Sunday, February 28, 2010

Lent 2, Genesis

Genesis 15.1-12, 17-18

“On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram, saying,’To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates…” Gen 15.18

The Al-Haram al-Ibrahimi or Haram al-Khalil, or Tomb of the Patriarchs is the most significant pilgrimage site in Hebron—built by Herod the Great in the first century CE, on the site believed to be the cave of Machpelah, where we are told Abraham buried his wife Sarah after purchasing the land from Ephron the Hittite (Gen 23). Abraham and Sarah lived in Hebron as aliens among the Hittites, one of the Canaanite peoples. Genesis later recounts that Abraham (Gen 25.7-10), Isaac, Rebekah, Jacob and Leah (Gen 49.29-32) were buried here as well. The building that stands today, the only fully surviving structure built by Herod, is thus sacred to Jews, Muslims and Christians.

Photo: Tomb of the Patriarchs, Hebron

Last week, on February 21, Israeli Prime Ministry Benjamin Netanyahu announced that the Tomb of the Patriarchs (and another burial site, Rachel’s Tomb, or Bilal Ben Rabah Mosque, in Bethlehem) would be included in the list of some 150 national heritage sites that his government plans to protect and renovate under a $170m restoration plan. The Palestinian Center for Human Rights notes that the announcement was made on the eve of the sixteenth anniversary of the massacre of 29 Palestinian worshippers at the mosque by Baruch Goldstein, an Israeli settler. Hebron is a town of 160,000 Palestinians and a few hundred Jewish Israeli settlers, who have set up residence in the area at the center of town, near the market and the Tomb of the Patriarchs.

On Monday in Hebron about 100 Palestinians rallied to protest this move. Rock- and bottle-throwing protests continued during the week, and on Friday Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad attended prayers at the Tomb of the Patriarchs, as a sign of Palestinian opposition to Israel’s actions.

Read how the events were reported in Al Jazeera: http://english.aljazeera.net/focus/2010/02/2010225111933403649.html
In the New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2010/02/21/world/international-uk-palestinians-israel-sites.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=tomb%20of%20the%20patriarchs&st=cse
In the Jerusalem Post: http://www.jpost.com/Home/Article.aspx?id=169404

Although there is no final peace settlement, I’d like to note that Hebron is in the West Bank, the area that most of the world thinks will some day become a state for Palestinians. Under the Oslo Accords in 1993 and a subsequent agreement between the PA and Israel in 2000, Hebron is designated Area A, under full Palestinian Authority control. Nevertheless, Israeli soldiers patrol Hebron….to protect the Israeli settlers.

As we read this week’s lesson from Genesis and ponder Abraham’s faithfulness, we see in the patriarch an example we might follow—of engaged, questioning faithfulness to God, who has also provided us with uncountable blessings and wealth. News from Israel and Palestine will also remind us of the ongoing struggle over these promised lands today. So what do we make of it all?
Abraham took seriously God’s presence and power in his life. Abraham challenges us to notice where God is present today—even in seemingly hopeless places like Hebron. For, above all, God is revealed to Abraham as a God of foolish, unreasonable hope—for childless Abraham and Sarah……and for us, living in a world of seemingly irreconcilable conflicts.

God of Abraham and Sarah, we confess that we underestimate your goodness; we limit your love and mercy by our own narrow interests. In this Lenten season, open our hearts to your love, and make us witness to your limitless love for all. Amen.

Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Lent 1, Gospel of Luke

Luke 4.1-13

“‘You are my son the beloved. With you I am well-pleased.’” (Luke 3.22) With these words, Jesus is identified by God and sent out to begin his ministry. But first, Jesus goes into the wilderness to learn what those baptismal words mean for him.

And in the wilderness, Jesus encounters the devil. Now, we expect the devil to be evil, but what the devil offers Jesus are GOOD things. First the devil offers Jesus the chance to make bread—just think how many hungry people Jesus could feed with this bread! Next, the devil offers Jesus the chance to rule the kingdoms of the world—Jesus could govern the people differently, with justice, and bring peace to the world. For the third test, the devil simply wants to see the saving power of God in action—a demonstration of God’s faithfulness. All seemingly GOOD things!

So it is with all the evils of the world. The evil offered up by the devil in today’s story masquerades as good. On the surface, what the devil offers sounds good, but Jesus is not fooled.

Today there are many places in the world where something which appears to be good actually produces evil consequences. Israel’s security barrier is only one example. Feeling threatened by suicide bombers, the Israelis are building a wall to keep them out—this seems like a good thing, right? Protecting people from danger, keeping children safe? Isn’t this what we all want? This is a good thing!

But where I have seen the wall, it only masquerades as a security barrier. The wall is not being built on the border between Israel and Palestine. It is being built many kilometers into the West Bank. All the area between the border and the wall, then, becomes Israeli territory because it is now on the Israeli side of the wall. The wall is a way of claiming more land for Israel, gobbling up olive groves belonging to Palestinian farmers. As I stood in the hilltop village of Jayyous, an Arab village in the West Bank, north of Jerusalem, I saw how the wall had been built to protect a nearby Israeli settlement, which had also been built on confiscated Palestinian farmland. The wall ate up more of the farmers’ orchards, cutting them off from the village. From that hilltop, the wall looked to me more like a way of stealing land from Palestinian farmers. More than 6000 olive trees were uprooted to build the wall, destroying an agricultural economy and reducing the income for the village—now many of these farmers, unable to get to their fields, depend on United Nations food aid for survival.

The map shows the wall snaking its way into the West Bank so that the Israeli settlement of Zufin can be included within Israel (Green Line is boundary between Israel and West Bank; red lines are the completed wall; purple lines are the wall under construction and planned). Read more about Jayyous and the wall:

Photo: Jayyous farmers' olive groves, seen from the hilltop village

Our unconditional support of Israel has seemed like a good thing. For sixty years, the U.S. has supported Israel with military aid, equipment and training. We have sided with Israel in the United Nations. The U.S. has refused to condemn Israel’s occupation of Palestinian lands. We have been uncritical of Israel’s arrests, interrogation and torture of Palestinian professors and students. We have stood by while Israeli soldiers, using American ammunition, have attacked Palestinian schoolchildren and peaceful protestors. Aircraft attacking Gaza in 2009 were manufactured by Boeing, as were the smart bombs they carried. http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=11743. These are complicated matters, and I don’t mean to suggest easy answers, but we need to examine our country’s actions and make changes.

Jesus was baptized as he began his ministry and so are we. This Lenten season offers us a “wilderness” time, time for testing our own purpose in the world. What are the devil’s messages to us? What is the work God would have us do to help bring God’s vision of justice, mercy and peace?

Gracious God, you sent your son to show us your way of justice, mercy and peace. Help us to be led by your Spirit during these forty days in the wilderness of Lent. Transform us by the power of your Holy Spirit and strengthen us to be your partners in building the world you have promised. Amen.

Monday, February 22, 2010

Lent 1, Deuteronomy

Deuteronomy 26.1-11
“Then you, together with the Levites and the aliens who reside among you, shall celebrate...” (Deut. 26.11)

For a variety of reasons, Israelis live in settlements constructed in the West Bank, on land where the international community expects a Palestinian state to be eventually located. Not all settlers are there because they are religiously or ideologically staking a claim on all “historic Israel.”
A few radical settlers claim all the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean; they want all Palestinians removed from that land. But most Israelis either are oblivious to the settlement-building or support the settlements because they provide a less expensive housing alternative. Housing in the settlements is subsidized, either by wealthy American and European Jews, or by the Israeli government. According to ICAHD (Isreali Committee Against House Demolitions: http://www.icahd.org/ ), most of the young families who buy homes in the settlements live there because the housing costs much less than in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv.

Some settlers, however, are fiercely militant, loudly and sometimes violently defending their right and obligation to populate all of the land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean, and they prove their claims with passages like these verses from Deuteronomy. So, when I read “the land that the Lord your God is giving you,” I cringed. These are the very words that I have heard settlers utter in defense of their illegal occupation of Palestinian homes and lands.

I was surprised to hear in today's text, however, that once the people of Israel have offered their first fruits to God in gratitude for this gift, they are instructed to celebrate “together with the Levites and the aliens who reside among you.” In the gift of the land, God does not assume that the Israelites will remove all the prior inhabitants of the land. God apparently did not envision 1948, when soldiers broke down doors and forced Palestinian families out into the streets and on up the road, out of town, most ending up in refugee camps, some as far away as Jordan and Lebanon. These verses in Deuteronomy present a different plan. God’s plan for the land is that it will be a place where the Israelites (who, we are reminded were once aliens themselves, “afflicted” and “oppressed”) can thrive, but also a home for the “aliens.”

This is not the reality of this land today. Non-Jews cannot thrive, cannot participate in the abundance God offers Israel in these verses. Non-Jews live under different rules. West Bank Palestinian cars must have green license plates, to ensure they do not drive on Israeli-only roads. Palestinians applying for building permits, whether to build an addition to their homes or a new school in their community, are routinely denied—for years. Palestinian homes are still being demolished. In January a home was demolished in Jaffa. Palestinians must have a permit to do anything. Even the Palestinians who live in “autonomous” areas of the West Bank, like Bethlehem, must have travel permits to be allowed to leave their town—even when they are traveling to another town within the West Bank. Israeli soldiers stand guard at the entrances to Bethlehem and check identification of everyone entering or leaving—except my own busload of American tourists.
Photo: House demolition in Jaffa, January 18, 2010

Wouldn’t this celebration described in Deuteronomy be a grand vision for peace in Israel/Palestine? Jews and Palestinians together, in one great big party, celebrating the abundance of the land, offering up their abundance in gratitude for God’s gift. After all, God is God of Jews and Palestinians (whether Muslim or Christian), all descendants of that “wandering Aramean.”

God, you led Abraham and Sarah to a land of milk and honey, with enough bounty for all the inhabitants of the land. We thank you for the plenty in our own lives. Help us to trust in your promise of abundance, opening our hands and hearts to share our bounteous harvest with the alien in our midst. Amen.

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Ash Wednesday--Mortality

Ash Wednesday, February 17, 2010
2 Corinthians 5.20b-6.10

Today we receive the ashes on our foreheads, a sign, to ourselves as much as to others, of our mortality, a reminder that “we are dust, and to dust we shall return,” as the words of the liturgy so brazenly proclaim. For, in America, it is easy to ignore our mortality, to think that we can live forever. After all, don’t we spend thousands of dollars on health clubs, vitamins, anti-aging creams, cholesterol-lowering drugs and spend our weekends on the ski slope or the treadmill—expecting to add a few years to our lives?

For Palestinians, living under Israel’s occupation, mortality is a daily reality—not some distant possibility. No matter how careful they are, at any moment the soldiers can knock on their doors, drag them or their husbands, wives, sons or daughters off to prison, or present the family with a demolition order, executable in two hours. For Palestinians, even if they obey all the rules (no additions to your house, no travels outside your town, no demonstrations against Israeli authority), there are no guarantees that the soldiers will not come.

When I read Paul’s words about all the hardships he has endured, I think of the Palestinians, “in great endurance, in afflictions, hardships, calamities, beatings, imprisonments, riots, labors, sleepless nights, hunger…” (2 Cor 6.4-5). The young men who work in the secret tunnels under the border between Egypt and Gaza endure hardships, working underground in hastily-dug dirt tunnels….and they know mortality. Take two minutes to hear them in their own words: "Tunnel youth."

Remember these two young men as you finger the grit of the ashes on your forehead and ponder your own mortality.

Gracious God, in your incarnation, you experienced suffering and death. Comfort those who today suffer hunger and imprisonment, especially the people of Gaza. Let your suffering accompany us on our Lenten journey. Teach us be your lips and hands, offering words of encouragement and support and sharing our abundance with the people of Gaza, who have nothing. Amen.

If you have another 3.5 minutes, learn more about the tunnels by watching “The Tunnels of Survival (Gaza).”

Sunday, February 7, 2010

Beware of Your Good Deeds—for Lent

Ash Wednesday, February 17, 2010
Matthew 6.1-6, 16-21

Strange, on this first day of the season of Lent, a season historically marked by intentional practices of piety, that in our gospel text Jesus warns us against these very practices. Most of us are familiar with the practice of “giving up” something for Lent; giving up chewing gum was a popular Lenten discipline in my high school days. Scripture calls for three specific pieties for the faithful: almsgiving, prayer and fasting. I suppose chewing gum fell under the rubric of fasting.

Here, in his Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is very clear: BEWARE of almsgiving, prayer and fasting. BEWARE of the very practices God requires of us. Jesus does not say that we are to be the guardians of how others live out their piety. We are to concentrate on ourselves and, particularly, our own “good deeds” and our motivations.

The U.S. claims that standing in solidarity with the State of Israel is one of its good deeds—standing with the victims who suffered so terribly during the holocaust. We claim to stand with a democracy surrounded by hostile nations. Isn’t it noble to stand with those who suffer, to stand with those whose lives are endangered simply because of their ethnicity? Who could possibly argue against such a heroic undertaking?

But Jesus warns us to examine our motivations—are we really noble heroes protecting the weak and powerless, the widow and the orphan? Jesus calls on us to discern what God might be calling us to do as we participate in this conflict between two peoples who wish to inhabit the same land. What is God’s will for these people and for their land and how can help bring it about?

It is easy for me, having seen how Palestinians are persecuted and demeaned under Israeli occupation, to point the finger at the evil Israelis who bulldoze houses, shoot non-violent protesters in the streets and imprison children who throw stones. It’s always easier to point the finger at others’ motivations—much harder to examine my own. But here is Jesus, reminding us that it is my own house I must examine, not Israel’s. Even though I do not carry the gun or drive the bulldozer, how do my own tax dollars work in Israel to support the weak and powerless?

What I see when I visit Israel and Palestine, is that my tax dollars bought guns and ammunition used to destroy property and people in Gaza last year. One Palestinian friend whose family was not allowed to leave Gaza to come with him for graduate studies in Denver, told about his daughter’s puzzlement: “Daddy, these airplanes and missiles are from where you are, from America.” My tax dollars have been used to construct checkpoints where Palestinians wait in long lines every day just to get to work; my tax dollars have been used to fund an army that bulldozes Palestinian homes simply because they cannot get a permit to add a bedroom.

I cannot blame Israel—I have not bothered to pay attention to how my money is used. U.S. unconditional military support for Israel (2.3b in 2008) —this is not Israel’s problem; it is mine. The foreign aid I have supplied to Israel has been used to assuage my conscience for atrocities committed sixty-seventy years ago, when the world chose to turn its back on the Jews, refusing to intervene in the killings or to accept the millions of refugees fleeing the carnage. But it has not brought about justice God demands for the people of the land, either for Israelis or for Palestinians. This Lent, as I ponder what I can do to bring peace and justice for the Palestinians and Israelis, Jesus’ sermon is a timely reminder for me to examine my own part in the oppression and violence.

Gracious God of mercy, as we enter into this season of introspection and penitence, preparing to remember your son’s life, death and resurrection, help us to examine our role in life, death and resurrection in our own small world where we seek to live out your justice and mercy. Help us find signs of your will and join in efforts to raise the dead where we live and work. Amen.