Monthly Archive for December, 2008

Who is this Jesus who will be born to us tomor­row? Is he a Jew? An Israelite of the House of David? Born of a vir­gin? Born in a sta­ble? The rea­son for the season?

Try­ing to define Jesus in a few words of a phrase seems a dis­ser­vice to the man I claim I try to fol­low. So, let me tell you what I do know. Though every child is a mir­a­cle, Jesus was the most miraculous.

He will come to us tomor­row, a help­less new­born child.

Are we ready to receive him?

In the days before and fol­low­ing Christ­mas, Nazareth Vil­lage puts on a Christ­mas play.  It is staged in the first cen­tury build­ings and gives vis­i­tors a feel for what it may have looked like at that time.  In this play I have been given the role of the Angel Gabriel.  In the lines that the nar­ra­tor reads lead­ing up to my entrance she talks about the Angel Gabriel who appears to Mary in Nazareth.  When I hear this, I always think about how strange it is that I am actu­ally in Nazareth in a first cen­tury recre­ation of Nazareth town act­ing out the part of an angel appear­ing to Mary who lived here at the time. And yet, real­iz­ing this has never really made me feel more Christ­massy about the whole thing. Shouldn’t one feel closer to Jesus in Beth­le­hem or Nazareth par­tic­u­larly when sur­rounded by 1^st cen­tury repli­cas? Many I talk to who visit this part of the world do not feel closer to Jesus here while there are those who most def­i­nitely do feel his pres­ence more strongly here than other places.

Fam­ily tra­di­tions sur­round­ing Christ­mas have always been very impor­tant to me for cre­at­ing the “feel” of Christ­mas. It is also a time for fam­ily in my view and so being away from fam­ily does make it more dif­fi­cult for me per­son­ally feel fes­tive about Christ­mas. How­ever, at the same time I am soak­ing up the oppor­tu­nity to be part of a new cul­ture and new tra­di­tions while devel­op­ing a new fam­ily of rela­tion­ships. I am not feel­ing sorry for myself at all, I am just observ­ing that Christ­mas is really about tra­di­tion and fel­low­ship for me per­son­ally and so the part I play in expe­ri­enc­ing Christ­mas here is really the part of an observer.

What I have appre­ci­ated about Christ­mas here is the lack of adver­tise­ment and gen­eral mate­ri­al­is­tic hype lead­ing up to Christ­mas.  I under­stand that there is more of this hype in Beth­le­hem itself but again doesn’t com­pare the hol­i­day sea­son splen­dor in North Amer­ica.  So what is the mean­ing of Christ­mas? Let’s con­sider the first Christ­mas of Jesus’ birth in the time of Herod’s rule and a time under gen­eral Roman occu­pa­tion. What is strik­ing is the con­trast of a sim­ple sta­ble scene, of sim­ple shep­herds in the fields, a sim­ple young woman, all tak­ing part in some­thing that would become a new way of look­ing at the word “king­dom”. So per­haps I should reeval­u­ate my low key Christ­mas this year and con­sider myself closer to the mean­ing of Christ­mas in its very sim­plic­ity and in the prox­im­ity to the atmos­phere of oppres­sion and empire that would have existed at the time of Jesus.

What has become very clear to me is this –I do not care if Mary was or was not eter­nally a vir­gin, or if the three wise men came when Jesus was three or one year old or if Jesus was born in this cave or that stone house.  What does mat­ter is that in the humil­ity and simul­ta­ne­ous coura­geous author­ity of his fel­low­ship and shar­ing with peo­ple, Jesus shat­tered the pre­con­ceived soci­etal norms, loved those who seemed unlov­able to oth­ers and pointed them toward God while open­ing their eyes to see beyond their imme­di­ate polit­i­cal and reli­gious envi­ron­ment. The divine Son of God came to live as a per­son among peo­ple, eat­ing with them, suf­fer­ing with them and ulti­mately offer­ing a free­dom from the dom­i­nance of empire, social repres­sion, and reli­gious elit­ism not through escape from these real­i­ties but through inti­mate knowl­edge with them and the capac­ity to see beyond in cer­tain hope.  The free­dom he offered was a king­dom we have part in that has come and is still com­ing and is one that offers free­dom through the promise of an eter­nal life that will never be cap­tured, boxed, and sold in bite-sized pack­ages. Can Chris­tian­ity today claim that it does the same?

Some­thing I’ve been think­ing about a lot lately is The Future. In April, if all goes well, I will grad­u­ate and then I will be able to add two let­ters to my name. After that, what? I remem­ber when I was fin­ish­ing up at Water­loo I strug­gled to decide if I should serve with MCC or go to grad school. I guess in the end I some­how felt that MCC was the right deci­sion at that time. You could say I heard God call­ing me to Nicaragua, although I never heard any­thing explic­itly telling me where I should go and what I should do.

Now I wait to hear God’s call again. This is chal­leng­ing. In life I like things that are fin­ished, that are clear. (In Myers-Briggs I’m a J). Maybe if I break it down it will be eas­ier to under­stand? Here goes. Now. In this moment, at this time, I am writ­ing essays. I am try­ing fran­ti­cally to fin­ish every­thing in my life this week and enjoy my Christ­mas hol­i­days. I wait. Wait­ing. This seems to be a theme lately in my life. Maybe Advent could teach me to be a bet­ter wait-er. Maybe I can learn the les­son this Advent? To hear. This implies some kind of sound. God’s call. How do we know that we heard God’s call? What does it sound like? It is just a release of anx­i­ety? Because those never last very long for me. Again. If I heard it once before, shouldn’t I be able to hear it again. Each part is now under­stood. How hard can it be to live?

“When ele­phants fight, it is the grass that gets tram­pled” says an African proverb.  This say­ing is often applied to a sit­u­a­tion where ten­sions between polit­i­cal pow­ers result in suf­fer­ing of the unin­volved com­mu­ni­ties of peo­ple at the grass roots level. Here I am, in Nazareth, in a part of the world where this proverb can so aptly be applied and yet I find myself los­ing track of who the ele­phants are and who the grass is. Don’t mis­un­der­stand what I’m saying…I am a typ­i­cal social jus­tice type Men­non­ite in my beliefs about injus­tices and the wall here in Israel/Palestine etc.  And if I label the sit­u­a­tion as “com­pli­cated” per­haps I will suf­fer the wrath of those who would say it a sim­ple mat­ter of lob­by­ing one’s gov­ern­ment because it is clearly the gov­ern­ments who can make the dif­fer­ence if they would only change their policies.

A story recently came out about a Jew­ish “museum of tol­er­ance” planned to be built on a Mus­lim grave­yard site in Jerusalem. The irony of the sit­u­a­tion is ratio­nal­ized away by lan­guage about rights, Jerusalem’s space issues, and the fact that the entire city is prob­a­bly built on bones anyway.

But if you remove your­self from the sit­u­a­tion for just a moment (which is dif­fi­cult to do when you live here) you real­ize how ludi­crous the ratio­nale is and yet this is the very ratio­nale that most gov­ern­ments base their action on when it comes to sit­u­a­tions of “injus­tice”.  In the first cen­tury when the Jews of Nazareth were being oppressed by the occu­py­ing Roman gov­ern­ment, they looked for a leader/or lead­ers who might lead them to some­thing that they under­stood as jus­tice.  Then when a 30+ year old Jesus stood up in the syn­a­gogue in Nazareth to read from the scroll of Isa­iah and when he so elo­quently took pas­sages from Isa­iah 61 and 58 all talk­ing about free­dom from oppres­sion, those gath­ered in the syn­a­gogue were elated! Yes finally, some­one who under­stood their sit­u­a­tion and would lead them, by the power of all those amaz­ing things they had heard he did in towns sur­round­ing them, to free­dom and justice.

Jesus turned the sit­u­a­tion on its head, ques­tioned the faith of those gath­ered and talked about a free­dom and a ful­fill­ment that did fit the demands of those gath­ered in the syn­a­gogue. In response to the sug­ges­tion that his min­istry and God’s mes­sage was for all – Jew and Gen­tile – those gath­ered were ready to kill Jesus (see Luke chap­ter 4:16–30).

Jesus has always sym­bol­ized the third way to Anabap­tists and this story in the syn­a­gogue in Nazareth is yet another exam­ple of how he so cre­atively and provoca­tively achieved this.  How would he cre­atively and provoca­tively find a third way today in Israel/Palestine? Yes there are polit­i­cal pow­ers who are clearly ele­phants but then there are other ele­phants who pose as grass and grass that abuses power like an ele­phant would. The sit­u­a­tion how­ever, is not more com­pli­cated than it is has ever been.  How did Jesus nav­i­gate the crazi­ness of his con­text? He sim­ply lived, chal­lenged the sta­tus quo in love of those who he came into con­tact with and that in itself was some­how rev­o­lu­tion­ary enough to get him killed. Sim­ply the integrity and truth of his being was enough to chal­lenge the pow­ers and enough to com­fort and encour­age the oppressed at the same time.

It’s a para­dox that I con­tin­u­ally strive to under­stand but risk mak­ing more com­pli­cated than it need be in my search to uncover it.