Where have you heard this story?
In the occupied territories, tens of thousands lie dead. Infants freeze as their parents are forced to flee their homelands. A decree has stripped houses of worship, schools, and places of healing of their sanctuary. Armed enforcers pursue the displaced even to the doors of prayer. An insecure, re-appointed leader seeks to ‘cleanse’ the land of the foreign-born.
You’d be forgiven if you thought I was talking about the Nativity story in first-century CE. I’m talking about right here, right now.
Religious leaders are arrested for sheltering refugees while others are pepper-sprayed by ICE agents. Congregations create protest installations depicting the holy family as displaced persons—the infant bound, the mother masked, the signs reading “ICE Was Here.” In Bethlehem, after two years of mourning, celebrations return tentatively—a city residents describe as “a big jail” hosting fragile hope while imperial forces still patrol. In Sudan, a forgotten war has displaced twelve million—the world’s largest exodus—with churches shuttered and believers persecuted by all sides.
It isn’t so much that these stories happened, as that they happen.
It turns out, a first-century refugee mother, her partner, and their problematic, prophesied, poverty-crushing progeny have a lot to say to us right now.
Clearly, our planet is in need of a Christmas miracle.
The question is, where should we look?
If in Advent the waiting is, indeed, the hardest part, what are we waiting for?
Let’s look back to look forward.
In first-century Palestine, a young unwed mother was told she would bear the Divine. Her homeland was under imperial occupation; her social standing and familial status was uncertain. So what did she do when she received word that she’d become Theotokos, bearer of God-with-us?
Mary of Nazareth couldn’t contain herself:
With all my heart I glorify the Lord!
In the depths of who I am I rejoice in God my savior.
God has looked with favor on the low status of God’s servant.
Look! From now on, everyone will consider me highly favored
because the Mighty One has done great things for me.Holy is the Name.
God shows mercy to everyone,
from one generation to the next,
who honors God as God.God has shown strength with a mighty arm.
God has scattered those with arrogant thoughts and proud inclinations.
God has pulled the powerful down from their thrones
and lifted up the lowly.God has filled the hungry with good things
and sent the rich away empty-handed.God has come to the aid of God’s beloved children,
remembering Divine mercy,
just as was promised to our ancestors,
to Abraham and to his descendants forever.
— Luke 1:46-55 (Inspired by the NRSVue)
In 20th-century Germany, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a theologian, instigator, and (ultimately) martyr against Hitler’s Nazi Party’s co-opting of God and country, drew inspiration from Mary’s defiant prayer for a decidedly different kind of Christmas. He said:
The song of Mary is the oldest Advent hymn. It is the most passionate, most vehement, one might say most revolutionary Advent hymn ever sung. It is not the gentle, sweet, dreamy Mary that we so often see portrayed in pictures, but the passionate, powerful, proud, enthusiastic Mary, who speaks here. None of the sweet, sugary, or childish tones that we find so often in our Christmas hymns, but a hard, strong, uncompromising song of bringing down rulers from their thrones and humbling the lords of this world.
— From Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Christmas Sermons, edited by Edwin H. Robertson.
A doll representing the baby Jesus is zip-tied in the Nativity scene outside of Lake Street Church of Evanston, in Evanston, Ill. / AP
Bonhoeffer drew Christmas strength from this uncompromising carol—a song not likely to be piped in as mall muzak to mollify the masses. Mary’s melody inspired Bonhoeffer and his Underground Seminary to release their religious pretense and practice the arcane discipline of ‘prayer and righteous action’—a faithfulness in the face of what looked like impossible odds.
Theirs were testimonies of resistance to the violently fashionable Christianity that was making Germany great again.
Girded with Mary’s Christmas carol of hope and resistance, and the Son that it heralded, the steadfast of Germany’s Confessing Church movement stood against genocide and the totalizing hijacking of faith for nationalistic ends—even unto death.
It’s not so much that it happened, as that it’s happening.
Once again, our planet is in need of a Christmas miracle.
The question is, what are we waiting for?
In this same plot of Germanic land where Bonhoeffer dwelled, some seven centuries prior, the Dominican mystic and preacher Meister Eckhart lived through a similar period of upheaval and need for fulfilled hope. In direct response to their own dire challenges, he asked his 13th-century Rhineland community:
What is my name?
What is your name?
What is God’s name?
He answered his own questions in this way:
Our name is: That we must be born.
The Creator’s name is: To bear.
We are all meant to be mothers of God.
What good is it for me that Christ was born a thousand years ago in Bethlehem, if he is not born today in our own time?
(Note: You can listen to a beautiful guided Advent meditation based on these Meister Eckhart reflections, narrated by Jennifer Helminski, here.)
In 2025, American churches are answering Eckhart’s question with their bodies. Across the country, congregations are creating protest nativity scenes: Baby Jesus with zip-tied wrists, wrapped in emergency blankets. Mary wearing a gas mask. Roman soldiers donning tactical vests labeled ‘ICE.’ Empty mangers with signs reading ‘ICE WAS HERE.’
Rag-tag soldiers in the Revolutionary ‘Army’ of the Infant Jesus are waking up from our slumber. Mary’s Magnificat is spilling into the streets, interrupting routine, hot in our lungs as testimonies of resistance to an inversion of Christianity being weaponized for nationalism. These are acts of remembering that the Holy Family were themselves refugees, fleeing state violence, finding sanctuary where they could.
In the 21st century, feminist music icon and pastor’s kid Tori Amos re-visioned the classic Christmas hymn Star of Wonder. I hear its refrain as a prophecy of sorts:
Some say a star will rise again
in the hearts of humankind
Some say we have been in exile
What we need is solar fire!
How do we reignite this Solar Fire that once lit our horizons so brightly?
How do we reflect the Son who blazes like a Sun of love and justice?
How do we warm our weary hearts and become all flame?
We’ve been exiled for too long. What if we summon the courage to return through this hinge of history?
As we say goodbye to 2025 in all its upheaval and prepare to greet a brand new year, let’s Stay Woke —present and witnessing the birth pangs of God being birthed again from the womb we’re growing:
In our bodies, our communities, our planet, and in this moment where chronos becomes kairos.
Our survival as a species and an ecosystem demands that we become the answer to our prayers.
Dare we pray as mother Mary prayed?
Dare we birth as Meister Eckhart midwifed?
Dare we shelter as sanctuary churches shelter?
Dare we die, if needs be, as Brother Dietrich died?
Might it be—in anticipation, grace, and faithful action—that we’re drawing down transcendence in imminent frame?
Can we wake up as the incarnations of Christ we are?
Could we be the ones we’re waiting for?
Three Ways to Answer the Christmas Call in 2026:
Palestinian Christian children at worship.
As Advent gives way to Christmas, let’s stop waiting and start acting. Here are three concrete ways to become the answer to your prayers:
- Make Your Church a Sanctuary Space
U.S. bishops have spoken: “We oppose the indiscriminate mass deportation of people.” But opposition without action is merely sentiment. Over 1,500 congregations across traditions—Lutheran, UCC, Catholic, Orthodox, Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist, Quaker, Mennonite—have declared sanctuary.
Start here:
- Connect with the New Sanctuary Coalition to join the Sanctuary Movement
- Host Know Your Rights workshops through ILRC, Just Power, and ACLU
- Partner with legal aid organizations like RAICES or the Florence Project
- Join Sojourners’ immigration campaign or the Interfaith Immigration Coalition
- Stand with Palestinian Christians and All Gaza Families
Cardinal Pizzaballa, visiting Gaza this Christmas, declared: “Christ is not absent from Gaza. He is there—crucified in the wounded, buried under rubble.” Palestinian Christians continue their ministry of presence amidst unimaginable suffering—500+ people sheltering in St. Porphyrius Church compound, clergy refusing to abandon those in need.
Take action:
- Give to humanitarian relief: UNRWA | Doctors Without Borders | ANERA | World Central Kitchen
- Support Palestinian Christian communities: Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center | Bethlehem Bible College
- Advocate through Churches for Middle East Peace (34+ denominations) and join their ceasefire campaigns
- Remember the Forgotten: Support Sudan Relief
While the world’s eyes turn elsewhere, Sudan’s civil war has created the world’s largest displacement crisis. A Sudanese pastor pleads: “Please tell the leaders of the churches and anyone with a Christian conscience to put pressure on the belligerents. Try sanctions. Try something. Anything. Just stop the dying.”
Respond:
- Give to hunger relief: World Food Programme | World Vision Sudan Crisis Fund
- Support displaced families: International Rescue Committee | UNHCR
- Advocate: Contact your elected officials demanding humanitarian access and ceasefire mediation
✧ ✧ ✧
“What good is it for me that Christ was born a thousand years ago in Bethlehem, if he is not born today in our own time?”
— Meister Eckhart
May this Christmastide find us laboring — not just waiting.
And so the Holy Night has come again and we gaze upon the refugee child, incarnate Christ of Divine LOVE. Great Mystery revealed to hearts that are open and willing to receive such timeless revelation.
A counterpoint.
The only thing new in the world is the history that you don’t know — same things, same patterns, same evils happening to different people over time. Shades of Solomon’s Ecclesiastes dark utterances written 3,000 years ago. Oldies but not-so-goodies. Play-it-again, Sam, 21st century style and counting.
Obla di, obla da.
That the entire creation and lot of humanity are pregnant with him unawares counts for nothing if the majority, or even a large minority of a given population on Earth, as it has been throughout its history since the Ascencion, remains unawakened to same. Ever wonder if in his time Jesus, as emissary of his Father’s Word, underestimated the enormous degree of humanity’s sheer density, and mutiple carnal resistances to so-called higher truth?
Withal, in the face of that question the world still awaits the “coming soon” promise of Second Coming deliverance made over two millennia ago, all but forgotten. Tell me, can you blame the victims of evil for that, when the hoard of evildoers in any given country since time immemorial are allowed to hold the winning cards, dominate, terrorize, and in effect have the upper hand for so long? As in, several millenia long?
How can one expect creatures operating under the mutiple and weighty limitations or their mortal existence, given to suffering indescribably in real time (chronos), hold to a promise that seems like a fairy tale occurring in another time (kairos) that they, as persons of immeasurable sense-bound spiritual limitations, cannot relate to, nor as a colletive, are lawfully consigned to by his “holy” Word, hopeless unable to overcome? Yes, CONSIGNED, jusicially sentenced, as in a jail sentence. Look it up (Rm 3:9, 11:32, Gal 3:22).
Spiritual bypassing is a defense mechanism marked by incorporating elements of avoidance, denial, wishful thinking, and moral masochism, among others. Stripped of those mechanisms, “faith” as it seems to have been presneted in ancient times begs to be redefined as “believing in something that your deepest being knows isn’t so.”
At some point every child becomes grieved upon awakening to the notion that Santa Claus is a holiday phantasm that isn’t real, along with a number of other figments of the imagination, and various unrealistic expectations that pain eventually causes them to relinquish along the way — Tooth Fairy tales, all.
That Christ suffers in all who suffer, have suffered, and will inevitably suffer long after we’re gone, and in successive generations is of little consolation short of the God-of-the-Whole putting an end to all this darkness and suffering with finality, which if S/he indeed exists as a loving cosmic overseer is the only remedy. And puh-leeze, don’t trouble me with the Teilhard de Chardin cosmology dream declaring the human species will sooner evolve into some Omega Point bliss. Evolution is a deep-time, snail speed process. Doesn’t jive with reality, as today’s world dangerously teerters on the threshold of its 6th great extinction via runaway climate change, overpopulation, mass migrations, the threat of nuclear annihilation, etc. I mean, how many centuries or millennia have to pass with overwhelming evidence that chronically flawed humanaity can’t do this on its own, even L-O-N-G AFTER the gospel message has been spread around the world to “every tribe and tongue” — several times over.
How many realize that the 20th century was the world’s bloodiest in it history? All told, in WWII alone 53 million people were killed. And that’s not counting casualties from multiple wars since. A convinving argument that Earth may the galactic dump for its cosmic, dark-side energies and evils. Or at least, a Hall of Fame monument to same on its way down the tubes.
The collective soul of humanity cries out over countless ages holding to the Second Coming promise like Charlie Brown clinging to his security blanket. Someone tell me, anyone, if this is an iron-clad divine truth on closing the show, what is the eternal value in its needless delay and prolongation?
So far, the only one able to speak with authority on the matter remains eerily silent — save for having left crumbling ancient scrolls behind millennia ago scribbled by unreliable mortals, with no consideration for needed updates for its helplessly depraved, chronically self-referenced, and inveterately dense inhabitants.
Truth be told, if divinity were a modern day Earth parent, they might be charged by child protective services with downright negligence, if not abuse. Nero fiddling, while Rome burns
Does all this sound like devil’s advocate stuff? Maybe so. Perhaps the universal God-of-the-Whole is the dual-aspect monad we’ve been reading about after all. You know, a two-part paradox, like darkness and light, goodness and evil, Tweedledum and Tweeldeee, opposites at war with each other in a schizoidal spiritual conflict (warfare) trying to work out its (their) unresolved inner conflicts and woes. And doing so by incarnating itself in humans, letting us do the work, suffering the symptoms, travails, and so-called “birth pangs” via the convulsions of the planet and troubled souls beset with same, as a country wars with another by proxy, like the U.S. vs Russia via Ukraine.
Truth can be stranger than fiction, and much more interesting.
Thought for food.
Joe Masterleo
addendum to “counterpoint”
The view that humanity is a proxy battlefied between cosmic forces is supported by ample biblical evidence — that there is one divine field with multiple levels of intelligence, where the spiritual conflict of opposites are endemic (internal )to unity, identifying humanity as a nodal point, not the origin of this conflict that extends beyond the Earth and is cosmic in scope — galactic if not intergalactic.
Indeed, not to be minimized, said conflict of opposites internal to unity not only involves humanity, it is essentially SEPARATE from it, humanity being involved by virtue of its origin and essence being the offpring of but one of its dual-aspect opposites — male and female, each with substantive deposits of its parent’s schizoidal DNA — darkness and light. But basically its an intramural battle that takes place between two facets of a onefold supertnatural kick-ass field divided against itself that hasn’t settled its conflict, ever, and isn’t about to do so. So why get everyone involved in heaven, on Earth, and in the cosmos and beyond as a theater in which to fight its battles?
Thanks, but no thanks. Don’t do us any favors.
Tell me, what kind of wisdom would dictate we on Earth should choose to be dragged into fighting someone else’s battles, let alone bear their unending conflicts and tensions — personal, interpersonal, national, international, to say nothing of cosmic? Silly, it is, and nonsensical from any standpoint.
Just ask Job; look what he went through as a designated pawn in this unresolved proxy war between God and Satan. And for what? He never knew what hit him, not until the end, even after his wife told him to throw in the towel, and his friends accused him of just desserts for evildoing. Any reasonable, self-respeting person worth his salt would have been enrgaged for being used as a go-between in that kind fight, kicked any so-called friend in the butt for trying to test his loyalty thusly.
Humanity is trapped in a cosmic prison in this universal fracture/schism, alright, pawns in thie same game as Job. Why else would it be included as part of the ancient canon? And who suffers for it? Not God or Satan, for sure. Not the chessboard they play “War of the Worlds” on, and not the kings, queens, or bishops who have their assinged roles there. While the knights and castles occupy their well armored stations in this game, its we front-line pawns (grunts) who pay the price, becoming so much “canon” fodder. Be honest.
Leave to the mystical outliers to starkly reveal that truth, the banned and censored esoteric “heretics” who also paid a steep price for wqnting to give us the inside scoop. Along with early church fathers like Dionysius the Areopagite, Maximus the Confessor, and even Origen, who in the 3rd century wrote that souls preexist in a cosmic moral order, that fallen intelligences inhabit planetary and stellar realms, and that Earth is one stage in a vast spiritual drama. Look it up. All of it theater, a view supported by second temple Jewish literature like Enoch (Book of Watchers), Jubilees, and the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Its all laid out in Genesis. And if that isn’t enough, In Ephesians 6, and Col.1:16-20, the apostle Paul universalizes this proxy warfare as originating beyond the human realm, and cosmic in scale. I mean, doesn’t Earth have enough problems without this kind of complicated internicine entanglement for which it, as a whole, is helpless to make a difference in? If the protaggonists in this dual-monad battle haven’t settled between themselves for millenia, what do they expect from puny us, dealt a hapless hand in their squabbles from the get-go?
Talk about warring parents creating dysfunctional families, this one takes the cake, and is apparently where all earthly conflicts and antagnisms begin and end. Nothing like wrestling with unseen forces that are playing toy soldiers with your personal, interpersonal, political, and international lives without most folk being aware of it “sifting everyone like wheat.” Political? Absolutely, the primary human theater of the absurd, one that tops institutional religion even.
Truth be told, human political events become the outworking of a cosmic deliberation, such that even “the elect” shall be deceived. Trumpers beware.
And if that ain’t enough evidence, try Daniel 10, Isaiah 24:21-22, and Psalm 82, and the Book of Revelation that clearly underscores this conflict between these dual aspects of a onefold monad consisiting of two spiritual hardheads, that this conflict is indeed cosmic in scope, with humanity situated squarely inside a much larger field of battle. What an honor, huh? A cosmic wishbone being pulled in two directions. Great stocking stuffer reminder this time of year.
Yes, Job alone is the most transparent case, but Genesis, Daniel, Psalmsk, the Gospels, Paul, and Revelation all portray humanity as the mediating arena where cosmic tension resolve themselves, the same energy with opposite polarities within a single spiritual field that permits opposition as the cost of freedom, growth, and eventual whole-making integration.
Not sure about what other clear thinkers muse over, but having been around the spiritua barnyard now well into my 7th decade, holding my piece of this cosmic stalmate has taken the starch clean out of me.
While these war addicted foes continue to duke it out in perpetuity, anyone got a better idea?
I need a break.
Joe Masterleo