Category: Holy Days

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advent bible study Holy Days Multifaith Other search markers Unpacking Antisemitism

Addressing Advent Anti-Judaism

Two contemporary paintings side by side. The first is of Isaiah receiving a burning coal to his lips by an angel. The second is the angel appearing before Mary.
"Isaiah" by Richard McBee; "The Annunciation" by Daniel Bonnell

During the season of Advent, Christians traditionally read Luke’s and Matthew’s Nativity stories alongside the book of Isaiah. It makes sense to do so, as Matthew himself makes the connection:

22 Now all of this took place so that what the Lord had spoken through the prophet would be fulfilled:

23 Look! A virgin will become pregnant and give birth to a son,
        And they will call him, Emmanuel. (Matthew 1:22-23)

– Matt 1:22-23, referencing Isaiah 7:14

But when we read Isaiah only in service to our Christian story, we do harm to our Jewish neighbors with whom we share these scriptures. To utilize the Hebrew Bible (= “Old Testament,” the Jewish Bible) solely as a promise fulfilled through Christ is to suggest that these scriptures are incomplete without and dependent upon Jesus — and therefore that Jews’ interpretation of their own Bible is incorrect and irrelevant.

So how do we simultaneously honor our Advent traditions, draw from Isaiah’s wisdom, and respect the vibrant, living faith of our Jewish neighbors?

Dr. Tyler Mayfield provides some excellent options in his 2020 book Unto Us a Son Is Born: Isaiah, Advent, and Our Jewish Neighbors.

The purpose of this post is to share some of the wisdom from Mayfield’s work, and to urge pastors, teachers, and others who help shape the Advent experience for their communities to check out the entire text for even more invaluable commentary.

A photo of Tyler Mayfield, a white man with short graying hair and short gray-brown beard smiling in the woods. To his right is the cover of his book

Contents of Unto Us a Child Is Born:

  • An introduction that, well, introduces the issues with current Christian uses of Isaiah and suggests a bifocal framework as remedy
  • Chapter 1: Using Our Near Vision During Advent
  • Chapter 2: Using Our Far Vision to Love Our Jewish Neighbors
  • The remainder of the chapters delve into each of the Isaiah passages offered by the Revised Common Lectionary for the Advent season.

This post will survey key points from the intro and first two chapters, and close with actionable ways to incorporate Mayfield’s message into Sunday worship and classes. Preachers and teachers will find it immensely helpful to read the rest of the book’s chapters as lesson/sermon preparation for each week of Advent.

The Bifocal Lens

Image of one side of a pair of bifocals, with the smaller, near lens fused in the larger, far lens. A line connects the larger lens to "Far Vision: Openness to our religious neighbors; paying attention to ways we may cause harm." A line drawn from the near lens leads to "Near Vision: Our sense of identity; e.g. worship rituals, cherished hymns"

In order to maintain our Christian traditions without monopolizing the Hebrew Bible, Mayfield recommends a bifocal view:

  • Our near vision focuses on our worship practices and liturgical celebrations, grounding us in our living religious tradition;
  • Our far view pays attention to the ways those practices affect those not in our communities and “compels us to critique and reject some aspects of this tradition, those that are hurtful, inaccurate, and derogatory toward our religious neighbors” (intro).

Using Isaiah and other Jewish scriptures responsibly during worship is not merely a scholarly endeavor; as Mayfield reminds us, reading and interpreting the Bible is a matter of ethics:

[…L]iturgy and ethics are not easily separated. In her excellent and provocative book on racism and sexism in Christian ethics, Traci West notes, “The rituals of Sunday worship enable Christians to publicly rehearse what it means to uphold the moral values they are supposed to bring to every aspect of their lives, from their attitudes about public policy to their intimate relations.” …We want our worship to spur us to live out our ethical claims. (Introduction)

Using Mayfield’s bifocal lens, we can ethically navigate “the tension between identity within a particular faith tradition and openness to the faith traditions of others.”

So what are some of the ways that traditional Advent worship can lead us to do harm to our Jewish neighbors?

Supersessionism

Supersessionism, also called replacement theology, claims that Christianity has replaced or supplanted Judaism; that our covenant through Christ cancels out Jews’ covenant through Abraham and Moses (hence the labeling of the two parts of the Christian Bible as the Old and New Testaments, from the Latin word for covenant).

Synagoga et Ecclasia, two statues on the Notre Dame cathedral representing the Jewish and Christian faiths. This juxtaposition of crowned Church standing strong next to the Synagogue who is “blind to Jesus,” the ten commandments almost falling from her hand, is unfortunately depicted in numerous artworks of Medieval Europe.

Mayfield brings in Susannah Heschel’s description of supersessionism as a “theological colonization of Judaism“; she defines it as:

“The appropriation by the New Testament and the early church of Judaism’s central theological teachings, including messiah, eschatology, apocalypticism, election, and Israel, as well as its scriptures, its prophets, and even its God, while denying the continued validity of those teachings and texts within Judaism as an independent path to salvation.” (Heschel, The Aryan Jesus, 2008)

The seeds that the early church planted have born violent fruit across the centuries. This attitude of judgment and/or pity has led both to ideological violence — “render[ing] Jews invisible or irrelevant or as incomplete Christians” (intro) — and immense physical violence through to the segregation, scapegoating, forced conversions, expelling, and flat-out murder of the Jewish people across multiple continents.1

Medieval painting of figures gathered around a fire on which a book is burning. One person presses a poker onto it, while another person holds up a book to throw it into the fire. There are piles of books around this figure
Detail from Pedro Berruguete’s “Saint Dominic and the Albigensians” (1490s), depicting a Medieval “trial by fire” in which potentially heretical texts were determined to be “false” if they burned.

There are multiple instances of the Talmud — the central text of rabbinical Judaism alongside the Jewish Bible — being likewise gathered and burned across Medieval Europe due to the anti-Jewish belief that the Talmud was the primary obstacle keeping Jews from converting to Christianity. In 1242, for instance, King Louis IX of France ordered the burning of “24 cartloads” — something like 12,000 volumes — of priceless, scribe-written copies of the Talmud. This event devastated France’s Jewish community, which had been one of the seats of Jewish scholarship. Louis also followed up the book burning with a decree to expel all Jews from France: violence against Jewish scripture goes hand-in-hand with violence against Jewish bodies.

All this to say, the views we shape through worship and elsewhere truly do have real-world implications.

Mayfield argues that it is possible — indeed, necessary — to share scriptures respectfully. After all, he says, Judaism and Christianity are siblings.

While Christianity is often envisioned as the “shoot” growing from the dead stump of Jesse in Isaiah 11:1, a child who has improved upon the parent, in reality Judaism and Christianity are more like two branches extending from the same tree. They “grew out of the same milieu,” developing from the religion depicted in the Hebrew Bible during the chaotic era of that first century CE:

While early Jesus followers were formulating an identity distinct from Christ’s Jewish origins, Rome’s 70 CE destruction of the Second Temple spurred on new iterations of Jews’ own religion; following the Pharisees,2 they recentered faith around local life rather than the temple. In this way, the two religions are around the same age, growing from the same foundations! We are sibling religions; and we are neighbors. The problem is that we Christians have frequently behaved as very poor neighbors indeed.

Why Jewish “Neighbors”?

In Isaiah, Advent, and Our Christian Neighbors, Mayfield has opted for the term neighbor to describe the Christian relationship to Jews in the present day. Why? For one thing, love of neighbor is a central tenet of both Jewish and Christian tradition, originating in Leviticus 19:18 and emphasized by Jesus in Mark 12:31 and Matthew 22:39. Reading scripture through the ethic of love thy neighbor, we must ask, “If a particular reading of Scripture leads us to think badly of Jews, then is this reading Christian?” (chapter 2).

Furthermore, Mayfield continues,

I also use the concept of neighbor because neighbors do not always agree. In fact, they sometimes disagree and have to take seriously one another’s perceptions, feelings, and opinions. Being neighborly is being attentive and listening well to the concerns of others. It is realizing that your actions affect those around you. Christians act neighborly when they take seriously Jewish critiques of Christianity and Christian teachings, just as Jews act neighborly when they offer these critiques. (Chapter 2)

In reconsidering how we read and teach scripture, we can imagine that scripture is the fence we share with our Jewish neighbors, even while we dwell in different “geographies.” But when we accept supersessionist theology, we deny Jews their side of the fence; we colonize it.

Let’s look at how supersessionism manifests specifically in the ways we use Isaiah during Advent.

Resisting a Christian Isaiah

Mayfield describes how, over the past two millennia, Christians have disconnected Isaiah from his ancient Jewish context and Christianized him, even going so far as to call this eighth-century BCE prophet’s book the “fifth Gospel” alongside Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John (intro).

ID; ancient mural of Mary on a throne with a young Jesus in her lap. To her right is Peter holding a key. To her left is Isaiah holding a scroll on which the Latin for "Behold, a virgin will conceive and birth a son" is written
The Virgin Mary and Jesus, flanked by Isaiah (right) and Peter (left).

In lifting Isaiah from his seat among Jeremiah, Amos, and all the Hebrew Bible’s prophets, we sever him from his original ancient Jewish audience and deny his relevance to our Jewish neighbors today.

We hear Isaiah (and Handel in his Messiah) proclaim: “For unto us a child is born; unto us a son is given” (Isaiah 9:6) and everything in our tradition preps us to assume that the “us” in question is us Christians; that this child must be Jesus!

In our presumption that Isaiah’s prophecies are all about Jesus, we render this prophet irrelevant to our Jewish neighbors, denying the validity of their interpretations of this biblical book. But if we dig into the historical context, we can broaden our ways of understanding these texts and thus learn how to better share these scriptures.

A Christ-exclusive interpretation of Isaiah misunderstands what biblical prophets did.

We hear the word “prophecy” and think of foreseeing the future, often the distant future. But the prophets of the Bible, from Joel to John the Baptist, were largely focused on their own here-and-now:

The prophets of ancient Israel (and ancient Mesopotamia) did not see their sole activity as foretelling. They were also “forthtellers,” speaking to the religious and political issues of their day with courage and strength. As mediators between God and the people, prophets delivered messages, oracles, and visions to audiences that included kings and commoners. They interpreted the past, analyzed the present, and spoke of the future but were undoubtedly more concerned with events of the present than events several hundred years in the making. …

[T]he notion of prophecy as foretelling renders the prophet’s words irrelevant to, and uninspired for, the first hearers and readers of these messages. (Chapter 1)

There’s another historical issue with reading Isaiah’s prophecies as exclusively about Jesus as his people’s anticipated Messiah:

At the time of Isaiah in the 700s BCE, the concept of the eschatological Messiah had not yet been developed!

While the Hebrew Bible does describe figures like David and Cyrus as anointed ones (which is what the Hebrew word mashiach, “messiah,” means), the concept of The Messiah who would usher in an age of justice and peace was most likely a later development of Second Temple Judaism (516 BCE – 70 CE).

We only see The Messiah in Isaiah’s descriptions of a “Wonderful Counselor…Prince of Peace” (Isaiah 9:6b) and a just judge on whom God’s spirit rests (Isaiah 11:1-10) because of our own bias: “We think we know what we will find before we look” (chapter 1).

Learning about a passage’s original context helps us interpret the text more faithfully as we seek its relevance today. What is more, we can and should consider its multiple historical contexts, the whole breadth of what it has meant for different groups in different eras:

Texts in Isaiah have an entire history of interpretation, which includes the “originating” context in ancient Israel, their reuse and interpretation in Second Temple Judaism perhaps, their Christian context in which some Isaiah texts became christological, the Jewish context in which some texts became messianic, and then later Christian context, that is, when these texts were attached to Advent.

The book of Isaiah was composed by ancient Israelites over several centuries, from the eighth to the fifth centuries BCE. These authors wrote for their ancient Israelite audiences with no comprehension of later events such as the life of Jesus and the growth of Christianity. Thus, the book of Isaiah does not predict the birth of Jesus. (Chapter 1)

Recognizing the long history of a piece of scripture helps reduce our sense of ownership over the text; we realize that its messages are not for Christians alone, but for faithful Jews and Christians (and Muslims, to an extent) across the millennia and today. This recognition is vital for unpacking biases and beliefs we often don’t even realize we carry deep in our psyches — and that some of the tools we use reinforce.

A Complicit Lectionary?

A key concern Mayfield explores throughout Unto Us a Child Is Born is how the lectionaries we use can guide us towards supersessionist readings during Advent. He focuses on the Revised Common Lectionary (RCL) because of its popularity: Denominations ranging from the UCC to the Roman Catholic Church make use of it; overall, a huge portion of all sorts of Christians (largely in Canada and the USA) use it. 

Mayfield explains that for each Sunday, the ecumenical team that created the RCL selected the Gospel reading first, and then selected an “Old Testament” text (plus a psalm & Acts/epistles/Revelation passage) to complement that Gospel reading.

The theological ramifications of always prioritizing the Gospel in this way include an unbalanced dialogue: If we imagine the readings in conversation with each other, the Gospel always gets to choose the topic; the “Old Testament” only ever gets to respond.

Actionable Ways to Be Good Neighbors

After learning about Advent’s supersessionist pitfalls, you might be tempted simply to drop Isaiah in an effort to avoid the issue entirely. But Mayfield argues that that is a mistake:

We need Isaiah to celebrate Advent. The book’s treasures are too marvelous to set aside as ancient history or consign to another liturgical season. As we begin the liturgical year, we need to hear of swords beaten into plowshares and of barren lands blooming. …To use only the Gospel readings during Advent limits our theological reflections while also insinuating that only those four biblical books are worthy of public reading and proclamation. (Chapter 1)

Instead of ditching Isaiah, Mayfield offers practical suggestions for using the prophet responsibly:

First, we can open readings of Isaiah in church with an explicit statement: “Today we hear words from a book held sacred by both Jews and Christians.” As Mayfield explains, “This simple and accurate statement…compels us to recognize our religious neighbors even as we worship” (chapter 2).

Going further, a preacher can remind congregants that “As Christians, we understand Isaiah through our histories and theologies, but Jews do not read Isaiah this way.”

(My own thought: A pastor can even take time in an Advent sermon to acknowledge some of the history of misusing Jewish scriptures / debunking common presumptions about Isaiah’s role in the Nativity story. A Sunday School teacher has even more space to explore that history and context, and to invite attendees to imagine how Isaiah speaks to us today.)

Beyond simple statements and one-time mentions, Mayfield urges us to commit to always interpreting scriptures through a paradigm of “do no harm” — to “share as good neighbors.”

A key part of this paradigm is an intentional shift from “a more linear approach to the narrative of Scripture (in which we read the biblical books as a progression both in time and in theological depth) to a more back-and-forth conversational approach (in which we allow various texts to speak to one another).” This conversational framework creates space for the Bible’s many voices and refuses to let “New Testament” voices dominate.

An outdoor statue of two women sitting side by side. Both are robed and crowned. One holds a large torah scroll; the other an open Bible. They are smiling and looking at one another's texts.
A new representation of Synagoga et Ecclasia, mutually crowned and learning from each other. Statue by Joshua Koffman for St. Joseph’s University, commissioned in honor of the 50th Anniversary of the Roman Catholic Church’s 1965 Nostra Aetate declaration, which repudiated past anti-Jewish doctrine and actions and called for more respectful relations.

Here’s a longer excerpt from Mayfield describing how to put this paradigm into practice while remaining true to ourselves:

So, how do we, as Christians, continue to affirm one of our central claims of Jesus as the Messiah while also allowing space for the dismissal of that claim? Perhaps we are helped by returning to the tension between identity and openness.

Christians maintain strong identities in the claim of Jesus as the Christ while also remaining open to other visions of the messianic kingdom, thus realizing that the full realm of God has not come. It is vital to our identity to claim Jesus as the Messiah, and we are also open to other formulations of messiah.

One meaningful way forward along this challenging path is not to claim too much: to be careful, considerate, and humble with our messianic notions. For example, instead of holding to a messianic or christological reading of Isaiah as the only valid notion, Christians could admit openly and explicitly that these texts provide some of the necessary elements that will constitute notions of messiahship in first-century Judaism, notions Jesus and his biographers took up and used. However, these texts do not point immediately to Jesus; there is just not a straight line — historically or theologically — between Point A, Isaiah, and Point B, Jesus.

This sort of admission presents real possibilities for neighborly engagement since it ties the Christian claim about Jesus more closely to sacred texts that are used only by Christians. It does not predetermine the meaning of Isaiah for all traditions, but it allows Jews and Christians to interpret Isaiah’s prophecies based on their respective traditions, with neither tradition holding ultimate authority over the biblical text. …We could go even further to say that the Jewish reading is an important and necessary one from which Christians could learn. (Chapter 2)

More Benefits of Interpreting Responsibly!

Ultimately, a paradigm of respect and mutual conversation bears rich fruit not only in our relationship to our Jewish neighbors, but to our own faith. Letting Hebrew Bible texts stand on their own merit opens us to how a given passage speaks to us here and now, rather than limiting its prophecies to a closed loop of prophecy-fulfilled-in-Christ. Mayfield quotes Ellen Davis’ comment that

“We like to keep the frame of reference for prophecy within the ‘safe’ confines of the Bible, by reading prophecy solely as illuminating what has already happened—the birth, life, and death of Jesus Christ—and not allowing it to meddle much in the current lives of Christians” [and Jews!]. (Chapter 1)

We are not called to play it safe; we are called to let scripture breathe, and to welcome in God’s mischievous spirit! Making room for many interpretations, for multiple messages from Isaiah for different times and contexts, liberates scripture to speak to us in new, challenging, relevant ways today.

Doing so also helps us live into the tension of Advent’s dual theological themes: Incarnation and eschatology. As Mayfield notes,

These two foci do not naturally cohere. The emotions invoked by Advent call us to “prepare joyfully for the first coming of the incarnate Lord and to prepare penitently for the second coming and God’s impending judgment.”3 Joy and penitence. …We are pulled in different emotional directions. (Chapter 1)

Churches tend to lean towards the joy — but we can’t ditch the solemnity, can’t “alleviate the tension,” without robbing ourselves of “the incredible richness and grace that result from the annual eschatological collision in the weeks before Christmas.”4

As someone who centers my ministry around breaking binaries, reveling in the in-betweens where God does Their best work, I appreciate this insistence on the “both/and” of penitence and joy — as well as of Isaiah and Matthew/Mark, and of a prophetic message for Isaiah’s time, and Jesus’s time, and for us and our Jewish neighbors today.

Two contemporary paintings side by side. The first is of Isaiah receiving a burning coal to his lips by an angel. The second is the angel appearing before Mary.
“Isaiah” by Richard McBee; “The Annunciation” by Daniel Bonnell

Closing

In Advent, past, present, and future queerly coalesce:

“We have hope in what the incarnation brings to our world each day, even as we hope for the setting right of things with the culmination of history.” (Chapter 1)

Though the details certainly differ, we can thus proclaim that “even though the Messiah has come, we wait with Jews for the ‘complete realization of the messianic age'” and that in this interim time, “it is the mission of the Church, as also that of the Jewish people, to proclaim and to work to prepare the world for the full flowering of God’s Reign, which is, but is ‘not yet’”5 (chapter 2).

This Advent claim “takes the unique identity of Christians seriously as ones who have seen in Jesus our Messiah yet remain open to the fullness of that claim in the future” (chapter 2).

It is possible to shape Advent into a season wherein we don’t perpetuate harm against our Jewish neighbors, but rather grow in our respect for and mutual relationship with them. The remainder of Unto Us a Child Is Born: Isaiah, Advent, and Our Christian Neighbors is overflowing with more knowledge and advice that further enables this aim. I highly recommend checking it out. If you need help obtaining a copy, hit me up.

Have a blessed, pensive, and joyful Advent.

  1. For a thorough history of antisemitism, and how to be in solidarity both with Jews and Palestinians, I highly recommend Safety through Solidarity: A Radical Guide to Fighting Antisemitism. ↩︎
  2. Pharisees were cool, y’all; go learn from the fabulous Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg about what Pharisees believed, how Jesus may have been a Pharisee himself, and the context around the Gospel writers’ negative depictions of them ↩︎
  3. Mayfield’s quoting Gail R. O’Day, “Back to the Future: The Eschatological Vision of Advent” (2008) ↩︎
  4. Mayfield’s quoting J. Neil Alexander, Waiting for the Coming (1993) ↩︎
  5. Mayfield is quoting Mary Boys, Has God Only One Blessing? (2000) ↩︎
Categories
advent Christmas Holy Days LGBT/queer Liturgy Other search markers

Advent/Christmas Resources

Greetings, it’s been a while and Advent is soon upon us!

Black and white linocut of an angel appearing to Mary, who is depicted only in sillhouette but who as an afro hairstyle. She sits on a stoop outside a brick wall. Text above and below reads out the first part of the Hail Mary prayer: Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus.
“Annunciation, 2015” by Ben Wildflower

In Advent, God’s Spirit comes in dreams,
daring us to conceive of impossible things:
that wolf and lamb
might live in harmony;
that the world’s despised
might rise to greatest glory;
that war-torn wastes might bloom
and grow good fruit.
– my writing in Call to Worship 59.1

Then on to Christmas, when we celebrate how (to paraphrase Saint Athanasius) the divine became human so that humans might become divine.

At Christmas, Creation sings a new song;
God’s prophets proclaim good news:
The Word of God
has put on flesh
so that we may put on divinity.
Through Jesus, our newborn brother,
we are adopted into God’s chosen family.
– my writing in Call to Worship 59.1

In preparation for this holy time of the year, I want to share several resources created for Advent / Christmas 2025 that I had the honor of being part of.

First is More Light Presbyterians’ Advent devotional!

This resource offers a ~100 word devotion for every day of Advent. They will be posted daily on MLP’s Instagram and Facebook pages. It’ll also be published all at once in MLP’s monthly newsletter for December; sign up to receive it here.

Next, there’s Unbound’s Trans Advent/Christmas devotional!

Along with an Advent calendar that lists a trans organization or trans activist for each day of the season, Unbound’s devotional provides a reflection by a trans author for every Sunday & special day of Advent & Christmas. It’s a fantastic resource for communities or individuals who are hoping to queer up this season.

Click this readmore for a snippet of my reflection on the second Sunday of Christmas.
Icon of Sophia with rainbow light radiating from her halo; she is androgynous and has wings and a crown.
Sophia illustration by Maria-Tina Karamanlakis

In the beginning, God spoke the Word; and God was the Word; and God was the breath that pushed that Word out into the void to spark life.

In the beginning was Wisdom, flowing forth from God’s mouth to unfurl Herself across the earth, seeking out those who’d welcome Her peculiar gifts.

Starting with Paul, who identified Christ as “the wisdom of God” (1 Cor 1:24), Christians have traditionally connected the Hebrew scriptures’ personified Wisdom — often called Sophia, the Greek word for wisdom — with Jesus. Yet while the Word took on a human body whose features led those present at Their birth to declare, “It’s a boy!”, Wisdom is described — and speaks of Herself — in feminine terms.

Sophia, Woman Wisdom, assigned male at birth! Now that’s a trans story if I ever heard one. […]

And yet…I still default to thinking of Jesus as male. Why, when many of us have expanded our language for God beyond exclusively masculine terms, does it still feel strange — even inappropriate — to speak of the Person of God who is Jesus as she or they?

…It’s the physical body, isn’t it? In many ways, Jesus is as constrained by his (/her/their/zir…) assigned gender as the rest of us.

From birth, we are bombarded by messages telling us that our flesh is our gender — that, as feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir put it, “biology is destiny.” From the moment the Word put on flesh, that flesh (or our assumptions about it, because the Gospels don’t actually tell us much about Jesus’s physical appearance beyond what we can deduce from his circumcision in Luke 2) sealed Their fate: Creator God can exist beyond human labels, and the Spirit is, well, Spirit; but God the Son is a human man.

But trans folk know deep in our bones that biology is not destiny. Trans wisdom cuts through the bonds of the binary’s imposed futures, freeing all of us to imagine new possibilities…and, sometimes, to remember old ones. [… read the full thing here]

Also check out Advent & Christmas liturgy in Call to Worship!

I wrote liturgy based on the Common Revised Lectionary for every Sunday and holy day of Advent 2025 and Christmas 2025/2026.

This liturgy is in many ways more “subtly queer” than Unbound’s devotional, as I wrote it to fit a broader range of contexts and church communities. However, I was delighted by the authorial freedom Call to Worship gave me; along with sticking to inclusive language for people (e.g. saying “siblings” instead of “brothers and sisters”), I was able to employ expansive language and pronouns for God! I also incorporate a lot of liberationist theology, from Ada María Isasi-Díaz’s concept of the Kin-dom of God to prayers emphasizing the goodness of embodied life.

To access all the Advent and Christmas material, you may need to subscribe to Call to Worship. If you are unable to do so, email me at queerlychristian36@gmail.com and I’ll get the material to you.

In the meantime, click this readmore for a sampling.

Fantastically scandalous God,
in being born into human life
you burst through the rigid binary between
worshiper and deity, Creator and creation.
Inspire us to proclaim your astonishing news
wherever we go — not only with words,
but through actions of justice and love.
Push us to prophecy
against hoarding and exploitation;
Empower us to rise up
with oppressed peoples everywhere;
Illuminate our path
as we tend to your poisoned planet,
so that all Creation may feel your embrace through us —
your hands, your feet, your body here on earth. Amen.

TWIBAR’s annual Christmas episode

Every Christmas, The Word in Black and Red podcast puts out an episode featuring the short reflections of largely Christian leftists; I’m one of them! Keep an eye out for the episode on the podcast feed.

digital art of a young Latino couple outside a convenient store in the rain; José is using a payphone while Maria, in a hoodie and visibly pregnant, sits on a toy horse
José y María by Everett Patterson

Other resources

I’m not part of these, but I always recommend the following resources:

  • Enfleshed – spiritual nourishment for collective liberation
  • A Sanctified Art – especially the illustrations they offer for Advent and for Christmas
  • I can’t recommend Cole Arthur Riley’s writings enough; check her out @blackliturgies on Instagram, Facebook, etc.

What about you? What are your favorite liberationist resources for Advent and Christmas?

Categories
Holy Days Hymns Other search markers

“Holy, Holy, Holy” revised

The deep black of space with several pinpricks of stars, with a nebula centered, glowing diaphanous shades of pink

Scroll lower to view reasons for revision + downloadable sheet music.

Unaltered lines are in light gray; altered lines are in black.

Holy, holy, holy!
Lord God Almighty
Early in the morning our song shall rise to thee
Holy, holy, holy!
Justice wed to mercy,
God in three persons, blessed Trinity!

Holy, holy, holy!
All the saints adore thee,
Casting down their golden crowns around the glassy sea.
Cherubim and seraphim,
falling down before thee,
Who was and is and evermore shall be.

Holy, holy, holy!
Sacred darkness cloaks thee,
Granting us mere glimpses of thine untold Mystery.
Still, thine image shows thee
in each human body:
Thou art our breath, our love and artistry.

Holy, holy, holy,
Although almighty,
Thou stripped off omnipotence to share our frailty.
Only Thou are holy,
yet thou chose the lowly —
With the despised, there shall thy Spirit be.

Holy, holy, holy!
God of the lowly!
All thy works shall praise thy name
In earth and sky and sea
Holy, holy, holy!
Justice wed to mercy,
God in three persons, blessed Trinity!

Reasons for Revision

This hymn by Anglican archbishop Reginald Heber (1783–1826) is a lovely piece of pure adoration of the Triune God. My personal appreciation of it centers on how it spans centuries — published the year Heber died, it’ll be two hundred years old next year! — and traditions:

I grew up singing it in Catholic Mass; I sing it now in a Presbyterian church; and I enjoy queer musician Sufjan Stevens’s cover of it. Heck, even the non-Trinitarian Latter Day Saints/Mormons sing it (altering “God in three persons, blessed Trinity” to “God in His glory, blessed Deity”). Thus when we sing this song we do so together not only with “cherubim and seraphim,” but with a vast cloud of human witnesses.

To better encapsulate the hymn’s expansive nature, and to infuse it with key concepts from liberationist theologies, I have revised parts of it with several goals:

  • To move from an emphasis on God’s “might” to God’s solidarity and abiding Presence.
  • To remove an instance of patriarchal language (“sinful man”).
  • To move from an equation of darkness and sightlessness with sinfulness (“Though the darkness hide thee / though the eye of sinful man thy glory may not see”) into an appreciation for the thick darkness — Hebrew עֲרָפֶל arafel — from which God guided the liberated Hebrews.
  • ^ That stanza on God’s hiddenness is the part of the hymn I changed most — I ended up turning it into two stanzas! Refocusing that hiddenness around Mystery rather than sin, and taking the opportunity that afforded me to explore how the Trinity chooses to relate to humanity in the Imago Dei, in the Incarnation, and through the Holy Spirit.

I am thankful to Dr. Matt Webb for his input on my revisions. If you notice anything more to change up in this hymn, let me know!

Sheet Music

Categories
bible study Current Events / Activism easter Holy Days LGBT/queer Queer Lectionary Reflections for worship services

Today is Easter Sunday. Today is Trans Day of Visibility. Today is day 176 of genocide.

This year the lectionary gives us Mark’s account of the Resurrection, with its fearful cliffhanger ending — an empty tomb, but Jesus’s body missing. And isn’t that unresolved note fitting?

In the face of so much suffering across the world, it feels right to be compelled to sit — even on this most jubilant of days — with the poor and disenfranchised in their continued suffering.

Mark’s account:

Just days before, the women closest to Jesus witnessed him slowly suffocate to death on a Roman cross. Now, now trudge to his tomb to anoint his corpse — and find the stone rolled away, his body gone. A strange figure inside tells them that Jesus is has risen, and will reunite with them in Galilee.

They respond not with joy, but trembling ekstasis — a sense of being beside yourself, taken out of your own mind with shock. They flee.

The women keep what they’ve seen and heard to themselves — because their beloved friend outliving execution is just too good to be true. When does fortune ever favor those who languish under Empire’s shadow?

A painting in a style resembling stained glass of three women standing over a coffin, which is empty except for strips of white and yellow linen. The women's hands are raised in confusion and shock.
“The Empty Tomb” by He Qi.

Love wins, yet hate still holds us captive.

I’m grateful that Mark’s resurrection story is the one many of us are hearing in church this year. His version emphasizes the “already but not yet” experience of God’s liberation of which theologians write: Christians believe that in Christ’s incarnation — his life, death, and resurrection — all of humanity, all of Creation is already redeemed… and yet, we still experience suffering. The Kin(g)dom is already incoming, but not yet fully manifested.

Like Mark’s Gospel with its Easter joy overshadowed by ongoing fear, Trans Day of Visibility is fraught with the tension of, on the one hand, needing to be seen, to be known, to move society from awareness into acceptance into celebration; and, on the other hand, grappling with the increased violence and bigotry that a larger spotlight brings.

The trans community intimately understands the intermingling of life and death, joy and pain.

When we manage to roll back the stones on our tombs of silence and shame, self-loathing and social death, and stride boldly into new, transforming and transformative life — into trans joy! — death still stalks us.

We are blessedly, audaciously free — and we are in constant danger. There are many who would shove us back into our tombs.

An art piece structured like a collage featuring an elegant figure wreathed in fire, with text around them reading "& like any goddexx you are scorned & become the fire anyway." The figure is pouring pitchers of water into a pool at their feet; green hills with various flowers stretch up around the pool.
Art by Amir Khadar, based off the poem “litany in which you are still here” by kiki nicole

And of course, the trans community is by no means alone in experiencing the not-yet-ness of God’s Kin(g)dom.

Empire’s violence continues to overshadow God’s liberation.

The women who came to tend to their beloved dead initially experienced the loss of his body as one more indignity heaped upon them by Empire. Was his torture, their terror, not enough, that even their grief must be trampled upon, his corpse stolen away from them?

The people of Gaza are undergoing such horrors now. Indignity is heaped on indignity as they are bombed, assaulted, terrorized, starved, mocked. They are not given a moment’s rest to tend to their dead. They are not permitted to celebrate Easter’s joy as they deserve. They are forced to break their Ramadan fasts with little more than grass.

Photo of a blanket set with bowls of grass soup and slices of lemon
A photo of a Palestinian family’s meal, taken in Gaza.

Those of us who reside in the imperial core — as I do as a white Christian in the United States — must not look away from the violence our leaders are funding, enabling, justifying.

We must not celebrate God’s all-encompassing redemption without also bearing witness to the ways that liberation is not yet experienced by so many across the world.

This Easter, I pray for a free Palestine. I pray for an end to Western Empire, the severing of all its toxic tendrils holding the whole earth in a death grip.

I pray that faith communities will commit and recommit themselves to helping roll the stones of hate and fear away — and to eroding those stones into nothing, so they cannot be used to crush us once we’ve stepped into new life.

I pray for joy so vibrant it washes fear away, disintegrates all hatred into awe.

In the meantime, I pray for the energy and courage to bear witness to suffering; for the wisdom for each of us to discern our part in easing pain; for God’s Spirit to reveal Xirself to and among the world’s despised, over and over — till God’s Kin(g)dom comes in full at last.

Painting of a woman playing a flute with several birds around her, as below her a line of Palestinians make their way up towards the city of Jerusalem. The colors are warm and bright.
Painting by Palestinian artist Fayez Al-Hasani
Categories
Current Events / Activism Holy Days lent

Two Palestinian Crucifixion Poems

Drawing of Jesus leading a group of people past chains, which are breaking apart as he raises his fist. A green dove flies above them.
A painting by Sri Lankan pastor Jebasingh Samuvel, who preaches and paints the Dalit-ness of Jesus.

In Jesus, God incarnate suffered and died on a cross, an imperial tool of torture, terror, and humiliation.

Ever since, some of the most dehumanized and oppressed peoples of the world have seen themselves in Christ’s execution. For them, Jesus expressed ultimate solidarity with all whom Empire criminalizes and murders — from the “untouchable” dalit class, to Black persons lynched or shot by police in the United States; and from Latin America’s “disappeared” across the 20th century to queer persons dying of AIDS in the 90s.

  • Drawing of Jesus leading a group of people past chains, which are breaking apart as he raises his fist. A green dove flies above them.
    A painting by Sri Lankan pastor Jebasingh Samuvel, who preaches and paints the Dalit-ness of Jesus.
  • Painting of Jesus in white and a crown of thorns being led in chains by military officers of the Argentine dictatorship (1976-1983). The mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in their white handkerchiefs cry out in pain and protest, as do the mothers and fathers of the 30,000 people who were disappeared during the Argentine dictatorship. Signs on the wall demand to know where children, women, and other disappeared persons have gone.
    The first station in Adolfo Pérez Esquivel’s “El Via Crucis Latinoamericano” (“The Latin American Way of the Cross,” 1992). Christ is led in chains by military officers of the Argentine dictatorship (1976-83).
  • This painting depicts Jesus nude except for his crown of thorns, with one hand on his knee and the other cradling his head. His skin is gray and covered in AIDS lesions. A quote from Matthew 25 is written in the background of the painting: “Then the king will reply, whatever you did for one of the least of these, you did to me.”
    “Man of Sorrows: Christ with AIDS” (1993) by Maxwell Lawton. Archbishop Desmond Tutu loved and defended Lawton’s painting.
  • Charles Cullen’s frontispiece to Countee Cullen’s “The Black Christ and Other Poems,” 1929.

In the mid-1900s, the symbol of crucifixion was uplifted by many Arabic poets as an image of unjust, collective suffering. Decades later, in 2021, Palestinian poet Najwan Darwish likewise made crucifixion the central image of his collection of poems Exhausted on the Cross.

Throughout this text, Darwish grapples with despair and uplifts resistance in the face of Israeli occupation, with all its “tedious” daily terrors interspersed with waves of escalated violence. He sees these decades of occupation as a long, drawn-out, collective crucifixion. When will it end? When will Palestinians know rest — and maybe, just maybe, resurrection?

I want to share two of the poems in Exhausted on the Cross.

Black-and-white photo of Najwan Darwish, a youngish man with short dark hair smiling at something out of view. Next to him is the cover image of Exhausted on the Cross, which doesn't have any illustrations.

“They Woke You at Dawn” by Najwan Darwish, 2021

In this first poem, Darwish imagines Christ as a fedayee, an Arabic term for various military groups willing to sacrifice themselves for a larger movement.

Palestinian Fedayeen are often smeared as terrorists by Israel and its allies, while their self-sacrifice is celebrated by the oppressed — not unlike how the Roman Empire viewed Jesus as a threat to be eradicated, while the poorest of his own people loved him. 

Darwish dedicated this poem, “They Awoke You at Dawn,” to Rasmea Odeh, a Palestinian activist whom some see as a convicted terrorist – despite her confession being made under Israeli torture — and others see as a hero and representative of collective Palestinian denigration.

Photo of Rasmea Odeh, a middle aged woman with brown hair mostly concealed under a keffiyeh being worn as a headscarf. She's smiling big enough at the viewer that it crinkles her nose.

“They Awoke You at Dawn”

When they woke you at dawn,
when they hung you up for slaughter
. . .

Christ was a fedayee, just like you,
but he was condemned and crucified
in the sea of a single day, while you—
your cross is raised with every dawn.

His name was on their blacklist,
his mother slept on a pillow of nightmares.

Which of these few women outside the Moscovia jail
can catch her when she falls,
hanging as she is
from the farthest star of the cosmos?

They’ve woken you at dawn again.
They’ve hung you up for slaughter.

“Exhausted on the Cross” by Najwan Darwish

In this second poem from — and, as it happens, the titular poem of — Exhausted on the Cross, Darwish expands the image of crucifixion from a singular victim (e.g. Christ, Rosmea Odeh) to all Palestinians.

Darwish sees the long decades of Israeli occupation as a drawn-out, collective crucifixion. Christ’s suffering is their suffering; their suffering is Darwish’s suffering. When will Palestinians know rest — and maybe, just maybe, resurrection?

“Exhausted on the Cross”

The ones hanging
are tired,

so bring us down
and give us some rest.

We drag histories behind us
here
where there’s neither land
nor sky.

Lord,
sharpen your knife
and give your sacrifice its rest.

◆◆◆

You had no mother or father
and you never saw your brothers
hanging
from the cold talons of dawn.

You loved no one
and no one ever abandoned you
and death never ate from your hands.
You cannot know our pain.

◆◆◆

I’m not King David—
I won’t sit at the gate of regret
and sing you psalms of lamentation
after the sins.

◆◆◆

Bring me down,
let me have my rest.

Further Reading

Categories
Current Events / Activism Holy Days lent Other search markers

Gaza’s Gethsemane

Today is Maundy Thursday, when Christians remember Jesus’s Last Supper, his final meal with his closest friends before his arrest and execution by the Roman Empire.

Painting of the last supper in which Jesus and his disciples all have deep brown skin; they gather around a low table as Jesus raises up a large bowl. They look solemn.
“The Lord’s Supper,” from the JESUS MAFA project of Cameroon

Meanwhile, right now, in Jesus’ own homeland, millions suffer starvation and terror, displacement and death under Western-funded Israeli colonialism and continued military assault. Israel blocks food from reaching them, leaving Palestinians in fear that any “supper” they can scrounge up might be their last.

A tablecloth is spread with bowls of soupy grass and a few plates of lemon slices
A Palestinian Muslim family’s fast-breaking meal: grass soup with some lemon.

After their meal, Jesus led his friends into the Garden of Gethsemane, where he prayed in anguish, fearing all he was about to endure: criminalization, torture, and a painful public death.

Jesus prays on the ground, looking agonized and raising his hands towards the dark sky, as three figures sleep in the background.
Gethsemane – Matthew 26:36-46

Jesus begs his friends to “stay awake” as he wrestles — just to be present, to make him feel a little less alone. How do we respond to Jesus’ plea by “staying awake” to Palestine’s current agony?

A painting of a young person, maybe a teen, mouth open in grief as he kneels and holds a child's body in his arms. Buildings on fire form the backdrop. The boy's clothes are in the colors of the Palestinian flag.
Detail from “Cry” (2016) by Mohammed Almadhoun.

That question also leads me to ponder another: how does God join Palestinians in their agony? Where is God in their suffering?

Palestinian Christian Mitri Raheb seeks to answer this question of where God is in his 2015 book Faith in the Face of Empire.

Photo of Mitri Raheb wearing clerical black with the white clerical collar, standing outside and smiling at the viewer. Cover of Faith in the Face of Empire, which features a painting of Christ on the cross with two other crucified behind him.

Raheb looks at the history of the Palestinian region, from ancient times to today, as a long chain of different empires — from the Assyrians to the Romans, Ottomans to Western-funded modern Israel.

He says that this long history of occupation is what gave Palestinians the ability to notice God where those in power do not: among the powerless. It is this revelation, Raheb declares, that has empowered Palestinians — Jewish, Christian, and Muslim — to survive and resist Empire again and again.

Raheb writes about how in ancient times, the divine was made

“…visible and omnipresent in the empire with shrines and temples that represented not only his glory but also that of the empire. God’s omnipotence and that of the empire were almost interchangeable. He was a victorious God, a fitting deity for a victorious empire.

At the other end of the spectrum there was the God of the people of Palestine, whose tiny territory resembled a corridor in Middle Eastern geography. …This God was a loser. He lost almost all wars, and his people were forced to pay the price of those defeats. In short, this God did not appear to be up to the challenge of the various empires. His people in Palestine were forced to hear the mocking voices of their neighbors who taunted them, ‘Where is your God?’ (Ps 42: 3, 10).

The revelation the people of Palestine received was the ability to spot God where no one else was able to see him. When his people were driven as slaves into Babylon, they witnessed him accompanying them. When his capital, Jerusalem, was destroyed and his temple plundered, they saw him there. When his people were defeated, he was also present. The salient feature of this God was that he didn’t run away when his people faced their destiny but remained with them, showing solidarity and choosing to share their destiny.

Consequently and ultimately, Jesus revealed this God on the cross, in a situation of terrible agony and pain, when he was brutally crushed by the empire and hung like a rebellious freedom fighter. The people of Palestine could then say with great certainty [that their God] ‘in every respect has been tested as we are’ (Heb 4:15).

For the people of Palestine this meant that defeat in the face of the empire was not an ultimate defeat. It meant that after the country was devastated by the Babylonians, when everything seemed to be lost, a new beginning was possible. Even when the dwelling place of God was destroyed, God survived that destruction, developing in response a dwelling that was indestructible. And when Jesus cried on the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mk 15:34), that soul-rending plea was just the prelude to the resurrection…”

It is this revelation that God sides against empire, Raheb continues, that keeps the Palestinian spirit alive through horrible oppression. Though the world may call such faith foolish — how can you believe God is with you and that God will have the final say, when all evidence points to your abandonment and defeat? — it is wisdom to the oppressed. Raheb describes how this wisdom feeds Palestinian resistance, over and over across the millennia:

“The art of survival and starting anew is a highly developed form of expression in Palestine, and one I see daily. People’s lives, businesses, and education are interrupted by wars and the aftermath of wars over and over again, and yet I witness people refusing to give up, taking a deep breath, and beginning again. Logically, it is foolish, and yet there is deep wisdom in such a course of action.

I’m often asked by visitors how I can keep going. Everything seems to be lost, the land “settled” by Israel, the wall suffocating Palestinian land and spirit, the world silent, and hope almost gone.”

Raheb’s answer to them is that God’s presence in and among the suffering, and God’s promised resurrection, of renewal in the face of all terror and death, is what keeps him and his people going.

As we enter into these final days of Lent, I pray for hearts and minds opened to witnessing God’s solidarity with and resurrection for Palestinians suffering imperial brutality. I pray that the Palestinians will survive as they always have — “afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed” (2 Cor 4:8–9).

Categories
bible study Holy Days lent Reflections for worship services

Ash Wednesday, Isaiah 6, and the blessing in our limitations

Painting by Justin “JUST” Simmons.

The below reflection is cross-posted from Daily Ripple; see the end of this post for more information. Furthermore, if you prefer to listen instead of reading, you can listen to this piece in the latest episode of the Blessed Are the Binary Breakers podcast.

I said, “Mourn for me; I’m ruined! I’m a man with unclean lips, and I live among a people with unclean lips. Yet I’ve seen the king, the Lord of heavenly forces!”

Then one of the winged creatures flew to me, holding a glowing coal that ze had taken from the altar with tongs. Ze touched my mouth and said, “See, this has touched your lips. Your guilt has departed, and your sin is removed.”

– Isaiah 6:5-7

Did the glowing coal leave a mark? A smear of dark? A bright burn?

Reading this text on Ash Wednesday, I can’t help but connect Isaiah’s coal and our ashy crosses:

He confesses himself unclean — admits his limits, where he and his people have failed.

We profess ourselves dust — acknowledge our limits, the finite time we have here and now, and how often we’ve failed to cherish that time.

In the confession, we open ourselves to blessing. Accepting our limits, we fall into God’s limitless love.

Why these physical, ritual actions — coal to the lips, ashes to the brow — to mark these limits and the blessings they yield?

God knows, respects, loves our existence as embodied spirits, inspirited bodies. She pairs spiritual gifts with tangible signs to help us experience Her truths with our whole selves.

A glowing coal — dead plants packed deep, transformed over eons, unburied at last and set alight — touches truth-telling lips to set them free.

Ashes of palm branches once waved in worship, burned down to begin the cycle anew, mark us as individually finite, but gathered into an infinite love.

Take time to prayerfully consider your own limits. What blessings, what liberation can you imagine flowing from our individual finitude? How can you connect your limited time and gifts to a greater whole, in small ways with great love?

Photo of a bowl of black ashes, with a small dried palm leaf cross in the middle of the ashes. The bowl sits on a green palm branch.

About Daily Ripple!

I am delighted to have joined the creative team at Daily Ripple — starting with posts this week, including what you just read!

If you want to incorporate queer-affirming, justice-oriented snippets of biblical reflection written by a diverse range of Christians into your everyday life, Daily Ripple is a lovely option. It’s free, and every weekday, subscribers receive a short reflection, ending with a question meant to guide you towards action. 

I’ve been writing the daily posts for this week, incorporating queer and autistic theology into readings of Psalm 119, Mark 4, and Isaiah 6. Check them all out at the Daily Ripple.

Categories
advent bible study Holy Days My poetry Queer Lectionary Reflections for worship services

Christ is barred from Bethlehem

A photo from the separation wall around Bethlehem that shows red and green graffiti reading "Merry Christmas world from Bethlehem ghetto"

A voice cries out in the wilderness,
“Prepare the way of the Lord! Make straight his paths.”

How do we do that in the present day?
We break down walls that block his family’s way.

As Mary and Joseph draw near Bethlehem
a fence looms over them, some eight yards high

and soldiers watch from towers as they trudge
not straight into the city, but around
to find the checkpoint — where they’re turned away:
“We’re only letting tourists in today.”

So Mary groans outside the barrier
no place to lay her newborn’s bloodied head

and John the Baptist paints in green and red
across that cold wall’s surface — shepherds, lo! —
“Merry Christmas world
from Bethlehem Ghetto”

You are welcome to make use of the above poem or below reflection in worship, in classrooms, on social media, etc. Please credit Avery Arden of binarybreakingworship.com.

_____

In a 2014 article, Medhi Hasan wonders how Mary and Joseph’s trip from Nazareth to Bethlehem would go in the modern day:

“How would that carpenter and his pregnant wife have circumnavigated the Kafka­esque network of Israeli settlements, roadblocks and closed military zones in the occupied West Bank? Would Mary have had to experience labor or childbirth at a checkpoint, as one in 10 pregnant Palestinian women did between 2000 and 2007 – resulting in the death of at least 35 newborn babies, according to the Lancet?

‘If Jesus were to come this year, Bethlehem would be closed,’ declared Father Ibrahim Shomali, a Catholic priest of the city’s Beit Jala parish, in December 2011. ‘Mary and Joseph would have needed Israeli permission – or to have been tourists.’ “

Meanwhile, a Reddit post claims they’d have to get through fifteen checkpoints on their journey. Chances are, they wouldn’t make it through — just get harassed and interrogated for their trouble.

As I reflect on these statements, I ponder also the opening of Mark’s Gospel. This text, which is read in many churches during the Advent season, recalls the prophetic cry of Isaiah 40:

A voice is crying out:
“Clear the Lord’s way in the desert!
    Make a level highway in the wilderness for our God!
Every valley will be raised up,
    and every mountain and hill will be flattened.
    Uneven ground will become level,
    and rough terrain a valley plain.
The Lord’s glory will appear,
    and all humanity will see it together;
    the Lord’s mouth has commanded it.”

What does such a prophetic leveling — a flattening of land so that all people, including children, elderly and pregnant persons, and people with mobility impairments can easily travel — look like today?

I envision the 440 miles of separation wall crumbling into the earth. Watchtowers topple. Barbed wire melts away. Snipers’ guns morph into ploughshares; bombs explode oh-so-gently into fertilizer to feed burned olive groves.

No more are humans caged in the world’s largest open-air prison. No more are children dragged away in the night to be tortured and tried as terrorists.

The land is free. The people are free. God’s liberating Spirit moves unhindered; God’s holy land becomes, as promised, a “house of prayer for all peoples” (Isaiah 56:7).

Thanks be to God. May we be moved to help make it so.

  • A person wearing a keffiyeh secures tear gas canisters to a tree, with normal Christmas ornaments visible on trees behind him
  • A person secures tear gas canisters to a tree with Christmas lights on it
  • A spent tear gas grenade shell casing lies on the ground near Aida Refugee Camp following clashes between Palestinian youth and Israeli forces, Bethlehem, West Bank, November 29, 2013. The grenade cartridge, made by the U.S. company Combined Tactical Systems (CTS) contains labeling in English including full contact information and the company’s U.S. address in Jamestown, Pennsylvania.
  • Mandatory Credit: Photo by Beata Zawrzel/NurPhoto/Shutterstock (13691022a) A graffiti of Jesus Christ wearing arafat scarf is seen near the Israeli separation West Bank Wall in Bethlehem, Palestine on December 28, 2022. Street Art And Banksy Hotel In Bethlehem, Palestine – 28 Dec 2022

Gallery images: a remake of a famous 1936 “Visit Palestine” poster to show the Holy Family and the separation wall; photos of Palestinians decorating a tree in Bethlehem with tear gas canisters in 2015, as well as a close-up of a canister showing it’s USA-made; and more photos from the separation wall, including the icon “Our Lady of the Wall,” where nuns and pilgrims pray rosaries to dismantle the wall.

Categories
advent Holy Days Hymns Other search markers Unpacking Antisemitism

“O Come Emmanuel” revised for Palestine’s plight

Painting depicts the wall that divides Bethlehem, with Joseph walking beside a donkey carrying Mary in the foreground, and a star shining above Bethlehem in the background.
Painting by Zaki Baboun, a Palestinian Christian who lives in a suburb of Bethlehem.

This Advent, some progressive Christians have discussed whether to table one of our religion’s most ancient hymns: “O Come, O Come Emmanuel.” When we sing of God coming to “ransom captive Israel,”
will our congregations recognize we don’t mean the modern Israeli nation?

Honestly, a conversation around this song is long past due (and many have had it over the decades). The truth is, it’s always been laden with supersessionist implications. Depicting the Jewish people as living “in lonely exile here / Until the son of God appear” perpetuates the idea that Jews’ relationship with God is incomplete because they “didn’t accept” Jesus as their Messiah.

How do we resist both antisemitism and Zionism, while seeking to maintain a connection to Christians who came before us? One option may be to reimagine the songs we cherish so that, instead of perpetuating deep-seated hate and Christian supremacy, they challenge us towards joining God in solidarity with the world’s oppressed.

In that spirit, below is my reworking of “O Come Emmanuel” to center the plight of Palestinians (and that removes, I hope, the supersessionism — let me know if I missed any). May our worship songs plant in us a deep desire for justice, and spark our action towards a future where all peoples, all religions live in mutual relationship and respect.

Please feel free to use and share around — just credit Avery Arden of binarybreakingworship.com.

__

O come, o come compassionate Divine,
And ransom captive Palestine
That mourns with tears that will not be soothed
Till empires fall and nations’ hearts are moved.

Rejoice! Rejoice! God’s justice is at hand
To liberate the people and the land.

O come, o bright and ever-burning star;
Bring Gaza comfort from afar!
Dispel from her the shadow of death
That murders dignity and chokes out breath.

Rejoice! Rejoice! God’s justice is at hand
To liberate the people and the land.

O come, o Wisdom from on high,
Take up the outcast’s cause, the captive’s cry.
Guide us to build your kingdom on earth
Where all faiths flourish, and the last are first.

Rejoice! Rejoice! God’s justice is at hand
To liberate the people and the land.

O come, o King of Peace and Justice, break
All weapons down, and from them ploughshares make.
Let all tears dry, all peoples respond:
“We are each other’s magnitude and bond.”

Rejoice! Rejoice! God’s justice is at hand
To liberate the people and the land.

Categories
advent Holy Days My poetry

Poem: Advent in (another) genocide

Photo of a statue of the infant Jesus among rubble, with text from a poem reading "This year, Mary is just one of many Palestinians failing to find a safe place to give birth. This year, Jesus is just one of many born into rubble."

This poem came to me after learning that Christian leaders in the Holy Land have asked churches not to organize any “unnecessarily festive” activities, in solidarity with Gaza; as well as seeing the Nativity scene set among rubble in the Lutheran Church of Bethlehem this year.

Find resources on what’s happening in Palestine and how to help below the poem.

Please feel free to share around; credit to Avery Arden (they/them) with a link to binarybreakingworship.com.

This year, Mary is just one of many
Palestinians failing to find
a safe place to give birth.

This year, Jesus is just one
of countless born
into rubble.

This year, the newborn Christ

dies 

his little body bombed
and tossed aside
into the growing pile.

This time, Jesus never makes it to adulthood —
doesn’t even make it the eight days to circumcision.
He doesn’t die a grown man
making a conscious choice
to defy Empire armed with naught but dreams

of a world where all the nations live as one
where last are first 
and all wars done —

No. This year, his newborn life is threat enough —
his family’s mere existence is rebellion enough  —
to warrant eradication.

Actually, it was then, too, two thousand years ago
— for Empire always fears the ones it grinds
beneath its millstone — back then, though
Christ’s parents found safe passage into Egypt —

now, snipers shoot them as they try
to leave the hospital that scarce had room
for one more woman’s labor cries.

Stigmata are
that much more
chilling between
an infant’s eyes.

And now, as then, some may blame Jesus’s death
on his own Jewish people — but
resist this lie! Now, as then,
the crime is Empire’s

with Western Christians at the helm

and those who would cast stones, look first
for your own nation’s name etched on the bombs
and tear gas canisters!

And, God,
if there is any hope at all
to wrestle from the rubble

as churches all across the Holy Land
close their doors to Christmas joy this year —
a holy choice to mourn with those who mourn
as Christ’s homeland is made a massive grave —

it’s this: there are still children left to save.

It’s this: not every olive branch has burned.

It’s this: the sacred promise of a God
who dies whenever Empire’s outcasts die —
that those cast down 

will rise.

Palestine, Palestine! I swear we will not cease
to shout your name until, at last, your streets
sing with your children’s laughter, loud and free.

– Avery Arden

Notes on this poem

I am writing this note after revising some middle portions of this poem, and coming away still unhappy with the results.

As a Christian who believes that God expresses a solidarity with the oppressed so strong and intimate that They are literally one with every oppressed person, I cannot help but recognize Christ within the people being killed and expelled from their homes in Gaza right now. Christ is there among them, and that means he is among their dead as well as their displaced.

As the Rev. Munther Isaac of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Bethlehem on the West Bank preached in October,

“God suffers with the people of this land, sharing the same fate with us. …God is under the rubble in Gaza. He is with the frightened and the refugees. He is in the operating room. This is our consolation. He walks with us through the valley of the shadow of death. …”

For Christians like Rev. Isaac, Christ’s intimate identification with those the world calls least, those whom Empire threatens to eradicate, is central to any sense of comfort they may have in the face of so much devastation. It’s also central to my own faith and personal understanding of the Divine.

Yet in this context, because modern-day Israel is a Jewish state, exploring that Divine solidarity comes with a great risk of perpetuating the long, harmful history of antisemitic blood libel and accusations of deicide. How do we affirm God’s presence with those suffering in Palestine without (implicitly or explicitly) adding to the poisonous lie that “the Jews killed Jesus”?

In wrestling with this complexity, I tried to write this poem to uplift both Jesus’s Jewishness and his solidarity with Palestinians. Jesus was born into a Jewish family, his entire worldview was shaped by his Jewishness, and he shared in his people’s suffering under the Roman Empire. His solidarity with Palestinians of various faiths suffering today does not erase that Jewishness. Nor does it mean that Jewish persons don’t “belong” in the region — only that modern Israel’s occupation of Palestine is in no way necessary for Jews to live and thrive there, or anywhere else in the world.

I also aimed to point out (sacrificing poetic flow to do so, lol) that Israel is by no means acting alone in this attack on Gaza or their decades-long occupation of Palestine. There is a much larger Empire at work, with my own country, the United States, as one of the nations at the helm. Israel is entangled in that imperial mess, and directly backed and funded by those forces — not because of what politicians claim, that we have to back Israel or else we’re antisemitic, but because Israel is our strategic foothold in the so-called Middle East. How do we name our complicity as our tax dollars are funneled into violence across the world, and act to end that violence?

Ultimately, I don’t know that this poem is a successful one. I don’t know if it avoids perpetuating harm. If nothing else, I hope it sparks conversation about resisting antisemitism as much as we resist Zionism.

Palestine Resources

HISTORY

CURRENT EVENTS

DREAMING OF A BETTER FUTURE

WAYS TO HELP

  • Urge your University/School/Organization to put out a statement denouncing Israel
  • Organize a Protest/Participate in a local one
  • While calling your reps, tell them that as a voter, you’re unwilling to support them in the upcoming election unless they urge the White House to take a stand against Israel and stop funding them
  • Share art/writing/films around Palestinian culture (see this tumblr post for Palestinian media to watch; I also recommend Oriented (2015) for an un-pinkwashed queer Palestinian story)
  • If you’re part of a union, ask them what they’re doing to urge their industry leaders to take a stand against Israel + pressure the White House OR urge them to start a strike/walkout/etc if they’re not doing anything already
  • Talk with your friends IRL about Palestine; keep spreading information on social media — don’t let talk of Palestine die down!
  • See if your city/state council has put out a statement in support of Gazans. If not, try to push them to do so.