Artwork: Flight into Egypt by Henry Ossawa Tanner
Great Displacement, Great Hospitality | by Krista Heide
Hope, Joy, Peace, Love - these are the more familiar themes of Advent celebration, routinely woven into our reflections of the gospel accounts of the birth of Christ.
Yet, beyond the heartwarming story of our Christmas pageants, the ancient advent texts offer less common themes, well worth exploration: themes of stacked oppressive circumstance; sagas of physical and spiritual displacement; people being pushed to places of vulnerability and desperation, in dire need of the hospitality of others.
- Mary, a young, unmarried, vulnerable teenage woman, pregnant, in a Jewish culture that places a high demand on purity - a situation that displaces her standing, and forces her to face humiliation, shame, ostracization, and the threat of death.
- Joseph and Mary (now 'great with child'), living under centuries of oppressive rule and domination, forced to join a caravan of other displaced Jews - travelling 90 miles on foot to Joseph's ancestral homeland of Bethlehem for the purpose of a government census - a counting of all people, cattle, and property - purely targeted to draw more taxes from an already overburdened population.
- A woman finding herself in the pangs of childbirth, in an overrun town, with no guest room to properly rest or deliver her child.
- A young family warned of imminent danger from a tyrannical ruler, fleeing in the middle of the night to Egypt - desperately seeking asylum from a nation with a history plagued with oppression and animosity towards their people.
(Sometimes I wonder if Jesus' prophetic text of Mathew 24:19 was partially a memory of his own beginnings -
"How dreadful it will be in those days for pregnant women and nursing mothers...")
Yet, it is amid this story of oppression, displacement, desperation and vulnerability that we are invited to witness the incredible miracle of hospitality:
Christ finds hospitality in the womb of a young woman.
Mary finds hospitality from a man who continues their engagement, despite her questionable circumstance.
The family finds the hospitality of a stable that offers warmth, and a safe place to birth their child.
The newborn Messiah finds hospitality from excited shepherds, and wisemen - bearing gifts.
Joseph finds hospitality from an angel whose warning allows escape from tragedy.
The family finds hospitality and asylum from an unexpected foreign nation, enabling them to weather their season of displacement unharmed.
It seems the darker the circumstance, the greater the light of hospitality shines.
This Christmas season, let us lean into these more complex themes held within the pages of our nativity story. Let us not shy away from the more difficult realities that are present in our own lives, and in our troubled world. But, rather than becoming overwhelmed, may we have eyes to see, and perception to behold that these areas of great need are the potential birthplaces of the miraculous - places where we are invited to witness and participate in the life-saving, abundantly generous, practice of hospitality.
