This has been a special, holy project at a particularly horrifying time in history.
As the world has watched the mass slaughter in Gaza and the escalating violence in the region, many people have been asking, “Where is God?” And our brother Rev. Dr. Munther Isaac offered the world an answer—God is in the rubble.
At the heart of the Christian faith is the deeply held conviction that God is with us—God is with the grieving parents in Gaza holding the limp bodies of their babies. God is with all those who suffer violence and feel the crushing foot of empire. It is something we remember in a particular way this season of Christmas—Emmanuel, God is with us.
The coming of Christ—and the way Christ comes—is the most profound act of divine solidarity the world has ever seen. God leaves all the comfort of heaven to join the struggle here on earth.
Of all the ways God could enter the world, God came to us as a baby born in the middle of a genocide. The Gospel of Matthew tells of a terrible massacre that occurred, an unspeakable act of violence as King Herod slaughters children throughout the land, hoping to kill Jesus, which the Church remembers as the massacre of the “Holy Innocents.”
Let this sink in as you read this devotional. The Savior of the world comes to us a refugee, born in an occupied land in the middle of a genocide. The Messiah is a brown-skinned, Palestinian Jew from a town called Nazareth from which people said “nothing good can come.”
From the cradle to the grave, Jesus felt the pain of the human condition. Indeed, if we believe the Bible is true, then Jesus felt the heaviness of the world in such a crushing way that even He asked, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” God felt the absence of God. That’s how close God is to the pain. And yet the Christ-story is the story of the triumph of God’s love over sin and evil and violence and all the principalities and powers of this world.
This Christmas we are grieving the mass slaughter in Gaza and the escalating violence in the region. Over half of the more than 44,000 confirmed deaths in Gaza are women and children. The age group with the most deaths is 5 to 9 years old. Every Palestinian life is just as precious as any other life, just as holy and made in the image of God.
There are people who say, “All we can do is pray.” And that’s not true. We can pray and we must. But we can also organize and boycott and march and participate in direct action. In the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., “Those who love peace must learn to organize as effectively as those who love war.”
As we pray through this season, let us ask, “Lord, what else would you have me do?” For we know that faith without works is dead. Sometimes we are waiting on God to act, and God is waiting on us to act. Let the words of this prayer book move you to action.
So this IS a prayer book. But it is also a call to action. It is a manifesto of love and justice, centering the voices of Palestinian Christians. They remind us of the deep roots of our faith that lie in the Holy Land, where so many unholy things are happening right now. And they remind us that Jesus was born in Bethlehem, in the West Bank, in the middle of a genocide.
May we have the courage to follow Christ, the Prince of Peace, in a world that continues to live by the sword and die by the sword. There is another way. It is the way of Christ, the refugee Savior born in Bethlehem.
Shane Claiborne
Red Letter Christians
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