I learned early in my life that not all Christmas wishes come true. The Montgomery Wards and Sears catalogues had a special place in our home. They were kept until the next edition of the catalogues came out. They were big books. We lived in a rural area where the telephone book was small, not nearly enough to boost a small child at the dinner table. For that job, we needed the catalogues. But when there was no child sitting on them, they could often be found in the hands of the children in our house, pouring over the sections that advertised a wide variety of toys. There were pages and pages of fancy bicycles. There were erector sets with thousands of pieces. I remember one that allowed the recipient to built a ferris wheel. There were train layouts that seemed like they would fill a room. We would sometimes mark the catalogues by circling items and putting our initials next to the pictures just in case Santa needed a reminder of which toys would make our Christmas wishes come true.

Just because a toy was marked, however, did not mean that it would come to our house. There were a lot of children in our house and there were Christmases when money was tight. The airport business slowed in the winter and our parents had to plan carefully to make it to the next busy season when income picked up again.

I have been looking forward to this Christmas for quite some time. We have friends who are in the Middle East this Christmas. The wife received a Fulbright Fellowship to teach and study in the West Bank. The husband is a talented poet who is a superb artist at catching great depth in a few words. They were supposed to be in Bethlehem for Christmas this year and I was looking forward to receiving their reports. At a party celebrating the fellowship and bidding farewell to them for their travels this academic year, I commissioned them to bring us stories of Christmas in Manger Square.

The October attack of Hamas terrorists on October 7 changed all of that. Manger Square, however, is empty of tourists this Christmas. Our friends have been evacuated by Fulbright officials to Amman, Jordan with anew teaching assignment. The Christmas observances in the birthplace of Jesus have been very subdued. Although the most intense fighting has been in Gaza, Palestinians in the West Bank, where Bethlehem is located, have suffered numerous attacks. Army and settlers have killed more than 240 Palestinians in the West Bank, including occupied East Jerusalem. The death toll in Gaza has climbed to over 20,000, including many children and others innocent of participation in attacks against Israel.

04EF0BEE-F35E-40D5-8355-24855FF0168Fhave made it a Christmas practice to look at images of Christmas Eve in Bethlehem since doing so has been made easy by the Internet. We have not been fortunate to travel to the Holy Land and the places reported in the New Testament scriptures, but I’ve poured over maps and images of those places so many times that they somehow seem familiar to me. This year there is an image that sticks in my head. I saw it in a brief video report prepared by BBC news. I couldn’t find a still image, but the image at the top of this journal entry is a screen shot taken from the video. It shows traditional figures of Joseph with a shepherd’s staff and Mary with the infant Jesus in the midst of rubble and barbed wire. I am not sure of the specific location of the scene, but if you look closely, there is a soldier dressed in black with an automatic weapon in the background. Another striking image is of the manger scene at the front of the Lutheran church in Bethlehem, with a scene where the Christ Child is wrapped in black and white, the traditional colors of Palestine, and lying on top of a pile of rubble with traditional creche figures scattered in the rubble.

Bethlehem is in the West Bank, that is Palestine, part of the territory surrounded by but not fully occupied by the modern state of Israel. Jesus was born to Jewish parents during a time of Roman occupation of the territory and the Bible reports that Joseph was of the house and lineage of Bethlehem a place where Palestinians have lived since time immemorial.

The manger scenes and the history that is being played out in the region recalls another passage of scripture from the Gospel of Matthew that follows the report of the visit of the Magi to the infant. It is a quote from the prophet Jeremiah: “A voice was heard in Ramah, wailing and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be consoled, because they are no more.” (Matthew 2:18)

Rev. Munther Isaac of Evangelical Lutheran Christmas Church in Bethlehem, the church where one of the manger scenes depicting the child in the rubble, said, “If Jesus is to be born today, he would be born in Gaza under the rubble in a sign of solidarity with us.” That is what Immanuel means - precisely that he is with us in the midst of our pain and suffering. This is how we understand it, and this is the message of Christmas.”

The devastation in the region is nothing short of apocalypse. Of the more than 20,000 killed in just over two months, more than 7,000 have been children. Bombing and the ground campaign continue to claim more and more victims each day with no let up for the holy observances of the birth of Christ.

The Bethlehem of my imagination, a place of sacred silence in awe of the birth of a child, does not exist this year. In place of the silence is the booming of the guns of war and the cries of parents mourning the deaths of children and of children mourning the deaths of parents.

If Jesus is under the rubble, where are we?

Each time we taste the bread and cup of communion, each time we address our common Creator in the prayer of Jesus, we acknowledge that we are kin with Christians around the world. That includes hundreds of thousands of refugees displaced by war. It includes those who live and worship in Gaza and the West Bank. Our Christmas prayer must include a call to ourselves to do whatever we are able to work for a just peace for all who live in the land we call Holy. There is no peace in Bethlehem this morning. Only weeping wailing and loud lamentation. We stand with those who grieve and recommit to the hard work of building peace in this broken world.