He Was Called Jesus

This episode begins with Luke 2:15–21, the brief scene where shepherds hurry to Bethlehem, Mary treasures their witness, and the community names the child Jesus eight days after his birth. From there, the reflection traces three movements in the text: the poor as first witnesses, Mary as the living archive of Christ, and naming as an act of allegiance rather than branding. To be called “Christian” in the early church was to break with empire, not to belong comfortably to it. The episode then unpacks how empire inverted that naming. Over centuries, the Holy Name that once protected the vulnerable was nailed to banners, detention regimes, and state churches. The “Jesus” of imperial Pisces becomes a counterfeit Christ who blesses whiteness, respectability, and national power. In our own moment, that inversion lives on in Christian nationalist prayers that cover border cages and police violence, and in quieter systems where databases and algorithms decide who is “high risk,” “inadmissible,” or “unsafe to platform.” Against that backdrop, the digital posadas return. Mary and Joseph are rejected on Christmas Eve in a nation that calls itself Christian, arrested by ICE while Mary is in labor, and their child is treated as a prop and thrown away in a trash bin. An unhoused elder black man finds the infant, and on the feast of the Holy Name, in a crowded subway no one is watching, he names the child Elian. The reflection reads Elian as antimessiah to the counterfeit Christ of the Piscean age and as a sign of messiah for Aquarius, where salvation comes through a web of ordinary people who refuse to walk past the bin, refuse to falsify the record, and refuse to let algorithms bury the truth. The synthesis presses a simple question into the new year: when systems are busy assigning labels to children of color, migrants, queer and trans youth, survivors, and whistleblowers, which god do those names serve. The episode calls listeners to reclaim naming as sacred work in a datafied world: learning real names at the margins, recording harms honestly, resisting the sanitizing language of “policy” and “safety,” and letting Elian haunt the Church into recognizing Jesus again in the ones empire discards. Protected Speech | Views My Own Between Bread and Stone © 2025 Stephen Brewer. All rights reserved. Podcast audio and full text may be quoted for noncommercial purposes with attribution. Gospel text from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved. Get full access to Drawing the Line at percival84.substack.com/subscribe