The first time I ever really understood the Nativity, I was in a village called Yanoun, in the northern West Bank. I had been serving as a Global Mission Intern, living and working in Jerusalem. I traveled to Yanoun with friends working with the World Council of Churches. We met village elders and learned about the dire situation facing the Palestinian families that had lived and worked this land for generations. We walked through the village and the surrounding fields, led by two cousins, both shepherds, who showed us the ins and outs of their daily routine. At one point, they showed us one of the spots where they corralled their sheep – it was a low cave in a hillside, with rusty feeding troughs for the animals located just outside. I ducked to look in the cave. It smelled like…well, sheep shit. Not a bad place to shelter your flocks, really. Just not exactly the kind of place I would want to have a kid.
“Oh,” I remember thinking to myself. “I get it. If God could be born here, God can be born anywhere.”
At Christmas, we read stories of unassuming people who meet God in an unexpected way, in an unexpected place, in a moment that, from the standpoint of emperors and kings, would never make it onto the radar of world history. What unassuming people are seeing God today – and in what unassuming people might we see God? In what unexpected ways and places will God be born today?
Christ is born. Christ can be born – anywhere. Born in a cave, huddled with the animals for warmth, laid in a feeding trough for a cradle. Born in the midst of the turmoil and tribulation of a world that might not stop to take notice, if not for the song of the angelic chorus. And born, even here. Even in my heart. Even in your heart.
Merry Christmas. Today, there is good news of great joy for all.
(Sheep in the village of Yanoun;
photo by EAPPI/G.Kerr-Sheppard, 2015)