Merry Christmas to all! On this most blessed day, I share with you a poem by Lynn Ungar, titled "Incarnation":
The trees have finally
shaken off their cloak
of leaves, redrawn
themselves more sternly
against the sky. I confess
I have coveted this
casting off of flesh,
have wished myself
all line and form, all God.
I confess that I am caught
by the story of Christmas,
by the pronouncement of the Spirit
upon Mary’s plain flesh.
What right did the angel
have to come to her
with the news of that
unprovided, unimaginable
birth? What right
had God to take on flesh
so out of season?
When Mary lay gasping
in water and blood
that was of her own body
but not her own
did she choose one gleaming,
antiseptic star to carry
her through the night?
The flesh has so few choices,
the angels, perhaps, none.
The trees will shake themselves
and wait for spring.
The angels, unbodied, will clutch
the night with their singing.
And Mary, like so many,
troubled and available,
will hear the word:
The power of the Most High
will overshadow you
And in her flesh, respond.
(Thanks to Tuhina Rasche, fellow FTE Ministry Fellow, for making me aware of this poem through her sermon from 4 Advent on her blog, This Lutheran Life.)
Sunday, December 25, 2011
Friday, December 16, 2011
Saying "Yes" to God's call
In my baby book, my mother writes about my baptism when I was sixteen months old:
“Pastor Sims baptized you. When he poured the water over your head, you shook your head and said, ‘No!’”
Tomorrow, I will say yes. Twenty-nine years after my baptism, I will be ordained a deacon in Christ’s church and say “yes” to God’s call on my life.
Although in my adult life I became a critic of infant baptism and delighted in the baby book witness that even as a one-year-old, I was against having something chosen for me that I did not choose for myself, I later discovered that the date of my baptism – February 27 – was the same date that I had an evangelical “conversion experience” in high school and the same date that I first started volunteering with the Outdoor Church in Cambridge, Mass., the homeless ministry out of which my calling to the priesthood emerged. So I can’t deny that something must have happened at my baptism, however much I did not choose it for myself at the time.
And as I approach the eve of my ordination, which marks my transition from being a lay person to being a member of the clergy, a transition in identity which can never truly be reversed – an ontological change, if you will – I am reminded of all the ways in which I did not choose this call for myself. Yes, I am assenting to it of my own free will, but it was not simply an individual, personal choice. The Episcopal Church does not allow people to take on ordination solely of their own choosing – the community has to affirm that they see the call as well.
The authority that will be given to me at my ordination is not mine to take, but the church’s to give, and I accept it with a measure of humility and honor and gratitude. The priest who led our pre-ordination Quiet Day told us a story of how the priest in her home congregation used to always have members of the congregation put his vestments on him before the Eucharistic liturgy, symbolizing that he could only be vested and serving them as priest by virtue of their assent and their choosing him as their representative leader. I like the metaphor that we cannot vest ourselves, just as we cannot celebrate Eucharist alone – there must be a community present to assent to the words that the priest offers on their behalf.
There have been times during the formal discernment process and my seminary career when I have wanted to shake my head and say, “No!” to this “odd and wondrous calling,” as UCC pastors Lillian Daniels and Martin Copenhaver refer to it. But after giving the matter serious thought and prayer, tomorrow, I will choose to say yes even to something that I have not entirely chosen for myself. And as a reminder of that, at the ordination tomorrow, under my collar and out of sight from everyone else, I will be wearing a tiny gold cross with a thin, short chain that barely fits around my neck. It is a delicate necklace made for a baby: my baptismal cross, the cross that was chosen for me by parents I did not choose as a keepsake for a sacrament that I did not choose – but that somehow has transformed my life, even without my consent.
“Pastor Sims baptized you. When he poured the water over your head, you shook your head and said, ‘No!’”
Tomorrow, I will say yes. Twenty-nine years after my baptism, I will be ordained a deacon in Christ’s church and say “yes” to God’s call on my life.
Although in my adult life I became a critic of infant baptism and delighted in the baby book witness that even as a one-year-old, I was against having something chosen for me that I did not choose for myself, I later discovered that the date of my baptism – February 27 – was the same date that I had an evangelical “conversion experience” in high school and the same date that I first started volunteering with the Outdoor Church in Cambridge, Mass., the homeless ministry out of which my calling to the priesthood emerged. So I can’t deny that something must have happened at my baptism, however much I did not choose it for myself at the time.
And as I approach the eve of my ordination, which marks my transition from being a lay person to being a member of the clergy, a transition in identity which can never truly be reversed – an ontological change, if you will – I am reminded of all the ways in which I did not choose this call for myself. Yes, I am assenting to it of my own free will, but it was not simply an individual, personal choice. The Episcopal Church does not allow people to take on ordination solely of their own choosing – the community has to affirm that they see the call as well.
The authority that will be given to me at my ordination is not mine to take, but the church’s to give, and I accept it with a measure of humility and honor and gratitude. The priest who led our pre-ordination Quiet Day told us a story of how the priest in her home congregation used to always have members of the congregation put his vestments on him before the Eucharistic liturgy, symbolizing that he could only be vested and serving them as priest by virtue of their assent and their choosing him as their representative leader. I like the metaphor that we cannot vest ourselves, just as we cannot celebrate Eucharist alone – there must be a community present to assent to the words that the priest offers on their behalf.
There have been times during the formal discernment process and my seminary career when I have wanted to shake my head and say, “No!” to this “odd and wondrous calling,” as UCC pastors Lillian Daniels and Martin Copenhaver refer to it. But after giving the matter serious thought and prayer, tomorrow, I will choose to say yes even to something that I have not entirely chosen for myself. And as a reminder of that, at the ordination tomorrow, under my collar and out of sight from everyone else, I will be wearing a tiny gold cross with a thin, short chain that barely fits around my neck. It is a delicate necklace made for a baby: my baptismal cross, the cross that was chosen for me by parents I did not choose as a keepsake for a sacrament that I did not choose – but that somehow has transformed my life, even without my consent.
Wednesday, December 14, 2011
What happens when we get what we are waiting for?
Sermon preached at Wednesday Morning Prayer, Chapel of the Apostles, Sewanee, Tennessee.
The reading from Matthew this morning (Matthew 24:45-51) comes from the apocalyptic discourses towards the end of that Gospel, those series of parables about what the last judgment and the kingdom to come will be like. The common theme is that it will come when we least expect it, and we should remain watchful and be attentive to how we are living our lives, lest we be caught off guard when the end comes.
Keep awake! Be watchful! Be alert! These are themes of Advent, which invites us into a period of holy waiting and expectation.
But today, thanks be to God, our expectant waiting for the end of the semester has finally come to an end. Juniors, you’ve survived your first semester of seminary! Middlers, you’re halfway through your seminary career as of today. And Seniors, well, we’re gearing up for our transitions out of this place, with only one semester remaining before graduation.
So here’s a question for us to ponder as we come to the completion of another semester and as we move closer to the arrival of the Christ child at Christmas: What happens when we get what we’ve been waiting for? What happens to us emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually, when the object of our expectant longing and hopefulness is suddenly realized?
Sometimes there can be an anti-climactic moment when we you get what you’ve been waiting for. The day after the graduation or the wedding you don’t really feel all that different than you did the day before. Or the day after the big party, you feel the loss of all the excitement you’d felt in preparing for it.
It can also be disorienting to get what you’ve been waiting for: suddenly your identity, which for so long had centered around waiting for that day when you would finally graduate or finally meet that person with whom you would share your life, has changed. If you’ve spent years of your life working for a certain kind of social change and you actually accomplish your goal, what then? If your identity has become that of an “anti-war protestor” and the war comes to an end, who are you now? You’ve gotten what you were waiting for, but now you don’t know who you are. Perhaps this is why common wisdom advises us to “be careful what you wish for – you just might get it.”
As Christians, we teach that our hope and longing will never be fully realized until the Second Coming. We talk a lot in seminary about “realized eschatology,” about the “already” and the “not yet,” but the Advent themes of waiting focus more heavily on the “not yet” part. To be a Christian means always to be waiting, not just during Advent, but throughout the church year. No matter how many To Do lists we check off and no matter how many major life transitions we experience, there will still be something we have to wait for. We will never “get what we’re waiting for” until the Second Coming.
But the “already” part of the equation says that we have gotten what we’re waiting for. The incarnation of God in Christ has “delivered us out of error into truth, out of sin into righteousness, out of death into life.” Part of our story as Christians is that we have gotten what we are waiting for – or at least, that the Israelites have gotten what they were waiting for in the Messiah.
So what happens when we realize we have already gotten what we are waiting for? Disorientation? An anti-climax? A loss of a sense of identity? The early church certainly went through these things, and I suspect we continue to experience these responses as we get things we’ve been waiting for in our lives. But there can also be great peace, contentment, and joy in getting what we’ve been waiting for, in seeing our hopes and dreams fulfilled.
As we enter this liminal time between the semesters, we have much still to wait for and anticipate: our final grades from the semester; a visit home to see family and friends; for us seniors, the dreaded GOEs. But in a twist from our usual Advent theme of waiting, as get what we’ve been waiting for today – the end of the semester – and as we draw nearer to Christmas Day, I invite you to reflect a bit more on what we have already received: the gift of Emmanuel, God with us.
Whatever awaits us, whatever things are unfinished, however much the Christian tradition looks forward to that final re-creation of a new heaven and a new earth, we have already gotten some things we’ve been waiting for: a God who offers us unconditional forgiveness and love, a God who took on human flesh, lived as one of us, and died in order to free us from the powers of sin and death. In John’s Gospel, Jesus’s last words from the cross are, “It is finished.”
What more could we be waiting for?
The reading from Matthew this morning (Matthew 24:45-51) comes from the apocalyptic discourses towards the end of that Gospel, those series of parables about what the last judgment and the kingdom to come will be like. The common theme is that it will come when we least expect it, and we should remain watchful and be attentive to how we are living our lives, lest we be caught off guard when the end comes.
Keep awake! Be watchful! Be alert! These are themes of Advent, which invites us into a period of holy waiting and expectation.
But today, thanks be to God, our expectant waiting for the end of the semester has finally come to an end. Juniors, you’ve survived your first semester of seminary! Middlers, you’re halfway through your seminary career as of today. And Seniors, well, we’re gearing up for our transitions out of this place, with only one semester remaining before graduation.
So here’s a question for us to ponder as we come to the completion of another semester and as we move closer to the arrival of the Christ child at Christmas: What happens when we get what we’ve been waiting for? What happens to us emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually, when the object of our expectant longing and hopefulness is suddenly realized?
Sometimes there can be an anti-climactic moment when we you get what you’ve been waiting for. The day after the graduation or the wedding you don’t really feel all that different than you did the day before. Or the day after the big party, you feel the loss of all the excitement you’d felt in preparing for it.
It can also be disorienting to get what you’ve been waiting for: suddenly your identity, which for so long had centered around waiting for that day when you would finally graduate or finally meet that person with whom you would share your life, has changed. If you’ve spent years of your life working for a certain kind of social change and you actually accomplish your goal, what then? If your identity has become that of an “anti-war protestor” and the war comes to an end, who are you now? You’ve gotten what you were waiting for, but now you don’t know who you are. Perhaps this is why common wisdom advises us to “be careful what you wish for – you just might get it.”
As Christians, we teach that our hope and longing will never be fully realized until the Second Coming. We talk a lot in seminary about “realized eschatology,” about the “already” and the “not yet,” but the Advent themes of waiting focus more heavily on the “not yet” part. To be a Christian means always to be waiting, not just during Advent, but throughout the church year. No matter how many To Do lists we check off and no matter how many major life transitions we experience, there will still be something we have to wait for. We will never “get what we’re waiting for” until the Second Coming.
But the “already” part of the equation says that we have gotten what we’re waiting for. The incarnation of God in Christ has “delivered us out of error into truth, out of sin into righteousness, out of death into life.” Part of our story as Christians is that we have gotten what we are waiting for – or at least, that the Israelites have gotten what they were waiting for in the Messiah.
So what happens when we realize we have already gotten what we are waiting for? Disorientation? An anti-climax? A loss of a sense of identity? The early church certainly went through these things, and I suspect we continue to experience these responses as we get things we’ve been waiting for in our lives. But there can also be great peace, contentment, and joy in getting what we’ve been waiting for, in seeing our hopes and dreams fulfilled.
As we enter this liminal time between the semesters, we have much still to wait for and anticipate: our final grades from the semester; a visit home to see family and friends; for us seniors, the dreaded GOEs. But in a twist from our usual Advent theme of waiting, as get what we’ve been waiting for today – the end of the semester – and as we draw nearer to Christmas Day, I invite you to reflect a bit more on what we have already received: the gift of Emmanuel, God with us.
Whatever awaits us, whatever things are unfinished, however much the Christian tradition looks forward to that final re-creation of a new heaven and a new earth, we have already gotten some things we’ve been waiting for: a God who offers us unconditional forgiveness and love, a God who took on human flesh, lived as one of us, and died in order to free us from the powers of sin and death. In John’s Gospel, Jesus’s last words from the cross are, “It is finished.”
What more could we be waiting for?
Sunday, October 30, 2011
Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
Sermon preached at Holy Trinity Parish, Decatur, Ga. (my sponsoring parish) for their Stewardship Kick-Off Sunday, October 30, 2011.
You knew it was coming. Fall is here, with all of its traditional trappings: football season, pumpkin carving, trick-or-treating, and, of course, the annual stewardship campaign.
Your stewardship committee, chaired by Steve and Ellen Bishop, have chosen Matthew 6:19-21 as the scriptural theme for this year’s canvass. Since we didn’t hear that passage in the lectionary this morning, let me refresh your memory.
In the middle of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus admonishes his hearers against storing up worldly possessions for themselves, advocating instead that they should set their minds and resources on things heavenly. Jesus says,
“Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal; but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”
Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
Until very recently, I thought this passage was about what you treasure in the sense of what you hold dear. I thought that Jesus was asking us to examine what it is that we treasure, because those things that we most value will be where our heart is. But that’s really a rather redundant observation, isn’t it? “Your heart will be with the things you care about?” By definition, the things you care about are the things that engage and move your heart!
Upon closer examination, it became clear to me that this passage is actually a lot more “in your face” than that. The Greek word for “treasure,” thesauros, means “what is deposited” or “a store of valuable things.” The word was used in other Greek texts from the biblical era to refer to state warehouses used to store government goods and for temple treasuries where offerings would be collected, in the Temple at Jerusalem and also in the temples of other religions. These religious “treasuries,” or “treasure chests,” if you will, provided a model for the development of private money boxes, places where people could store their personal finances.
In other words, the “treasure” Jesus is referring to here is not “those things you most value,” but your money! In Jesus’s world, it was storehouses of grain or flocks of sheep that people put away to “plan for the future,” but in 21st century America, it’s often cold, hard cash that people “store up” for themselves on earth. That nest egg saved up for a rainy day, or the pile of bills you have stuffed under the mattress or collecting interest in the bank. That’s what Jesus is talking about when he says, “where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” You become emotionally attached to the things you spend your money on.
I saw this verse illustrated powerfully by a pastor at a mega-church in South Carolina that I attended while I was visiting a friend. Allow me to share this very high-tech mega-church sermon illustration with you:
In this hand I have a nice pink heart. And in this hand I have a wad of cash. Jesus is telling us in this passage that where this (money) goes, this (heart) will follow. Not that if this (heart) is engaged with something, this (money) will follow, but the other way around. Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
Think about the ways you’ve seen this play out in the world. If your money goes toward an expensive new computer, your heart breaks when the computer breaks. If you invest your money in stocks and the market falls, your heart falls with it. If you give lots of money to your alma mater, your heart is suddenly a lot more affected by changes made to the campus or the curriculum, or the success of the football team.
When you invest your money in something, you become emotionally attached to it. We even use the financial word “investment” to describe our emotional attachments: “I’m invested in my child’s education” or “I’m invested in the success of this new community initiative.” We may or may not be contributing financially towards these things, but we’re using a financial term to describe our emotional attachment. Perhaps this is due to this inherent link that Jesus points out between our financial investments and our emotional attachments.
If this is true, what does that say about how our financial giving to the church – or to other organizations that work to bring about the kingdom of God – affects our relationship with God? The mega-church pastor told his congregation that he was certain some members of his church had not fully given this (heart) to Jesus because they’d never given him this (money).
Now, when I first heard that, I recoiled. “What? You can’t love Jesus if you haven’t given him your money?” I scoffed to myself. “But surely ‘treasure’ in this passage means much more than just financial wealth. It sounds so crude to say that we have to give God a wad of cash to really give our hearts to God.”
But that statement stuck with me, and the more I investigated this passage, the more I’m convinced that that pastor was right. Because God demands all of our lives, not just some parts of them, and that includes even the areas of our lives we don’t like to talk about, like money.
We can’t compartmentalize which aspects of our lives we’re willing to give to God and which aspects we’re not. As the mega-church pastor put it, “If there’s anything in your life that if God said ‘give it to me,’ you’d say ‘no,’ that’s an idol.” And isn’t that so often our attitude towards our money when we feel that God is asking us to give it away? We’ll give our time and our talent all day long, but our money? Like the “rich fool” in the parable who builds bigger barns to be able to store more grain for himself for the future, we think that we can – and even that we must – store up treasures on earth so that we can provide for our futures.
It’s only responsible financial management to have a savings account, an IRA, an emergency fund, we say to ourselves, and to a certain extent this is true. But the problem comes when we think we are providing for ourselves, that we are ensuring our future financial success, forgetting that we are utterly dependent on the mercy and grace of God for our very being as well as all the material goods we have around us. We think that our money is ours to spend as we please, rather than a gift from God given to us to use for the service of God’s kingdom. Our hearts are focused on ourselves and our abilities rather than on God.
Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
Where is your treasure? Where do invest your money? In paying the rent or mortgage? In fun outings with the kids or grandkids? In fast food? In attending theater or music concerts? In car payments? What does your bank or credit card statement tell you about where your heart is? Are you happy with what you find there?
Are there things that you want to value more, but you realize that other things have your heart? Maybe you wish you were more passionate about your faith or about church attendance. Maybe you wish you cared more about social injustices like discrimination or poverty. Maybe you wish you were more worried about the effects of warfare on children in other countries. Perhaps we should not just “put our money where our mouth is,” but put our money where we WANT our hearts to be.
In the same way that the Anglican tradition teaches that “praying shapes believing,” that through participating in worship and church life even when you don’t feel like it, you will live your way into the faith you hope to have, it is also true that “giving shapes caring.” What if instead of trying to will yourself to want to give or waiting until you felt called to give, you just gave? What if Jesus is right and your heart will follow your treasure? You might begin to care more about church, about God, and about working for the kingdom, because you would be invested – financially and thus emotionally – in those things.
For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
*The "mega-church" referred to in this sermon is NewSpring Church, founded in Anderson, S.C. but now with campuses in Greenville, Columbia, Florence, and Charleston, and with campuses "coming soon" in Spartanburg, Greenwood, Myrtle Beach. I attended the Charleston campus, and since the pastor, Perry Noble, is based at the Anderson campus, he was not even at the service, and the sermon was piped in on a live video feed. It's interesting how much of an impact his sermon illustration still made on me, even though I wasn't seeing it "in person." To watch the entire sermon, which was a "Frequently Asked Questions" about the church (the money/heart illustration was prompted by the question, "Why do you always teach on money?"), click here and choose "Frequently Asked Questions" (June 26, 2011).
Thursday, October 6, 2011
The choice is ours
Sermon preached at the Thursday evening community Eucharist at the School of Theology, Sewanee: The University of the South, on the feast day of William Tyndale and Miles Coverdale.
Today we commemorate William Tyndale and Miles Coverdale, both priests in England in the sixteenth century. They are included among those we call “saints” for their work in translating the Bible into English. In a time when the Scriptures were only available in Latin and the reading and interpretation of them was reserved to church authorities, Tyndale and Coverdale worked to make the Scriptures available to the people in a language they understood and spoke in their daily lives.
Although their work was controversial in its time, having the Bible available to us in a language that we understand has become such a “given” to us today that sometimes people forget the Scriptures were not actually written in English! We take it for granted that anyone who picks up the Bible in a church or a bookstore will be able to read and understand it.
But those of us who have been in seminary for any length of time begin to notice, as we delve into our Old Testament and New Testament classes, the ways in which we have not truly understood the Scriptures, however much we’ve been able to read them ever since we were a child. The ability to read the words of the Bible in our native language has not prevented us from being ignorant about the nature and history of the texts. Some of our interpretations of certain passages turn out to be not only unsupported by the way church tradition has read them historically, but also based on inaccurate translations that change the entire meaning of the text. What we thought we knew and understood we do not understand at all!
It’s not a very politically correct thing to say in our culture because of the value we place on individualism self-discovery, but some of us begin to wonder whether it was such a good idea to put the Scriptures into the hands of the “common people” after all, when there is so much potential for misunderstanding and even harmful interpretations of the texts. As Alexander Pope once wrote, “A little learning is a dangerous thing.” People gain a small amount of knowledge about something and suddenly think they know everything about it. Biblical interpretation has been no exception. People sometimes think that because they are able to read the Bible for themselves, they have the authority to teach and interpret the Scriptures for whole groups of people. Since the Reformation, we’ve seen the formation of sectarian groups who believe they are able to predict the exact date of the end of the world through their interpretation of the Book of Revelation, or groups that justify hatred and violence toward gay people or Jews or Muslims or any other group that they perceive to be outside of the “righteous” people of God that the Bible describes. We begin to understand why the Church had guarded the texts so carefully for so long. In the wrong hands, they can do great harm!
We could say that the anecdote to the problems of the destructive interpretation of Scripture by “the masses” is a healthy dose of good instruction from the priest, or maybe from a lay person who is educated in the Scriptures. But those of us who are “educated” in biblical studies are just as susceptible to destructive uses of Scripture for our own gain as anyone else. It’s not entirely clear that “the Church” itself did only good with the Scriptures when they were read and understood only by the learned clergy. The pre-Reformation era Church, immune from those pesky lay people’s misinterpretations of Scripture, was the force behind the Crusades, the Inquisition, and the anti-Jewish pogroms. Clearly, it is not only the laity or the “uneducated” who have problems with using Scripture to justify destructive behavior.
Although one caricature of church history suggests that the people who pushed for the translation of the Bible into the language of the people “saved the church” from its disregard of the “plain sense” of the Scripture and restored the true Gospel message to the people, it was not quite as simple as that. The problems of destructive interpretations of Scripture lay not in the lack of availability of the “true message” of the Bible in a language people could understand, but in the tensions inherent in the Scriptures themselves, no matter who was reading and interpreting them.
The fact of the matter is, there is not one clear, uncontested or unchallenged message in the Bible, however much the Church has been reluctant to admit it. There are actually two main motifs that are in tension with one another throughout the Bible. One asserts that we are the chosen people, that those who are not part of the people of Israel and do not worship the God of Israel will be destroyed, that ultimately we are the only ones who will see salvation, and that we are justified in celebrating over the death and destruction of our enemies. The other motif asserts that God has created and cares for all people, that God in Christ has redeemed not just those who believe, but the whole creation, and that “God does not rejoice in the death of a sinner” (Ezekiel 18:32).
Both themes are there. We can’t make a respectable case that the Bible only proclaims one of them. And thus simply making the text available to the whole church in a language they can read does not solve the problem. The problem lies with us – in which motif we choose to privilege over the other in our interpretation of the text.
The gift that Tyndale and Coverdale have given us is a larger “us” who gets to make those choices. Now that the Scriptures are able to be read and understood by the entire Church, and even those outside the Church, our decisions around interpretation are more obvious and transparent. Those who are on the receiving end of destructive interpretations of the Bible can read it for themselves and find the liberating message there as well.
So the burden of responsibility for productive, healthy use of Scripture in our lives rests with us – each one of us, individually, and also collectively, as a community. And perhaps this is not an accident.
Perhaps this unavoidable choice embedded in the heart of our sacred Scriptures was given to us intentionally by the same God who created us with free will. Perhaps God is giving us a choice, much as he gave the Israelites at Sinai when Moses presented them with the Ten Commandments. “I have set before you today life and death, blessings and curses,” God says to the people. “Choose life so that you and your descendents may live” (Deuteronomy 30:19).
We have a very real choice about how we will approach Scripture. We can choose to emphasize the Scriptural passages that claim that God cares for Israel – and by extension, the Church – more than God cares for other people. We can choose to allow this motif to guide our lives and our approaches to people outside the Church. There certainly is support for it from both Scripture and from the Church’s tradition. But what are we really choosing if we privilege this motif? Although theological exclusivity may not always lead to a crusade mentality, I worry about the tendencies for it to move in that direction. If those “other people” are the “wicked,” and we are “the righteous,” why should we care if they are mistreated or even killed? In fact, maybe it’s our responsibility to take on their destruction ourselves. What are we choosing if we choose this motif?
There is equal support available in Scripture and in tradition – both Christian and Jewish tradition – for a much more generous interpretation of Scripture, one that sees all people as part of the “people of God” and rejects a triumphalist attitude that leads to the dehumanizing of the “other,” even if that “other” is our “enemy.”
There is a passage in the Talmud, the main collection of rabbinical teaching on Jewish scripture and ethics, in which the rabbis assert that when the angels began to rejoice at the death of the Egyptians in the Red Sea, God rebuked them. The Israelites, the “good guys” in our story, were finally free from those “bad guys” who had been oppressing them for so long. Isn’t this a story that calls for rejoicing? According to the rabbis’ interpretation, God did not think so. God says to the angels, “My handiwork is drowning in the sea; would ye utter song before me!” (b. Sanhedrin 39b) In other words, “Stop celebrating. The Egyptians were my children, too.”
I don’t know about you, but that’s the kind of God I choose to believe in.
Today we commemorate William Tyndale and Miles Coverdale, both priests in England in the sixteenth century. They are included among those we call “saints” for their work in translating the Bible into English. In a time when the Scriptures were only available in Latin and the reading and interpretation of them was reserved to church authorities, Tyndale and Coverdale worked to make the Scriptures available to the people in a language they understood and spoke in their daily lives.
Although their work was controversial in its time, having the Bible available to us in a language that we understand has become such a “given” to us today that sometimes people forget the Scriptures were not actually written in English! We take it for granted that anyone who picks up the Bible in a church or a bookstore will be able to read and understand it.
But those of us who have been in seminary for any length of time begin to notice, as we delve into our Old Testament and New Testament classes, the ways in which we have not truly understood the Scriptures, however much we’ve been able to read them ever since we were a child. The ability to read the words of the Bible in our native language has not prevented us from being ignorant about the nature and history of the texts. Some of our interpretations of certain passages turn out to be not only unsupported by the way church tradition has read them historically, but also based on inaccurate translations that change the entire meaning of the text. What we thought we knew and understood we do not understand at all!
It’s not a very politically correct thing to say in our culture because of the value we place on individualism self-discovery, but some of us begin to wonder whether it was such a good idea to put the Scriptures into the hands of the “common people” after all, when there is so much potential for misunderstanding and even harmful interpretations of the texts. As Alexander Pope once wrote, “A little learning is a dangerous thing.” People gain a small amount of knowledge about something and suddenly think they know everything about it. Biblical interpretation has been no exception. People sometimes think that because they are able to read the Bible for themselves, they have the authority to teach and interpret the Scriptures for whole groups of people. Since the Reformation, we’ve seen the formation of sectarian groups who believe they are able to predict the exact date of the end of the world through their interpretation of the Book of Revelation, or groups that justify hatred and violence toward gay people or Jews or Muslims or any other group that they perceive to be outside of the “righteous” people of God that the Bible describes. We begin to understand why the Church had guarded the texts so carefully for so long. In the wrong hands, they can do great harm!
We could say that the anecdote to the problems of the destructive interpretation of Scripture by “the masses” is a healthy dose of good instruction from the priest, or maybe from a lay person who is educated in the Scriptures. But those of us who are “educated” in biblical studies are just as susceptible to destructive uses of Scripture for our own gain as anyone else. It’s not entirely clear that “the Church” itself did only good with the Scriptures when they were read and understood only by the learned clergy. The pre-Reformation era Church, immune from those pesky lay people’s misinterpretations of Scripture, was the force behind the Crusades, the Inquisition, and the anti-Jewish pogroms. Clearly, it is not only the laity or the “uneducated” who have problems with using Scripture to justify destructive behavior.
Although one caricature of church history suggests that the people who pushed for the translation of the Bible into the language of the people “saved the church” from its disregard of the “plain sense” of the Scripture and restored the true Gospel message to the people, it was not quite as simple as that. The problems of destructive interpretations of Scripture lay not in the lack of availability of the “true message” of the Bible in a language people could understand, but in the tensions inherent in the Scriptures themselves, no matter who was reading and interpreting them.
The fact of the matter is, there is not one clear, uncontested or unchallenged message in the Bible, however much the Church has been reluctant to admit it. There are actually two main motifs that are in tension with one another throughout the Bible. One asserts that we are the chosen people, that those who are not part of the people of Israel and do not worship the God of Israel will be destroyed, that ultimately we are the only ones who will see salvation, and that we are justified in celebrating over the death and destruction of our enemies. The other motif asserts that God has created and cares for all people, that God in Christ has redeemed not just those who believe, but the whole creation, and that “God does not rejoice in the death of a sinner” (Ezekiel 18:32).
Both themes are there. We can’t make a respectable case that the Bible only proclaims one of them. And thus simply making the text available to the whole church in a language they can read does not solve the problem. The problem lies with us – in which motif we choose to privilege over the other in our interpretation of the text.
The gift that Tyndale and Coverdale have given us is a larger “us” who gets to make those choices. Now that the Scriptures are able to be read and understood by the entire Church, and even those outside the Church, our decisions around interpretation are more obvious and transparent. Those who are on the receiving end of destructive interpretations of the Bible can read it for themselves and find the liberating message there as well.
So the burden of responsibility for productive, healthy use of Scripture in our lives rests with us – each one of us, individually, and also collectively, as a community. And perhaps this is not an accident.
Perhaps this unavoidable choice embedded in the heart of our sacred Scriptures was given to us intentionally by the same God who created us with free will. Perhaps God is giving us a choice, much as he gave the Israelites at Sinai when Moses presented them with the Ten Commandments. “I have set before you today life and death, blessings and curses,” God says to the people. “Choose life so that you and your descendents may live” (Deuteronomy 30:19).
We have a very real choice about how we will approach Scripture. We can choose to emphasize the Scriptural passages that claim that God cares for Israel – and by extension, the Church – more than God cares for other people. We can choose to allow this motif to guide our lives and our approaches to people outside the Church. There certainly is support for it from both Scripture and from the Church’s tradition. But what are we really choosing if we privilege this motif? Although theological exclusivity may not always lead to a crusade mentality, I worry about the tendencies for it to move in that direction. If those “other people” are the “wicked,” and we are “the righteous,” why should we care if they are mistreated or even killed? In fact, maybe it’s our responsibility to take on their destruction ourselves. What are we choosing if we choose this motif?
There is equal support available in Scripture and in tradition – both Christian and Jewish tradition – for a much more generous interpretation of Scripture, one that sees all people as part of the “people of God” and rejects a triumphalist attitude that leads to the dehumanizing of the “other,” even if that “other” is our “enemy.”
There is a passage in the Talmud, the main collection of rabbinical teaching on Jewish scripture and ethics, in which the rabbis assert that when the angels began to rejoice at the death of the Egyptians in the Red Sea, God rebuked them. The Israelites, the “good guys” in our story, were finally free from those “bad guys” who had been oppressing them for so long. Isn’t this a story that calls for rejoicing? According to the rabbis’ interpretation, God did not think so. God says to the angels, “My handiwork is drowning in the sea; would ye utter song before me!” (b. Sanhedrin 39b) In other words, “Stop celebrating. The Egyptians were my children, too.”
I don’t know about you, but that’s the kind of God I choose to believe in.
Tuesday, September 27, 2011
Thank you, John Macquarrie
"There is validity in the sight of God, and there is validity in the sight of the church. It cannot be assumed that these are always necessarily the same. ... [I]t must be assumed that sometimes what is deemed invalid in the churches is valid in God's sight, especially if there is evidence of holiness of life. Likewise, Christians believe that the sacraments of Christ are 'doors to the sacred' in a very special sense, but they cannot and should not deny that there may be other doors to the sacred, even in non-Christian religions."
- John Macquarrie, A Guide to the Sacraments
- John Macquarrie, A Guide to the Sacraments
Tuesday, September 20, 2011
The woods do not work well as a labyrinth
Today, our Contemporary Moral Issues class met at our professor's house and we had a guest speaker from the Center for Religion and the Environment lead us in "Opening the Book of Nature," a class he teaches to instruct people in seeing God in nature and "reading" God's presence in nature. The ancient church fathers and saints wrote about the "two books" -- the book of scripture and the book of nature -- that were essential to understand God. We've gotten really good in post-enlightenment western Christianity about analyzing the "book of Scripture," but have all but let the "book of nature" go.
This all sounded good enough, and I was looking forward to the hour that we were given to "wander" in the woods behind our professor's house. It was very "retreat"-ish, and all my "aha" moments where I've really felt a sense of direction and purpose and what I believe to be God's call to me have all happened when I have been out in nature on retreat. So this was a familiar scenario to me. Only problem was, there weren't any clearly marked trails right behind her house, and there were three miles of woods to explore with no signs of "civilization."
Unfortunately, the good sense of direction that I generally pride myself on failed me, and I got completely lost. I came upon the same spot on the woods three different times, after being SURE that I was headed in the opposite direction, back towards the house, I'd suddenly find myself again back at the same spot. My husband, who is an Eagle Scout and lived in Alaska for a number of years and is familiar with wilderness survival and wanderings, later informed me that the human tendency in such situations is to walk in circles. I wonder what that says about our spiritual and intellectual pursuits.
I was sort of following these open paths (or what I saw as open paths) through the woods, thinking I'd let the woods guide me as I would a labyrinth. Only problem is, the labyrinth is carefully engineered (by humans!) to do what it does -- to bring you to the center and then bring you back out again, without you having to focus on remembering where you've been or where you're going. It's a nice metaphor for being led by God. But out in God's actual creation, following a path and allowing it to lead you without being aware of your surroundings only leads to being lost and scared. So how should we REALLY approach our relationship with God? Is the labyrinth really such a good metaphor? It certainly doesn't work to use God's untamed creation that way.
This all sounded good enough, and I was looking forward to the hour that we were given to "wander" in the woods behind our professor's house. It was very "retreat"-ish, and all my "aha" moments where I've really felt a sense of direction and purpose and what I believe to be God's call to me have all happened when I have been out in nature on retreat. So this was a familiar scenario to me. Only problem was, there weren't any clearly marked trails right behind her house, and there were three miles of woods to explore with no signs of "civilization."
Unfortunately, the good sense of direction that I generally pride myself on failed me, and I got completely lost. I came upon the same spot on the woods three different times, after being SURE that I was headed in the opposite direction, back towards the house, I'd suddenly find myself again back at the same spot. My husband, who is an Eagle Scout and lived in Alaska for a number of years and is familiar with wilderness survival and wanderings, later informed me that the human tendency in such situations is to walk in circles. I wonder what that says about our spiritual and intellectual pursuits.
I was sort of following these open paths (or what I saw as open paths) through the woods, thinking I'd let the woods guide me as I would a labyrinth. Only problem is, the labyrinth is carefully engineered (by humans!) to do what it does -- to bring you to the center and then bring you back out again, without you having to focus on remembering where you've been or where you're going. It's a nice metaphor for being led by God. But out in God's actual creation, following a path and allowing it to lead you without being aware of your surroundings only leads to being lost and scared. So how should we REALLY approach our relationship with God? Is the labyrinth really such a good metaphor? It certainly doesn't work to use God's untamed creation that way.
Sunday, September 11, 2011
Choose life, that you may live.
Sermon for the Thirteenth Sunday After Pentecost (Proper 19, Year A), Sept. 11, 2011
Delivered at Trinity Episcopal Church, Winchester, Tenn. (my field ed parish).
“I will sing to the LORD, for he has triumphed gloriously;
horse and rider he has thrown into the sea.” (Exodus 15:1)
Thus sang Moses and the Israelites after they escaped from slavery in Egypt, in the Exodus story that we have been reading for the past several weeks. This morning we reach the climax of the story: Moses leads the Israelites through the Red Sea on dry land, the waters rush in on the Egyptians, and the people of Israel sing. They sing a song of deliverance, a song of joy at being freed from slavery. They rejoice that God has triumphed over the evils of oppression and begun to move them toward a home in the Promised Land.
This sacred story of a God who brings freedom from slavery and oppression is at the heart of both the Jewish and Christian faiths. It is a narrative that has given hope to millions of people in dark times, from Jews in Nazi-era Germany to African slaves in the United States to South Africans living under apartheid.
But despite the power and hope of this story, it is not only a story of liberation from oppression. It is also a story of revenge. It is a story of a God who “pays back” the Egyptians for the harms they have inflicted on the Israelites in captivity by “tossing them into the sea,” and of a people who rejoice in their deaths. It is a story of “us” verses “them,” a story in which God is clearly on “our side.”
I’ve often wondered what the story would look like from the Egyptians’ point of view. Unfortunately, the biblical accounts don’t give us much information about the Egyptians, apart from painting them as the “bad guys” opposing our friends and ancestors, the Israelites. The Egyptians are not “us,” they’re not part of our group, they don’t speak our language, and they don’t worship our god, so therefore they must be bad. But I’ve always felt that there must have been more to the story than that.
This summer, during my pilgrimage to Israel, I visited the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. There, I spent about two hours exploring the Archeology wing, which traced the history of all the peoples who have lived in “the Land,” as they called it, from prehistoric times to the Ottoman Empire. After gazing at ancient fossils of cave men and giant mastadons, I rounded the corner to enter a section of the exhibit called “The Land of Canaan.”
I wandered through cases full of jewelry and food bowls and even ancient women’s make-up cases. I saw statues of “Ba’al,” the Canaanite god who is so often pitted as the enemy of the God of Israel in the biblical texts. Even though I had learned about Canaanite religion and culture as a religion major in college, something about seeing the objects of their daily lives – the combs the women used to brush their hair, or the utensils they used to prepare their food – brought about an awareness of the full humanity of these people that had been lacking in my formation as a western Christian.
I found myself extremely saddened that my religious tradition and my sacred texts had essentially demonized this entire group of people, who got up every morning and ate their food and loved their children and praised God, whose only crime was that they happened to live in the land that the Israelites believed God had given to them, and that they had a different understanding of God than the Israelites did.
Learning the Bible stories as a child, and even as an adult, I’d come to associate the Canaanites with the “bad guys.” It was a process of cultural conditioning that was very similar to the ways in which I knew “Communist” was a bad word when I was growing up during the Cold War-era, even if I hadn’t the slightest idea what a communist was. Or the ways in which children today learn that “Muslim” and “Arab” are bad words, even if they don’t have any idea what Islam is or what Arab culture is.
As we are mindful today of the ten years that have passed since the attacks on New York and Washington, D.C. on Sept. 11, I find myself wondering about the other side of the story. I remember very clearly sitting in my dorm room in college in March of 2003 and watching President Bush address the nation about the war we were about to begin in Iraq. He concluded his speech with the promise that “God is on our side.” Immediately thereafter, the news channel showed a clip of Saddam Hussein addressing his people, ending his speech with the promise that “God is on our side.”
Of course, they were both right – God is on our side – but the “our” in that sentence is much broader than either of them were imagining. God is on “our” side in the sense that God is on the side of humanity – that God is for us – for all people – in the sense that God wills salvation for all people. God is not against us as someone who wills our destruction – or the destruction of our enemies.
But wait a minute, some might say, doesn’t God destroy the Egypitans and deliver the Israelites? Wasn’t God clearly on Israel’s side? Weren’t the Israelites justified in celebrating the death of the Egyptians, who had oppressed them for so long? Weren’t Americans justified in celebrating the death of Osama bin Laden? Isn’t there Scriptural warrant for rejoicing in the death of one’s enemies?
Well, yes, of course there is. We heard some of it this morning in the Song of Moses:
“I will sing to the LORD, for he has triumphed gloriously;
horse and rider he has thrown into the sea.” (Exodus 15:1)
But there is also scriptural warrant against rejoicing in the death of those who sin against us and advocating for forgiveness instead. We see this in the parable Jesus tells in the Gospel of Matthew that we read this morning.
“Peter came and said to Jesus, ‘Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?’ Jesus said to him, ‘Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times.’” (Matthew 18:21-22)
Granted, this passage is about reconciling with other Christians, with those who are “one of us” who have offended us, but there are many other passages where Jesus and the Apostle Paul both advocate for forgiveness not only of people who are “one of us” but of people we perceive as our enemies as well.
Contradictory as they may seem, both these motifs – the idea that we are the chosen people, that God cares for us but hates the other, that ultimately we are the only ones who will see salvation, and that we are justified in celebrating over the death and destruction of our enemies, and the idea that God has created and cares for all people, that God in Christ has redeemed not just those who believe, but the whole creation, and that “God does not rejoice in the death of a sinner” (Ezekiel 18:32) – are present in the Bible. We can’t make a respectable case that the Bible only proclaims one of them. And that means we have to choose which motif we will allow to take precedence in our interpretation of scripture.
Regardless of what some Christians may say, it is impossible to read the Bible without interpreting it – and people who think they are reading just the “plain sense” of the text are often unknowingly endorsing one particular interpretation without even realizing it. We will choose, either consciously or unconsciously, which of these two motifs we will allow to guide our lives as we read the Bible. And perhaps that isn’t an accident.
What if, just what if, the same God who created us with free will has implanted a free choice right smack dab in the middle of our Scriptures? What if the fact that the Bible contains these two seemingly contradictory messages is not an indication of the flawed human authorship of the Bible and a reason to dismiss it, but an opportunity for us to exercise the “reason and skill” with which God has endowed us?
In the story of the giving of the law in the Book of Deuteronomy, God presents the 10 commandments to the people of Israel with the exhortation that they can choose a life of blessing by following his commandments or a life of curses if they do not. “I have set before you today life and death, blessings and curses,” God says to the people. “Choose life so that you and your descendents may live” (Deuteronomy 30:19).
Perhaps we have a similar choice in the way we read Scripture. We can choose to focus on the triumphalist, exclusive passages of Scripture that assert that only we are God’s chosen, or we can choose to focus on the more inclusive and generous passages that assert that God cares for all.
There is a passage in the Talmud, the main collection of rabbinical teaching on Jewish scripture and ethics, in which the rabbis assert that God rebuked the angels for rejoicing at the death of the Egyptians, saying, “My handiwork is drowning in the sea; would ye utter song before me!” (b. Sanhedrin 39b) In other words, “Stop celebrating. The Egyptians were my children, too.”
Over three thousand years later, the British government and other Western powers persuaded the United Nations to recognize a homeland for the Jewish people in the historic land of Israel, thereby displacing the Palestinian families who had lived there for centuries. In 1948, the Palestinians became the modern-day Canaanites, those who were “in the way” and preventing the Jews from taking ownership of “their” land. With the creation of the state of Israel, thousands of Palestinians were forced out of their homes and killed. The biblical texts that say that God gave the land to the Jews were used to justify severe violations of human rights against Palestinians. Some Palestinians fought back, and the violence from both sides has not stopped to this day, as we all know from what we see on the news.
But this summer, I visited the West Bank, and after meeting actual Palestinian people, I ceased to think of them as those “terrorist suicide bombers” we see on the news. I met these modern-day Canaanites, with very real, full, human lives, still living in refugee camps over sixty years later, wanting only to return to their family homes, but prevented from doing so by the Israeli government. I left Israel feeling very discouraged and disturbed about the way theology had been used to justify the violence that is so prevalent in that region, and the ways in which my own Christian tradition has perpetuated it.
On the plane back from Israel, I read the book Have a Little Faith, by Mitch Albom, author of Tuesdays With Morrie. In it, Mitch writes about the relationship he built with his childhood rabbi, Albert Lewis, in the years before his death. One day, Albert, whom Mitch calls “the Reb,” shows Mitch an Arabic schoolbook he’d found in an abandoned home in northern Israel shortly after the 1967 war. The conversation that ensued between them went like this:
Delivered at Trinity Episcopal Church, Winchester, Tenn. (my field ed parish).
“I will sing to the LORD, for he has triumphed gloriously;
horse and rider he has thrown into the sea.” (Exodus 15:1)
Thus sang Moses and the Israelites after they escaped from slavery in Egypt, in the Exodus story that we have been reading for the past several weeks. This morning we reach the climax of the story: Moses leads the Israelites through the Red Sea on dry land, the waters rush in on the Egyptians, and the people of Israel sing. They sing a song of deliverance, a song of joy at being freed from slavery. They rejoice that God has triumphed over the evils of oppression and begun to move them toward a home in the Promised Land.
This sacred story of a God who brings freedom from slavery and oppression is at the heart of both the Jewish and Christian faiths. It is a narrative that has given hope to millions of people in dark times, from Jews in Nazi-era Germany to African slaves in the United States to South Africans living under apartheid.
But despite the power and hope of this story, it is not only a story of liberation from oppression. It is also a story of revenge. It is a story of a God who “pays back” the Egyptians for the harms they have inflicted on the Israelites in captivity by “tossing them into the sea,” and of a people who rejoice in their deaths. It is a story of “us” verses “them,” a story in which God is clearly on “our side.”
I’ve often wondered what the story would look like from the Egyptians’ point of view. Unfortunately, the biblical accounts don’t give us much information about the Egyptians, apart from painting them as the “bad guys” opposing our friends and ancestors, the Israelites. The Egyptians are not “us,” they’re not part of our group, they don’t speak our language, and they don’t worship our god, so therefore they must be bad. But I’ve always felt that there must have been more to the story than that.
This summer, during my pilgrimage to Israel, I visited the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. There, I spent about two hours exploring the Archeology wing, which traced the history of all the peoples who have lived in “the Land,” as they called it, from prehistoric times to the Ottoman Empire. After gazing at ancient fossils of cave men and giant mastadons, I rounded the corner to enter a section of the exhibit called “The Land of Canaan.”
I wandered through cases full of jewelry and food bowls and even ancient women’s make-up cases. I saw statues of “Ba’al,” the Canaanite god who is so often pitted as the enemy of the God of Israel in the biblical texts. Even though I had learned about Canaanite religion and culture as a religion major in college, something about seeing the objects of their daily lives – the combs the women used to brush their hair, or the utensils they used to prepare their food – brought about an awareness of the full humanity of these people that had been lacking in my formation as a western Christian.
I found myself extremely saddened that my religious tradition and my sacred texts had essentially demonized this entire group of people, who got up every morning and ate their food and loved their children and praised God, whose only crime was that they happened to live in the land that the Israelites believed God had given to them, and that they had a different understanding of God than the Israelites did.
Learning the Bible stories as a child, and even as an adult, I’d come to associate the Canaanites with the “bad guys.” It was a process of cultural conditioning that was very similar to the ways in which I knew “Communist” was a bad word when I was growing up during the Cold War-era, even if I hadn’t the slightest idea what a communist was. Or the ways in which children today learn that “Muslim” and “Arab” are bad words, even if they don’t have any idea what Islam is or what Arab culture is.
As we are mindful today of the ten years that have passed since the attacks on New York and Washington, D.C. on Sept. 11, I find myself wondering about the other side of the story. I remember very clearly sitting in my dorm room in college in March of 2003 and watching President Bush address the nation about the war we were about to begin in Iraq. He concluded his speech with the promise that “God is on our side.” Immediately thereafter, the news channel showed a clip of Saddam Hussein addressing his people, ending his speech with the promise that “God is on our side.”
Of course, they were both right – God is on our side – but the “our” in that sentence is much broader than either of them were imagining. God is on “our” side in the sense that God is on the side of humanity – that God is for us – for all people – in the sense that God wills salvation for all people. God is not against us as someone who wills our destruction – or the destruction of our enemies.
But wait a minute, some might say, doesn’t God destroy the Egypitans and deliver the Israelites? Wasn’t God clearly on Israel’s side? Weren’t the Israelites justified in celebrating the death of the Egyptians, who had oppressed them for so long? Weren’t Americans justified in celebrating the death of Osama bin Laden? Isn’t there Scriptural warrant for rejoicing in the death of one’s enemies?
Well, yes, of course there is. We heard some of it this morning in the Song of Moses:
“I will sing to the LORD, for he has triumphed gloriously;
horse and rider he has thrown into the sea.” (Exodus 15:1)
But there is also scriptural warrant against rejoicing in the death of those who sin against us and advocating for forgiveness instead. We see this in the parable Jesus tells in the Gospel of Matthew that we read this morning.
“Peter came and said to Jesus, ‘Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?’ Jesus said to him, ‘Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times.’” (Matthew 18:21-22)
Granted, this passage is about reconciling with other Christians, with those who are “one of us” who have offended us, but there are many other passages where Jesus and the Apostle Paul both advocate for forgiveness not only of people who are “one of us” but of people we perceive as our enemies as well.
Contradictory as they may seem, both these motifs – the idea that we are the chosen people, that God cares for us but hates the other, that ultimately we are the only ones who will see salvation, and that we are justified in celebrating over the death and destruction of our enemies, and the idea that God has created and cares for all people, that God in Christ has redeemed not just those who believe, but the whole creation, and that “God does not rejoice in the death of a sinner” (Ezekiel 18:32) – are present in the Bible. We can’t make a respectable case that the Bible only proclaims one of them. And that means we have to choose which motif we will allow to take precedence in our interpretation of scripture.
Regardless of what some Christians may say, it is impossible to read the Bible without interpreting it – and people who think they are reading just the “plain sense” of the text are often unknowingly endorsing one particular interpretation without even realizing it. We will choose, either consciously or unconsciously, which of these two motifs we will allow to guide our lives as we read the Bible. And perhaps that isn’t an accident.
What if, just what if, the same God who created us with free will has implanted a free choice right smack dab in the middle of our Scriptures? What if the fact that the Bible contains these two seemingly contradictory messages is not an indication of the flawed human authorship of the Bible and a reason to dismiss it, but an opportunity for us to exercise the “reason and skill” with which God has endowed us?
In the story of the giving of the law in the Book of Deuteronomy, God presents the 10 commandments to the people of Israel with the exhortation that they can choose a life of blessing by following his commandments or a life of curses if they do not. “I have set before you today life and death, blessings and curses,” God says to the people. “Choose life so that you and your descendents may live” (Deuteronomy 30:19).
Perhaps we have a similar choice in the way we read Scripture. We can choose to focus on the triumphalist, exclusive passages of Scripture that assert that only we are God’s chosen, or we can choose to focus on the more inclusive and generous passages that assert that God cares for all.
There is a passage in the Talmud, the main collection of rabbinical teaching on Jewish scripture and ethics, in which the rabbis assert that God rebuked the angels for rejoicing at the death of the Egyptians, saying, “My handiwork is drowning in the sea; would ye utter song before me!” (b. Sanhedrin 39b) In other words, “Stop celebrating. The Egyptians were my children, too.”
Over three thousand years later, the British government and other Western powers persuaded the United Nations to recognize a homeland for the Jewish people in the historic land of Israel, thereby displacing the Palestinian families who had lived there for centuries. In 1948, the Palestinians became the modern-day Canaanites, those who were “in the way” and preventing the Jews from taking ownership of “their” land. With the creation of the state of Israel, thousands of Palestinians were forced out of their homes and killed. The biblical texts that say that God gave the land to the Jews were used to justify severe violations of human rights against Palestinians. Some Palestinians fought back, and the violence from both sides has not stopped to this day, as we all know from what we see on the news.
But this summer, I visited the West Bank, and after meeting actual Palestinian people, I ceased to think of them as those “terrorist suicide bombers” we see on the news. I met these modern-day Canaanites, with very real, full, human lives, still living in refugee camps over sixty years later, wanting only to return to their family homes, but prevented from doing so by the Israeli government. I left Israel feeling very discouraged and disturbed about the way theology had been used to justify the violence that is so prevalent in that region, and the ways in which my own Christian tradition has perpetuated it.
On the plane back from Israel, I read the book Have a Little Faith, by Mitch Albom, author of Tuesdays With Morrie. In it, Mitch writes about the relationship he built with his childhood rabbi, Albert Lewis, in the years before his death. One day, Albert, whom Mitch calls “the Reb,” shows Mitch an Arabic schoolbook he’d found in an abandoned home in northern Israel shortly after the 1967 war. The conversation that ensued between them went like this:
“There’s a reason I gave that book to you,” the Reb said.
What’s the reason?
“Open it.”
I opened it.
“More.”
I flipped through the pages and out fell three small black-and-white photos, faded and smudged with dirt.
One was of an older dark-haired woman, Arabic and matronly-looking. One was of a mustached younger Arabic man in a suit and tie. The last photo was of two children, side by side, presumably a brother and sister.
Who are they? I asked.
“I don’t know,” he said, softly.
He held out his hand and I gave him the photo of the children.
“Over the years, I kept seeing these kids, the mother, her son. That’s why I never threw the book away. I felt I had to keep them alive somehow. I thought maybe someday someone would look at the pictures, say they knew the family, and return them to the survivors. But I’m running out of time.”
He handed me the photo back.
Wait, I said. I don’t understand. From your religious viewpoint, these people were the enemy.
His voice grew angry.
“Enemy schemenmy,” he said. “This was a family.”In our sacred texts, we have set before us life and death. Choose life, that you may live.
Friday, August 19, 2011
Ministry Fellowship Re-Cap
Earlier this week, I attended the "closing retreat" for the 2010 Ministry Fellows. The 19 other people who had the same fellowship as I did came together at a conference center just south of Atlanta to share with each other what we did with our summers.
The projects were wonderfully diverse, addressing issues including modern-day slavery (sex trafficking), treatment of undocumented immigrants on the border in Arizona, acceptance of LBGTQ people in the Black Church, healing "moral injury" among returned combat veterans, farm-church relations in rural Vermont and New Hampshire, developing multi-cultural community in churches, the inclusion of Asian-American or Pacific Islanders among the clergy in different churches, and issues of God's presence during the "dark night of the soul" and healing of mental illness.
Eight of us traveled internationally, with visits to Spain, Hungary, Greece, Albania, Ukraine, Israel and Palestine, Nigeria, South Sudan, South Africa, and China. The fellow who traveled to South Sudan was there when South Sudan was declared an independent country this summer and got to witness "the birth of a nation." The projects that were not specifically issues-focused were mostly centered on addressing personal needs for healing, pilgrimage, prayer and renewal, providing a model for the importance of self-care in pastoral ministry.
Hearing my fellow Fellows' stories and their journeys was inspiring and gave me hope for the future of the church. But the best thing that came out of our conference, in my opinion, was that our group covenanted to continue meeting with each other in the future, maybe bi-annually, as a support system for one another as we go forward into church leadership.
In preparing for my presentation, I wrote the following reflection on the development of my project and the outcomes of it. I spoke on these themes and then shared the book of images and poetry I created with the group, and also posted an "exhibit" of some enlargements of my photographs on the wall in the conference room. I was surprised to find that many people asked if my book or the enlarged images would be available for purchase, so I am working on how to make that possible. I will post information about that on this blog when it is available.
Here's my "re-cap" of my Ministry Fellowship experience and what I presented to the group this week. Thanks to all of you who followed my journey this summer.
Ministry Fellowship Re-Cap
The issue I engaged with in this project had to do with participation in and with people of other religions in religious practice. It started with a story about an interfaith conference I attended where we all participated in worship services from different traditions. Rather than try to plan a generic, “interfaith” worship, they opted to offer many different worship services that were very specific – a Muslim Friday prayer service, a Jewish Sabbath service, Hindu meditation practice, and a Christian Eucharist, which was led by an Episcopal priest. I found that Eucharist very moving because all these people of different faiths were participating in the most sacred ritual of my tradition. I learned later that it is against the official rules of the Episcopal Church to offer communion to non-Christians, so what the priest did that day was in violation of her ordination vows. This all got me thinking about the value of boundaries between traditions as well as the ways in which we can experience God in and through religions and religious services other than our own.
My original idea for the project was to make an interfaith pilgrimage with my friend Valarie Kaur, who is a Sikh and who has been to churches with me and has received communion in the Episcopal Church. The idea was for us to visit each other’s holy lands – for me to go to India with her and for her to come to Israel with me. She was not able to travel with me, however, so I ultimately chose to make the pilgrimage alone, and to travel just to Israel instead of India – because I could not afford to travel to both places and from what I could gather, it would be safer and more manageable for me to travel alone in Israel than in India.
I still planned to make an “interfaith” pilgrimage by visiting sacred sites from different traditions – Jewish, Christian, Muslim, and Baha’i – and by meeting and talking with people involved in interfaith work in the Holy Land. The “dissemination piece” of the project was to chronicle my journey on my blog and to document the trip artistically through photography and to create an exhibit of my photos for display at my seminary and my home parish once I returned.
Although I did visit sites from different religious traditions, there were often restrictions against non-Muslims or non-Jews or non-Baha’is visiting except during certain hours or under certain circumstances, and I found that I spent most of my time visiting and meditating on Christian sites. I found myself more shy or hesitant about just walking in to a mosque or a synagogue (the ones that WERE more open and less restricted). I did visit the White Mosque in Nazareth, which was open to the public, but no one was there except one man praying in the corner and I felt very out of place and feared it would be obvious I wasn’t a Muslim and people someone would wonder why I was there if they came in and saw me. I walked through the Jewish Quarter in Jerusalem but did not enter any of the historic synagogues I came across, even though they were likely open. I simply did not feel comfortable just walking in to a religious place of another tradition like I did walking into any of the churches I visited. On a visceral level, I felt that I did not belong there, that it wasn’t my holy place.
This was strange for someone who usually feels very comfortable visiting places of worship of many different traditions and has spent a good bit of my adult life working in interfaith work. I realized, however, that I had not often visited other religions’ places of worship entirely on my own. I was either going to do research and had an appointment to speak with someone, or I went with friends who were followers of that faith, to accompany them to a service or event. I had visited mosques and synagogues in Turkey and Greece and Italy on my foreign study trip in college, but I was with a large class and a guide every time I entered the places. Although I know some people draw from many different traditions in their own personal spirituality, for me as someone deeply grounded in one particular faith, I came to the somewhat obvious but still very insightful observation that I can’t be “interfaith” by myself – that a crucial element of “interfaith” is actually engaging with a PERSON of a different faith and encountering that faith through that other human – and that without that personal engagement, my encounter with sites from different religious was less meaningful and even intimidating.
This pilgrimage raised awareness for me about the importance of developing interfaith friendships and relationships, and how that really has to come through person-to-person engagement, not just through learning about other religions in a book or visiting other places of worship. While I think it’s great that some churches participate in interfaith “tours” of their cities or towns, where a group from the church will visit the local synagogue or mosque, I think these trips are largely in vain if they are not also accompanied by very real opportunities for the people from those two congregations to develop relationships with each other – which doesn’t happen naturally when they’re both serving in an “ambassador” or “host” role for their house of worship and their tradition. Programming social and outreach events with other religious communities where Christians can interact in more “normal” settings with Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Sikhs, Baha’is, and others is crucial for the future of interfaith leadership in the church, in my opinion.
My encounter with Palestinians in the West Bank through a one-day trip I took to Bethlehem also opened my eyes to the very real dangers of “exceptionalist” theology that asserts that we are God’s chosen and either implicitly or explicitly justifies degradation and violence toward other groups. I wrestle with how to preach certain passages from the Old Testament about Israel as God’s chosen people and God giving the land to the Jews in light of the ways that theology has caused the suffering and subjugation of the Palestinian people.
My encounter with the injustice in the West Bank made me question the significance of my original plan to produce an exhibit of photos as the "outcome" of this trip. Who cares about my "pretty pictures" when there are people suffering in the world? I wondered. I felt like my presentation and the outcome of my trip should be entirely about Palestinian advocacy -- to focus solely on an artistic response seemed not important and serious enough.
A poetry reading in Sewanee this summer after I returned helped to change that response. Nick Flynn's integration of his experiences traveling to Turkey to meet with Iraqi people who had been imprisoned at Abu Ghraib into his poetry made me realize that art can be used for advocacy, and the two need not be mutually exclusive. (I know I had known this before, but that poetry reading was a helpful reminder and example of the ways in which advocacy can be done through art.) This helped me to move forward with my plans to create an exhibit and I even decided, at the suggestion of my husband, to try my hand at some poetry myself to accompany the images.
Re-engaging with my creative side through this project also reminded me of the importance of nurturing the creative arts among the clergy. Seminaries are very good about teaching students book knowledge and even hands-on knowledge of ministry experience, but overall are not so good about teaching the creative arts, at least not from what I’ve seen. Since the Bible itself is largely poetry and literature, and many essential religious truths cannot be expressed in rational prose but are communicated best through art, I think clergy have an obligation to nurture their own creative sides and think about how to use art to preach the Gospel. My exhibit of photographs and my book of images and poetry that came out of this project is one small step towards doing that in my own ministry.
The projects were wonderfully diverse, addressing issues including modern-day slavery (sex trafficking), treatment of undocumented immigrants on the border in Arizona, acceptance of LBGTQ people in the Black Church, healing "moral injury" among returned combat veterans, farm-church relations in rural Vermont and New Hampshire, developing multi-cultural community in churches, the inclusion of Asian-American or Pacific Islanders among the clergy in different churches, and issues of God's presence during the "dark night of the soul" and healing of mental illness.
Eight of us traveled internationally, with visits to Spain, Hungary, Greece, Albania, Ukraine, Israel and Palestine, Nigeria, South Sudan, South Africa, and China. The fellow who traveled to South Sudan was there when South Sudan was declared an independent country this summer and got to witness "the birth of a nation." The projects that were not specifically issues-focused were mostly centered on addressing personal needs for healing, pilgrimage, prayer and renewal, providing a model for the importance of self-care in pastoral ministry.
Hearing my fellow Fellows' stories and their journeys was inspiring and gave me hope for the future of the church. But the best thing that came out of our conference, in my opinion, was that our group covenanted to continue meeting with each other in the future, maybe bi-annually, as a support system for one another as we go forward into church leadership.
In preparing for my presentation, I wrote the following reflection on the development of my project and the outcomes of it. I spoke on these themes and then shared the book of images and poetry I created with the group, and also posted an "exhibit" of some enlargements of my photographs on the wall in the conference room. I was surprised to find that many people asked if my book or the enlarged images would be available for purchase, so I am working on how to make that possible. I will post information about that on this blog when it is available.
Here's my "re-cap" of my Ministry Fellowship experience and what I presented to the group this week. Thanks to all of you who followed my journey this summer.
Ministry Fellowship Re-Cap
The issue I engaged with in this project had to do with participation in and with people of other religions in religious practice. It started with a story about an interfaith conference I attended where we all participated in worship services from different traditions. Rather than try to plan a generic, “interfaith” worship, they opted to offer many different worship services that were very specific – a Muslim Friday prayer service, a Jewish Sabbath service, Hindu meditation practice, and a Christian Eucharist, which was led by an Episcopal priest. I found that Eucharist very moving because all these people of different faiths were participating in the most sacred ritual of my tradition. I learned later that it is against the official rules of the Episcopal Church to offer communion to non-Christians, so what the priest did that day was in violation of her ordination vows. This all got me thinking about the value of boundaries between traditions as well as the ways in which we can experience God in and through religions and religious services other than our own.
My original idea for the project was to make an interfaith pilgrimage with my friend Valarie Kaur, who is a Sikh and who has been to churches with me and has received communion in the Episcopal Church. The idea was for us to visit each other’s holy lands – for me to go to India with her and for her to come to Israel with me. She was not able to travel with me, however, so I ultimately chose to make the pilgrimage alone, and to travel just to Israel instead of India – because I could not afford to travel to both places and from what I could gather, it would be safer and more manageable for me to travel alone in Israel than in India.
I still planned to make an “interfaith” pilgrimage by visiting sacred sites from different traditions – Jewish, Christian, Muslim, and Baha’i – and by meeting and talking with people involved in interfaith work in the Holy Land. The “dissemination piece” of the project was to chronicle my journey on my blog and to document the trip artistically through photography and to create an exhibit of my photos for display at my seminary and my home parish once I returned.
Although I did visit sites from different religious traditions, there were often restrictions against non-Muslims or non-Jews or non-Baha’is visiting except during certain hours or under certain circumstances, and I found that I spent most of my time visiting and meditating on Christian sites. I found myself more shy or hesitant about just walking in to a mosque or a synagogue (the ones that WERE more open and less restricted). I did visit the White Mosque in Nazareth, which was open to the public, but no one was there except one man praying in the corner and I felt very out of place and feared it would be obvious I wasn’t a Muslim and people someone would wonder why I was there if they came in and saw me. I walked through the Jewish Quarter in Jerusalem but did not enter any of the historic synagogues I came across, even though they were likely open. I simply did not feel comfortable just walking in to a religious place of another tradition like I did walking into any of the churches I visited. On a visceral level, I felt that I did not belong there, that it wasn’t my holy place.
This was strange for someone who usually feels very comfortable visiting places of worship of many different traditions and has spent a good bit of my adult life working in interfaith work. I realized, however, that I had not often visited other religions’ places of worship entirely on my own. I was either going to do research and had an appointment to speak with someone, or I went with friends who were followers of that faith, to accompany them to a service or event. I had visited mosques and synagogues in Turkey and Greece and Italy on my foreign study trip in college, but I was with a large class and a guide every time I entered the places. Although I know some people draw from many different traditions in their own personal spirituality, for me as someone deeply grounded in one particular faith, I came to the somewhat obvious but still very insightful observation that I can’t be “interfaith” by myself – that a crucial element of “interfaith” is actually engaging with a PERSON of a different faith and encountering that faith through that other human – and that without that personal engagement, my encounter with sites from different religious was less meaningful and even intimidating.
This pilgrimage raised awareness for me about the importance of developing interfaith friendships and relationships, and how that really has to come through person-to-person engagement, not just through learning about other religions in a book or visiting other places of worship. While I think it’s great that some churches participate in interfaith “tours” of their cities or towns, where a group from the church will visit the local synagogue or mosque, I think these trips are largely in vain if they are not also accompanied by very real opportunities for the people from those two congregations to develop relationships with each other – which doesn’t happen naturally when they’re both serving in an “ambassador” or “host” role for their house of worship and their tradition. Programming social and outreach events with other religious communities where Christians can interact in more “normal” settings with Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Sikhs, Baha’is, and others is crucial for the future of interfaith leadership in the church, in my opinion.
My encounter with Palestinians in the West Bank through a one-day trip I took to Bethlehem also opened my eyes to the very real dangers of “exceptionalist” theology that asserts that we are God’s chosen and either implicitly or explicitly justifies degradation and violence toward other groups. I wrestle with how to preach certain passages from the Old Testament about Israel as God’s chosen people and God giving the land to the Jews in light of the ways that theology has caused the suffering and subjugation of the Palestinian people.
My encounter with the injustice in the West Bank made me question the significance of my original plan to produce an exhibit of photos as the "outcome" of this trip. Who cares about my "pretty pictures" when there are people suffering in the world? I wondered. I felt like my presentation and the outcome of my trip should be entirely about Palestinian advocacy -- to focus solely on an artistic response seemed not important and serious enough.
A poetry reading in Sewanee this summer after I returned helped to change that response. Nick Flynn's integration of his experiences traveling to Turkey to meet with Iraqi people who had been imprisoned at Abu Ghraib into his poetry made me realize that art can be used for advocacy, and the two need not be mutually exclusive. (I know I had known this before, but that poetry reading was a helpful reminder and example of the ways in which advocacy can be done through art.) This helped me to move forward with my plans to create an exhibit and I even decided, at the suggestion of my husband, to try my hand at some poetry myself to accompany the images.
Re-engaging with my creative side through this project also reminded me of the importance of nurturing the creative arts among the clergy. Seminaries are very good about teaching students book knowledge and even hands-on knowledge of ministry experience, but overall are not so good about teaching the creative arts, at least not from what I’ve seen. Since the Bible itself is largely poetry and literature, and many essential religious truths cannot be expressed in rational prose but are communicated best through art, I think clergy have an obligation to nurture their own creative sides and think about how to use art to preach the Gospel. My exhibit of photographs and my book of images and poetry that came out of this project is one small step towards doing that in my own ministry.
Tuesday, June 14, 2011
A crisis of faith
My trip to the West Bank affected me more than anything else on my three-week trip. The night after I returned from my trip, I found myself going on and on at dinner at the convent to several college students who were part of a study abroad trip who were staying at the convent for a month. I told them about my visit and all the things I'd seen, as they sat, captivated, listening to the things I described. That night, I sat in my room and tried to process all the things I'd seen and experienced that day. I thought about the starkly different versions of history I'd gotten on either side of the Wall.
In Manger Square, there was a large display showing the "History of the Occupation," from 1948 to the present day, showing the shrinking amount of land that Palestinians have had access to over the years. At the Sea of Galilee Guest House where I'd stayed the weekend before, there were old photographs on the wall with accompanying captions about the Jewish "pioneers" who'd settled that area in the late 40s. The Israel Museum in Jerusalem spoke about the "War of Independence" in 1948 and had plaques honoring various soldiers who had died. On the West Bank side, that war was referred to as al-Naqba, "the Catastrophe."
The Jewish "spiritual travel guide" I'd bought for the trip included political sites related to the founding of the state of Israel as religious pilgrimage sites complete with prayers of thanksgiving to be recited for the restoration of the state of Israel. The Knesset, the governmental center of the state of Israel, was included as one of the pilgrimage sites. The opening scripture passage was Amos 9:11, 14:
In that day,
I will set up again the fallen booth of David;
I will restore my people Israel;
I will plant them upon their soil, never more to be uprooted.
The introductory material for this chapter waxed philosophic about the creation of the state of Israel: "Modern pilgrims can only imagine the thrill of receiving a letter from the British government in 1917, saying that Israel might some day be born; or standing near here in 1948, hearing the Declaration of Independence of the State of Israel being read. But at least we can imagine it by reading the historic letter from Britain lord Balfour, known ever after as the Balfour Declaration." The book went on to reprint the entire Balfour Declaration and the entire "Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel." I read with some irony these words from the famous (or infamous, depending on which side of the Wall you're on) Lord Balfour:
His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine...
As I read this, I thought of the third generation of Palestinian families living in refugee camps, denied the right of return to their homes. I thought about the Israeli annexation of land in the West Bank and the denial of water to Palestinians there. I thought about the massive bloodshed and violence that followed the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, and I shook my head sadly at Balfour's naiviety and ignorance in 1917. "Nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine," huh? What an empty promise that has turned out to be.
I picked up a copy of the International Christian Embassy Jerusalem newsletter that had been given to me by one of the Jewish Israeli participants in the Jewish-Muslim interfaith dialogue meeting on Sunday night. "Here, I get this magazine that's about Christians' support of Israel," he'd said to me as he dropped us off back at Bob's apartment after the end of the evening. "You might find it interesting."
"Thanks," I said, taking it and shoving it into my bag. Now I pulled it out and looked at it. The ICEJ was founded in 1980 "as an act of comfort and solidarity with Israel and the Jewish people in their claim to Jerusalem," and represents Christians "who share a love and concern for Israel and an understanding of the biblical significance of the modern ingathering of Jews to the land of their forefathers."
The magazine included articles about how the Second Coming of Jesus was clearly immanent since the state of Israel has been restored and since there is much international resistance to it.
"The miracle of Israel's restoration is the validating sign heralding the return of our dear Lord," one of the articles asserted. "It is also true that the Word of God portrays Israel's restoration as taking place amidst great international resistance to it. The nations will eventually mobilize, as they did in AD 70, against Jerusalem and they will try to remove it from Jewish hands (Zechariah 12). They will be thwarted and Jesus will return in glory and splendour to set up His throne in Jerusalem and from which He will rule the nations with a "rod of iron" (Revelation 19:15).
Another section of the magazine exhorted its readers to pray for Israel as it came under increasing international pressure to cede control to parts of the land to Palestinians, including the parts of Jerusalem that were annexed by Israel in 1967 on so-called "Jerusalem Day" - June 1 - the day I had first set out to explore Jerusalem. Some of the parades celebrating the "unification of Jerusalem" were scheduled to go right through predominantly Arab neighborhoods. The Rev. Bob Carroll, the canon pastor to the English-speaking congregation at the Episcopal cathedral in Jerusalem, told me how Jewish families would walk up and down the streets of his predominantly Arab neighborhood in East Jerusalem, pushing their baby carriages.
"They don't have to come this way," he said. "There are plenty of other routes they can take. They do it to make a statement. They're saying, 'We're here, and don't you forget it.'"
Or, in other words, "F*** you."
And yet, this very large Christian organization stands "in solidarity with the Jewish people in their claim to Jerusalem." I found myself wondering how many of this organization's supporters and subscribers to this magazine had ever actually been to Jerusalem or the West Bank, how many of them had ever met a Palestinian and heard their story and their family history. Christians supporting the kind of behavior that has taken place in Israel in order to return the land to Jewish ownership seems to me a blatant violation of what Christians should stand for. Even if you truly believe that God wants the land to be given to the Jews, at what cost? Would God approve of the violation of basic human rights and dignity for the sole purpose of giving the land back to the Jews? If they're the "chosen ones" and everyone else is chopped liver, maybe so. I began to see how very dangerous this kind of theology of "chosenness" can be, and realized that I do NOT believe, with any ounce of my being, that God has "chosen" any one group over the other and wants this kind of violence and slaughter to continue.
But what about those passages in the Old Testament where God tells the Israelites to slaughter the Canaanites (who were in this land before the Jews!) so that they can "possess the land that I am giving to you"? I opened my Bible and leafed through some of those passages and felt my blood boiling as I did. It was one thing to have been disturbed by these passages, as I always had been, when I encountered them in church and in religion classes and it was merely an intellectual conundrum over something that happened over 5,000 years ago and the way the people interpreted those events and attributed divine significance to them. It was quite another thing to see the ways in which this kind of theology had caused violence and injustice and oppression to VERY REAL HUMAN BEINGS in the HERE and NOW.
"How can I become a priest and be a part of a tradition that considers these passages Scripture?" I thought. "How can I vow at my ordination that I 'believe the Old and New Testaments to be the Word of God and to contain all things necessary to salvation' when there are these kinds of texts that essentially justify genocide? How do I preach on these texts when they come up in the lectionary?"
Before my experience in the West Bank, I probably would have tended to spiritualize or metaphorize the biblical stuff about the "Promised Land" (it's really heaven) or about being "chosen" (we're ALL chosen), but now I felt the need, the moral imperative, even the CALLING to actively preach AGAINST those notions. Although one of my seminary professors advises us to "never preach against the text" -- as in, don't directly contradict something the Bible says; find some way to use it positively, even if it's through a metaphorical interpretation -- I found myself feeling very strongly that I would not be able to do that with these passages. Tip-toeing around these passages and not tackling them head-on is exactly the kind of hands-off approach that has produced a kind of blindness and apathy and even tacit acceptance of the kind of things going on in the West Bank. I cried myself to sleep that night as waves of heart-wrenching pain wracked my body as I took in all that I had seen.
A few days later, I went to meet with Bob Carroll at the Episcopal cathedral to talk about the world of the Episcopal Church in this region. I was beside myself with frustration at the things I'd experienced and I wanted to know what the Episcopal Church was doing about it. "What kinds of things are the church doing in this area to help advocate for Palestinians?" I asked. He gave me lots of resources, including information about the World Council of Churches' Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme in Palestine and Israel (EAPPI), which sends volunteers to regions where injustices are going on to be witnesses to the activities of the Israeli government and Israeli settlers in the West Bank and to provide protection to the local people by their presence. If the Israeli government and settlers know they are being watched by an international presence, the violence they inflict on the Palestinians tends to decrease. A quote from one of the local people in the village of Yanoun in the booklet Bob gave me said this:
He also told me, as I talked about my encounters with different folks working in interfaith dialogue in the region, that interfaith work in Israel is often a ruse, a way of avoiding dealing with the hard political issues in the area. Interfaith dialogue, often initiated by the dominant Jewish community, is a way to make themselves feel good about reaching out to Muslims and Christians while not really changing anything about the oppression of these groups in the country. He told me a story about a rabbi approaching the diocese about starting an interfaith dialogue with the Episcopal Church.
"Our bishop [who is a Palestinian Arab] sat right here and said to him, 'Look, rabbi, with all due respect, are you going to do anything to help my people in the West Bank?' Do you want to work together to get medicines to the hospitals there and help with education? Because if not, I think this conversation is over.'"
I remembered the woman from Elijah Interfaith Institute that I'd met with saying that St. George's was "not known for their openness to interfaith dialogue," which surprised me, since the Episcopal Church in the U.S. is very open to such things. I'd wondered what that was all about -- and after talking to Bob, got an interesting insight into a dynamic that I hadn't been aware of in my previous encounters with the interfaith scene in Israel. Suddenly it made sense that a man who was involved in interfaith dialogue with Palestinian Muslims could also be a subscriber to a magazine about Christians supporting the Jews' exclusive right to the lands there, and advocating only for injustices committed against Jews by "Muslim extremists," with no mention on their website of the injustices committed by the Israeli government against Palestinian Arabs (who are not just Muslim but also CHRISTIAN, by the way!) that had provoked those extremists to such action!
Bob also warned me that when I went to the airport that night (it was my last day in Jerusalem), I should expect to be questioned severely, since "young women traveling alone are considered a security threat to the government of Israel."
"What??" I asked, surprised. I wasn't used to being lumped in the "security threat" stereotype category, and actually felt somewhat proud to be given that distinction. "Why?" I asked Bob.
"Well, because young women tend to come over here and visit the West Bank and get all sympathetic to the Palestinian cause," he said, and I laughed sheepishly. Well, I certainly fit the bill on that one! I guess stereotypes do come out of some sense of reality.
But perhaps the most important thing Bob said to me was his advice to not get caught up in my anger.
"This is a lot to take in right now," he said, "and it's natural that you'd get very upset upon first encountering these things. But once you've gotten home and have some time to settle in and process, it's very important to let go of the anger. Holding on to the anger is not productive, it doesn't really help anyone, and it'll just destroy you. You have to move past the anger if you want to do something productive."
I've thought a lot about "moving past the anger" since I've been back. In general, that's something that's very difficult for me to do, especially when I feel that I or someone else has been wronged. I get my hackles up in what I consider to be a "righteous anger" about some wrong or injustice done to me or someone else and I want the offending party to be punished or to apologize for their behavior before I'm able to let it go. This has been a subject of discussion for me with spiritual directors and confessors, about the importance of letting go of this feeling in order to truly be able to forgive others. Forgiveness does not come easily to me -- at least not a forgiveness where the other party is unrepentant. Since I don't see the Israeli government "repenting" of their actions any time soon, I think I'll have to find a way to move forward if I don't want to come to demonize the entire state of Israel -- which is also against my principles.
On the flight home, I read a book by Mitch Albom, author of Tuesdays With Morrie, about several years he spent with his childhood rabbi before he died, after that rabbi asked him to write his eulogy. The book, called Have a Little Faith, helped me to move past some of my anger at the state of Israel and, by extension, all Jewish people. I remembered going to hear Mitch Albom speak at a synagogue in Boston with the Jewish girls who used to live in my apartment. I thought about my dear friend and former roommate Ayala, who was born and raised in Israel. I thought about Naomi and Yinon who I'd stayed with in Tel Aviv at the beginning of my trip, Naomi an American Jewish woman who had "made aliyah," using her "birthright" as a Jew to be able to immigrate there, and Yinon a born-and-bred Israeli who was a member of that Israeli military that I was so angry at. I thought about their daughter Aya, born here and oblivious to all the political implications of her birth as a Jewish child on this highly contested soil. Certainly I wasn't going to lump all of them into this one big category of "Israel" and "Jews" that I was mad at?
In the book, there is a passage where Mitch finds an old photograph of an Arab family amongst the rabbi's belongings.
"Who are these people?" he asks, and the rabbi tells him how the photograph came from a home in the north of Israel that was demolished during the war in 1948 after the creation of the state of Israel. He tells how the people fled their homes and nothing was left but a few remnants like this picture, found in a crack on the floor by one of the Zionist soldiers. I can't remember how the rabbi came to be in possession of it, but I think it said that he kept it to remind himself of the capacity of humans to do harm to one another.
"But these people were the enemy!" Mitch protested.
"Enemy, schmenemy," the rabbi replied. "This was a FAMILY."
As I sat on the plane with tears rolling down my face, I found my crisis of faith abating somewhat. This was the kind of faith I could stay on board with.
"The miracle of Israel's restoration is the validating sign heralding the return of our dear Lord," one of the articles asserted. "It is also true that the Word of God portrays Israel's restoration as taking place amidst great international resistance to it. The nations will eventually mobilize, as they did in AD 70, against Jerusalem and they will try to remove it from Jewish hands (Zechariah 12). They will be thwarted and Jesus will return in glory and splendour to set up His throne in Jerusalem and from which He will rule the nations with a "rod of iron" (Revelation 19:15).
Another section of the magazine exhorted its readers to pray for Israel as it came under increasing international pressure to cede control to parts of the land to Palestinians, including the parts of Jerusalem that were annexed by Israel in 1967 on so-called "Jerusalem Day" - June 1 - the day I had first set out to explore Jerusalem. Some of the parades celebrating the "unification of Jerusalem" were scheduled to go right through predominantly Arab neighborhoods. The Rev. Bob Carroll, the canon pastor to the English-speaking congregation at the Episcopal cathedral in Jerusalem, told me how Jewish families would walk up and down the streets of his predominantly Arab neighborhood in East Jerusalem, pushing their baby carriages.
"They don't have to come this way," he said. "There are plenty of other routes they can take. They do it to make a statement. They're saying, 'We're here, and don't you forget it.'"
Or, in other words, "F*** you."
And yet, this very large Christian organization stands "in solidarity with the Jewish people in their claim to Jerusalem." I found myself wondering how many of this organization's supporters and subscribers to this magazine had ever actually been to Jerusalem or the West Bank, how many of them had ever met a Palestinian and heard their story and their family history. Christians supporting the kind of behavior that has taken place in Israel in order to return the land to Jewish ownership seems to me a blatant violation of what Christians should stand for. Even if you truly believe that God wants the land to be given to the Jews, at what cost? Would God approve of the violation of basic human rights and dignity for the sole purpose of giving the land back to the Jews? If they're the "chosen ones" and everyone else is chopped liver, maybe so. I began to see how very dangerous this kind of theology of "chosenness" can be, and realized that I do NOT believe, with any ounce of my being, that God has "chosen" any one group over the other and wants this kind of violence and slaughter to continue.
But what about those passages in the Old Testament where God tells the Israelites to slaughter the Canaanites (who were in this land before the Jews!) so that they can "possess the land that I am giving to you"? I opened my Bible and leafed through some of those passages and felt my blood boiling as I did. It was one thing to have been disturbed by these passages, as I always had been, when I encountered them in church and in religion classes and it was merely an intellectual conundrum over something that happened over 5,000 years ago and the way the people interpreted those events and attributed divine significance to them. It was quite another thing to see the ways in which this kind of theology had caused violence and injustice and oppression to VERY REAL HUMAN BEINGS in the HERE and NOW.
"How can I become a priest and be a part of a tradition that considers these passages Scripture?" I thought. "How can I vow at my ordination that I 'believe the Old and New Testaments to be the Word of God and to contain all things necessary to salvation' when there are these kinds of texts that essentially justify genocide? How do I preach on these texts when they come up in the lectionary?"
Before my experience in the West Bank, I probably would have tended to spiritualize or metaphorize the biblical stuff about the "Promised Land" (it's really heaven) or about being "chosen" (we're ALL chosen), but now I felt the need, the moral imperative, even the CALLING to actively preach AGAINST those notions. Although one of my seminary professors advises us to "never preach against the text" -- as in, don't directly contradict something the Bible says; find some way to use it positively, even if it's through a metaphorical interpretation -- I found myself feeling very strongly that I would not be able to do that with these passages. Tip-toeing around these passages and not tackling them head-on is exactly the kind of hands-off approach that has produced a kind of blindness and apathy and even tacit acceptance of the kind of things going on in the West Bank. I cried myself to sleep that night as waves of heart-wrenching pain wracked my body as I took in all that I had seen.
A few days later, I went to meet with Bob Carroll at the Episcopal cathedral to talk about the world of the Episcopal Church in this region. I was beside myself with frustration at the things I'd experienced and I wanted to know what the Episcopal Church was doing about it. "What kinds of things are the church doing in this area to help advocate for Palestinians?" I asked. He gave me lots of resources, including information about the World Council of Churches' Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme in Palestine and Israel (EAPPI), which sends volunteers to regions where injustices are going on to be witnesses to the activities of the Israeli government and Israeli settlers in the West Bank and to provide protection to the local people by their presence. If the Israeli government and settlers know they are being watched by an international presence, the violence they inflict on the Palestinians tends to decrease. A quote from one of the local people in the village of Yanoun in the booklet Bob gave me said this:
"Harassment by the settlers has decreased by maybe 80 or 90 percent. The reason is that you are in the village. The biggest effect has been on the children. I have asked how they feel, when the settlers come and you are here, and they say they are no longer scared like they used to be."Bob also directed me to several websites: the UN's website for monitoring injustices in Israel and Palestine, Sabeel, an ecumenical liberation theology center in Jerusalem (I later found out that another FTE Ministry Fellow, Staci Imes, had spent time working with them this summer), and a site called B'Tselem, an Israeli-run organization that monitors human rights offenses in the occupied territories.
He also told me, as I talked about my encounters with different folks working in interfaith dialogue in the region, that interfaith work in Israel is often a ruse, a way of avoiding dealing with the hard political issues in the area. Interfaith dialogue, often initiated by the dominant Jewish community, is a way to make themselves feel good about reaching out to Muslims and Christians while not really changing anything about the oppression of these groups in the country. He told me a story about a rabbi approaching the diocese about starting an interfaith dialogue with the Episcopal Church.
"Our bishop [who is a Palestinian Arab] sat right here and said to him, 'Look, rabbi, with all due respect, are you going to do anything to help my people in the West Bank?' Do you want to work together to get medicines to the hospitals there and help with education? Because if not, I think this conversation is over.'"
I remembered the woman from Elijah Interfaith Institute that I'd met with saying that St. George's was "not known for their openness to interfaith dialogue," which surprised me, since the Episcopal Church in the U.S. is very open to such things. I'd wondered what that was all about -- and after talking to Bob, got an interesting insight into a dynamic that I hadn't been aware of in my previous encounters with the interfaith scene in Israel. Suddenly it made sense that a man who was involved in interfaith dialogue with Palestinian Muslims could also be a subscriber to a magazine about Christians supporting the Jews' exclusive right to the lands there, and advocating only for injustices committed against Jews by "Muslim extremists," with no mention on their website of the injustices committed by the Israeli government against Palestinian Arabs (who are not just Muslim but also CHRISTIAN, by the way!) that had provoked those extremists to such action!
Bob also warned me that when I went to the airport that night (it was my last day in Jerusalem), I should expect to be questioned severely, since "young women traveling alone are considered a security threat to the government of Israel."
"What??" I asked, surprised. I wasn't used to being lumped in the "security threat" stereotype category, and actually felt somewhat proud to be given that distinction. "Why?" I asked Bob.
"Well, because young women tend to come over here and visit the West Bank and get all sympathetic to the Palestinian cause," he said, and I laughed sheepishly. Well, I certainly fit the bill on that one! I guess stereotypes do come out of some sense of reality.
But perhaps the most important thing Bob said to me was his advice to not get caught up in my anger.
"This is a lot to take in right now," he said, "and it's natural that you'd get very upset upon first encountering these things. But once you've gotten home and have some time to settle in and process, it's very important to let go of the anger. Holding on to the anger is not productive, it doesn't really help anyone, and it'll just destroy you. You have to move past the anger if you want to do something productive."
I've thought a lot about "moving past the anger" since I've been back. In general, that's something that's very difficult for me to do, especially when I feel that I or someone else has been wronged. I get my hackles up in what I consider to be a "righteous anger" about some wrong or injustice done to me or someone else and I want the offending party to be punished or to apologize for their behavior before I'm able to let it go. This has been a subject of discussion for me with spiritual directors and confessors, about the importance of letting go of this feeling in order to truly be able to forgive others. Forgiveness does not come easily to me -- at least not a forgiveness where the other party is unrepentant. Since I don't see the Israeli government "repenting" of their actions any time soon, I think I'll have to find a way to move forward if I don't want to come to demonize the entire state of Israel -- which is also against my principles.
On the flight home, I read a book by Mitch Albom, author of Tuesdays With Morrie, about several years he spent with his childhood rabbi before he died, after that rabbi asked him to write his eulogy. The book, called Have a Little Faith, helped me to move past some of my anger at the state of Israel and, by extension, all Jewish people. I remembered going to hear Mitch Albom speak at a synagogue in Boston with the Jewish girls who used to live in my apartment. I thought about my dear friend and former roommate Ayala, who was born and raised in Israel. I thought about Naomi and Yinon who I'd stayed with in Tel Aviv at the beginning of my trip, Naomi an American Jewish woman who had "made aliyah," using her "birthright" as a Jew to be able to immigrate there, and Yinon a born-and-bred Israeli who was a member of that Israeli military that I was so angry at. I thought about their daughter Aya, born here and oblivious to all the political implications of her birth as a Jewish child on this highly contested soil. Certainly I wasn't going to lump all of them into this one big category of "Israel" and "Jews" that I was mad at?
In the book, there is a passage where Mitch finds an old photograph of an Arab family amongst the rabbi's belongings.
"Who are these people?" he asks, and the rabbi tells him how the photograph came from a home in the north of Israel that was demolished during the war in 1948 after the creation of the state of Israel. He tells how the people fled their homes and nothing was left but a few remnants like this picture, found in a crack on the floor by one of the Zionist soldiers. I can't remember how the rabbi came to be in possession of it, but I think it said that he kept it to remind himself of the capacity of humans to do harm to one another.
"But these people were the enemy!" Mitch protested.
"Enemy, schmenemy," the rabbi replied. "This was a FAMILY."
As I sat on the plane with tears rolling down my face, I found my crisis of faith abating somewhat. This was the kind of faith I could stay on board with.
Tuesday, June 7, 2011
Visiting the West Bank
Author's Note: My visit to the West Bank was probably the single most powerful and moving part of my entire three-week trip, but I didn't get around to writing this entry until two months after I'd been home in the U.S. (Although this entry is dated June 7, the day this all happened, I'm writing it in early August.) I'm not sure why I kept avoiding and procrastinating writing this, probably because I know it's such a charged subject and because there was just so much to process and write about that I didn't even know where to start. I settled on simply writing a narrative about my experience and allowing the reader to "listen in" on my raw thoughts and feelings as I encountered the things I did. This entry became so long that I decided to divide it into several sections with different headers, to help break the story up. I hope you'll stick with me and read through the entire experience; all of it seemed too significant to edit any of it out. - Tracy
Planning my visit
When I was first doing research for my pilgrimage to Israel, I Googled "Bethlehem," since it was definitely one of the top Christian sites I'd want to visit -- the site of Jesus's birth. I discovered, to my surprise, that Bethlehem was not in Israel at all, but in the West Bank.
So I started investigating tours. Rachel had told me there was also a group called "Breaking the Silence," comprised of ex-Israeli soldiers, who give tours of the West Bank. This sounded fascinating to me, so I looked them up, but there were no tours scheduled to go before I would be leaving Jerusalem. So, I started looking around for other tour groups. All throughout this trip, I had bristled at the presence of tour buses packed with tourists taking pictures and generally looking very out of place. I cringed at the thought of being "one of them" for this excursion to the West Bank, but decided I'd have to just bite the bullet and do the tour bus thing for this one day, to give me a somewhat safe way to explore the West Bank. I settled on going with a company called Green Olive Tours, on an eight-hour day trip from Jerusalem to Bethlehem. I wished I could visit Hebron and Abraham's Tomb as Rachel and Kevin had, but that tour only went on Thursdays, and I was flying out from Tel Aviv Thursday evening. So, I settled on just going to Bethlehem.
Arriving in the West Bank
It was around 9 a.m., so the morning crowds had already dissipated and the checkpoint was almost empty when we went through. We all had our passports out as we approached the guard timidly, expecting a severe round of harassment about our intentions in crossing the border. Without so much as a second glance at us, the guard waved us on through, without even the pretense of looking at our passports. We didn't ask any questions and just kept walking. After we got out on the other side and started down the next barred-off walkway, the British girls laughed at how easy that had been for us to cross. "Oh, well, I mean, I guess they could tell we're tourists. I mean, we don't exactly look like terrorists," one of them said. We all laughed, but I couldn't stop myself from saying, "Yes, but what does a terrorist 'look' like?"
"So, my name is Yamen, I live here in Bethlehem, and we're going to show you a bit about what's going on here today," he said. "People don't realize what's going on here. But we're going to show you. Now, while you're here in the West Bank, you need to learn a little Arabic. So, I'm going to teach you -- yalla. That means, "Let's go," or "hurry up," like, "Come on, let's go." Ok. Ready? You need a little Arabic. So. Yalla!"
Much of the graffiti in this area played on the irony of the subjugation and oppression taking place in the city of Jesus's birth. Yamen told us that most of the graffiti was done not by locals, but by visiting tourists -- and indeed, much of it was in English. It was obvious that lots of Christian groups had not lost the connection between the city of Jesus's birth and the people who are being oppressed there today. "Jesus wept," someone had scrawled on one part of the wall, and in another area someone had stenciled the words to Ephesians 2:14 - "For he himself is our peace, who has made the two one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility." The British girls and I were going nuts with our cameras, taking pictures of one set of graffiti art after the other. I felt very touristy doing so, and somewhat silly, taking pictures of writing on a wall. Surely there was something more "artistic" for me to shoot? But the messages on the Wall were just so compelling, I couldn't stop myself. There was more than one allusion to Berlin, with phrases like "this wall must fall" and "Apocalypse now! Berlin 89!" Idealized murals of the city of Jerusalem showed transcendent hands holding a ladder with a heart descending from the sky as a dove flew over the city with an olive branch in its mouth, and a large Christmas tree was depicted encircled by a large, towering concrete wall.
We continued on to the Aida Refugee Camp, where Palestinian families have been living since 1948 when the state of Israel was first created. It now looked like a fairly well-developed area of apartments -- at least in contrast to the images of people living in tents that the phrase "refugee camp" conjured up in my mind. Yamen explained that for the first seven years after 1948, the people had indeed lived in tents, but eventually began to build more solid structures as it became apparent they were not going to be able to return to their homeland anytime soon. Many of the people living in the refugee camps are Palestinians who fled from their homes in what is now Israel during the fighting and violence that ensued after the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. These families were told they would be able to return to their homes after the violence stopped, but those promises have yet to be fulfilled. There is now a third generation of refugees growing up in this camp and others like it across the West Bank.
The thing I couldn't quite figure out was WHY these people weren't allowed to return to their homes -- some of them still have the keys to their homes, now on Israeli land, that their families had lived in for hundreds of years. The Palestinian people who did NOT flee the violence and remained in the land that became Israel eventually were given Israeli citizenship -- like the many Arab people I had encountered in Nazareth and Jerusalem. It didn't make sense to me -- so these refugees were punished just because they fled from the violence and did not want to be killed? What if they just wanted to go back to their homes and were willing to be Israeli citizens and didn't want to try to make Israel back into a Palestinian state? Nope, they still wouldn't be allowed back in, was the answer I consistently got from different sources, because the Israeli authorities were worried if they let the Palestinian refugees back in, the Arabs would become a demographic majority in the state of Israel.
The government's agenda is to preserve Israel's existence as a "Jewish state"... which it certainly can't be if the majority of its citizens aren't Jewish. So for that reason and that reason only (from what I could gather), three generations of people are living in refugee camps on blocks of land that supposedly belong to them -- "Palestinian territories" -- but where they are not allowed to build or plant crops and where even their water supply is controlled by Israeli authorities and is often cut off at random, for no particular reason (or worse, for a particular reason -- to benefit Israelis at the expense of Palestinians. For more on the "unnecessary drought" in the West Bank, see my fellow FTE Ministry Fellow Staci Imes' blog entry, "The Senseless Drought." Staci spent three months in Israel and Palestine this summer as her Ministry Fellowship project.)
When I say the refugee camp looked "well-developed," please understand that that is a relative term. It was certainly well-developed in comparison to a tent city, but it made even the worst of Section 8 housing projects in the U.S. look like the Taj Mahal. Concrete slab buildings butted up against one another, and livestock often lived right underneath people's homes in cages since there was no green land for farming. (The grid-like gated area under the building pictured at right housed a whole hoard of goats, for example.) The entire place was a concrete slab; I didn't see one blade of grass the entire time we were in the camp. Young children ran through the streets and smiled shyly at us, and Yamen pointed out that they had nowhere to play -- no playgrounds, no green grass to run around in -- and said they were all coming to him asking for toys and things because often he would bring them gifts when he came through here.
Now I know my A, B, Cs... for today, at least
After our trek through the refugee camp on foot, we made our way to Yamen's car, a six-door extra-long vehicle that could seat eight and had "Limousina" plastered across the front windshield in stickers. We all piled in and Yamen gave us a driving tour in his very un-air-conditioned car of the greater Bethlehem area, singing along in Arabic and English at the top of his lungs to the different songs on the radio. He pointed out various shops, restaurants, historic sites, and the "borders" between the different "areas" in the West Bank -- Area A (full Palestinian control), Area B (shared Israeli-Palestinian control) and Area C (full Israeli control). The boundaries of these areas were marked by short concrete pylons sitting on the sidewalks (pictured below).
"Um, what?" I asked, incredulously. "That's IT?? That's what marks the boundaries between these different areas of control, and yet there's this huge wall around the whole West Bank to mark THAT boundary?"
Yes, well, apparently these boundaries are a bit more, shall we say... mobile. Yamen explained that these concrete blocks would change color or move on a regular basis and an area that had been Area A (full Palestinian control) would suddenly become Area C (full Israeli control) and the Israelis would start building a settlement on that land.
On our tour, Yamen took us to an area just outside of Bethlehem that had recently been designated Area C and where construction was beginning on a new settlement. Just down the road from that site, he pointed out a completed Israeli settlement, which we could expect that other area to look like soon. The Wall (which is still under construction) is being built in such a way that it essentially annexes these lands for Israel, putting the settlements on the "Israeli" side of the Wall and cutting off access to those areas for Palestinians.
As Yamen told us about this, I couldn't believe my ears. Well, I could, but I couldn't. So the Israeli government can just come in and... excuse me, but I can't seem to find a better word for this... f*** with the boundaries of what land Palestinians actually have control over, and no one does anything about it? Why don't the Palestinians do anything about it?
Well, really, what can they do? The Palestinians don't have a real government or a state, and most of the areas that are actually SAID to be under "full Palestinian control" are only the central parts of the cities. The areas that Palestinians actually control are a bunch of isolated geographic pockets that aren't even contiguous (that is, they don't share a border or touch each other), so they are completely surrounded by areas under Israeli control. All the transactions we made in the West Bank took place in shekels, the Israeli currency. And yet, we left the state of Israel when we left Jerusalem and crossed the checkpoint... but we weren't really in another country.
It was all very confusing to me and didn't seem to make sense; my mind didn't have a place to put "occupied territory that isn't part of any country" in my system of categorization. I began to understand where the so-called "terrorist" violence in the West Bank comes from. If I lived there, I'd probably want to start shooting at Israeli soldiers, too. What do you do when you are rendered politically impotent and are unable to organize your people in any meaningful way to work for change? What else is there to do but turn to violence? I found my strong belief in non-violence being tested. I didn't want to think that violence was the answer, but I literally could not see any other option for these people. I was about ready to sign up to join a revolutionary army to overthrow the state of Israel.
Yamen then took us to see a section of the Wall that was still under construction. As we drove, I was surprised to notice that I actually recognized the road we were on -- it was the same road we'd taken when I was with the Israeli folks for the interfaith meeting at the restaurant in "no-man's land." Then we turned on the road to Beit Jala that the Israelis had pointed out to me on Sunday, saying, "See that road? We can't go down there." And two days later, here I was, going down that very road with a Palestinian guide! I realized what a unique position I was in as a visiting American, able to travel freely between the ares that were restricted to the people who actually live here.
I was surprised to see, as we looked at the Wall from this high vantage point, that it was encircling the very road I'd driven on from Jerusalem in the car with the Israelis on Sunday -- the same road where I'd noticed what looked like a large sound barrier and asked if it was "The Wall," and been given a negative answer by my Israeli car-mates. Well, turns out that "sound barrier" actually WAS part of the Wall. I don't think my Israeli hosts were intentionally lying about it; I think they really didn't know that it was part of the Wall. It certainly looks very different on the Israeli side than it does on the Palestinian side.
Outside the adjacent Roman Catholic chapel was a small plaque that said, in English and German, "The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. (St. John 1.14) When dark is the world today, This Child brings the world the light." It was particularly poignant given all the things I had just seen, and I began to understand that Jesus lives not only on the streets of Boston and New York and Atlanta where I had encountered him in the faces of homeless people. Jesus lives in a refugee camp in Palestine.
We left the church and met back up with Yamen, who took us on a walking tour of Manger Square and the market (sooq) there. As we walked, he asked me what I was doing on my trip to Israel, and I said I was on a pilgrimage. He looked somewhat alarmed.
Dr. Abusrour took a deep breath and sat back. The answer to this question did not come as quickly as the sound-bite speeches about what his program does that he has probably delivered thousands of times.
"We do not have the luxury of despair," he said slowly. "We can't. We must keep going. For our children. We have to give them the belief that their future can be better."
As if on cue, his younger daughter, who seemed to be around six years old and who had been running in and out of the office throughout our time with him, came running into the room squealing, evidently having been the brunt of a squabble with her older sister and the other kids who were playing in the next room. She crawled onto her dad's lap and buried her head in his chest, looking up occasionally and peering at us -- especially me, it seemed -- with deep beautiful brown eyes.
As her eyes held mine, I thought about the young girl I'd encountered on the streets of Turkey during my foreign study in college who had motivated me to begin outreach to homeless people. This girl appeared to me as a similar icon, as a manifestation of God's presence, as a messenger or prophet. What will her life be like growing up here? I thought. And what am I going to do to make a difference for her life and the lives of thousands of other children here?
"For me, I am a Muslim, so I turn to my faith for hope," Dr. Abusrour continued. "I really do believe that ultimately injustice will not prevail. I believe that one day all of us will be able to live together in peace."
Yamen shrugged off my question with a smile and a yalla -- it was time for us to go, and Yamen didn't seem to be the deeply philosophical type. Instead, he wanted to make sure he had time to take us out for a Palestinian beer before we had to head back to Jerusalem.
Life goes on
Despite the harsh realities of many aspects of life in the West Bank, life does go on. Palestinians are able to live some semblance of normal lives -- within the narrow confines of the spaces they are allowed to inhabit. Yamen took us out for a beer at a local bar after our tour was over, proudly telling us that this beer was locally brewed in Tabeh in the West Bank. I was amazed by what an optimistic and positive and friendly attitude Yamen had, even after spending his time showing people the depressing realities of his city week after week.
As we wrapped things up at the pub, Yamen took a call on his cell phone and then announced with a grin, "Good news. The driver from Jerusalem is going to pick you up here so you don't have to go back through the checkpoint."
In a short white, another yellow taxi pulled up outside the bar, similar to the one that had driven us to the Bethlehem checkpoint that morning. The Israeli driver got out and greeted Yamen warmly with a big hug and a pat on the back. I can't remember whether they spoke in English, Arabic, or Hebrew, but it was the equivalent of a "Hey, what's up, man?" kind of friendly guys greeting. It was nice to see the way Green Olive Tours (the company who organized our tour) -- run by an Israeli Jew -- is bringing together people from both sides of the Wall and building friendship through a shared desire to expose people to the injustices happening in the West Bank.
As we drove away, I couldn't help but feel a bit strange knowing that we, with our American and British passports, could breeze freely between the West Bank and Jerusalem, but Yamen hadn't been able to go there for years and probably wouldn't be able to go back anytime soon. The image of Yamen standing on that sidewalk and waving to us as we left will stay with me for a long time.
Planning my visit
When I was first doing research for my pilgrimage to Israel, I Googled "Bethlehem," since it was definitely one of the top Christian sites I'd want to visit -- the site of Jesus's birth. I discovered, to my surprise, that Bethlehem was not in Israel at all, but in the West Bank.
"Oh my gosh, Bethlehem's in the West Bank? Can I even GO there?" I thought, as images of suicide bombers and gunfire from the evening news flashed through my mind.
Then I checked myself. Maybe the West Bank was like Harlem in New York, or Roxbury in Boston -- places that lots of people said you "shouldn't go," and that were "scary," but the people who said you shouldn't go there were mostly white middle-class people and their fears had a lot to do with uncomfortability around racial and economic class difference or just downright inaccurate stereotypes. I'd been to Harlem and didn't feel unsafe there; I'd been to Roxbury and didn't feel unsafe there either. Granted, I didn't walk around those places alone at night, but I found that a lot of the hype was just that -- hype.
So I started asking around about the West Bank, and the general consensus I got from all the American Christian people I knew was that it was perfectly safe to go to Bethlehem and visit the Church of the Nativity. Thousands of tourists do it every day, and there are even buses that run from Jerusalem to Manger Square, they told me. I decided I definitely wanted to go to Bethlehem, but figured I'd work out all the details of that trip once I got to Jerusalem, since it was close enough to be a day trip from Jerusalem.
Then I checked myself. Maybe the West Bank was like Harlem in New York, or Roxbury in Boston -- places that lots of people said you "shouldn't go," and that were "scary," but the people who said you shouldn't go there were mostly white middle-class people and their fears had a lot to do with uncomfortability around racial and economic class difference or just downright inaccurate stereotypes. I'd been to Harlem and didn't feel unsafe there; I'd been to Roxbury and didn't feel unsafe there either. Granted, I didn't walk around those places alone at night, but I found that a lot of the hype was just that -- hype.
So I started asking around about the West Bank, and the general consensus I got from all the American Christian people I knew was that it was perfectly safe to go to Bethlehem and visit the Church of the Nativity. Thousands of tourists do it every day, and there are even buses that run from Jerusalem to Manger Square, they told me. I decided I definitely wanted to go to Bethlehem, but figured I'd work out all the details of that trip once I got to Jerusalem, since it was close enough to be a day trip from Jerusalem.
On the day that Rachel and Kevin and I went to the Dead Sea, they told me about a trip they'd taken to the West Bank a few days before from Jerusalem. "Oh yeah, we just took one of the Arab buses from East Jerusalem and got off in Bethlehem," Rachel said, "and we just flagged down a taxi driver and asked him to show us around."
"We're not really interested in all the religious sites," they told the driver, "we just want to know what life is like for you under the occupation." So he took them all around the West Bank on a four-hour tour of Bethlehem and Hebron, telling them all about life in the West Bank and the Israeli settlers confiscating their land and the tension and violence and physical separation barrier walls at Abraham's Tomb in Hebron between the Jewish and Muslim sides.
"It was just so crazy," Rachel said, "because here were these people, praying in two languages that sound so very similar, and venerating the same prophet, and yet they had to have these bullet-proof barriers between them while they prayed."
The driver told them that as a Palestinian, he was not allowed to go on the Jewish side of the wall. "You can go, since you are American," he said, "but we're not allowed over there." He told them how the "security" at Abraham's tomb was blatantly biased, with the Palestinians required to go through multiple checkpoints and metal detectors and scans, while the Israelis could walk right up after going through one single scanner. "They do it just to wear us down," he said, "to make things difficult for us."
The driver told them that as a Palestinian, he was not allowed to go on the Jewish side of the wall. "You can go, since you are American," he said, "but we're not allowed over there." He told them how the "security" at Abraham's tomb was blatantly biased, with the Palestinians required to go through multiple checkpoints and metal detectors and scans, while the Israelis could walk right up after going through one single scanner. "They do it just to wear us down," he said, "to make things difficult for us."
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| The Jewish side of Abraham's Tomb (Rachel's picture) |
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| The Muslim side of Abraham's Tomb (Rachel's picture) |
After hearing about their trip, my appetite was whetted to learn more, and I knew that I could not do what so many Christian tourists do and simply go and visit the Church of the Nativity and return back to Jerusalem without really engaging with the local Palestinian population. Given my penchant for work among homeless people and advocating for people on the margins of society, I felt that I wouldn't be being true to my faith to take that kind of isolated, spectator approach to my visit to the West Bank. Rachel and Kevin said they'd gotten their taxi driver's number and that they were sure he'd be willing to show me around. I called Rachel a few days later to ask for his phone number, but ultimately chickened out of calling him. I just didn't feel comfortable as a woman traveling alone to call up some random taxi driver and ask him to show me around. If I'd had someone with me, I might have done it, but not by myself.
So I started investigating tours. Rachel had told me there was also a group called "Breaking the Silence," comprised of ex-Israeli soldiers, who give tours of the West Bank. This sounded fascinating to me, so I looked them up, but there were no tours scheduled to go before I would be leaving Jerusalem. So, I started looking around for other tour groups. All throughout this trip, I had bristled at the presence of tour buses packed with tourists taking pictures and generally looking very out of place. I cringed at the thought of being "one of them" for this excursion to the West Bank, but decided I'd have to just bite the bullet and do the tour bus thing for this one day, to give me a somewhat safe way to explore the West Bank. I settled on going with a company called Green Olive Tours, on an eight-hour day trip from Jerusalem to Bethlehem. I wished I could visit Hebron and Abraham's Tomb as Rachel and Kevin had, but that tour only went on Thursdays, and I was flying out from Tel Aviv Thursday evening. So, I settled on just going to Bethlehem. The tour description said the Church of the Nativity would be included in the tour, so I knew I'd get a chance to see it, but it also said we'd see a refugee camp and get to see the Wall up close and some of the Banksy graffiti art on it. All these things sounded like the same kind of tour that Rachel and Kevin had gotten from their taxi driver, so I decided to go for it. It seemed like I would get to see pretty much everything I wanted to see from this tour.
Arriving in the West Bank
**A note on pictures: None of the pictures in the first part of this entry are my own; I have found them online and given credit where possible. I did not start taking pictures until after I was in the West Bank and past the security checkpoint and had asked if it was ok to take pictures; before then I thought maybe I could get in trouble with "the authorities" for trying to take pictures.**
Tuesday morning I got up early and made my way to the Notre Dame Hotel in Jerusalem (pictured at right), just outside the Old City, which was listed as the pick-up spot for the tour. I had reserved my spot online, so I hadn't actually spoken to anyone with this organization before I showed up, and I essentially knew nothing about the logistics of getting to the West Bank. I assumed a big tour bus -- of the same kind that passed me constantly for the thirty minutes I waited outside the hotel (I actually got there EARLY cause I didn't want to miss it!) -- would arrive to pick up the folks on the Bethlehem tour.
I had asked the guard at the gate to the hotel where the Green Olive Tours picked up, and he pointed me to a spot on the corner. I stood there for a while, noticing two young college-aged-looking girls sitting with their hiking backpacks stuffed full and speaking in English with British accents. I wondered if they were going to be on the same tour. After thirty minutes passed and it was getting closer and closer to pick-up time and no one else had arrived to wait with us, I was starting to wonder if I was in the right place.
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| Photo from TripAdvisor |
I had asked the guard at the gate to the hotel where the Green Olive Tours picked up, and he pointed me to a spot on the corner. I stood there for a while, noticing two young college-aged-looking girls sitting with their hiking backpacks stuffed full and speaking in English with British accents. I wondered if they were going to be on the same tour. After thirty minutes passed and it was getting closer and closer to pick-up time and no one else had arrived to wait with us, I was starting to wonder if I was in the right place.
"Are y'all waiting for the Green Olive Tours trip to Bethlehem?" I asked the two girls. They affirmed that they were, and we shared our confusion at the lack of other tourists present. "I guess this is the right spot?" I said, looking around and peering at the tour buses that kept pulling in to the circle up by the hotel lobby and then departing without so much as a second glance at the three of us.
Suddenly, a yellow cab pulled halfway up onto the curb in front of us. The driver rolled down the passenger window and asked brusquely, "You are waiting for Green Olive Tours?"
The girls and I looked at each other.
"Yes," I said.
"Get in," he said quickly, motioning to the back seat.
I looked back at the girls again. What? This random cab driver is telling us to just get in with him? Where's the tour bus? What the heck is going on?
The driver put the car in park and jumped out with a piece of paper in his hand. "Tracy?" he asked, looking down at his list. "Yes, that's me," I said, assuming he really must be with this company if he had a print-out of my registration. He identified the other girls as well and started throwing their luggage into the trunk. I don't think I would have gotten in the car with him if those other two girls hadn't been with me, but I figured, okay, what the heck, here we go...!
We got in the car, and the driver spurted off on a wild maniac dash through the streets of Jerusalem, dodging cars and traffic signs and any other obstacles in his way.
"I take you to the checkpoint, and then you meet your guide on the other side," he said.
"Um, what? You're going to drop us off?" somebody said. Maybe it was me.
"Yes, I take you to the checkpoint. Your guide will be waiting on the other side. You will see him. His name is Yamen. He is a brown-skinned man with a shaved head."
Oh, great. What specific identifying information! I pictured a whole line of brown-skinned men with shaved heads standing around on the other side of the checkpoint and the three of us very white girls trying to figure out which one was Yamen.
The cab driver pulled up in front of the main Jerusalem-Bethlehem checkpoint, bid us farewell, and zoomed off. The girls and I stared up at the monstrous concrete complex in front of us, surrounded by iron bars, with only one way in that we could see, up a long ramp. "Um, oh BOY!" I said out loud, looking at the girls, assessing their general comfort level. They also seemed wary of this whole thing, having expected, as I did, a tour bus with air conditioning to safely escort us across the border in the hands of some seasoned local expert tour guides. "Oh my God," one of the girls said as we walked through the long corridor and into the checkpoint area, "this is the real thing."
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| Entering the Bethlehem checkpoint. (Not my picture) |
It was around 9 a.m., so the morning crowds had already dissipated and the checkpoint was almost empty when we went through. We all had our passports out as we approached the guard timidly, expecting a severe round of harassment about our intentions in crossing the border. Without so much as a second glance at us, the guard waved us on through, without even the pretense of looking at our passports. We didn't ask any questions and just kept walking. After we got out on the other side and started down the next barred-off walkway, the British girls laughed at how easy that had been for us to cross. "Oh, well, I mean, I guess they could tell we're tourists. I mean, we don't exactly look like terrorists," one of them said. We all laughed, but I couldn't stop myself from saying, "Yes, but what does a terrorist 'look' like?"
After working on the film Divided We Fall and meeting many brown-skinned people in the U.S. who were mistaken for "terrorists" after 9/11 based on just such a stereotype of the Palestinian Arab "terrorist," it was a strange thing to now be encountering those very Palestinian Arabs that everyone was so afraid of and that were at the root of the anti-Arab, anti-Muslim sentiment in America. I had this sneaking suspicion that even if the identity wasn't mistaken -- these really WERE Arabs, not Indians or Mexicans or Bangladeshis or Pakistanis -- that the stereotype was still incorrect. And yet, years of conditioning via the media and movies and the general culture in America to be afraid of Arabs -- particularly in -- GASP -- THE WEST BANK -- still made my stomach tighten a bit as we crossed that border.
Any fears I had were soon assuaged when we met Yamen, our brown-skinned, bald-headed guide, who was indeed waiting for us on the other side, with a huge smile on his face and a bubbling enthusiasm. He quickly picked us out, introduced himself, and motioned us to follow him a few steps away from the area where all the cabs were waiting to pick up passengers.
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| Taxis waiting on the West Bank side of the checkpoint (not my photo) |
"So, my name is Yamen, I live here in Bethlehem, and we're going to show you a bit about what's going on here today," he said. "People don't realize what's going on here. But we're going to show you. Now, while you're here in the West Bank, you need to learn a little Arabic. So, I'm going to teach you -- yalla. That means, "Let's go," or "hurry up," like, "Come on, let's go." Ok. Ready? You need a little Arabic. So. Yalla!"
He bounded off down the street, with the three of us and another white woman from Belgium who was staying in the West Bank for a few days and had joined in on our trip tagging along behind him. I noticed that he was wearing a t-shirt that said, "Merry Christmas, Bethlehem!" on it in French and English, showing a cartoon of the Wall and a metal detector with a man with a large sword inspecting the shepherds and the three wise men on camels. I laughed to myself and thought, "I like this guy already."
First Encounters: Settlements and The Wall
Our first stop was just down the street from the checkpoint where we'd entered Bethlehem, where Yamen pointed out to us an Israeli settlement in the distance.
"You see? The settlers are over there," he said, pointing. "That is Palestinian land. They just come and take it and build their settlements on it, and the Israeli soldiers protect them."
"Can we take pictures?" I asked, worrying that at any moment an Israeli soldier would show up and confiscate my memory card.
"Of course," he said, nonchalantly. He went on to talk more about settlements and how many Israeli citizens are living -- illegally, according to international law -- in the West Bank.
"Obama talks about 1967 borders," he said, referring to President Obama's speech in mid-May calling for the recognition of a Palestinian state using the 1967 borders after the cease-fire at the end of the Six-Day War. "If you want 1967 borders, all those people have got to go," he said, pointing to an immense suburban settlement full of towering apartment complexes.
"So what do you think will happen in September?" one of the British girls asked, echoing my question to the American Israeli rabbi solider in Jerusalem just two nights before.
Yamen shrugged in much the same way as Bob had. "Nothing will change," he said. "These people aren't going anywhere. You want 1967 borders, they'd have to leave. That's not going to happen."
We then walked along "The Wall" for quite aways. (Unlike my Jewish Israeli guides on Sunday's excursion across the border, the folks in the West Bank had no trouble identifying where the Wall was!) As we looked at the countless graffiti scrawled on the Wall (not present on the Israeli side), Yamen pointed out all the Banksy art. "There, that's Banksy!" he'd say, with an air of pride, seemingly excited that the anonymous British graffiti artist had brought publicity and attention to the Wall through his art. "With Love and Kisses - Nothing Lasts Forever," said a ribbon that Yamen told us was Banksy art. Not too far from there, someone had scrawled over a figure of a man standing facing the wall, "Once a human rights teacher was born in Bethlehem."
Much of the graffiti in this area played on the irony of the subjugation and oppression taking place in the city of Jesus's birth. Yamen told us that most of the graffiti was done not by locals, but by visiting tourists -- and indeed, much of it was in English. It was obvious that lots of Christian groups had not lost the connection between the city of Jesus's birth and the people who are being oppressed there today. "Jesus wept," someone had scrawled on one part of the wall, and in another area someone had stenciled the words to Ephesians 2:14 - "For he himself is our peace, who has made the two one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility." The British girls and I were going nuts with our cameras, taking pictures of one set of graffiti art after the other. I felt very touristy doing so, and somewhat silly, taking pictures of writing on a wall. Surely there was something more "artistic" for me to shoot? But the messages on the Wall were just so compelling, I couldn't stop myself. There was more than one allusion to Berlin, with phrases like "this wall must fall" and "Apocalypse now! Berlin 89!" Idealized murals of the city of Jerusalem showed transcendent hands holding a ladder with a heart descending from the sky as a dove flew over the city with an olive branch in its mouth, and a large Christmas tree was depicted encircled by a large, towering concrete wall. 
I couldn't help but make the Berlin connections myself as I walked along this all-too-real wall. I remembered when my sister and I visited Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin during our trip to Germany in 2005. The checkpoint was now a tourist destination, a museum nearby depicting history of Cold War-Era East Germany. Across the street from the museum was a food court area called, cutely enough, "Snackpoint Charlie." The frivolity with which that site was now treated in the tourist market was striking compared to this real-life version of an active separation wall. I found myself hoping that someday my children and I could visit "Snackpoint Bethlehem," when the West Bank Wall would be no more than a museum. Perhaps my children will one day be given pieces of the West Bank Wall in high school as an honor when they show leadership potential, as I was given a piece of the Berlin Wall in 10th grade.
Aida Refugee Camp
We continued on to the Aida Refugee Camp, where Palestinian families have been living since 1948 when the state of Israel was first created. It now looked like a fairly well-developed area of apartments -- at least in contrast to the images of people living in tents that the phrase "refugee camp" conjured up in my mind. Yamen explained that for the first seven years after 1948, the people had indeed lived in tents, but eventually began to build more solid structures as it became apparent they were not going to be able to return to their homeland anytime soon. Many of the people living in the refugee camps are Palestinians who fled from their homes in what is now Israel during the fighting and violence that ensued after the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. These families were told they would be able to return to their homes after the violence stopped, but those promises have yet to be fulfilled. There is now a third generation of refugees growing up in this camp and others like it across the West Bank.The thing I couldn't quite figure out was WHY these people weren't allowed to return to their homes -- some of them still have the keys to their homes, now on Israeli land, that their families had lived in for hundreds of years. The Palestinian people who did NOT flee the violence and remained in the land that became Israel eventually were given Israeli citizenship -- like the many Arab people I had encountered in Nazareth and Jerusalem. It didn't make sense to me -- so these refugees were punished just because they fled from the violence and did not want to be killed? What if they just wanted to go back to their homes and were willing to be Israeli citizens and didn't want to try to make Israel back into a Palestinian state? Nope, they still wouldn't be allowed back in, was the answer I consistently got from different sources, because the Israeli authorities were worried if they let the Palestinian refugees back in, the Arabs would become a demographic majority in the state of Israel.
The government's agenda is to preserve Israel's existence as a "Jewish state"... which it certainly can't be if the majority of its citizens aren't Jewish. So for that reason and that reason only (from what I could gather), three generations of people are living in refugee camps on blocks of land that supposedly belong to them -- "Palestinian territories" -- but where they are not allowed to build or plant crops and where even their water supply is controlled by Israeli authorities and is often cut off at random, for no particular reason (or worse, for a particular reason -- to benefit Israelis at the expense of Palestinians. For more on the "unnecessary drought" in the West Bank, see my fellow FTE Ministry Fellow Staci Imes' blog entry, "The Senseless Drought." Staci spent three months in Israel and Palestine this summer as her Ministry Fellowship project.)
When I say the refugee camp looked "well-developed," please understand that that is a relative term. It was certainly well-developed in comparison to a tent city, but it made even the worst of Section 8 housing projects in the U.S. look like the Taj Mahal. Concrete slab buildings butted up against one another, and livestock often lived right underneath people's homes in cages since there was no green land for farming. (The grid-like gated area under the building pictured at right housed a whole hoard of goats, for example.) The entire place was a concrete slab; I didn't see one blade of grass the entire time we were in the camp. Young children ran through the streets and smiled shyly at us, and Yamen pointed out that they had nowhere to play -- no playgrounds, no green grass to run around in -- and said they were all coming to him asking for toys and things because often he would bring them gifts when he came through here.He showed us a school in the refugee camp run by the United Nations that was boarded up on one side because of all the gunfire that had been directed at the school by Israeli soldiers from the other side of the Wall during the second intifada in 2001-04 (approximate dates). The bullet holes were still visible in the doorway to the school (pictured below), and that entire side of the building had no windows. Why were Israeli soldiers shooting at an elementary school? "Some of the children were throwing rocks at the Wall," Yamen explained.
On the outer wall of the school was a beautiful mural of the Kabba, the holiest site in Islam in Mecca and the site of Muslim pilgrimage, and the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, where I had been just two days before. Yamen told us that it is now very difficult for Palestinians in the West Bank to travel to Jerusalem, which many Palestinians consider their capital. "I haven't been in Jerusalem since 1999," he told us, even though Bethlehem is less than six miles from the heart of Jerusalem.
After our trek through the refugee camp on foot, we made our way to Yamen's car, a six-door extra-long vehicle that could seat eight and had "Limousina" plastered across the front windshield in stickers. We all piled in and Yamen gave us a driving tour in his very un-air-conditioned car of the greater Bethlehem area, singing along in Arabic and English at the top of his lungs to the different songs on the radio. He pointed out various shops, restaurants, historic sites, and the "borders" between the different "areas" in the West Bank -- Area A (full Palestinian control), Area B (shared Israeli-Palestinian control) and Area C (full Israeli control). The boundaries of these areas were marked by short concrete pylons sitting on the sidewalks (pictured below).
"Um, what?" I asked, incredulously. "That's IT?? That's what marks the boundaries between these different areas of control, and yet there's this huge wall around the whole West Bank to mark THAT boundary?"
Yes, well, apparently these boundaries are a bit more, shall we say... mobile. Yamen explained that these concrete blocks would change color or move on a regular basis and an area that had been Area A (full Palestinian control) would suddenly become Area C (full Israeli control) and the Israelis would start building a settlement on that land.
On our tour, Yamen took us to an area just outside of Bethlehem that had recently been designated Area C and where construction was beginning on a new settlement. Just down the road from that site, he pointed out a completed Israeli settlement, which we could expect that other area to look like soon. The Wall (which is still under construction) is being built in such a way that it essentially annexes these lands for Israel, putting the settlements on the "Israeli" side of the Wall and cutting off access to those areas for Palestinians.
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| Israeli settlement near Bethlehem, with barbed wire where the Wall will eventually go |
As Yamen told us about this, I couldn't believe my ears. Well, I could, but I couldn't. So the Israeli government can just come in and... excuse me, but I can't seem to find a better word for this... f*** with the boundaries of what land Palestinians actually have control over, and no one does anything about it? Why don't the Palestinians do anything about it?
Well, really, what can they do? The Palestinians don't have a real government or a state, and most of the areas that are actually SAID to be under "full Palestinian control" are only the central parts of the cities. The areas that Palestinians actually control are a bunch of isolated geographic pockets that aren't even contiguous (that is, they don't share a border or touch each other), so they are completely surrounded by areas under Israeli control. All the transactions we made in the West Bank took place in shekels, the Israeli currency. And yet, we left the state of Israel when we left Jerusalem and crossed the checkpoint... but we weren't really in another country.
It was all very confusing to me and didn't seem to make sense; my mind didn't have a place to put "occupied territory that isn't part of any country" in my system of categorization. I began to understand where the so-called "terrorist" violence in the West Bank comes from. If I lived there, I'd probably want to start shooting at Israeli soldiers, too. What do you do when you are rendered politically impotent and are unable to organize your people in any meaningful way to work for change? What else is there to do but turn to violence? I found my strong belief in non-violence being tested. I didn't want to think that violence was the answer, but I literally could not see any other option for these people. I was about ready to sign up to join a revolutionary army to overthrow the state of Israel.
Yamen then took us to see a section of the Wall that was still under construction. As we drove, I was surprised to notice that I actually recognized the road we were on -- it was the same road we'd taken when I was with the Israeli folks for the interfaith meeting at the restaurant in "no-man's land." Then we turned on the road to Beit Jala that the Israelis had pointed out to me on Sunday, saying, "See that road? We can't go down there." And two days later, here I was, going down that very road with a Palestinian guide! I realized what a unique position I was in as a visiting American, able to travel freely between the ares that were restricted to the people who actually live here.
I was surprised to see, as we looked at the Wall from this high vantage point, that it was encircling the very road I'd driven on from Jerusalem in the car with the Israelis on Sunday -- the same road where I'd noticed what looked like a large sound barrier and asked if it was "The Wall," and been given a negative answer by my Israeli car-mates. Well, turns out that "sound barrier" actually WAS part of the Wall. I don't think my Israeli hosts were intentionally lying about it; I think they really didn't know that it was part of the Wall. It certainly looks very different on the Israeli side than it does on the Palestinian side.
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| View of the Wall from the vantage point of the road to Beit Jala |
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| View of the wall from the Israeli side, driving on the road seen in the picture above |
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| The Wall from the Palestinian side -- all concrete slab, no nice stone ornamentation |
Later in the day, Yamen drove us down a "shared road" that both Israelis and Palestinians could use that ran through the West Bank to some of the Israeli settlements and showed us a bus stop where Israeli settlers waited for buses to Jerusalem, where most of them work. Orthodox Jewish women in long skirts pushing baby carriages waited for the bus, surrounded by several Israeli soldiers with large machine guns.
"See, the Israeli soldiers come out here to protect the settlers, because people here shoot at them and throw things at them," Yamen explained.
I was livid. Something about the image of these women standing here in a land they do not even own and being "protected" by the military forces who were illegally occupying this land, really set me off. I wanted to throw rocks at them! Shouldn't someone be "protecting" the Palestinians from these settlers instead of the other way around???? I began to feel a deep anger building within me toward the entire state of Israel, at its very existence, and at the twisted theology that made these people feel they were entitled to this land because God gave it to their ancestors over 5,000 years ago.
Church of the Nativity
Our visit to the Church of the Nativity was strangely anticlimactic for me. After being bombarded with all this information about the injustices happening in the West Bank, to just saunter off to visit the church seemed rather unimportant. We met a different guide at the church, who took us through on a very orderly timeline, to have us back to Yamen in time for lunch.
I joined the crowds in line to touch the spot where tradition says Jesus was born, and after I knelt down and touched it and stood up, an Orthodox priest handed me a little paper icon of the Nativity, like my own personal certificate of completion for kissing the spot where Jesus's bloody body rushed out of his mother's womb.
Outside the adjacent Roman Catholic chapel was a small plaque that said, in English and German, "The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. (St. John 1.14) When dark is the world today, This Child brings the world the light." It was particularly poignant given all the things I had just seen, and I began to understand that Jesus lives not only on the streets of Boston and New York and Atlanta where I had encountered him in the faces of homeless people. Jesus lives in a refugee camp in Palestine. We left the church and met back up with Yamen, who took us on a walking tour of Manger Square and the market (sooq) there. As we walked, he asked me what I was doing on my trip to Israel, and I said I was on a pilgrimage. He looked somewhat alarmed.
"You do realize this is not a religious tour, right?" he said. He later told me that he often had "religious people" get angry when they realized that this tour was not just about seeing the church but about seeing the realities of life for Palestinians in the West Bank. "Why are you showing us all these things?" they'd ask angrily, when Yamen led them into the refugee camp. "I don't want to get into this 'political' stuff; I just want to see the church."
I assured him that no, I was well aware that this tour was about getting a taste of Palestinian life under the occupation, and that to me, that was a religious pursuit.
"Personally, I don't think I'd be being true to my faith as a Christian if I were to come here and NOT meet the people and see the injustices that are going on here," I told him. "For me to come here and turn a blind eye to what's happening to the local people and just go to 'see the church' would pretty much contradict everything that Christianity is about."
"Personally, I don't think I'd be being true to my faith as a Christian if I were to come here and NOT meet the people and see the injustices that are going on here," I told him. "For me to come here and turn a blind eye to what's happening to the local people and just go to 'see the church' would pretty much contradict everything that Christianity is about."
"Ah, I get it," he said, nodding. "Yeah, I know what you mean."
Beautiful Resistance
After a wonderful lunch at a local Palestinian restaurant, we went back to the refugee camp to meet with the general manager of the Al-Rowwad Cultural and Theater Training Center, Dr. Abdelfattah Abusrour. Dr. Abusrour, who appeared to be in his late 40s, was born in Aida Refugee Camp and left to get an education in Europe. He talked about experiences in school when administrative people tried to figure out what to put in his "nationality" box on his forms.
"They listed me as Jordanian," he said. "I took it to them and said, 'I am not a Jordainian. I have never lived in Jordan. I am a Palestinian living under Israeli occupation.' So they took it back and changed my nationality to 'undetermined.' I do not have a country. It's like I do not exist."
After living abroad, Dr. Abusrour decided to come back to his homeland, even to the refugee camp itself, to work with his people and help motivate the children to what he calls "beautiful resistance" to the Israeli occupation -- through artistic expression in visual art, theater, and music. His organization is committed to non-violence, a stance he had chosen because of all the negatives he had seen come out of violence, even violence in resistance to the occupation, even violence "for a good cause."
"Violence is never the solution," Dr. Abusrour said. "Violence only creates more violence. I call my work 'beautiful resistance,' which some people take offense at because they think I am saying that other kinds of resistance are not beautiful. Well, I don't think they are. Violence is never beautiful, and I want our children to realize that they have another option besides violence to resist the occupation."
Dr. Abusrour spoke to us in his office, where I noticed he had posters of Martin Luther King, Jr., Ghandi, and Mother Teresa hanging up over his desk. He offered us tea and showed us this 10-minute video (below) about the work of Al-Rowwad that brought tears to my eyes.
When the video was over, we had some time to talk with him about his work. After many questions and answers about the specifics of what Al-Rowwad does, about its history, about his personal history, and about his opinions on a two-state solution in Israel/Palestine, I changed the topic a bit. I asked him -- and Yamen, who was with us -- how they could keep going every day, how life under the occupation didn't completely tear them down.
"What gives you hope?" I asked, remembering a question my friend Valarie Kaur asked all her interviewees for the film Divided We Fall that we worked on together. After talking in detail about their experiences dealing with post-9/11 hate crimes and being at the brunt of violence and discrimination, Valarie would ask, as a final question, what gave these people hope. I sat in on some of the interviews for the film and I was always impressed with how that question changed the tenor of the conversation and the atmosphere in the room. Now, sitting in the office of a Palestinian man in a refugee camp in the West Bank, the answer to that question seemed more important than ever.
Dr. Abusrour took a deep breath and sat back. The answer to this question did not come as quickly as the sound-bite speeches about what his program does that he has probably delivered thousands of times.
"We do not have the luxury of despair," he said slowly. "We can't. We must keep going. For our children. We have to give them the belief that their future can be better."
As if on cue, his younger daughter, who seemed to be around six years old and who had been running in and out of the office throughout our time with him, came running into the room squealing, evidently having been the brunt of a squabble with her older sister and the other kids who were playing in the next room. She crawled onto her dad's lap and buried her head in his chest, looking up occasionally and peering at us -- especially me, it seemed -- with deep beautiful brown eyes.
As her eyes held mine, I thought about the young girl I'd encountered on the streets of Turkey during my foreign study in college who had motivated me to begin outreach to homeless people. This girl appeared to me as a similar icon, as a manifestation of God's presence, as a messenger or prophet. What will her life be like growing up here? I thought. And what am I going to do to make a difference for her life and the lives of thousands of other children here?
"For me, I am a Muslim, so I turn to my faith for hope," Dr. Abusrour continued. "I really do believe that ultimately injustice will not prevail. I believe that one day all of us will be able to live together in peace."
Yamen shrugged off my question with a smile and a yalla -- it was time for us to go, and Yamen didn't seem to be the deeply philosophical type. Instead, he wanted to make sure he had time to take us out for a Palestinian beer before we had to head back to Jerusalem.
Life goes on
Despite the harsh realities of many aspects of life in the West Bank, life does go on. Palestinians are able to live some semblance of normal lives -- within the narrow confines of the spaces they are allowed to inhabit. Yamen took us out for a beer at a local bar after our tour was over, proudly telling us that this beer was locally brewed in Tabeh in the West Bank. I was amazed by what an optimistic and positive and friendly attitude Yamen had, even after spending his time showing people the depressing realities of his city week after week.
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| At the bar with Yamen (center). British girls in the middle, Belgian woman on the right |
As we wrapped things up at the pub, Yamen took a call on his cell phone and then announced with a grin, "Good news. The driver from Jerusalem is going to pick you up here so you don't have to go back through the checkpoint."
In a short white, another yellow taxi pulled up outside the bar, similar to the one that had driven us to the Bethlehem checkpoint that morning. The Israeli driver got out and greeted Yamen warmly with a big hug and a pat on the back. I can't remember whether they spoke in English, Arabic, or Hebrew, but it was the equivalent of a "Hey, what's up, man?" kind of friendly guys greeting. It was nice to see the way Green Olive Tours (the company who organized our tour) -- run by an Israeli Jew -- is bringing together people from both sides of the Wall and building friendship through a shared desire to expose people to the injustices happening in the West Bank.
As we drove away, I couldn't help but feel a bit strange knowing that we, with our American and British passports, could breeze freely between the West Bank and Jerusalem, but Yamen hadn't been able to go there for years and probably wouldn't be able to go back anytime soon. The image of Yamen standing on that sidewalk and waving to us as we left will stay with me for a long time.
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