The purpose of keeping Sabbath

Sermon delivered Sunday, August 21, 2016 (The Fourteenth Sunday After Pentecost, Proper 16, Year C (Track 2)), at St. Cuthbert's Episcopal Church, Oakland, CA.

Sermon Text(s): Isaiah 58:9b-14, Luke 13:10-17



“Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy.” (Exodus 20:8)

So God commanded the people of Israel when he gave them the Ten Commandments at Mount Sinai. And pretty much since that moment, people have been arguing over what exactly it means to “remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy.” Does it mean not doing any work? If so, does that mean just not doing whatever it is we do for a living, or do other things count as “work” as well? Does it mean spending the day worshipping God? If so, does that mean doing only religious activities, and preferably those that are serious and dour, leaving no room for fun? When we attempt to figure out what is acceptable and what is unacceptable on the Sabbath, what things we can “get away with” doing and what things are forbidden, we’re pretty much missing the point of why God gave us the Sabbath in the first place, why God commanded us to honor the Sabbath.

The most basic purpose of observing the Sabbath is to give us a day of rest. The passage from Exodus where God gives the Ten Commandments to Moses says:

“Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy. For six days you shall labor and do all your work. But the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work—you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or the alien resident in your towns. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day and consecrated it.” (Exodus 20:8-11)

In this passage, keeping sabbath is linked to God’s own pattern of action and rest: we are to work for a certain number of days and then rest, just as God did at creation. The book of Genesis tells us that on that day that God rested, he stepped back and looked at his creation and observed that it was good. So although there is no explicit reason given in the commandment as to why the people should keep the Sabbath or what the purpose of it is, by linking it to the creation story, the message is that we are not only given a break to rest, but to take delight in our work and in the work of God around us. To step back from our busy life just long enough to appreciate what we have and what is all around us.

In the book of Deuteronomy, a different reason is given for keeping the Sabbath:

“Observe the sabbath day and keep it holy, as the Lord your God commanded you.”– Then it goes on to repeat what is in Exodus about how nobody, not even the slaves or the livestock, is to do any work on the sabbath. But rather than a reference to the creation story, in Deuteronomy the commandment about Sabbath concludes with this line: “Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm; therefore the Lord your God commanded you to keep the sabbath day.”

Here the day of rest is linked with the liberation of the people from slavery – a condition in which they likely had had very little rest. Every time they observed the Sabbath, it would be a reminder to them to be grateful for their liberation. So the Sabbath is to be not just a day of rest, but a time to be grateful for the freedom to take that rest, a time to celebrate liberation.

When Jesus heals on the Sabbath – as he does in today’s Gospel reading and in many other places throughout the Gospels – he gets flack from Jewish leaders who saw this as a violation of the rule to do no work on the Sabbath. But Jesus rebukes them with this comeback:

"You hypocrites! Does not each of you on the sabbath untie his ox or his donkey from the manger, and lead it away to give it water? And ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen long years, be set free from this bondage on the sabbath day?"

Without directly saying it, Jesus is alluding to that other reason for keeping Sabbath – to celebrate liberation. Notice the language Jesus uses: “Ought not this woman… be set free from this bondage on the sabbath day?” He’s reminding them of the connection between the Sabbath and the exodus from Egypt: “Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm.” Remember that part, guys? Being set free from bondage? Remember that that’s one of the reasons God established the Sabbath? So why should it be considered inappropriate to bring someone freedom from an ailment on the Sabbath day?

The ancient prophets had a lot to say about people who dishonored the Sabbath, and we have a glimpse of their critique in our Hebrew scripture passage today, from Isaiah:

“If you refrain from trampling the sabbath, from pursuing your own interests on my holy day; if you call the sabbath a delight and the holy day of the LORD honorable; if you honor it, not going your own ways, serving your own interests, or pursuing your own affairs; then you shall take delight in the LORD, and I will make you ride upon the heights of the earth.”

The prophets chastise people who “pursue their own interests” on the Sabbath day, who dishonor the Sabbath for selfish reasons, like wanting to make more money by keeping their store open one more day. In an ironic twist, the adamancy of the religious leaders that Jesus clashes with who insist that he should not heal because no work should be done on the Sabbath becomes a perfect example of those who “pursue their own interests” on the Sabbath day, as these religious leaders seek to maintain the order of the social institution that benefits them.

Jesus’s healing on the Sabbath, although it breaks the technical letter of the law, is not an example of “pursuing your own interests” on the Sabbath day. Jesus’s actions are not done out of a selfish desire to do whatever he wants on the Sabbath, disregarding God’s commandments. His act of healing is an unselfish act, an act in which he gives of himself to someone else, an act that honors the Sabbath by bringing someone freedom from bondage, echoing the action of God in bringing the people out of slavery in Egypt that prompted the establishment of the Sabbath day in the first place.

This exchange between Jesus and the religious leaders is a perfect illustration of what the apostle Paul observed in his second letter to the Corinthians: “the letter kills, but the spirit gives life” (2 Corinthians 3:6). Jesus is observing the spirit behind the law of keeping Sabbath, even if he is not strictly obeying the letter of the law. But the religious leaders who are so focused on the letter of the law – “no work should be done on the Sabbath, ever, not for any reason!” – lose sight of the spirit of the law. They become focused on obeying the law for the law’s sake rather than for the reason the law was given in the first place – to bring freedom and new life. Jesus calls out the religious leaders who are so upset that he has healed this woman, and yet despite their insistence that no work be done on the Sabbath ever, they still untie their animals and take them to drink on the Sabbath day, which, if we’re using that strict interpretation of the law, would be considered work. So, he challenges them, you’re willing to make an exception to keep your own animals alive, but not to serve and care for a woman who is suffering?

Living on the West Coast in 21st century America, we’re perhaps in an opposite situation from Jesus’s audience in today’s Gospel reading. Sabbath laws prohibiting work on a certain day are so far from our consciousness here that this passage likely has little relevance to us in that regard. We get that “the letter kills,” and so as a society, we’ve largely thrown out the letter, seeing religious observance as burdensome and restrictive. But what we’ve forgotten as we’ve done so is that excessive work also kills. A constant stream of information input coming at from our phones, our tablets, our televisions, the internet – 24 hours a day – that also kills.

Our problem is not so much being overly restricted about what we can’t do on the Sabbath, but having absolutely no restrictions about what we can do on the Sabbath! Running from one event to another, from one meeting to another, being too busy to do anything – our hectic lives never slow down anymore, not even over the weekends. There is no social pressure – from the society or from the church, anymore – at least, not the Episcopal Church! – to refrain from any action on any particular day of the week, and so it is left to each one of us, individually, to impose healthy restrictions on ourselves, and oftentimes it is easier to obey external laws than it is to set up internal ones for our own good. As a result, many of us today have no concept of what it means to “remember the Sabbath day,” to follow the wisdom of the ancients in listening to God’s commandment to just STOP, already. To remember that there is value in doing nothing, in resting, in just being.

Donna Schaper, a Baptist minister in New York City who has written extensively on the Sabbath, says, “When we do not keep sabbath, our life is a list.”

“When we do not keep sabbath, our life is a list.”

Lists are good. They keep us going and help us get things done by keeping us accountable. But if we don’t ever take a break, if we don’t ever just stop and rest, our entire life becomes one long to-do list.

This is the flip side of keeping Sabbath too strictly – not keeping it at all. And in both scenarios, actually, life becomes a list – either a list of “dos” and “don’ts,” a list of rules and regulations, or a list of “to-dos,” a list of things for which there will never be enough time, shutting out any time for ourselves or for God.

What might it look like to take charge of our own Sabbaths and stay true to the spirit of God’s command to “honor the Sabbath and keep it holy”? What kinds of things might you do to reclaim that Sabbath time, that rest time, on whatever day of the week works best for you?

If you have any preconceived notions about what it means to keep Sabbath, throw them out and ask yourself this question: “What brings me life? What rejuvenates me? What reminds me to be grateful for God’s grace and mercy in my life and motivates me to work for the liberation of others?”

Whatever your answers to those questions, make intentional time during your week to do those things, without worrying about whether you are “working” on the Sabbath or not, or whether you are being “productive” or not. Worrying too much about either the religious commandment to not do any work on the Sabbath or about the unspoken secular commandment that we must be productive and “get things done” 24 hours a day leads to the same result: a life in which true spiritual joy and connection is squelched. The letter kills, but the spirit gives life. Honor God by making time in your schedule for what brings you life and what motivates you to bring life to others. In doing so, you are “remembering the Sabbath day and keeping it holy.”

"Spiritual but not religious?" Let's be the kind of "religious" Jesus was

Sermon delivered Sunday, Jan. 31, 2016 (4th Sunday After the Epiphany, Year C), at St. Anne’s Episcopal Church, Fremont, CA (where I was filling in as a supply priest). Audio (but no video) posted below on Vimeo.

(1 Corinthians 13:1-13, Luke 4:21-30)

Our Gospel passage from Luke today describes Jesus’s return to his hometown of Nazareth after beginning his ministry in other parts of Galilee. The homecoming does not end well: while the people are initially impressed with his preaching, the story ends with them running him out of town and trying to throw him off a cliff! Jesus observes, in a now oft-quoted statement: “no prophet is accepted in the prophet’s hometown.”

But it’s not just in his hometown that Jesus is rejected; he offends lots of people and almost gets attacked in several different stories throughout the Gospels, and of course, ultimately ends up crucified. It was not just his childhood friends and neighbors who found Jesus’s teachings hard to accept or threatening, it was many, many people – and most of them highly religious people.

In reading commentaries on today’s Gospel text, I came across an article titled, “Why Religious People Reject Christ.” Why Religious People Reject Christ. The author points to the fact that today, as in the time of Jesus, “most opposition [to the work of God] comes from the religious crowd, not from those outside.”[1] It’s always the people who are the most passionate about and devoted to their faith who are the most threatened by any criticism of it, even when that criticism is well-deserved.

“Religious people” don’t fare too well in the Gospel texts. It’s the religious leaders and the highly devout who reject Jesus, and ultimately come to call for his execution. Most of the prophets throughout the Hebrew Bible are rejected and scorned by “religious people” as well. Prophets come to remind the faithful of what it truly means to follow God, but they are met with resistance from those who think they already have it all figured out. In today’s particular example, the people of Nazareth are so offended by Jesus reminding them – with stories from their own scriptures, by the way – that God can and does work outside of the people of Israel that they almost kill him. They are so sure that they alone are deserving of God’s favor that the very idea that God would neglect lepers and widows in need in Israel while blessing and healing people who would normally be considered enemies of Israel – a leper who is a commander of the Syrian army and a widow who is a Canaanite, one of the people the Israelites had been commanded to drive out of the land so they could possess it – sends them into a rage. How dare God show mercy on anyone other than us? And how dare you suggest that somehow that has something to do with the fulfillment of God’s purpose?

This kind of thinking is alive and well today, as we all know. There’s a modern “parable” that says that a public sinner was excommunicated and forbidden entry to the church. So he takes his case to God in protest: ‘They won’t let me in, Lord, because I am a sinner,’ he says. ‘What are you complaining about?’ God responds. ‘They won’t let me in either.’[2]

It’s likely because of those kinds of “religious people” that an increasing number of Americans are rejecting organized religion – the latest surveys show that up to 20% of the population now does not claim any particular religious affiliation. [3] When asked, many of them will tell you they are “spiritual but not religious.” Perhaps you’ve heard that line before; perhaps you’ve even said it yourself at some point. Because being “religious” has gotten a bad rep because the “religious” people are the ones who are so often uptight about things, the ones who draw lines around who’s in and who’s out, the ones who manage to take the fun out of everything.

People who say they are “spiritual but not religious” often point out the hypocrisy within organized religion and the ways in which it is used to control or exploit people. They take issue with any group of people thinking that God chooses or prefers them over others, and point out that when people think they have all the answers, not only do they shut out God, but they shut out other people, in the most extreme cases leading to dehumanization and violence.

This critique of religion is really nothing new – in an interesting twist, these modern religiously unaffiliated people are echoing the words of the biblical prophets!

“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!” Jesus says to the “religious people” of his day. “For you lock people out of the kingdom of heaven. For you do not go in yourselves, and when others are going in, you stop them. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you cross sea and land to make a single convert, and you make the new convert twice as much a child of hell as yourselves.” (Matthew 23:13-15)

Before Jesus, John the Baptist called out any within the Jewish faith who might have felt that their lineage as “sons and daughters of Abraham” entitled them to a kind of “free pass” at the last judgment, who might have thought that they were worthy just by virtue of the fact that they were part of God’s “chosen people.” He says to them (you might remember this from a few Sundays ago during Advent):

“Do not begin to say to yourselves, 'We have Abraham as our ancestor,’ for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham.” (Luke 3:8-9)

John calls them to “bear fruits worthy of repentance,” to live an authentic life of faith that bears visible fruit in their actions. Being a son or daughter of Abraham means nothing, John says, if your life does not bear witness to God’s justice and love.

Reaching back into the Hebrew Bible, the prophet Amos brought this word of God to the people: “Because you trample on the poor and take from them levies of grain… you… afflict the righteous, … take a bribe, and push aside the needy in the gate… I hate… I despise your festivals, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies. Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them” (Amos 5:11a, 12b, 21-22a).

Prophets always remind religious people that the correct observance of rituals means nothing if their hearts are not in the right place. You can say all your prayers and go to services every week, but if you do that while people are suffering from injustice and hunger all around you and do nothing to help, you’ve entirely missed the point. And that’s pretty much what the “spiritual but not religious” people are saying as well.

What’s frustrating to me is when people reject religion entirely when they encounter religious hypocrisy and abuses of power, when they see all the things that are wrong with “religious people.” Because what they’re rejecting isn’t actually an authentic representation of religion. It’s a twisted version, filtered through the lens of sinful humanity. The prophets rejected that kind of religion, too, and yet they were all deeply “religious!”

There’s a common misperception among many people, Christian and non-Christian alike, that Jesus’s message carried with it a rejection of “religion.” They see in Jesus’s critiques of Jewish ritual practice and his scathing rebukes of the religious leaders of his day a rejection of religion altogether. I've heard folks say, "Christianity isn't a religion -- it's a relationship." But Jesus didn’t reject religion; Jesus was a devout Jew. He followed all the rituals and traditions of his faith. As we read in last week’s Gospel, “he went to the synagogue on the sabbath day, as was his custom” (Luke 4:16). He knew the scriptures of his tradition well enough to quote them from memory on a regular basis. He observed the Passover. He did all the things that a “good Jewish boy” of his day would have done. He just didn’t let the observance of those rituals blind him to the meaning behind why they were set up in the first place.

Jesus didn’t reject religion, he rejected a certain kind of religiosity, one that puts ritual observance above love of neighbor, one that puts the letter of the law above the spirit of the law. He rejected the kind of religiosity that would allow someone to die on the Sabbath because it is forbidden to do “work” on the Sabbath and healing them would be considered “work.” He rejected the kind of religiosity that makes people think God owes them something, instead of acknowledging that everything is a gift from God, the kind of religiosity that talks about “birthrights” instead of gifts, about righteousness instead of grace. He rejected the same kind of religiosity that “spiritual but not religious” people reject today.

What Jesus and the prophets came to remind us is that that kind of religiosity is not really being “religious,” it’s being self-righteous. It’s not worshipping God, it’s worshipping self. And it’s condemned in all the major world religions.

“This is the fast that I choose,” God says to the people through the prophet Isaiah; this is what he tells them it means to be “religious”:

“to loose the bonds of injustice…

to let the oppressed go free…

to share your bread with the hungry,

and bring the homeless poor into your house” (Isaiah 58:6-7).

I get the critique of the “spiritual but not religious” folks. I do. It’s easy to want to walk away when you encounter hypocrisy and corruption in any institution. But let’s not let that define what it means to be “religious.” Instead of rejecting religion, let’s be the kind of religious Jesus was. The kind of religious that comes to “bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the broken-hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners; to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor” – that passage from Isaiah that Jesus quoted in the synagogue in his hometown and said he came to fulfill (Isaiah 61:1-2, quoted in Luke 4). Let's be the kind of religious that reminds us that God can and does work through Canaanites and Syrians as well as Israelites. The kind of religious that acknowledges that “we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part” (1 Corinthians 13:9), that only God knows the full truth. The kind of religious that cultivates humility, not pride, and remembers Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians, that “if I do not love, I am nothing” (1 Corinthians 13:2).

Perhaps if we were all that kind of “religious,” people would be drawn to religion instead of repelled by it. Religion could be a part of the solution instead of part of the problem. In our collect for today, we pray for God to “hear the supplications of your people, and in our time grant us your peace” – but we have to play a part in making peace as well. Perhaps God might respond to our prayer with a prayer of his own, that might go something like this:

“O finite and limited human beings, you are indebted to me for all things both in heaven and on earth: Mercifully hear the supplications of my prophets, so that in your time I may use you to bring peace.” Amen.

---

[1] Steven J. Cole, “Why Religious People Reject Christ.” From the series “Luke,” on Bible.org. Published 6 June 2013 https://bible.org/seriespage/lesson-16-why-religious-people-reject-christ-luke-414-30 Accessed Jan 28 2016.

[2] Brennan Manning, The Ragamuffin Gospel.

[3] As cited by the 2014 Pew Research Forum survey of religion in American life. Article on the results of that story here: "America's Changing Religious Landscape," published May 12, 2015. http://www.pewforum.org/2015/05/12/americas-changing-religious-landscape/ Accessed Jan 28 2016.

Easter Message: God goes beyond what would have been "enough" to lavish abundant blessings on us

Sermon delivered Saturday, April 19, 2014 (The Great Vigil of Easter, Year A) at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Franklin, TN.

Tonight we gather for one of the most ancient liturgies in the church. Although celebrating Easter on Sunday morning became the main Easter observance in Western churches after the Reformation, the custom of celebrating Easter with a vigil on Saturday night is much earlier, dating back to at least the 3rd century. When we gather for the Easter Vigil, we are celebrating Christ’s resurrection as some of our most ancient forefathers and foremothers did. As we say their prayers and sing their songs, they become our songs as well, no matter how long ago the texts were written. In the liturgy, time collapses, and no matter how many centuries have passed between the events we remember and our present time, we experience them as if they are happening now. Today, tonight, “this is the night that Christ broke the bonds of death and hell and rose victorious from the grave.”

This custom of retelling the sacred stories of our history as if they were happening now, as if we were participants in the story, is even more ancient than the Easter Vigil service itself. In fact, it’s something we inherited from our Jewish brothers and sisters. Every year on Passover, the Jewish community gathers to remember the story of God’s deliverance of the people of Israel from slavery in Egypt, one of the foundational stories of the Jewish tradition. As they gather around the table for the seder dinner, the traditional liturgy of Passover, the youngest child present has the honor of asking the loaded question: “Why is this night different from all other nights?” This question comes in the middle of the re-telling of the Passover story, which is told as if it happened to the people present. The leader of the seder says, “We were slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt, and the Lord our God took us out from there with a strong hand and with an outstretched arm.” [1] Passover is not just about remembering an event that happened to some other people a long, long time ago. It is about reliving that event, experiencing it as if it happened to them, as if it happened this night, so that the ancient story of their ancestors becomes their story, so that they become one with their forefathers and foremothers.

And tonight, in the Easter Vigil, we celebrate our own version of Passover. Jesus died during the time of the Passover in Jerusalem, and his death took on added religious significance to his Jewish followers because it occurred during that most sacred holiday. Although our English word “Easter” bears no resemblance to “Passover,” in most languages the word for “Passover” and the word for “Easter” are linguistically related, if not identical. The Latin word for the holiday we celebrate this weekend is Pascha, and Eastern Orthodox Christians still talk about celebrating “Pascha” rather than “Easter.”

The Passover imagery is vivid and plentiful in our liturgy tonight – we open by declaring that this is “the Passover of the Lord,” in which “our Lord Jesus Christ passed over from death to life” (BCP 285), and the exsultet, that wonderful ancient hymn at the beginning of this service, declares this is both the night that God brought the children of Israel out of bondage in Egypt and the night that Christ rose from the dead (BCP 287). Of the nine readings we hear from the Hebrew Bible during the Liturgy of the Word, the only reading that is not optional, that must be included if you are going to do an Easter Vigil service, is the story of the Exodus, of Israel’s deliverance at the Red Sea – the story of Passover (BCP 288). A clergy colleague of mine who was raised Jewish says that, in essence, the Easter Vigil is our Passover seder! [2]

In this liturgy, we too declare that this night is different from all other nights. We too remember the deliverance of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt. But we add another way this night is different from all other nights: “This is the night that Christ broke the bonds of death and hell and rose victorious from the grave” (BCP 287).

In Jesus’s Resurrection, in his defeat of the powers of our greatest enemy, death, his earliest Jewish followers saw an echo of that ancient Passover story – the deliverance from their enemies at the Red Sea. The early church declared the Easter Vigil to be the most appropriate time for baptisms not only because at Easter we recall the Resurrection and we are joined to Christ’s resurrected life through our baptism, but because baptism symbolizes a movement from slavery to freedom through water – an echo of that ancient Passover story. Just as the Israelites came out of slavery in Egypt into freedom in the Promised Land by passing through the waters of the Red Sea, so the newly baptized move from slavery to sin into freedom in the new life of Christ through the waters of baptism. In baptizing Megan and Anders tonight, we join them to the stream of God’s redemptive work that flows from the Exodus to the Resurrection and on to this day. The layers of meaning enfold over one another as we pour symbols upon symbols in this liturgy, in an attempt to give words to what is ultimately beyond the bounds of human language – the abundant mercy and love of God.

In the Passover seder, there is a famous liturgical poem, a hymn, that is sung after the re-telling of the story of the exodus. It is called, in Hebrew, dayenu, a word that is translated as “it would have been sufficient for us” or “it would have been enough.” One by one, the people recall the various stages of the exodus story, after each one saying that “it would have been enough” if God had stopped there – if God had only brought us out of Egypt, that would had been enough. If God had only split the Red Sea, that would have been enough. If God had only sustained us in the wilderness with manna, that would have been enough. If God had only given us the Torah, the Jewish law, that would have been enough. If God had only led us into the Promised Land, that would have been enough. This hymn emphasizes how abundant God’s mercies are – because even though any one of these great acts of deliverance would have been “enough,” God continually goes beyond what is merely “sufficient” to lavish his love and mercy on us. God wants us not to just survive, but to thrive, to use an old cliché. Or as Jesus says in the Gospel of John, he came that we might have life, and might have it more abundantly (John 10:10).

The clergy colleague I spoke of earlier who was raised Jewish has written a Christian version of the Dayenu, which seems appropriate to share with you at this Easter Vigil, which is in so many ways the liturgical descendant of the Passover seder:

“If only God had come to be with us, it would have been enough.

If only God became human, the Word made flesh. If only through Jesus God entered creation so that by his presence he might bless it, it would have been enough.

If only Jesus taught us and healed us and fulfilled the Law in Love, it would have been enough.

If only he’d died, if only he stretched out his arms of love on the cross, if only Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us, it would have been enough.

If only he rose again, if only he left a pile of linens in an empty tomb. If only he denied death the final word and changed forever the life we live here and now, it would have been enough.

If only he sent us the Spirit to be a comforter and advocate and to lead us into all truth, it would have been enough.

If only he ascended, drawing our humanness back to God, leading the way for us, it would have been enough.

If only he made a way for us all to be adopted as daughters and sons, if only he led us all through the waters to be joined to him, our hope and our calling, and to be joined to one another, it would have been enough. Dayenu. It would have been enough.” [3]

For each one of those statements, of course, there is a still more wonderful action of God for us to celebrate, a way in which God went the extra mile, so to speak, to come even closer to us and draw us closer to one another, bringing even more blessings and joy into our lives. And although the litany must stop somewhere, in fact it never really stops. There are always more ways to say “dayenu” – it would have been enough – and to experience gratitude for the abundance in our lives.

So what is your “dayenu” this Easter season? If only God had _______, it would have been enough? In what ways has God gone beyond what would have been “enough” in your life to lavish you with abundant blessings?

In the church, we are pretty good about observing the season of Lent, but we often forget that Easter is not just a day, but an entire season. While we have 40 days of Lent to reflect on our mortality and repent of our sins, we have 50 days of Easter to celebrate the joy of the Resurrection! We’re all familiar with the tradition of taking on a Lenten discipline, but what if we started a new tradition and during the Great 50 Days of Easter, we took on an “Easter joy”? What if we committed to spend the next 50 days – from now until Pentecost, which is on June 8 this year – doing things that that bring us joy, and intentionally bringing to mind all the ways in which we are abundantly blessed, all the ways in which God has gone beyond what would have been enough in our lives?

We just might begin to re-tell the story of Easter as if it had happened to us personally. We might experience the resurrection as if it were happening now. We might live into the story so completely that it would become our story. We might become aware in new ways of our mystical union with Christ’s death and resurrection in our baptism. And in the liturgy each week, we might say with ever-deepening appreciation:

Alleluia! Christ is risen!
(The Lord is risen indeed! Alleluia!)

---
[1] English Haggadah Text With Instructional Guide, http://www.chabad.org/holidays/passover/pesach_cdo/aid/661624/jewish/English-Haggadah.htm Accessed 14 April 2014.
[2] The Rev. Jenna Faith Strizak, associate rector at Holy Trinity Parish in Decatur, GA.
[3] The Rev. Jenna Faith Strizak, “a sermon for the feast of all saints (year c), with baptisms,” November 3, 2013, Holy Trinity [Episcopal] Parish, Decatur, Ga. http://graceandgrits.wordpress.com/2013/11/03/a-sermon-for-the-feast-of-all-saints-year-c-with-baptisms/ Accessed online 8 April 2014.

An exegesis of John 6:35, 41-51 - Jesus as the bread of life and the new Passover lamb

Sermon delivered Sunday, Aug. 12, 2012 at St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Franklin, Tenn.

Two weeks ago, we began reading through chapter 6 of the Gospel of John in our lectionary, with the story of the feeding of the five thousand. Last week, some of the people who were fed followed Jesus to Capernaum and started asking him questions about who he was and what they must do to follow God. Jesus says that they must believe in him as the one whom God has sent, and tells them that he is the bread of life.

This week, we pick up the story with the people’s reactions to Jesus’s comments. “What on earth is this guy talking about?” they ask each other. “What does he mean, he’s the ‘bread of life’? And how can he have ‘come down from heaven’ when we know who his parents are?” It doesn’t make much sense to them – and it doesn’t make much sense to some of the disciples, either. Later in chapter six, after Jesus finishes talking about how he’s going to give his flesh as bread for the world and people must eat his flesh and drink his blood in order to have eternal life, the author of John’s Gospel tells us that “from this time many of his disciples turned back and no longer followed him.” (John 6:66)

These teachings from Jesus about eating his flesh and drinking his blood lose some of their “shock value” on us because we are used to hearing similar language each week in the Eucharist. The bread is the “body of Christ, the bread of heaven,” and the wine is “the blood of Christ, the cup of salvation.” These words are probably familiar and non-threatening, maybe even comforting, for most of us, and since we hear this passage from John’s Gospel with a knowledge and understanding of the Eucharist, these words about eating Jesus’s flesh and drinking his blood may seem metaphorical and benign.

But even within the context of the Eucharist, language about eating Jesus’s flesh and drinking his blood has been controversial in the history of the church. One of the earliest accusations against the followers of Jesus after his death was that they were cannibals – because they spoke of eating Jesus’s flesh and drinking his blood. There were even rumors that Christians sacrificed babies to provide the flesh and blood for their cannibalistic rituals. The mistaken belief that Christians were taking part in such inhumane and abhorrent practices was used to justify persecution of Christians in the first few centuries after Jesus’s death. Although that particular controversy is likely over – I highly doubt that any non-Christians today perceive us as cannibals – the language of eating Jesus’s flesh and drinking his blood still sparks debate among Christians – between those who believe that the consecrated elements of bread and wine actually become the body and blood of Jesus and those who believe that the bread and wine are just symbols for Jesus’s body and blood.

But why is the central ritual of Christianity one that has to do with eating Jesus’s flesh and drinking his blood? The short answer is because Christians believe this is what Jesus commanded his followers to do – to remember the last meal that he shared with his disciples, when he told them that the bread was his body and the wine was his blood.

But why did Jesus do such a thing? And why was he already talking about himself as the bread of life and his flesh as bread for the world in the middle of his ministry in Galilee? The key is found in the Jewish festival of Passover.

Those of you who were here two weeks ago may remember that Passover is very important to the theological claim the author of John’s Gospel is making about Jesus: that Jesus is the Messiah and the new Passover lamb. We looked at the ways in which John’s version of the story of the feeding of the five thousand portrayed Jesus as the Messiah, and I told you that I’d be talking more about Jesus as the Passover lamb in a few weeks. Jesus’s words in today’s passage from John’s Gospel about giving his flesh as bread for the world make more sense in connection with the Passover imagery that is so strong in the Gospel of John.

Passover is the Jewish religious festival that celebrates the deliverance of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt. You may remember the stories from the Hebrew Bible: while Moses was trying to convince the Pharaoh to free the Israelites, God brings a series of plagues on the land of Egypt as a way of showing the Pharaoh that Moses was serious and was indeed speaking the Word of God. The final plague was a slaughter of all the firstborn of Egypt – people and livestock alike. Before this horrific event happened, God instructed the Israelites to sacrifice lambs and to spread their blood on the doorframes of their households. The name “Passover” comes from the fact that this blood served a sign to God so that he would “pass over” those households with the blood on the doors and not kill anyone inside; the blood of the lamb was a protection against the power of death that overshadowed the land of Egypt. After all the firstborn of Egypt are struck dead, the Pharaoh finally agrees to free the Israelites. When he changes his mind and pursues them into the desert, he and his entire army are killed in the Red Sea while the Israelites pass through on dry land. Chapter 12 of the Book of Exodus details God’s command to the people of Israel to commemorate that day as a perpetual ordinance, with specific instructions about how to celebrate the Passover – to kill a lamb and eat it with bitter herbs and unleavened bread.

All four Gospel accounts tell us that Jesus died in Jerusalem, sometime during the weeklong observances surrounding Passover. But while Matthew, Mark, and Luke all indicate that Jesus ate the Passover meal with his disciples the night before his death, in John’s Gospel, Jesus’s last supper with his disciples is not a Passover meal, but takes place the day before the Passover. In John’s version, on Passover, Jesus is not sharing a meal with his friends, but dying on the cross, crucified at exactly the same time that the Passover lambs were being slaughtered in preparation for the Passover meal. Thus John’s Gospel makes a powerful theological point: Jesus is the new Passover lamb whose sacrifice saves us from death. Just as the blood of the lambs saved the Israelites from the plague of the firstborn in Egypt, the blood of Christ shed at his death saves us from death once and for all.

This theology is reflected in our Eucharistic liturgy. When we say, “Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us. Therefore let us keep the feast,” we are affirming that Jesus is the Passover lamb whose flesh and blood we are about to eat. This is where Christian imagery about Jesus as the “lamb of God” comes from – it all points back to Passover.

Now, at this point, you might be asking, “So what? Why is this connection with Passover important to us as twenty-first century Christians?”

Most Christians in the world today trace their heritage to the Gentile group in the early church who were not part of the “in crowd” of Jesus’s first, Jewish followers. From that perspective, the fact the central ritual of our faith, the Eucharist, has its roots in the Jewish festival of Passover might not look so wonderful at first. After all, the whole story of Passover is about God choosing the Israelites and rejecting the Egyptians – about Jews being “in” and Gentiles being “out.” This sharp delineation between “us” and “them” was so strong in first-century Judaism that many Jews who had chosen to follow Jesus as the Messiah had a very hard time accepting the message of people like Paul, who believed that God’s will was for the community of Christ-followers to include all people, Jews and non-Jews alike.

There is certainly potential for Passover to be a triumphalist celebration of God being on “our side” and a rejoicing in the destruction of another people, and those of us of Gentile heritage who were once on the “other side” of that story should be particularly sensitive to the potential for our Eucharist to convey a similarly exclusive message, affirming that we and not others are God’s chosen people. But there are strong correctives to this perspective in both Jewish and Christian tradition.

Some aspects of Jewish tradition have broadened the theme of Passover celebrations to be not just about the deliverance of the Israelites from Egypt, but a celebration of and praying for the freedom and liberation of all people. There is an entire movement among modern-day Jews of hosting “freedom seders” or “liberation seders,” which are interfaith or multicultural Passover meals designed to celebrate all those who fight against oppression and injustice.

In the Christian tradition, there is a strong precedent to viewing the Eucharist as a meal in which we commemorate not only our own deliverance from death through Christ, but the redemption of the whole world. This theology is expressed beautifully in our Eucharistic Prayer D, the most ancient Eucharistic prayer in our prayer book and one that is also used, with slight variations, in Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches. It affirms that “rising from the grave, [Jesus] destroyed death, and made the whole creation new.” Not “made us new” or “saved those who believe in him,” but “made the whole creation new.”

Jesus says in John’s Gospel that he will give his flesh as bread for the world, not just for the community of Israel or for a chosen group of his followers. The “Passover” we celebrate in the Eucharist is like those modern Jewish “freedom seders” – a celebration of our redemption from death and an expression of faith in the power of God to liberate all people from all forms of oppression and violence.

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:

“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.

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:

"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.

Interfaith dialogue in "No-Man's Land"

On Sunday evening, I went to a meeting of the "Circle of Light and Hope," an interfaith dialogue group that is part of the Interfaith Encounter Association, an organization "dedicated to promoting peace in the Middle East through interfaith dialogue and cross-cultural study." I was put in touch with Bob, a rabbi who was one of the chairs of the group, through the Elijah Interfaith Institute, my primary point of contact for the interfaith connections I made while on this trip. 

Bob is an American rabbi from Ohio who had moved to Israel in the early part of the 21st century, just before the second intifada. He has a fondness for geology, and this interfaith group of Israeli Jews and Arab Muslims spawned out of his friendship with Taleb, an Arab Muslim man who was also a geologist. (After buying a sampler of geological specimens from the Holy Land from Taleb at the meeting that night, saying I would give it to my husband since he loves rocks, Bob invited me to come up to his apartment after the meeting to "see my rocks," showing off several lighted cases of geologic specimens from around the world.)

As we corresponded about meeting logistics beforehand, Bob told me that the group's discussion topic for that night would be "Jesus: What each religion teaches about him, and what each religion believes about a Messiah." He swore to me that they did not pick this topic because an American Christian seminary student would be with them, but that Taleb had suggested it at their last meeting before they even knew I'd be coming. But he did ask me to speak on this topic "from a Christian perspective," since he said it was often difficult to find Christians to participate in their interfaith dialogue group. This was fascinating to me given the over-population of Christians in most interfaith groups in the U.S., but again I was reminded of the very different demographics of this land -- Christians are not the dominant majority here the way they are in the U.S.

On Sunday afternoon I walked to Bob's apartment in Jerusalem to meet up with the group that was going to the meeting. We piled into a car with three other Israeli Jews and headed off to a restaurant just past the border between Israel and the West Bank. Bob explained to me that the group had chosen this particular spot to meet since it was in a sort of "no-man's land" between Israel and the West Bank -- it was an area to which both Israeli citizens and Palestinians could travel freely. Since Israeli citizens are not allowed in the Palestinian territories and Palestinians are not allowed into Jerusalem without a serious vetting process and a permit, this was a compromise zone where all parties would be able to meet together. I thought of Ghassan Manasra in Nazareth and the physical danger that interfaith work had brought to him and his family, and the military metaphor of an interfaith dialogue in "no-man's land" seemed rather appropriate.

As we drove down the highway toward our destination, my Israeli hosts pointed out various landmarks to me -- there's such-and-such monastery, there's so-and-so church. As we got further outside of Jerusalem, I noticed what appeared to be a large sound barrier wall beside the interstate. 

"Is that 'The Wall?'" I asked, referring to the infamous separation barrier between Israel and the West Bank. 

"Um... hmm... no, I don't think so," was the consensus from my Israeli travel mates. "No, that's not it. You'll see it when we get to the restaurant, you can see it from there."

As we drove up to the restaurant area, we passed a turn-off for a road into Beit Jala, an area in the West Bank. "You see that road there?" Bob asked. "That goes to Beit Jala and the West Bank. We're not allowed to go down that road."

"Yeah, but I was in Bethlehem the other day," a Jewish Israeli woman with a strong New York accent piped up from the back seat. "I was with some people and we went to the church. I know we're not supposed to be there, but I went anyway. They can't stop me from going there."

We pulled in to the restaurant parking lot and a minor quarrel ensued as all of my travel mates argued amongst themselves as to where "The Wall" was, trying to find a place where it was visible to point it out to me. "It's over there!" "No, it's right here!" "No, that's it... you can see it there." "No, that's not it." Finally it was determined that it was actually about 600 feet from where we stood. "Oh, there it is" -- right above our heads.

We walked in to the restaurant and found our Palestinian dialogue partners already seated and waiting for us. I was introduced around, and a few other people who hadn't been to the group before were introduced, including a young Palestinian college student who was studying in Jerusalem. As we talked, Taleb, the other co-chair, translated what we were saying into Arabic for the few Palestinian folks who did not speak English.

After our dialogue, we heard a brief presentation from a young Jewish Israeli man who was working with young adults in Jerusalem on a project called "Oil for Peace," which was about bringing "Jews and Arabs, both religious and secular" together to cultivate olive oil. (The organization has a website at www.oil4peace.org, but unfortunately for me and my English-speaking readers, seems to be only in Hebrew at the moment.)

At the end of the day, we drove back toward Jerusalem and encountered an amazingly beautiful sunset over the mountainous landscape of the West Bank. I pulled out my camera and took pictures, to the "oohs" and "aahs" of my fellow travelers, and stern instructions for me to send them a copy of these pictures!!! 

As we re-entered the Jerusalem area, we came to a checkpoint on the road, where several soldiers were pacing about and checking cars on their way through. A car a few spaces in front of us was being searched thoroughly; the soldiers opening the trunk and sifting through the stuff inside. I started to fumble for my passport in my bag, to be ready and prepared. 

"So, are these Israeli soldiers or Palestinian soldiers?" I asked naively.

"Oh, they're Israeli, of course," Bob replied. "All soldiers at the checkpoints are Israeli."

I pondered this for a minute, feeling somewhat confused that the Palestinians would not be involved in patrolling the borders of their own land, if this land was indeed the "Palestinian territories."

Finally it was our turn. We drove up and Bob rolled down the window on my (passenger) side and waved at the guard who approached our window. "Shalom!" he said cheerfully, and the soldier waved us on through. No asking to see ID, no searching the car, nothing. I awkwardly shoved my passport back into my bag. 

Bob had mentioned to me in an email as we were coordinating our trip that he is also a soldier in the anti-terror unit of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). Perhaps these guards knew him? I was surprised by the ease with which we passed, compared to the cars in front of us. Was it our Israeli license tags? I couldn't make heads or tails of any of it.

After we got back to Jerusalem and Bob showed me his rocks, he called me a cab and walked downstairs to wait for it with me. As we stood there, I started to ask him about his experience in Israel, how long he'd lived here, etc. Given that he was a solider with the IDF, I was curious as to his perspective on the murmurings in the news about the recognition of a Palestinian state by the U.N. in September. (I had arrived in Israel on the same day that Obama made his speech about the Middle East advocating for the creation of a Palestinian state.)

"So what do you think will happen in September?" I asked him.

"Bah," he said, shrugging it off with a rather indifferent look. "Nothing will happen. Nothing will really change."

"Do you think it will start another wave of violence, maybe a third intifada?" I asked.

"Eh," he said, again sounding nonchalant. "Maybe. I hope not. Who knows what will happen." 

He got quiet for a minute, then volunteered without any prompting, "People can say whatever they want about the Wall. But you have to understand where it's coming from. A bunch of extremists had holed up in Beit Jala -- that neighborhood we drove by today on the way to our meeting -- and they were shooting at us. Most of the people over there are really wonderful people, like the folks we met with tonight. The problem is when these extremists come in and start creating violence. You can say whatever you want about the Wall. But what else were we going to do? They were shooting at us."

I found myself wishing I had a lot more time to talk with Bob and to meet other Israeli soldiers to get their perspective on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I had a feeling, as with the military in my own country, that they were a more diverse and complex group than anti-war activists often made them out to be. But perhaps that's for another trip.