This morning I was down at the Hennepin County Jail to do a Christmas service for folks locked up there. Sadly, we're not able to bring in the Eucharist (yet-- we're working on it) so what we did was sing some Christmas carols, pray, and do the readings from Midnight Mass. The Midnight Mass Gospel is Luke's account of the birth of Jesus, which includes that quotation from an angel saying: "I proclaim to you good news of great joy." The first song we sang was "Joy to the World." But, as I told the folks there, Christmas is not always a season of joy for those of us struggling with life in 2019. I didn't say this, but it is hard for me to see that most of the people who will be in jail on Christmas will experience joy, at least if the joy they're seeking is the joy we're taught to seek-- parties, presents, decorations, Santa Claus and all of that. So my homily talked about what it is about the Incarnation which truly ought to give us joy, despite our circumstances. The first point I made was this--- the fact that God became a human being (a truly incomprehensible fact if you stop to try to understand it) establishes beyond a doubt the dignity we all share as humans. God became one of us. What more needs to be said about our fundamental worth than that! The implications of the fact that we have dignity simply as humans are numerous. Because we have that dignity, we should respect our bodies and our minds. We should do nothing to them, or put nothing in them, that causes harm. We're made in God's image and God became one of us, so let's respect that. Our dignity also means that we can't let other people do to us things they shouldn't do. We deserve better. We can't let ourselves be used or abused. We have dignity-- Godlike dignity-- and that means we don' have to tolerate behavior inconsistent with that. Finally, the fact that we all have dignity as human beings profoundly influences how we must treat others. It affects public policy issues-- like incarceration, the death penalty, abortion, immigration, health care, systemic poverty. It also governs how we must act in our day-to-day affairs. We simply can't let ourselves treat others, even those we dislike or who are our ennemies, with anything other than the respect to which they are entitled. The fact that we have this kind of dignity-- regardless of who we are or what we have done-- is, if we think about it, a cause for great joy. I hoped that message would make time in the jail more tolerable-- can't know if it worked, of course. More on points two and three later.