. Who heard the news first? Shepherds in a field at night. The angel brought “good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people” (Luke 2:10), and he brought them to people with no status.
4. How far down did God come? All the way. Christ “took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men” (Philippians 2:7). McCaulley says that “the incarnation showed that there was nothing beneath God. There was no place God wasn’t willing to go in order to bring us back to himself.”
5. Where was the future of the world decided? In a small town, not a palace. In McCaulley’s words, “So while people thought they were making a decision about the future of the world in Jerusalem, the real future of the world was being settled in Bethlehem.”
6. What does God do with a long wait? He remembers it. An angel told an old priest not to fear, “for thy prayer is heard” (Luke 1:13).
7. Whose story is this? It is Israel’s story, and God brings every nation into it. McCaulley makes the point that no one group holds the deed to it: “Europe doesn’t own, in that sense, the Christian story.”

Before moving on, pick the one answer you find hardest to believe right now. You do not need to explain why. Just mark it. You will come back to it at the end of the week.

See it: reading the scenes for yourself

A catechism is only as good as its grounding. This section asks you to open the text and test the answers you just learned. Read each passage in full. Do the observation task before you read the explanation underneath it, so the text gets the first word.

Luke 1:5-25: the couple who waited

Observation task: Before the angel appears, write down everything Luke tells you about Zechariah and Elizabeth. Note their character, their age, their work, and what they lacked.

You should have a list that includes faithfulness, old age, priesthood and childlessness. McCaulley draws out what priesthood meant under Roman rule. Zechariah and Elizabeth spent their lives explaining God’s goodness to a people who were not free, and they did it while carrying their own grief. So the promise of John is more than a private answer. McCaulley says, “It is a vindication of long suffering.” Then he adds a sentence that is worth memorizing: “You don’t need everybody to get a miracle. You need enough people to get a miracle for there to be hope.” Luke tells of one couple. One is enough to show that God has not forgotten.

Luke 1:39-56: where Mary went

Observation task: Mary has just received news that few people will believe. Where does she go first, and what happens when she arrives?

She goes to Elizabeth, an older woman whom Luke has already described as righteous. McCaulley reads this as a deliberate choice. Mary went to someone likely to recognize God at work: “And when Mary was in crisis, she went to someone who knew the Lord.” Only after that meeting does Mary sing. Notice the order. The song of reversal comes out of a visit between two women, each carrying something others would misread. Hope in this scene is received in company, not invented alone.

Luke 2:1-20: an inventory of the stable

Observation task: Make two columns. In the first, list every person present at the birth and the announcement. In the second, write what each one owns or controls, as far as the text tells you.

The second column comes out nearly empty. McCaulley’s summary of the nativity is three words: “Nobody with money.” His point is aimed at the church as much as at history. Congregations celebrate the famous convert as if a celebrity’s faith lent the gospel some weight. McCaulley admits he feels that pull too, but he says the story overrules it: “God doesn’t need somebody famous to bring him glory. God can get glory from the shepherds.” Look at your two columns again. They describe the guest list God chose.

Matthew 2:13-18 with Philippians 2:5-8: the vulnerable king

Observation task: Read Matthew first. Who has power in this scene, and what does he do with it? Then read Philippians. What does Christ do with his power?

Herod kills children to protect his throne. McCaulley sees the same pattern in Pharaoh and names it: these stories show “how often the people in power are willing to sacrifice the poor, to maintain that power.” Philippians shows the opposite movement. God’s Son empties himself. McCaulley makes that concrete by pointing to infancy itself: “Jesus was someone who had to be breastfed by his mother.” The God who could have sent an argument about suffering came as a baby who needed protecting. As McCaulley puts it, “God doesn’t just download an explanation for our pain from on high, but he comes alongside our pain.”

Test it: what this hope does and does not promise

A catechism can turn into slogans if no one presses on it, so press on it here. Lisa Fields describes what many people carry into December, saying “it’s like we’re living in constant state of trauma, constant state of hopelessness.” Does the Christmas story promise to end that?

Read honestly, it does not offer a timetable. Zechariah and Elizabeth waited most of their lives. The mothers of Bethlehem were not spared. Mary sang about the mighty brought down while Herod still ruled. Anyone who uses these chapters to guarantee that a specific injustice will end soon is claiming more than the text says. What the story gives is a fixed point. It shows where God stands and what he has bound himself to do.

A second test concerns McCaulley’s boldest application. He compares Black Christians who came to faith under slavery to Zechariah and Elizabeth, faithful through generations of oppression. He then names the Black church as the promised child, a sign that forces the question of how it could exist at all. This is an analogy he draws, not a claim about what Luke meant in chapter 1. Its strength is that it follows the text’s logic: a sign of God’s faithfulness given in the middle of oppression, not after it. Hold it as testimony that deserves serious attention, and keep it distinct from the passage it applies.

The third test is ownership. Can Black Christians claim this story as their own without making it a story for one group? McCaulley’s answer is that everyone outside Israel arrives at it as a newcomer. Italians and Ethiopians stand on the same footing. That frees a Black reader from the idea that Christmas is someone else’s tradition on loan. It also keeps the reader from turning it into a private possession.

Rest in it: a week ordered by Bethlehem

McCaulley describes the church calendar as a way of letting Jesus set the shape of time: “instead of ordering our lives according to the secular events, either now or in the past, we’re ordering our days and weeks and months and years according to Jesus.” This practice does the same thing on a small scale for seven days. It takes about ten minutes a day.

• Morning, three minutes. Say the seven catechism questions aloud and answer them from memory. On days one through four, also read one of the four passages from the section above, in order. On days five through seven, read Luke 1:46-55 aloud.
• During the day, one act. Give honor to one person the day is likely to pass over. The person could be a cashier, a custodian, a quiet student or an elderly neighbor. Learn their name, thank them specifically, or give them unhurried attention. The point is to take part in God’s guest list, not to make a show of it.
• Evening, five minutes. Write two short lines. In the first, name one place today where it looked as if “Jerusalem” was deciding everything: a headline, a boardroom, a person with power over you. In the second, name one place where you saw something small that the story says matters more.

On one day of the week, add a harder step if you are willing. Like Mary going to Elizabeth, bring one real burden to a believer you trust and ask them to pray with you. This is an invitation, not a requirement. If you are carrying something heavy, such as grief, depression or the weight of racial harm, the story’s pattern points toward people. That can include a pastor, and it can include a trained counselor. Seeking that help is not a failure of faith.

On day seven, return to the catechism answer you marked as hardest to believe. Read your evening lines from the week. Did anything you saw make that answer more believable, less believable, or simply clearer?

Questions for conversation

For groups, these work best at the second gathering, after the week of practice. Let people answer from their own experience of the practice, and allow anyone to pass. Some participants will have painful reasons to find these scenes hard. The facilitator’s job is to keep the room honest and unhurried, not to bring everyone to the same conclusion. If the Herod passage turns the talk toward current politics, McCaulley’s own move is useful: ask first what posture the story forms in us before debating any policy.

1. Which catechism answer was hardest for you at the start of the week? Did the week change your relationship to it, and if not, what would?
2. When you made the stable inventory, what surprised you about the second column? How does it compare to the people your church most often puts in front of the room?
3. McCaulley says one miracle can be enough for hope. Is that convincing to you? What is the difference between that kind of hope and wishful thinking?
4. Mary went to someone who knew the Lord. Who in your life plays that role? If no one does, what keeps that from happening?
5. How did your evening “Jerusalem and Bethlehem” lines shift over the week, if at all? Did you get better at seeing the small thing, or did the large things keep crowding it out?
6. McCaulley’s reading of the Black church as the promised child is an analogy. Where does it fit the story of Zechariah and Elizabeth well, and where would you want to be careful with it?

After the week

Keep one line of the catechism past this season, whichever one the practice made most real to you. Say it on an ordinary Tuesday in March, when no one is singing carols and the news has its usual weight. That is the test of whether the story has become ground to stand on: it holds in a month that does not feel like Christmas, in a town nobody is watching.