(Start Video at 35:15 to watch the sermon)
This is an expanded version of a reflection originally published as part of "Advent Journey to Bethlehem" by Red Letter Christians, in partnership with Bright Star Bethlehem, Global Immersion, the Christian Community Development Association (CCDA) and Freedom Road.[1]
As a Palestinian Christian who grew up in Nazareth, where the angel visited Mary, where Jesus spent most of his life, and frequently visited Bethlehem, I thought I understood what it meant to read scripture as an Indigenous person. I had read the nativity story hundreds of times, but I had never truly seen the land in it. Despite living right next to Mary's well where this story unfolded, I, too, read it through the colonial lens I acquired - one that treated the Palestinian landscape as mere backdrop.
Now, being here, 11,000 kilometers from Nazareth, I wonder if my drive to write land-based readings of scripture comes from a deep need to stay connected to the land that formed me. Or perhaps I am seeking something that was there all along - a rooted and embodied spirituality, trying to uncover ancestral wisdom that was overshadowed by my Evangelical upbringing. Most likely, it is both: distance has given me new eyes to see what was always before me.
It took encountering Indigenous land-based methodologies to help me see this familiar story anew. Vine Deloria teaches us that in Indigenous understandings, "revelation was seen as a continuous process of adjustment to the natural surroundings and not as a specific message valid for all times and places."[2] The emphasis lies not on what people believed to be true, but that the experience itself was true. Sacred places hold intimate revelations, as personal as "our own personal thoughts."[3]
This fundamentally challenged my understanding. In Indigenous contexts, places where revelations were experienced are remembered and set aside. Through rituals and ceremonials, people could once again communicate with the divine. These locations are often kept secret - protected from outsiders who might desecrate them, preserved for those who understand their true significance. A mountain isn't just a setting - it's a relative that holds stories, teaches wisdom, and participates in the community's spiritual life.[4]
In Palestine, we face a different reality. Our sacred places have become public markers of historical events, built upon and turned into sanctuaries over two millennia of Christian pilgrimage. Every spot where divine encounters happened has become a church, a shrine, a place marked on tourist maps. You can visit the exact location where Gabriel appeared to Mary - well, actually, you can visit several 'exact' locations, depending on which ancient tradition you follow.
Yet beneath these stone markers and golden shrines, Palestinians maintain something closer to what Deloria describes - an understanding that regardless of what happens to the people, sacred lands remain as permanent fixtures in our cultural and religious understanding through ceremonies, rituals, and stories.[5] While tourists snap photos of the Church of the Nativity, local Christians in Bethlehem continue ancient relationships with the limestone caves that sheltered the holy family, with the hills where shepherds watched their flocks.
This tension helped me understand what Indigenous methodologies were teaching. The land itself carries revelations that are continuous, intimate, and alive - far deeper than any human marker can capture.[6]
These Indigenous insights provided tools to decolonize my own reading of scripture. Consider how our Palestinian landscape is marked by churches tracing Mary's journey - each one a testament to a living revelation rather than just a historical marker. Starting from the north of West Bank: the Visitation church in Zababdeh near Jenin where local tradition holds that Mary rested during her travels; the Milk Grotto in Bethlehem, where tradition says Mary nursed Jesus; and in the south, the ancient Church of Saint Porphyrius in Gaza, marking where the Holy Family passed through on their flight to Egypt.[7] Today, along this same ancient route where Mary once sought refuge, only bombs and military jets travel freely from north to south, while our people remain trapped and divided.
Each site speaks not of a single moment frozen in time, but of a continuous relationship between people, place, and divine presence. Today, as these bombs fall on Gaza, including near this ancient church that witnessed Mary's flight from violence, we see how these sacred revelations continue to resonate with painful immediacy. When families in Zababdeh share stories of Mary's visit, when communities in Bethlehem tell their children about the Milk Grotto, when Gaza's Christians pray in Saint Porphyrius Church - they're not just remembering historical events. They're participating in living revelations that have survived empire after empire.
Palestinian Christians maintain their witness as 'living stones' - a term that takes on new meaning through a land-based reading.[8] In Bethlehem today, Christian families who have lived there for generations maintain ancient traditions that connect them to the land itself. Every Christmas, homes across Palestine transform their walls with carefully crafted brown paper, recreating the texture and folds of limestone caves. These elaborate nativity scenes, often covering entire walls, aren't mere decorations - they're a way of bringing the sacred landscape into our homes, teaching our children that the same stone that cradled Jesus remains part of our living story.
In the nativity story, I see a profound moment where Creator, Creation, and Created-beings participate together in divine revelation. Through Indigenous ways of knowing, we understand that plants, animals, and the community of creation are not passive backdrop but co-inhabitants of this sacred story.[9] Just as Indigenous peoples recognize plants as elders and teachers who share their wisdom through their very being, we can see how creation actively participated in co-creating this holy moment.
When the manger's hay cushioned the divine child, it wasn't merely serving as bedding - it was a plant relative offering its own form of welcome and protection. The frankincense and myrrh weren't simply valuable commodities, but plant elders sharing their medicine and wisdom, participating in this revelation through their aromatic presence and healing properties.[10] These plants, like the Indigenous medicines of Turtle Island, are understood as generous relatives who choose to share their gifts with human communities.
The gifts brought by the magi reveal ancient trade routes that connected communities through the wisdom of the land. Frankincense, harvested from Boswellia trees in the Arabian Peninsula and Horn of Africa, wasn't just a luxury item - it was traditional medicine used for healing and spiritual practices across cultures.[11] Its aromatic resin was known to reduce anxiety and create a sense of peace - perhaps chosen specifically to calm a young mother and newborn in uncertain times.
Myrrh, similarly, came from the sap of Commiphora trees native to Yemen and Somalia. Used in traditional medicine for its anti-inflammatory properties, it was also central to burial practices - a gift that foreshadowed both healing and sacrifice. These weren't random expensive items, but carefully chosen substances that carried deep cultural and medicinal significance.
Even the gold holds deeper meaning in first-century Palestine. Unlike today's purely monetary value, gold was understood as the earth's own treasure, formed in its depths over millennia. In local traditions, it was seen as the earth's way of participating in sacred moments, offering its most precious substance to honor divine presence.[12]
Yet today we must ask: what happens when empire disrupts these sacred relationships? When bombs crater ancient trading routes, when olive groves are uprooted, when access to medicinal plants is cut off by walls and checkpoints? The current genocide in Gaza isn't just targeting a people - it's attempting to sever ancient relationships between people and land.[13]
When we see fields burned and trees bulldozed with the logic of 'if we can't have it, no one can,' we witness an attempt to not just displace a people but to destroy the very possibility of relationship with creation. How can traditional plant knowledge be passed down when families are forced from their ancestral lands? How can sacred sites continue to teach when they're bombed into rubble? How can creation participate in revelation when it's being systematically destroyed?
This is what Indigenous methodologies help me see - that creation itself participates in revelation, that traditional ecological knowledge carries spiritual wisdom, that trade routes are more than just economic paths but ways that landscapes and peoples remain in relationship with each other. And this is precisely why empire seeks to destroy these relationships - because a people rooted in their land, maintaining sacred relationships with creation, cannot be easily erased or replaced.[14]
Living Witnesses to Sacred Harmony: A Bethlehem Story
In the darkest nights of winter, Christians worldwide turn their hearts to a small town in Palestine called Bethlehem. Yet this year, as we witness the catastrophic destruction and genocide in Gaza, Mary's journey to Bethlehem takes on deeper meaning. A young teenager, barely more than a child herself, traveling while pregnant, facing an uncertain future far from her home in Nazareth. Her vulnerability and fear must have been overwhelming - much like the fears of young Palestinian mothers today, giving birth amid destruction, displacement, and death. The comfortable distance many maintain from this reality cannot hold, for a placeless nativity story disconnected from its land and people serves only to numb us to the urgent cry for justice rising from the grieving earth of the very place where "the Word became flesh and dwelt among us" (John 1:14).
The real Bethlehem remains a living tapestry of sacred relationships where Creator, creation, and humanity meet. Under Roman occupation, this humble town became a refuge where all creation fulfilled its spiritual responsibility to comfort a frightened young mother: The earth offered a manger - a feeding trough carved from local limestone that Palestinian craftsmen still work with today. The hay that cushioned the manger represents creation's nurturing abundance - the same hay that would feed the animals, now cradling the divine child.
The cosmos itself participated in this sacred drama, as "the star which they had seen in the East went before them" (Matthew 2:9). The same Palestinian skies that witnessed the angels' proclamation to the shepherds now light up with deadly explosions rather than heavenly hosts. Yet Palestinian Christians maintain their vigil beneath these stars as "living stones," their presence a testament to divine promise amid systematic destruction.
The earth offered its treasure: gold from its depths, while the plant world brought frankincense and myrrh (Matthew 2:11). Through ancient trade routes, these precious offerings connected distant communities to this small town - from Arabian deserts to African mines to Palestinian hills. Even the name Bethlehem - House of Bread - speaks to the earth's provision and human cultivation. Each being in creation played its part in co-creating this holy moment, teaching us that shalom cannot exist alongside the destruction of any of its parts.
When we separate the nativity from its place and its peoples, we risk losing these profound truths about creation's harmony and human witness. A placeless theology inevitably becomes a rootless spirituality, unable to hear creation's groaning under the weight of destruction (Romans 8:22). Yet as Bethlehem's inhabitants have long understood, empires and their violence do not last forever. This Advent season calls us to reconnect with the real Bethlehem - not as a distant symbol, but as a living place where heaven and earth met in perfect shalom, where a young mother found refuge in creation's embrace.
Like Mary, we carry creation's sacred wisdom in our hearts: the safety of a womb, the freedom of a bird, the love of a child, the equality of siblings, the rootedness of a tree. Like the community of creation that welcomed her, we are called to be midwives of hope in a land crying out for justice.
As we prepare to sing 'O Come, O Come, Emmanuel,' we remember that this ancient hymn has always been a song of the displaced, originally echoing the cries of those in Babylonian exile. When we sing 'Your people lost and broken, roam, and seek a place of welcome and peace,'[15] we remember that Emmanuel - God with us - is not bound to any empire or nation, but is present wherever people cry out for justice, wherever the land holds memories of sacred revelation, wherever communities maintain their connection to place despite displacement and destruction.
[1] "Advent Journey to Bethlehem," Christian Community Development Association, December 2023, https://ccda.org/advent-journey-to-bethlehem/; see also "Advent 2024," Red Letter Christians, December 2023, https://redletterchristians.org/advent-2024/
[2] Vine Deloria Jr., God Is Red: A Native View of Religion (Golden, CO: Fulcrum Publishing, 2003), 65.
[3] Vine Deloria Jr., God is Red, 67.
[4] Vine Deloria, God Is Red, 61. Deloria explains that "context is therefore all-important for both practice and understanding of reality. The places where revelations were experienced were remembered and set aside as locations where, through rituals and ceremonials, the people could once again communicate with the spirits."
[5] Vine Deloria Jr., God is Red,
[6] This understanding aligns with what Shawn Wilson describes as Indigenous ways of knowing. See Shawn Wilson, Research Is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods (Nova Scotia: Fernwood Publishing, 2008), 87.
[7] For historical context of these sacred sites, see Mitri Raheb, "The Bible and Land Colonization," in Theologies of Land: Contested Land, Spatial Justice, and Identity, ed. Khiok-Khng Yeo and Gene L. Green (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2021), 15-17.
[8] The concept of 'living stones' draws from 1 Peter 2:5 and has been particularly significant in Palestinian Christian theology.
[9] This understanding of creation as co-inhabitant rather than backdrop draws from Indigenous methodologies. See Shay Welch, "Dance as Native Performative Knowledge," Native American and Indigenous Philosophy 18, no.1 (Fall 2018): 25.
[10] For traditional uses of frankincense and myrrh in ancient Near Eastern cultures, see Nigel Groom, Frankincense and Myrrh: A Study of the Arabian Incense Trade (London: Longman, 1981), 12-15.
[11] For the significance of trade routes in maintaining cultural relationships, see Mary L. Keller, "Indigenous Studies and 'the Sacred,'" American Indian Quarterly 38, no. 1 (Winter 2014): 85-86.
[12] For gold's significance in ancient Near Eastern sacred contexts, see Carol Meyers, "Temples and Sacred Places," in The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Daily Life in Roman Palestine, ed. Catherine Hezser (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 545-47.
[13] This parallels what Indigenous scholars have identified as environmental colonialism. See Raymond Aldred, "An Alternative Starting Place for an Indigenous Theology" (PhD diss., Wycliffe College and University of Toronto, 2020), 87-89.
[14] Deloria, God Is Red, 275-276.
[15] Juanita L. Austin, "O Come, O Come, Emmanuel (alternative words)," November 29, 2017.
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