[00:00:07] Speaker A: Welcome to that Makes Total Sense, a podcast dedicated to exploring God's generosity and justice. I'm Alexis Busetti, a Christian aiming to ask good questions and encouraging you to do the same.
Every one of us is wired by God to live out generosity and justice. But the how sometimes elusive that Makes Total Sense is a way for us to get together, posture ourselves as learners, and challenge one another to practice generosity and justice in a tangible way every day.
Well, as it often happens, my guests and I have spent a few minutes already chitchatting a little bit about her new book and some of our experiences and what we hope to cover in this conversation. So, Kelly, I'm hoping that what we record is even better than what we just did before we hit record. Welcome to the show.
[00:01:05] Speaker B: Thank you so much. I'm excited to be here in conversation with you and tease out a little bit more things, common experiences we have and new conversations that we can forge together.
[00:01:18] Speaker A: Yes. So we are recording this in December. We are in the midst of Advent right now, and you have written an incredible book called The First Advent in Palestine reversals, Resistance, and the Ongoing Complexity of Hope. And, Kelly, I just want to say, first of all, that, yes, the book itself is but and I know everyone can't see this, it's not fair. I'll put a link in the show notes. But the COVID art to this book is stunning. I think that it might be kind of a good place for us to start. Like, when people pick this book up and they see this beautiful artwork on the COVID what are they witnessing even in the COVID art of this book?
[00:02:09] Speaker B: Well, the COVID art was so important to me. If you think about the title, there's a lot of heavy lifting that each of those words are doing right. Advent palestine resistance complexity of Hope But what I knew was that the image on the COVID was going to be what I hope would pull people in. And it was important to me that that be art by a Palestinian artist. And so this image is called The Flight into Egypt, and it is by the iconic artist known to be the artist of resistance in Palestine. His name is Sliman Mansour, and so he gave us permission to use this art, which I'm so grateful, but in it, he is showing a very Palestinian picture of a mother and her child, right, which Jesus and Mary and the backdrop, very indicative of Palestine, and the empty sack of flour across her lap.
If you look close, you can see that it says UN relief, because, man, we get a bag of flour and sometimes that's all we get.
And so to hear him talk about this artwork and then allow us to use it for the COVID of the book just meant so much to me. And I hope that it does pull people into the reality that Palestinian stories are part of the first Palestine and Advent in Palestine today. I mean the first advent. And advent today in Palestine. So his work does a lot of goodness in getting us in that direction, I think.
[00:04:02] Speaker A: Yeah. Thank you so much. I had just almost forgotten that I wanted to bring that up first thing, because it's stunning. And yeah, the UN relief there.
There's so much story there, right? There's so much connection between what's happening now and what happened then. And I think part of the connection that I remember one of the first times when I was like, oh, snap, jesus was a refugee. Right?
It was one of these crazy moments.
I'd love to get your take on that for sure, but you really start off one of the things I appreciate so much about how you started this book was setting the scene for the first Advent.
You name what many, I think, American evangelical Protestants would say, yeah, this is the story I heard, too, which is that God was silent, right? There's this intertestamental period where God was silent, and then boom. And then Jesus comes and he's the light, and it feels very Sunday school, and it feels kind of these really I appreciated so much how you intentionally took the time at the beginning of the book to set up.
Just because this didn't make our canon doesn't actually mean, historically, that there was a period of what we might have known as silence there that Jesus stepped into. He was born into a very specific political environment inside of Roman occupied Palestine. So can you tell us about that.
[00:05:53] Speaker B: History a little bit for those of.
[00:05:54] Speaker A: Us who may not be as familiar? And then why is that important for you, writing a devotional book and not a devotional book on Advent? Why is that part important to you?
[00:06:07] Speaker B: Well, let's be very candid. This is not a devotional book.
[00:06:11] Speaker A: That's right. That's correct.
[00:06:12] Speaker B: Anybody expects a devotional book for Advent. This is not it. It's an exploration of those beautiful Advent.
[00:06:18] Speaker A: Narratives that we do have devotionals. We'll link to those that's what I was thinking of, but this is definitely not it. That's correct.
[00:06:24] Speaker B: Right. I never want people to feel like I have misled them in what I am offering. So these are explorations of the Advent texts that were gifted by Luke and Matthew. But I am a big context girl. I have always believed in the deep importance of knowing the context of a part of scripture. If we're going to share it for devotion or for a sermon or even for our own meditation on scripture, it's so important to know this didn't just come from nowhere. It's connected to something. And so it was in that process of trying to see what is the connective tissue to these Advent stories, because I was raised to believe we have God speaking to the prophet Malachi. And then we have nothing for those 400 years until the Gospel writers start telling us what was going to be happening in the land. And of course, I think we can look back and say, well, of course we knew that time still happened. But there is something that when there is no testimony, there's no testament to it.
Between the page of what we call the Old Testament and the New Testament, it's easy to sort of think, well, nothing significant happened. Even if we could look back and say, oh, well, wait a minute, that can't be true. But if it's not there, we are kind of conditioned to believe nothing that you need to know, nothing that mattered, nothing that shaped this story mattered. Otherwise we would have had it there. And of course, our Catholic brothers and sisters do include the apocrypha in their version of the Bible, which is how I found it, because I have some Catholic roots. And in hunting around and finding my mother's Catholic Jerusalem Bible, it's like, wait a minute, there's some things in the middle here. Which is where I discovered the story of the Maccabees. And yet another time when the Jewish people were under occupation, this time by the Seleucid Empire and their temple had been destroyed and there was religious persecution and heavy taxation and violent uprisings with the Seleucid military. And I think for me, what cracked open was this is what predates the arrival of God, right? Jesus's birth, what was happening on the ground was 400 years of trauma, of both military and economic exploitation, of land loss and enslavement and just loss.
And if anybody got to be silent, it was only God, because on the ground there would have been such loud, lament cries of pain and mourning the losses that happened under these successive empires. And so I think it's important to recognize that this is what predates our Advent stories. And maybe to put it another way, that when we recognize now, we, I think, have more what I would call trauma informed theology. We are starting to understand what trauma is and how it affects our human bodies, how it affects our psychology and how we respond to the stimuli around us.
And we are starting to understand generational trauma. Well, now I read back into these texts and think in the body of the Jewish people, there was generational trauma, and it would have shaped their bodies, their ways of thinking and reacting. It would have shaped their culture. And so when Jesus is born into a story and literally born into human skin, jesus was born into a family that was victim of generational trauma. Jesus is not exempt from the experience, generational trauma and the lived experience of trauma that he would undergo in his human journey. I think that is actually a very important thing to understand about the Incarnation. So I think context for the Advent stories, it's important to know about Jewish suffering. But I also think it starts us thinking differently about even what incarnation means.
This is in the body of Jesus and therefore in the body of I.
[00:11:23] Speaker A: Mean, I don't know. I think this time of year I get a little teary a little more easily know I do in other times of your other meditations. But this makes The Magnificent make more sense right. When we think about it in this way, that it wasn't a poem that she had memorized or something like this. Right. But this is her cry of understanding, I think, at least at that first level, of what this could mean for her. What what this could mean for them.
[00:12:05] Speaker B: Yes. The Magnificent rings different when we factor in the reality of the trauma that Mary as a member of this community would have experienced and when we understand her region in particular. Right. Galilee was what I call a restive region. There was always things happening up in the Galilee region. There was military incursions from the Roman Empire because of all of because there was so much resistance and banditry and so many things happening that not unlike the West Bank now.
You see so much activity and it shapes you.
[00:12:47] Speaker A: Right.
[00:12:47] Speaker B: It shapes you into a kind of person to see the injustices every day, to see your uncles being humiliated, to see your cousins going out on some of these protests, to maybe see other things because the soldiers were known for coming in pretty hard on the women.
This should not be uncommon for us to know, but often war is really particularly difficult for women.
And the Roman Empire was known for raping women as a way to humiliate and make their control so visceral.
Mary would have known that. She would have seen it happen in her community because it was so prevalent in the Galilee region at the time. And so I think when she sings that song, she is singing from a very real place of I know what this feels like and I am being redeemed in real time and that's how I know that God will in fact redeem others. So is her song prophetic? Sure. But I think the more important thing is she's telling us what is happening in her body and in her story in real time. This is happening to me that I am the lowly, humiliated one that is being lifted up. That's how I know that God will do it for others. That's right. Right.
It's from her own experience. And that song, to me, just vibrates with a different intensity and liberative power when you factor that in. Yeah.
[00:14:29] Speaker A: Sometimes I like to say that the prophetic is just saying what is right.
[00:14:36] Speaker B: Yes, absolutely.
[00:14:38] Speaker A: And that's exactly what you just said. Mary is saying what is exactly?
[00:14:42] Speaker B: I think that's a perfect way to say it.
[00:14:45] Speaker A: So you mentioned it, Kelly, that we've got context for the first advent.
Before we started recording, I mentioned that a friend of mine had shared a video with me that you had actually also shared on your social media about Bethlehem now, today inside the West Bank and what that looks like specifically for Palestinian Christians inside of Bethlehem and the West Bank. Now, but I want to go back to where you started to go because there's historical context of trauma and then what we know. But I'll just say, from my experience, what many American Christians are not super aware of is the traumatic or the traumatic experiences of Palestinians now and their families and communities. And having lived where they live for some of them hundreds, if not 1000 years or more, but especially over the last almost hundred years as things have shifted dramatically in the Middle East. So you share some stories of Palestinians that you know in the book, but without going there just yet. Why is it important that we understand this current context and the current conflict? Why would that be important to us as we think about Advent, as we meditate on the incarnation? Why does that matter to us in our context now?
[00:16:35] Speaker B: Well, I'll start with a little bit of my own story in terms of why Palestinians are important in my own story. Maybe we'll get to where you want to go with a little direction, maybe. But I grew up in both Catholic and predominantly evangelical spaces.
I grew up in a season, at least eighty s and ninety s, where there was such fervor around the Holy Land. And it was a big deal if you could go to the Holy Land and visit the places where Jesus walked. And I heard so often really eloquent testimony of times spent in the Holy Land and meeting Jewish men and women in the Holy Land, and especially in Jerusalem, et cetera.
But it wasn't until after college I picked up a book. It was right when the I now know it was when the first intafada happened, the first uprising of Palestinians in the West Bank. And so it was hitting the news. And all I knew is that something was roiling in the Middle East. And as somebody who just graduated from college, I'm like, well, I'll pick up a book on that. I'll read one book and I'll understand everything happening in the Middle East, how naive I was.
But I picked up a book and it was the first time and this book was a New York Times bestseller, was not written by a Christian person.
And this person was telling me that there was another people group in the Holy Land. I knew about the Jewish people, and I probably at some level knew that there were also some variety of Christians there, but I never knew that there were Palestinian people who had equally deep roots in the place in that same land that we call holy. That blew my mind. And I almost felt like, what kind of a Christian am I that I didn't know this? But now I can look back and say, well, nobody told me. It was like this little secret. Nobody told you that they were there? And now I know that when people would go to the Holy Land, they didn't go to the places where our Palestinian brothers and sisters live.
And so I think the other thing is that when people do find out that there are Palestinians, so many of them are Muslim, but they don't even realize that actually there are Christian Palestinians. These are our brothers and sisters in even a deeper way. Not only our human brothers and sisters, but we share the same faith tradition and they are there and they are safeguarding our holy sites and they are right. So I think for me, this is where it began, the recognition, like, oh, now that I have seen them, I can't unsee. And so over the next set of, I mean, 30 years I've been reading books out of the region from both Jewish and Messianic, Jewish and Palestinian and Muslim. I'm reading from all over because I just want to learn and have traveled there multiple times and now have some very dear Palestinian friends. And to me, it's like, oh, understanding their story is part of understanding the story of this place that we call holy. It is part of understanding the texture of the world of Jesus.
But I also think that now there is this different dynamic because our Palestinian friends are now living under times that are quite fraught.
And I think we need to explore that now imperial dynamics. It used to be Rome pressing upon the Jewish people.
I think a case could be made that now it is the Israeli state and largely empowered by the west, including our own country, the United States.
They are the oppressive force that our Palestinian friends are living under and struggling under. And I think that calls upon a lot of really hard work to understand the history, which is quite complex, to maybe investigate our own complicity. Where are our blind spots? What do we need to learn? Part of my journeying there has been to continue to learn by putting myself in the world of my friends and letting that shape me and challenge me. But my guess is there are other people who similarly are faithful Christians, faithful students of Scripture, and may not even know, oh, there are Christian Palestinians. There are a whole other group of people that also are part of this story. And so my hope was that maybe if I could put some of that in this book, it would help people not only see the power dynamics and ask some of those questions, but even just saying, oh, alongside our Jewish and Messianic brothers and sisters and Christians, there are also Palestinians. And so let's see them. I mean, the shepherds were kind of the unseen people in the advent stories. Right. They were the essential workers that you needed them, but you didn't want to see them. And I sometimes think that the Palestinians are treated that way. They're not fully seen, but they're there and they are stewards of our holy sites, and they are fighting for justice in their own communities.
[00:22:17] Speaker A: Yeah, no, it's right. It's rich and it's good. I loved that section where you compared the shepherds to essential workers calling Bethlehem, I think, like the House of Meat, right?
[00:22:31] Speaker B: It was meatbacking industry. That's right.
[00:22:34] Speaker A: It's the meatbacking industry. Yeah.
[00:22:37] Speaker B: The temple had to get their meat from somewhere.
[00:22:39] Speaker A: That's exactly right.
[00:22:40] Speaker B: We got it from Bethlehem, which is not very far away.
[00:22:43] Speaker A: The hop, skipping and jump, it's just right there.
[00:22:46] Speaker B: Just cross the checkpoint and you're there.
[00:22:50] Speaker A: But I think that I'm going to interject just a little bit because I really appreciate you giving us that background in that context, and especially from where you were coming from. I will say my story is similar, but it's later.
I started traveling to Israel during the Second Enthata at the beginning of the 2000s. So 2003 was my first trip, but last month was my first time to cross a checkpoint. So I've been to the Holy Land eight times, and one time only have I spent time in Palestine, and I am still processing that trip. And so I won't process completely out loud with, you know, other than to say that I'm incredibly grateful for what you've done in this book. But I would say my experience has a lot of similarities, and I think it's good that you and I can talk through this a little bit and kind of have kind of found each other in our similarities, in our stories. Because it makes me say if there's two, there's more, right? If there's two of us who have this similar story, there's more, right.
And this is not an uncommon thing for American Christians especially.
Yeah, I hear this all the time, like it's a once in a lifetime opportunity. It's a pilgrimage thing. And then it crushes parts of my heart to think that for people for whom it is a once in a lifetime opportunity, they might miss the chance to get to engage with so many people who are still a very vital part of the land and of the Christian faith and story. And that is the Palestinians who live, many of them on the other side of the wall where Bethlehem exists today.
And so I do think, as Christians.
[00:24:57] Speaker B: As we.
[00:25:00] Speaker A: The the biblical aspects of the story, that you bring forward the context there, the questions that we could ask about what were Mary's experiences, what were her family's experiences, what did this look like for Jesus to be born into this political environment? I think it's entirely appropriate that we also ask some of those same questions about our contemporary context today, because letting our hearts break for what Jesus was born into gives us a bridge to help us understand and form compassion for what's happening now in Palestine. And I think it's just vital that we do that as Christians. I think it's just vital that we.
[00:25:42] Speaker B: Do that if we recognize it in the text. And I hope that that's part of what my excavation work was, was if you can see it here, then you should be able to turn on the news and recognize it.
And that may provoke a lot of soul searching on our part, but Jesus is always telling us, right, to repent, to rethink.
Repentance is about rethinking, recalibrating what you think you know.
And so, you know, if we can look at Scripture well and see the dynamics political, economic, socio political, I mean, they're all there. If we can see that, then we can actually look at the news and say, oh, I see some things and I might have to rethink, but this is the invitation, and I'm so grateful. This is where the Spirit guides us in that process, I believe.
[00:26:41] Speaker A: Yeah. I mean, one of the places that I found to be really interesting as far as your exploration of the biblical text was concerned, is the talk about justice.
I don't know. Many of us kind of have this thought, and you name it, of like, this is about the law, or this is about these kinds of things, right?
I don't know. Sometimes I get excited. I kind of think this is what we bang our fists, know, this kind of thing. But you're like, yeah, and what about the money, right? Like, you talk a lot about the economic justice, and again, then these things from the text just start coming out, right? Like, we know Mary and Joseph, when they went to the temple, had to sacrifice.
[00:27:29] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:27:29] Speaker A: They were poor people in a poor region in a poor land, and Jesus grew up in this house.
Can you talk about that a little bit? Because I do. I love this exploration of this incarnation advent. We're like, let's talk about Jesus being here in the body. This is what it looked like. He was not feasting like a king every night at his dinner table. This is not what it looked like.
[00:28:01] Speaker B: And this is where, you know, my husband is from Burundi, which is a small country, landlocked country in East Africa.
And they always come in near the bottom of the UN's list of underdeveloped countries. They're usually in the bottom five in terms of being and we do development work. That's kind of our day job.
But my husband grew up on less than a dollar a day. So when we talk about that less than a dollar a day, that was his lived experience. And it was really helpful to hear because what I know that means is there are meals you don't have and the meals that you do get are not full of nutrient rich foods.
So many people in countries like this and Palestine now is a lot like this. And Palestine then was absolutely like this. So to grow up poor, as most people did, as Joseph and Mary and Jesus would have grown up this way.
Yes, that means you lacked resources, but it also meant, like you were most likely malnourished, which does things to your body and our cognitive function.
It shapes society in a certain way to grow up in a kind of a world that is dealing with such deep economic stress. There's lots of studies now about how extreme poverty is a driver of trauma. So, like, in our work, we have trauma therapists that work in our most impoverished communities because poverty, like the violence that we associate with militarism, actually similar dynamics. When you are being exploited economically, it is also traumatic and it shapes the society a certain way. It shapes this would have been the bodily experience of Jesus to grow know. Of course, we will hear the story from, you know, he was a political target of Herods, and that's why they became political refugees to Egypt for a while. And even when they returned, they couldn't go back to Bethlehem where they had right family connection and probably a plot, according to Matthew, they had to go up and around to Nazareth. They were basically internally displaced.
Like this is all in the body of Jesus. And I think how we never hear in the story in the Gospels, we don't hear that adult Jesus ever returned to Bethlehem. He went down to Bethany, he went to places around and I wonder if there isn't some purpose like did Jesus experience survivors guilt? He got out of Bethlehem before right? And the slaughter of the innocents, where he would have lost family members like Zechariah, right?
And I think when you think about the humanity of Jesus, he comes into this traumatized, his DNA already has that in his human DNA and then his lived experience, the lack of the maybe most likely malnourishment, the lack of education, the survivors guilt, all of these things. Jesus entered into probably what most humans experience as normative. You and I are probably among those privileged, a small percentage of privileged people who don't know this kind of trauma, this kind of human experience. But I have learned that most people live a life that is shaped by war, economic duress, these kinds of malnourishment, et cetera. And when we talk about incarnation, god came into what probably was the most ubiquitous human experience to enter into deep solidarity with humanity. That's what Jesus did. And that's what we see if we can pull apart the threads of the story and really look and say, wow, God understands what it is to really be human at its most difficult, at its most basic. And that now, as I say, lives in the body of God.
That's to me what incarnation is it's? How deeply God has experienced the world as most people experience it?
Yeah.
[00:32:35] Speaker A: Kelly and as you're talking, I think how right it is for us to be curious and ask those questions.
I don't know. I wonder maybe he did have survivor skill. We don't you're right. Not that I can think of. We don't see him go back to Bethlehem. What does that mean? This was the place where his dad was from. Right.
What is it about that just to begin to ask those questions, to allow ourselves to be curious and just to say, as you mentioned, we're learning more about trauma studies now, and in fact, I'm taking a class. The final that I'm going to write as soon as we hang up here, I'm going to finish, is on a Theologies of Exile class where we do we take a lot of time looking at the prophets and especially Ezekiel and Jeremiah. Now, we're in the Torah right now, but just through the lens of know, what did this look like? And I think a lot of times with maybe the history of the exile, but certainly with the Gospels as well, for those of us who have grown up around those stories, they just become really common. The language becomes common.
We can kind of tell these stories with our eyes closed.
The language becomes very familiar. Right.
And it breaks my heart when I'm reading through the prophets now and doing close readings and trying to go, what did this actually mean?
What if Jeremiah isn't just entirely poetic in what he's saying, right? What if people are experiencing things like this? Then what did that look like? Or, okay, let's pretend it is poetic. What was going on that made those words so meaningful for the community and for the population, right? And as we look at the gospel stories, I think that to ask ourselves some of those similar questions, even for text that is so familiar, can really deepen our gosh. I mean, our love, our affection for Jesus, for sure, but our understanding of what that really meant, that he would come incarnate into a body like this, into experiences like this.
[00:35:01] Speaker B: And I think, as you were talking about the ways we become familiar with texts, right? We have these stones with sharp edges, but over time, we've polished them down to these rounded pebbles that we so cavalierly hold and toss in our hands. And yet they were sharp. They were meant to be sharp. They were forged in pain, right. That we are so out of touch with that has been sanitized or domesticated or just softened with our familiarity. And I definitely see that in the gospel stories now. I see when you think of poker, right, somebody has a like now I'm like, oh, the tells are all throughout these stories that Matthew and Luke are giving us, but, boy, until I revisited them over the last set. Of years I hadn't seen know. And I'm like, gosh, I'm a student of scripture. I'm a faithful Christian, and I missed it. But Luke intended that you would definitely see one of the big features of his story is the economy is a huge, huge character right alongside Mary and Joseph and Gabriel and the shepherds. You're meant to I mean, he talks about that Darn census that they had to go register like five times. He mentioned meaning you're supposed to pick up on this. There's a tax hike coming for people who are already barely making it. Joseph wasn't just traveling south worried about his wife who was pregnant. He was also probably worried about, like, right, things are going to get worse, and how are we going to economically make this work for like, we are meant to see the economy as such an integral part of Luke's story. But, man, I missed it for all those years.
And coming back to it in the last set of years has allowed me to go, oh, wow, now I can't not see it right now. It's there.
And seeing these stories afresh now every time I encounter a gospel story, like, further on, it's like, oh, Jesus having conversations with Roman functionaries when he most likely was a victim, right? He was traumatized by a lot of Roman in his childhood. He might have lost a parent due to a Roman invasion. He lost his Uncle Zachariah with what happened down in Bethlehem, like he would have had in his own body. This my life is shaped by these people.
And then you see how he is magnanimous and how he points out things but also invites them. And I'm like, Jesus is much more stunning when you factored in what would have been in his human self, in his human experience, and that human ness to react.
Jesus is even more to me, he is even more miraculous in his utter.
[00:38:03] Speaker A: We've had I've had this conversation a couple of different times, but it keeps coming up, and I think it's because it's stunning to me, too. And it's important, I think, for us as Christians that sometimes we have this view of Jesus as if he was only know because we have the dualism that exists and some of the things that we take with us in our faith that really, I don't know, nt Wright would say aren't exactly biblical.
[00:38:35] Speaker B: But.
[00:38:35] Speaker A: It was just a shell. It was like just a shell. It's just a body. And he was really just like this God inside of this shell of a skin. It's like but really no, he really was, as we're talking about, fully human and fully divine. And so it's not that he just snapped his fingers like the chick on Bewitched and was like, okay, I'm going to talk to these Romans and be totally fine about it now.
It was in him, in his whole self in a way that we can't fathom. I understand. But I think we do ourselves a disservice, our faith a disservice when we neglect to I don't know, to be curious to use that word again when we neglect to be curious about Jesus'humanity in that wonder.
[00:39:32] Speaker B: I mean, for me, I don't know if this is your experience, but I grew up where when Incarnation was talked about. I mean, yes, sometimes, yes, the Incarnation happened at the Christmas story, but the deeper conversations about Incarnation were always connected to atonement, so right. It was more about, yeah, he had to be born that's right. Into human. So okay. Yes. At Christmas, so that then we could really talk about the big deal, which was what happened during Holy Week. That's right.
So much of my understanding about Incarnation has been shaped from crucifixion right. From Holy Week and Atonement thinking and I think this has been such a revelation for me to actually look at Incarnation from Advent instead of atonement. And I'm like, wow, it changes everything for me and how humanity becomes the place that God works. Even in Mary's story. Right. In her humanity, God enters in well, that's a whole nother story. But, yeah, I think that has been one of the fundamental things for me, is I see the Incarnation so differently now because of the Advent stories, and I think it's a healthy corrective, and to me, it makes Jesus so much more relatable. Maybe not to me as an upper class, American, white, passing person, but I think for so many people in the world over, this picture of Jesus is like, yeah, oh, he is like us in every way and has suffered what we have suffered and knows our pain. It makes Jesus more relatable, I think, to think maybe he too struggled with survivor's guilt. Maybe he too knew what it was like to be like to have hunger pangs from not eating. Wow. And I think for a whole group of people, this makes Jesus yes, he knows us and therefore knows how to save.
Right?
[00:41:38] Speaker A: Yeah.
I would like for you to share, if you would, another kind of one of your tells, and it can be from the book or not from the book, but we talked a little bit about the economy. We talked a little bit about the resistance in the Galilee region, a little bit about the unseenness, I think, yes, of the shepherds, but of others in the story as well. When you think about going through the Gospels now, what are some of those things that what's, at least one of those things that you thought, I can't believe I didn't see that.
[00:42:16] Speaker B: Well, I think when you recognize that well, first of all, I do think I believe and if you read the book, you'll see how I get there theologically. But I do believe that Joseph most likely perished in some Roman incursions up in sephiroths when Jesus was quite young. And so we know Jesus having lost his father at a young age to the Empire again, I think that deeply shapes the way you see him deal with any Roman soldier, any Roman functionary throughout the story, or those who are losing any other fathers he's dealing with. I just think I sometimes wonder what was the relationship between him and John the Baptist, really?
John the Baptist is like, my dad died protecting me in Bethlehem, right outside of Bethlehem.
But you got advance notice and got to leave and go to Mean. Don't you think there might have been a little even if they loved each other a little awkwardness or a little work that they had to do in their humanness around their fathers and losing their fathers, both of them losing them to the Empire in one way or another?
I think of Mary being somebody who would have been aware of brutality against women, maybe herself a victim of it. We don't know. I think there is a valid reading of the story that Mary is as likely to have been a victim as would it. When I think about Mary's possible experience, or at least her deep understanding of what it is to be the precarity of being a woman in that time and the stigma that she would have had raising Jesus on her own, well, then you watch the way that Jesus deals with women.
I just think there was so much there that he would have seen in his own mother's story, seen in his aunties and cousins, and would have shaped how he saw and interacted with women with a different kind of knowing, a different kind of tenderness. And the times when he stood up for I'm not going to condemn you. And none of these guys can either.
[00:44:40] Speaker A: Right.
[00:44:40] Speaker B: That he had a different perspective.
I don't seems there's hardly a story that I've come to since I've done this that I don't say, oh, wow. When you understand where the story started, where Jesus started, where his natal family started, it's deeper, it's richer, it's more challenging sometimes.
[00:45:05] Speaker A: Yeah, I think it's definitely more challenging. And I think for for what it is, for everything that's wonderful and fun and beautiful, sometimes the Christmas culture that we have here in the States make things like this more challenging. Right.
My husband sometimes refers to me as a Debbie Downer. Right.
Kelly's with me, you can't see that she raised her hand.
I'm going to say she's joined me.
But this is heavy. Right. To think about these kinds of things.
It's heavy to meditate on them. It's heavy when we think about trying to figure out how to hold intention the joy of a new baby and the hardship that that can bring when everything else is well in the world or in your world to imagine just let our theological imaginations go for a few minutes or for a few hours or to sit and read this work. It is challenging. It really is. Because the complexity that it brings to our faith is hard to hold.
[00:46:40] Speaker B: Yes, but isn't it also I mean, for me it's challenging, but it's also deeply comforting.
Sometimes I read this and I feel like, oh, but this makes so much more sense, this feels so much more true. And that if this is what the writers Luke and Matthew were experiencing and wanted to share with us about what most likely was like. This feels like the more honest understanding of what it is to be human, what the world often looks like. Because there have been so many empires since and so many people who have suffered, whether it was death or enslavement or sexual abuse or land loss. When I read it that way, I feel like finally somebody is being honest about what this human experience is and where God enters into it. Not neat and tidy. There is, as I say, the ongoing complexity of hope. It's there, but we have to look at the hard stuff in order to really get to hope to me, but then it's more solid.
But there's a deep comfort for me. Like I'm doing this and I remember my editor was like, this is pretty intense.
We need to leave people with some hope. And I'm like, oh, but honesty is so comforting and kind of the runway to hope for me.
[00:48:14] Speaker A: Absolutely.
I think about as you were talking about, and the empires continue, right? And I think Luke Two is kind of the quintessential. If somebody's going to read something on Christmas morning while their kids are trying to tear at the presents, it's probably going to be Luke Two. But if we just flip a couple of pages, might be my favorite chapter in Luke, which is Luke Four. And you mentioned or you allude to it near the beginning of the book. This is where Jesus almost gets thrown off a cliff, right? But he almost gets thrown off a cliff in the wake of reading from the scroll of Isaiah those beautiful Jubilee texts. Those beautiful jubilee texts.
[00:48:56] Speaker B: But they're also sharp.
[00:48:58] Speaker A: They are, they are.
And then I preached on this a couple of weeks ago, and I come back to John the Baptist, who is one of my absolute favorites. But then Jesus again, quotes from Isaiah, right? And this felt sharp to John in prison waiting to be beheaded, right? I've come to do all of these things, and guess what, my friend? None of this is going to happen for you. Right.
And this is hard, right? This is really hard. But this is the hope of the gospel, though.
This is what I think we I would say in my experience and my upbringing, I don't think I'm the only one who kind of missed it. But there is a holistic gospel that Jesus is preaching with his whole body. Yes, with his whole body, right. This isn't about the hope isn't, well, you get to join me in heaven when you die. Like there is hope for us in the world today, in our living today, there is hope.
[00:50:09] Speaker B: It is a hard born hope.
Those Jubilee texts, they are good news for the poor. They are hard news for the rest of us.
[00:50:20] Speaker A: That's right.
[00:50:24] Speaker B: That's the connection I made is I think the Advent stories are good news for the poor, and they are hard news for those of us who have something to lose, who have something we have to reconsider, who have something that we have been complicit in.
Man, these stories should make us tremble a bit. That's what they're meant to do for people who are in our position.
But, man, good news. Like my husband's family, he's like hearing that your debts have been forgiven. There would have been nothing more exciting to his father than hearing that his father was a pastor and a church planner for 45 years, known countrywide for the work he did, spreading the gospel and growing churches. And the best news would have been, Andre Nikundeja, your debts are forgiven.
And my dad would have had to struggle with the other side, which is you have some things to give back. You have some land that isn't yours to keep. You have some deep thinking about how the economy works, that you need to rethink to stay in this Jubilee campaign. Right. But Advent gives us some similar notes.
[00:51:37] Speaker A: I think that's right. All right, Kelly.
[00:51:43] Speaker B: I cannot talk about Jubilee texts and not get fired up and cry simultaneously.
[00:51:48] Speaker A: I'm hearing you. I'm hearing you. And now I'm fired up.
I want to ask you to wrap us mean, this conversation has just been food for my soul, and so I'm so appreciative.
It's hard in this time of year. Sometimes we get wrapped up. Sometimes I get wrapped up in the wrong things just to be truthful. And they're not always wrong, but it's like I want to take the time. I want to meditate on the miracle of the incarnation. And not just that this teenage woman was pregnant with the Messiah, but what that meant as he was born into that situation and lived into that situation, his life of hope, what that meant for them and what it means for us. So, Kelly, I'm just going to ask you to wrap us up. What question didn't I ask? Where didn't I go?
Or what meditation might you have for us as we move closer to the celebration of Christmas in this season?
[00:52:59] Speaker B: Well, I think there's one scene that if I could challenge I wish translators would have done a better job interpreting what Luke was trying to tell us about what that initial Christmas Eve looked like. Because I grew up believing that it was a very solitary, very lonely, in a sense experience of Joseph and Mary not being able to find lodging kind of on the outskirts, maybe finding a cave. If you've ever been to Bethlehem, they take you to Shepherd's Field where there's some little cave that maybe Jesus was born in out there on the outskirts. Thank God some shepherds came by and some angels had some songs to sing. But it was a very lonely scene. And I actually don't think that that's what Luke intended to describe.
And I think so much has been done with that little word in that there was no room in the in. And we translators, like I said, have made this worse. But in our Americanness we hear an inn and we think of a motel. There was no room in the motel and there were no room in any of the other motels. And so they end up on the outskirts. But that's not the understanding I think we're meant to get.
Joseph was coming to his family home. This was his extended family. They may not have been his intimate family, but they were his extended family. If you know anything about the Abrahamic cultures, it's a big deal. You would have been welcomed. There would have been room for you in the family compound.
Now, I know something about compounds from living in Burundi where there's a compound where there's a nice big wall or hedge or something. And inside there's a house with a few room, private rooms. There are some other covered spaces.
There's the area where the livestock is that's still in the compound. There's some quarters out back where maybe some of your workers live.
And actually this tracks with what it looked like in ancient Palestine. There would have been a family compound. And so there wasn't room in the inn and the better translation would be in a private room. There wasn't a private room where Mary could have shut the door know had a moment, but they would have been welcomed into the family compound with all of Joseph's family, and they would have been part of the family. Meals, and they would have been surrounded and had a place. Not a private space, not an inn, but maybe out by the livestock, but still within the boundaries of the family compound. Still within the welcome of the family. And in my mind I see all the women are busy making dinner. They're pitting the olives and cutting up cucumbers and tearing the fresh mint leaves and putting everything together. And Mary's water breaks and all of those know, wash their hands and functionally become midwives. And she is surrounded by family. And Joseph is waiting with family to get word about the safe birth of their son. And I just think we have been given a very lonely Christmas Eve. But I actually imagine they were surrounded by family that loved them and cared for them and celebrated the birth of this baby, and that the shepherds got to come into the compound and share in the party, but that they were not alone. And even that, like I said, gives me comfort that Mary was surrounded by new aunties and cousins. And I would hope that that might be more of the picture we have, that even though we have these little crushes around our house or under our Christmas tree that just showed Joseph and Mary and Jesus, imagine the family that loved them and welcomed them and surrounded them and helped usher this little life into the world. Like you said, in the midst of all that was terrible about the empire, right? The pushback that we still have each other, you cannot beat out of us the hospitality and the joy that we have in each other. Even herod can't do that. Even Caesar can't do that. You can raise our taxes, but you can't deprive us of our humanity and the ability to be together. So maybe that would give us a different picture on Christmas Eve.
[00:57:30] Speaker A: That was one of my favorite parts, Kelly.
I loved it. Thank you so oh, thank you for this conversation. Thank you for the book. Thank you for that fresh it is for me, a fresh meditation as we move in to Christmas Eve and Christmas. And the thought of Jesus and his parents being surrounded by family brings me so much joy.
[00:57:56] Speaker B: Again.
[00:57:56] Speaker A: This is Kelly Nicondeja, writer of the first advent in Palestine. Reversals, resistance and the ongoing complexity of hope. I'll link this on the Show Notes so that everyone can know where they can find it. This will air just about a week before Christmas, but I would encourage everyone that if the shipping makes it impossible for you to get your hands on before Christmas morning, read it anyway. Read it after. Read it. Keep it for next year.
This as Kelly and I have talked and as she has shared, this just helps us get a little bit more of a grasp on the complexity of our faith and who we serve as our savior. So thanks for being with us, Kelly.
[00:58:44] Speaker B: It was a joy to be with you.
[00:58:47] Speaker A: The links for all the resources mentioned in today's episode can be found in the Show Notes music and podcast production by Seth Busetti.
[00:58:55] Speaker B: Be sure to give us a review.
[00:58:57] Speaker A: On itunes and subscribe at your favorite podcast listening app. You can also visit
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