Jesus was poor: an Advent Reflection

I had the good fortune of visiting a friend in San Jose, California over the Thanksgiving holiday week. She is living in a small, beautiful home owned by dear friends; it’s located at the back of their main house, on their same property. Some folks call these cozy, smaller dwellings “granny flats.”

There was a time when houses in this neighborhood sold for a reasonable amount; the owners of the house where my friend is staying lucked out this way. Many people with ordinary jobs bought homes and lived here—teachers, grocery store managers, nurses. They most likely don’t anymore, not unless they inherited their property or have been here for years. Houses in this neighborhood sell for multi-millions now. You read that right: not hundreds of thousands, but multiple millions. The house where my friend is might fetch 2.8 million dollars, according to Zillow, and it seemed like that estimate was just for the main house, and didn’t include the additional dwelling where my friend is staying at the rear of the property.

This fact gobsmacked me. These are four bedroom, two bath homes. They are lovely—but they are not mansions.

I was able to go for walks around the neighborhood. There is an independently owned bookstore within walking distance, a Boba shop, an ice cream parlor. There are restaurants that sell nearly every kind of food that you can imagine. It was a treat for me, someone who lives in a small town that isn’t served by DoorDash, to go out in the afternoon and wander around and suddenly find myself passing a coffee shop, a donut shop. I grabbed an Oreo Crème Brulee Boba Milk tea one  afternoon, even though I knew that my mile walk wouldn’t burn off the more than 700 calories it held.

Some of the neighborhood homes were starting to put up their Christmas decorations. The house on the corner of my friend’s street had a gigantic blow up turkey in the front yard for Thanksgiving Day. When I left the next day, it was gone and a pile of oversized decorative Christmas packages had taken its place.

It’s a funny thing about Christmas—all of us know that it has gotten commercialized. In the USA, it’s a holiday that revolves around sales and spending. We even have a new holiday now, one that hits the day after Thanksgiving:  Black Friday. Black Friday used to mark the beginning of the Christmas shopping season, but Black Friday sales started weeks earlier this year. The retailers are anxious to get us spending our money.

The season of Advent also starts right after Thanksgiving. It lasts four weeks, starting on the fourth Sunday before Christmas, which this year is November 30 (maybe the day you are reading this). In the Christian tradition, Advent is a time waiting for the birth of Jesus, which used to be the main point of Christmas. There’s not much waiting involved in the Christmas season anymore, though. It’s about doing more—more decorating, baking, shopping, and buying—and doing it now.

I am so annoyed with billionaires and how they profit from the Christmas shopping season. I am annoyed with how they made their money, especially Bezos of Amazon. I am not wanting to buy much of anything from his site now. I let my Amazon Prime membership expire this week and am doing my best not to surrender to the siren song of fast, free shipping. I do not need Prime Music. I do not need Amazon Prime streaming shows.

I am also annoyed with Musk and Trump. I’m annoyed with Trump for a lot of reasons, but his being a billionaire doesn’t help. I am annoyed with Zuckerberg. There was a recent New York Times article that said that Zuckerberg bought at least eleven properties in a Palo Alto neighborhood, spending more than $110 million, bringing “major construction and intense surveillance with him.” The neighborhood was an affluent one and was home to “lawyers, business executives and Stanford professors.” But when the billionaire “moved in next door” he created “a compound for his family, a private school for his children—and headaches for his neighbors,” the article said.

The homes in the neighborhood where I stayed for Thanksgiving are relatively inexpensive compared to what Zuckerberg has spent to create his little private enclave in Palo Alto—but they are out of reach for most of us. They are especially out of reach for the people who I saw working in the neighborhood—the helpers. The people driving the Amazon delivery vans, the Uber drivers, those bringing DoorDash orders to people’s front doors, those painting houses and blowing leaves into piles on the streets—they mostly were not white. I do not know for sure, but I do not think they would be able to live in that lovely neighborhood, where they could walk to a Boba shop or grab a slice of pizza at the Pizza My Heart restaurant up the street. It’s not because they are not hard workers. Not because of that at all.

Maybe this is finally the tie that brings us back to Advent, because this was supposed to be a post that ushered in four weeks of Advent writing. In my book “Watch for the Light: Readings for Advent and Christmas,” there is an essay by Gustavo Gutierrez, a priest and Catholic theologian who is widely considered to be the founder of liberation theology, a movement that emphasizes helping the poor through political change.

Gutierrez writes, “The Son of God was born into a little people, a nation of little importance by comparison with the great powers of the time. Furthermore, he took flesh among the poor in a marginal area…he lived with the poor and emerged from among them to inaugurate a kingdom of love and justice. This is why many have trouble recognizing him…Jesus shows himself to be…present via those who are the absent, anonymous people of history—those who are not the controllers of history, namely, the mighty, the socially acceptable, ‘the wise and the learned.’”

That passage easily sends me into my ‘Judge Judy” mode: take that, you billionaires! Take that, you influencers who are socially acceptable! And also all of you in Trump’s cabinet who are trying to control history now. It’s easy to judge, to scoff at Bezos’ yacht,  Zuckerberg’s compound and Trump’s ballroom–but where is Jesus for me? That’s my question this Advent: where can I find Jesus, this season and always? How can I help usher in his kingdom of love and justice? It’s something for me to think about, pray about, wrestle with. Because I am not rich, compared to the annoying billionaires. But also? I am not poor, either.