1 – Christmas is canceled

In January 2017, I was hosted by the beautiful and welcoming community of the Christmas Church in Bethlehem. As a Lutheran who is a) not white and b) from a culture whose predominant language is not English, I breathed in the sermon, songs, and sounds of joyful conversations in another language amidst other not-white-Lutherans; joyful sounds in the midst of occupation. I worshiped, I drank tea, I talked to Pastor Mitri Raheb, I read the Lord’s Prayer in Arabic, I marveled at the beauty of the simple sanctuary… a beauty you’d miss was this church in any town in the so-called US, I laughed with the women. I couldn’t stop smiling as I watched, as I participated in the activities of a community held together by the love of mothers, daughters, wives, sisters, believers.

I anguish with them and for them as they experience the deaths of volunteers, family, and fellow Palestinian Christians. Jesus’ faithful followers living in the land of His birth, life, and death – a death at the hands of empire following said empire’s acquiescing to the leaders of a culture that demanded the blood of an innocent as a means of defending their claim to authority over land and people- are now endangered. Another motivator for those who called for Jesus’ death was the preservation of a relationship with the most powerful empire in the world, arguing their protection was dependent upon their intercession of violence.

I anguish amidst the failure of some to learn from history. I weep with those who are experiencing the repetition of history at a scale, speed, and force that would impress the Romans.

I’m centering Palestinians mentally and spiritually. I am extraordinarily blessed I am to spend this time with my family, and so I’ve been talking to them about Gaza and a free Palestine. I’ve been praying for the families lost, made smaller, and still living under occupation. My Jesus, my Lord, is a brown man who, when coming to this earth, was born to an oppressed people in an occupied Palestine. 

I’m not celebrating Christmas. I’m remembering the true reason for the season: a brown-bodied person who brought about hope, love, and liberation that made no sense in the time and place. It makes no sense now in this time …and the same place.

Jesus. A brown-bodied person bringing liberation in every manifestation -spiritual, physical, psychological, all of it- and bringing the sacred to the most profane circumstances. What could be more profane than a land soaked in the blood of innocents trapped in the fires of a hellish genocide? My liberator is a brown man born outside to an unwed teenage mother and adoptive father in an occupied Palestine. 

My Creator made me in that image. For that, I will say an “Aleluya.”