To conflate people of Jewish faith, wherever they reside, with the actions of today’s Israeli government is the equivalent of attacking people of the Christian faith, around the world, for anything and everything that governments do in countries that are majority Christian.
Ever since Saul became Israel’s first king, holy prophets have been relegated to the role of speaking divine truth to power; but when the empire refuses to listen, it is the people who are called to rise up and shift the tectonic plate of culture toward a justice that encompasses all.
Before we continue to wag and point our fingers elsewhere, we need to peer into the mirror that the prophet Nathan held in front of king David:
“You are the man!” (2 Samuel 12:7)
The world doesn’t need more religious people. It needs more people who are led to breathe, speak, and act from a deeper faith, and a broader love.
We thought it would always be an anniversary or a birthiversary, but now it has become a painiversary and a griefiversary and yet, somehow, we still go on.
Help us, O Holy One, to recognize the undergirding gift of love, even and especially when it bears the weight of loss and carries the stone of longing.
Wrap our hearts in a blanket of the accompaniment of all who now sing in the chorus of the Communion of Saints.
The history of a people called Israel goes back for centuries. Before there were culturally captured written records, a faith group passed its history along in the form of oral narrative, tracing its origins through a wandering Aramean named Abraham, a sibling rivalry between twins, one of whom was renamed “God Wrestler” (AKA “Israel”), an 11th son, Joseph, who was sold into slavery, but rose to Egyptian prominence, a river-rescued adoptee, Moshe (“drawn from the water”) a 40 year wilderness wandering exodus, and an eventual settling in a land called Promise.
But the struggle didn’t end there. Progressing (or was it digressing?) from prophet-encouraged judges to royals who preferred yes-men over prophetic truth-telling, there came a painful and lengthy Babylonian exile, which transitioned to a Persian version, and, eventually, a partial, gradual return to a homeland which had transfigured into, not so much a melting pot, as a cauldron of fragmented glass shards.
The decades piled on, as the land’s diverse inhabitants learned a fragile, sometimes volatile coexistence, even and especially in Gaza.
Eventually, as the earth shrunk — or at least as information and humanity grew swift and limitless wings — struggling Euro-empires dragged the whole world into their brawl for domination and control.
It took two wars across the globe to widen the divide enough, so that on May 14, 1948, for the first time in nearly 2,000 years, the state of Israel had its territorial existence declared, making the biblical account of 400 years of Egyptian subjugation seem but a fortnight.
But treaties, with their parceling and partitioning, weren’t enough to bring a cease to the fire, and the pros became cons. Seven days of raging intensity, 19 years later, led to Israel’s self-declared expansion, which included laying claim to the Golan Heights, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip.
Despite the eventual signing of a 1993 peace accord, extinguishing the fire of fighting, much less Palestinian self-governance, have both been little more than a pipe dream — more like a pipe-bomb nightmare.
When we’re out here throwing our words — if not our weight — around, let us be sure to clearly differentiate between a continuing people of Jewish faith and a modern nation named Israel.
Let us also make sure we spend sufficient time and energy in mirror-reflected soul-searching, so that the shalom we’re willing to breathe, speak, and act into existence, is not merely the silence of dissent from bodies stacked like cordwood, but the unhindered arrival of justice for all.
Even when Cheek Creek runs dry, the grief still scratches at the scars, reminding us of all the “what ifs” that will never be.
In the ache of this journey, we pray you’d accompany us, O God, both with your holy presence, and the ears and tears of all in our orbit whose footprints lie beside our own.
These, and all prayers, we ask in the name of of the one who was and is God with skin on. Amen.
Rally ‘round the truth, child, ‘gainst all the ways our money, and the power it commands, have tilted the playing field as if gravity is a force that can be manipulated by the deep pockets of those who’ve stacked the deck so their card is always turned first.
Rally ‘round hope, child, so all of us, together, can blend our hearts and voices, crooning a song of compassion, weaving all creation into a tapestry that rises up.
Rally ‘round grace, child, so all of us can finally understand that who we are is not defined by where we’ve come from or what we’ve done and accomplished, but by the one who claims us as beloved.
Rally ‘round that love, child, so all of us can feel the warm embrace of the divine blanket of unconditionality, freeing us to risk our very souls to deeply plow the soil in every garden of the cosmos.
As one who usually eschews titles, I dare to declare that I’m a poet pastor; though not exactly proficient at either one; more like a struggling soul who awakens every morning and steps into each moment’s circumstances with the understanding that my quiver only has two functioning tools; and if/when I can use them both to inspire the world to act for justice in the here and now, with prophetic anticipation, I just might be a small part of what helps the earth continue its revolution toward Hope; after all, the earth completes a revolution each day, and the least that we can do is to find a revolution of our own.
When Grief arrives, barging into your life like a thief in the night, it feels like Love has expired, its precious fruit gone permanently sour.
Breath, in the midst of this train wreck, is often in short supply. That’s why it helps to have others breathing with and even for you.
The promise of Hope is that there will come days when respiration’s rhythm reappears, and Love’s tender embrace returns with a look and feel that was heretofore unknown, yet one whose scent is powerfully reminiscent.
We want you to know that we are all out here, sitting under the stars with Faith, breathing both with and for you, for as long as it takes.
1 Corinthians 13:13 And now faith, hope, and love remain, these three, and the greatest of these is love.
For all of us who are sure we are islands, inhabited or not, remote or nearby, there comes a time when we’re given a glimpse of a different reality.
Someone enters our life, or we find ourselves in theirs, or a whole lot of both.
First, it may only seem peninsula-like, with but a narrow stretch of connection.
Then comes the day when it all breaks up again; not merely a canal trenched between us, but a catastrophic explosion, as life evaporates and with it, love.
Unmoored, we seem to drift, no rhyme or reason, no hope or season.
Then, one day, a memory revisits in ways unimaginable, awakening us to the reality that we’ve never been alone.
Both love and the one with whom we discovered and experienced it have accompanied us all along; silent most days, but always there, watching, holding, giving.
Now that we know, it gradually becomes easier to feel, if not see; and others who have also experienced the island’s isolation are pontoons, if not bridge-builders for us, reflecting the light of their loves into the depths of our shadows.