This Advent and Christmas the “little town” of Bethlehem is eerily and ominously still. As the Rev. Munther Isaac, pastor of Christmas Lutheran Church in Bethlehem, writes in this year’s Kairos Palestine Christmas Alert 2023, “Christmas celebrations are cancelled this year in Bethlehem. There will be no tree lighting, no street parades, and no festivals. It is not possible to celebrate or rejoice when our families and people in Gaza are being massacred and ethnically cleansed. This is a time of mourning. This is a time of lament. The Empire has crushed our lives, homes, hopes, and dreams.”

In a time when “things are far from normal,” as the introduction to the Christmas Alert asserts, “even the so-called 'normal' of a people under a brutal occupation,” how does one worship with integrity? How does one honor the need for lament, naming clearly the current reality of genocide and ethnic cleansing, while also embracing the incarnation of God as a babe, born in solidarity with those suffering, those oppressed, as the good news it is? This season’s nativity scene at Christmas Lutheran Church offers a visual response. 

As Rev. Isaac describes in an Al Jazeera interview, the keffiyah swaddled baby Jesus born under the rubble is a “message to the world that this is what Christmas looks like in Palestine . . . children being pulled from under the rubble, families being displaced with their homes destroyed.” That message is a reminder of the relevancy of the Christmas narrative in this time. Jesus, the Prince of Peace, was also born under occupation, in an empire that brutalized and tortured. Within days of his birth, Mary and Joseph fled for their lives, now refugees forcibly displaced, when Herod, the ruler of his day, ordered a massacre of innocents. Our worship needs to recognize and name these common themes; they will preach.

This is a time to remember and remind others that Jesus was born into a world enthralled by violence, as ours continues to be today. Throughout his ministry, Jesus challenged and threatened empire’s harsh and oppressive ‘matrix of control’ with his unequivocal call for peace. “Blessed are the peacemakers.” To be sure, his message of nonviolence was unnerving to the powers-that-power, the merchants of death, then, as it is now. Their response? To ignore, ridicule, resist and/or vilify. But nonviolence is precisely the revolutionary message that we as people of faith are mandated to proclaim with our lives, in word and, more importantly, in deed.

Palestinian Christian leaders are emphatic about this mandate. As they wrote in their recent Call to Repentance, an open letter to Western church leaders and theologians, Palestinian Christians are “fully committed to the way of Jesus in creative nonviolent resistance, which uses ‘the logic of love and draw[s] on all energies to make peace.” Their plea to western Christians? “To come alongside us in this.”

We come alongside when we ground ourselves, with the roots of our faith sunk deep, in Jesus’ way of nonviolent love. We come alongside when we renounce and denounce violence and challenge warmongers. Today, that requires speaking the truth of nonviolent love to our own leaders, President Biden and almost all members of Congress, who still refuse to call for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza and continue to provide obscene levels of military aid to Israel and to supply weapons for its genocidal violence. We come alongside when we stand in solidarity with the oppressed and advocate with relentless persistence for justice. 

In this witness, may we find inspiration from these Palestinian children from the Ramallah Friends School. With new words put to the tune of The Little Drummer Boy, they sing on behalf of the children of Gaza: “We want love, life, and justice. We will create it with our own hands no matter what. We will build our country after destruction, home after home. We are determined.” May we be so determined.

Reflection by the Rev. Allie Perry