O Little Town of Bethlehem

[catherine]

I was listening to Christ Hedges' interview with Rev. Munther Isaac, who is the pastor at the Evangelical Lutheran Christmas Church in Bethlehem (the real one in Palestine) and the Lutheran Church in Beit Sahour. Like many, many Christian churches all over the world, his church has a creche:

christ in the rubble.jpg

Christ in the rubble, not a bed of straw. What a powerful symbol. I don't know how anyone attending Christmas Eve services can sing O Little Town of Bethlehem this year without thinking about the irony and contradiction of the song's lyrics "...how still we see thee lie" and the hell hole the town is currently in the midst of.

Isaac says in the podcast: "I think many times we forget the actual circumstances in which Jesus was born. We make it a romantic story, forgetting that, in essence, the vocabulary of that story is a refugee family, a tyrant, a massacre, taxation. These are all terminologies that we don't usually associate with the Christmas story, but to us here in Palestine, they actually make the story, as we read it in the Gospel, very much a Palestinian story, because we can identify with the characters. And so the message to me was clear—if Jesus was born today in our world, he would be born in Gaza under the rubble as a sign of solidarity with the oppressed. Just as Jesus was born 2,000 years ago among an occupied community, a community that is under the yoke of a ruthless empire, in circumstances in which children were massacred. And interestingly, sadly, out of all places, they escaped to Egypt in the very same way today people from Palestine, from Gaza, escape into Egypt. So we see it's the same story. That's what I tried to emphasize."

It's discouraging to see how nothing much has changed in 2000 years. Or maybe it has, but it has all just come full circle again. I do believe and have faith in Christ's message, but not in the way it has been twisted.

If our church has O Little Town of Bethlehem as part of the service Christmas Eve, I'm going to silently boycott. The words would stick in my throat if I tried to sing it.

[KayLR]

I appreciate this, Catherine. It's not lost on me. All is not calm, all is not bright.

[happystuff]

Well put, Kay. I agree "all is not calm, all is not bright".

[Tybee]

Yes, it's not. I always thought that song was about the contrast, with the birth being the one still shining place in the center of the world. Words like "dark streets" and "hopes and fears" represented the chaos around the center. So we are attempting to see beyond the darkness and chaos to the miracle of the Christ child.