"God is under the rubble"

some thoughts on the Christmas season

“We’ve been glued to our screens, seeing children pulled from under the rubble day after day. We’re broken by these images,” said the Rev. Munther Isaac, the pastor at the Evangelical Lutheran Christmas Church (in Bethlehem) ... “God is under the rubble in Gaza, this is where we find God right now.” (quoted from article in New York Times; click on quote to see it)

Image by hosny salah from Pixabay

This year for the first year ever I looked forward to the day the church has traditionally celebrated the Feast of the Holy Innocents, the day that we remember the baby boys under the age of 2 in Bethlehem slaughtered by Herod’s minions, Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted because they are no more. That is because this year, it seemed the most fit way to celebrate the season. This year, one of my closest friends is weeping for her son, lost this summer. This year, we all saw the faces of Gazan children and adults, hopeless, crushed, hurt, confused, lost, on our computer and television screens. The joy of the Christmas season seemed elusive—materialistic and elitist at best. My house is not rubble. My children are hale and healthy. I have a gorgeous live tree that was piled with presents, that still smells of fresh fir. I listened to Jason Mormant’s song Emmanuel with its evocative line “of the wars we made, of the lives we trade. for this desert of prosperity” over and over again, and I mourned. I lamented. I felt like I couldn’t bear it all, and if I couldn’t bear it from across the globe, how could those experiencing it possibly manage?

In the midst of this lament, of this unusually strong tension between “peace on earth goodwill to all” and the terror and grief of war, of loss, my mind kept returning to the story told by Matthew in chapter 2. Emmanuel came to a world that was like our own. Children were slaughtered to help a leader feel more secure in his position; a people’s hope in the future was buried to make other people feel safer in their own future. What has changed? Nothing. And yet Christ was born, and the angels proclaimed their mystifying message of peace on earth. Christmas has always been celebrated in this tension, whether we are personally aware of it or not. The world is not worse this year than it was when God, doing things in a way I would never have thought of and frankly don’t understand at all, came as a baby.

I have long recognized that God’s way are not my ways. I would have wiped out the world and started over—I mean REALLY over—a long time ago. To be completely honest, I wouldn’t have risked free will in the first place. It’s been too abused in ways great and small. And it would never have crossed my mind that the way to reconcile first us to God and then us to each other would be by coming as a baby. I feel that we could have come up with something more efficient—maybe a glimpse of heaven, a warning from those already past. I write this not to blaspheme but to wonder. And some of you may remember the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, where the rich man is convinced that a voice from the dead would change people’s ways, only to be told that he’s wrong. His ways are not our ways, and his understanding is beyond my comprehension, as Isaiah wrote. I know this. And so, even amidst the rubble of Gaza and the West Bank, amongst the slain in Ukraine, amongst the bodies lost to the Mediterranean or the Darien Gap while we turn our backs and clamor for more security and maybe new cushions from Target, I cling to hope.

It may not seem like strong enough to be called hope, but that is what it is—a slender lifeline grasped between sweaty palms, a sense of bedrock underneath flailing feet. God with us—even in the pain and sorrow, and even amongst the sleek and well-fed. God with us in it all—mundane quotidian pains and joys, as well as the deep sorrows that shape our souls. He is with us whether we are facing eviction or simply sighing at rising gas prices. He will not leave us during times when we can afford pedicures and times when we tighten our belts and vow to pay off our credit cards by June, and fail, when we gather all our loved ones around a feast, and when we’re alone staring at empty places in despair. He is there in the rubble, under the rubble. He is in the deepest depths of hell, and the highest heavens cannot contain him. He is Emmanuel.