Rebirth in Bethlehem
Every year on Christmas Eve, we take a trip to Bethlehem in our imaginations as we hear the nativity stories once again. We journey back to the Bethlehem of over 2000 years ago, through a Christmas pageant, Bible readings, the carols sung - reliving a past which still lives in the present tense, inspiring in people’s hearts a sense of hope and joy that a new birth is always possible.
Tonight’s story also takes us on a reflective pilgrimage to Bethlehem, following the steps of the exhausted travellers, Joseph and a very pregnant Mary, heading to Bethlehem to register their family in the census. This is no vacation jaunt to the old hometown. Caesar Augustus has spoken; everybody has to register in the town of their ancestry. In Pieter Bruegel’s painting The Numbering at Bethlehem, one has to search hard to find Mary and Joseph among the village folk crowding into town. They have faded into the anonymity of the powerless. They are faceless nobodies under the boot of an uncaring Empire. There’s a sense of fright and oppression in the air: first, Mary and Joseph are refused shelter, then find a place in a stable, and hear their first child’s cry of birth break the silent night in their tiny, animal-scented refuge.
I see this beloved Christmas story, this particular scene of the nativity story, from the perspective of people on the move, engaging in migration, relocation and dislocation. I boarded a flight to Canada from Korea in 2006, just a few days before Christmas, carrying my passport and my seven-month-old son. My partner, Min Goo, had already arrived in Vancouver to find us a home before we joined him. Our first home in Canada was a small apartment on a street near a big shopping mall; our first Christmas in Canada had the same sense of dislocation that Mary and Joseph must have felt.
When I was young, Christmas meant going to Christmas Eve service with my parents. My father taught my brother and I how to show our adoration to the baby Jesus, lifting us up to his shoulders as he approached the nativity scene set up beside a Christmas tree at the church, to look into it carefully and appreciate the small figures in it. He would say, “There’s a story.”, as he taught us what their hands, body language and faces could tell us about the night of Jesus’ birth. The little figures of Mary, Joseph, Jesus, shepherds, lambs, cows, angels all looked very calm and still. I tried to study their faces and hands, yet, to me, they were no more than delicately made porcelain dolls or wooden miniatures. They didn’t tell me a story. They didn’t move. They were keeping their warm, yet still peace, like Jesus on the Cross, hung at the front of the church, or the statue of Mary which greeted me every time I entered the sanctuary. To me, that Christmas Eve scene was as if the big statues became the small figures in the nativity - they looked the same as each other, different from me- they all had the faces of ‘Westerners.’: pretty faces, long eyelids, high nose, pink cheeks. I contemplated the still peace they made: What stories are they telling me?
I still wonder what the Christmas story can teach us. Like Mary and Joseph moving to Bethlehem for their family’s registration according to the Emperor’s decree, people in our world often struggle to find their place, their purpose. They protect their family. They move. They go. They relocate themselves, or are forcibly relocated. Dislocation is very much a part of human history globally, in our world, right now. People are forced to leave their homes by war, occupation, violence, injustice inflicted on their lives. We think of Mary and Joseph as people whose lives were made perfect by the birth of Jesus, but Mary and Joseph and the infant Jesus were refugee themselves when they left the Bethlehem they had just settled into to flee to Egypt in order to protect their son from the schemes of the murderous Herod.
Taking a pilgrimage to Bethlehem through stories helps us to contemplate the deep realities of our lives and of our world – reflecting on both the light and the darkness, hope and suffering, resistance and oppression – the context of all people and the context of the birth of Jesus. We learn why we need to hope, learn that ‘hoping’ and ‘anticipating’ for a new birth can live in the present tense, right here, right now.
When I was young, Bethlehem was simply a small town where Jesus was born in a fairy-tale-like story, coloured by the angel’s and the shepherds’ joy, resounding with thundering praise from the heaven by a multitude of heavenly host, with a mysterious and solitary star that guides the three Kings. Bethlehem was the place where all the mysteries happened, leading to the birth of the holy child that takes us on a journey that will change us from the inside out.
We all journey to a Bethlehem of our own. A pilgrimage of heart and mind is involved as we hold this night in silence and adoration. Bethlehem is multi-dimensional; the Bethlehem of over 2000 years ago and of 2014 co-exist as we open our eyes and hearts to the struggle of the Palestinians, cast into darkness by the separation walls that cast long shadows upon their lands. Bethlehem is the symbol of any place which is in need of rebirth, an impregnation of hope and vital peace. The Christmas story carries sorrow as well as joy, telling us of the darkness in humanity as well as the divinity that is born among us as an infant, the purest and most innocent form of humanity. Tonight, may our Christmas story open our hearts to a journey of rebirth in Bethlehem; may it inspire us to throw open the gates of that little town for all to enter in.
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