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Sunday September 10, 2006 - Proper 18, Year B

Peace be upon Israel.

Those final words of our psalm today
caught my attention as soon as I read them.
Because peace seems so far away in Israel
and the rest of the Middle East.

It's been that way for a long time.
In recent history, it goes back to the years after the Holocaust,
to the partition of what was then known as Palestine into the Jewish state of Israel and a separate Arab state;
long before that
there were the Crusades,
when European Christian monarchs, supported by the Pope,
tried to drive Muslims out of the Holy Land,
and before that
the Roman occupation, and before that
the Persian occupation,
and so on and so on,
all the way back
to the settlement of the land by Abraham,
and its resettlement and conquest
after the escape from Egypt
in the time of the judges and kings.
Back then they seemed
always to be at war. The books of Joshua and Judges
tell of battle after battle
as the people of Israel, the people of God,
fought their way into the promised land
displacing all those
who had lived there before them.
By the time of King David,
fighting had become such a habit
that Spring heralded
not the fresh flush of new life
but the time
to go to war.
It was part of the promise, the covenant that God had made with Abraham
to give them, this formerly nomadic people,
a land that they could call their own.
And they rooted themselves deep in the soil;
it became their lifeblood.
But it wasn't just
about land.
It was about faith.
Because Israel was the place God gave them; Jerusalem was God's home.
The ark of the covenant
stood in the temple,
a visible sign
of the presence of God.
Without the land
God was just a memory;
without the temple
worship almost lost its point.

But the land itself
is a key location, a bridge between east and west, between Europe and Africa. It is strategic for military purposes
and an essential link for trade.
And so it is no wonder that time and time again
it has been occupied,
time and time again
the residents have been overwhelmed and often booted out
to secure a new regime.
The people of God, the people of Israel,
they clung to the land, and as the waves of occupiers came through,
Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, Greek, Roman, Byzantine, and Muslim,
but as each successive wave passed through
their numbers became smaller.

And at the same time,
other faiths came to honor the land as holy.
We Christians
remember Bethlehem
as the place where Jesus was born;
place names that we hear on TV
evoke memories of the stories of Jesus
as he traveled around, preaching and teaching and healing.
We remember Jerusalem
as the place that Jesus entered in triumph that first Palm Sunday,
riding on a donkey,
the place, just five days later
where he hung on a cross to die,
and then
the day of resurrection
against all the odds
came back to life.
It is a holy place for us,
because there
the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.
God became incarnate and lived like us;
Christ died
and bought us forgiveness.

And then, six hundred years later, the Muslims conquered the land, and built in the heart of Jerusalem
the Dome of the Rock,
a shrine to mark the place
where they believe
that the Prophet Muhammad ascended through the heavens to God
accompanied by the angel Gabriel,
where he consulted with Moses and was given the Islamic prayers
before returning to earth.

Three religions,
all claiming this place as holy,
all seeing it
as a physical expression
of their faith.
It's a place where peace has been rare,
where conflict
soaks the soil.

Peace be on Israel,
the psalmist says,
a place where there has been
so little peace.

So why should we care?
We are American Christians,
and Israel is a long way away.
It doesn't really affect us a whole lot here in Swedesboro.

But the reality is
that it does.
We have parishioners who have served in Iraq. We know people who went up to New York to help out after 9/11. Any time we get on a plane,
the increased security reminds us
that none of us is really safe
from the failure of peace in the Middle East.

And Israel
is at the heart of it all.
Part of the mess that we find ourselves in today,
with international tensions escalating,
with terrorism crating a climate of fear,
part of it stems
from the history of Israel.
Because when the state of Israel was created,
many people who had lived in that land
were displaced. They became refugees.
And they were Arabs,
mostly Muslim but many Christians as well.
There was local fighting
as people who had lived on the land for generations
fought to stay;
soon Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Iraq got involved.
The Arab-Israeli war of 1948
lined up the opposition
and we are still reaping the fruit of what was sown.

On the one hand
there were huge numbers of Arab people displaced,
the people who now fill the West Bank and Gaza strip
and have turned to terrorism
as what they see as their only way
to fight for their homeland.

And on the other hand
there are the Jewish people,
displaced over centuries and centuries,
and most recently the survivors of the holocaust
who desperately needed
a place of safety to call their home.
And when they found that home
they brought with them Western ways of thinking
from the countries in Europe where they had lived for centuries,
and that just increased the distance
between them and their Arab neighbors.

And the divisions have solidified,
and have escalated
and what began as a passionate dispute over land
has spread to become a complex global mess.
We have tensions between Arabs and Israelis,
between Muslims and Christians and Jews,
between Western and Middle Eastern ways of thinking.

And it's even more complicated for us as Episcopalians.
Because we have a branch of our church,
a branch of the Anglican Communion
that is based in Jerusalem.
The Anglican bishop of Jerusalem
is responsible for our brothers and sisters in Israel and the West Bank and Gaza, and Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. There are about 5000 Christians
from our own tradition caught up in the middle of it all,
the vast majority of them
Arabs.

And no matter what we think about the politics of it all,
our brothers and sisters in faith
are struggling
as they try to keep schools and hospitals open,
as they live in that uncertain place
of being Christians in a predominantly Muslim world,
with roots that are by birth Arab and by faith Jewish,
refugees longing for a safe place to call home.

Peace be on Israel.
As much as we long for it
there are no easy answers.
And we could just read those words in our psalm,
say it's too hard,
close the book
and get on with our lives.

But the reality, the sad reality,
is that there will be no peace in Israel,
there will be no peace there,
or anywhere else in this world of ours
until people decide
that peace is so important
that it's worth laying down arms,
that it's worth risking their own lives
to make it happen.

Because war will never solve things.
It may be a temporary solution
but it will never bring lasting peace.
Peace is something
that cannot be bought by force.
True peace
has no winners or losers.

And where does that leave us?

On a global level,
most of us don't have a lot of power.
We're not the ones
making the decisions.
But what we can do,
is to pray.
To pray for the peace of Jerusalem, the peace of Israel
the peace of this world of ours.
And so that we know what we're praying for,
we should make an effort
to find out what is going on internationally.
Watch the news, read the newspapers.
And be critical: listen for the biases. Most nights
I watch the news on one of the network channels
and the BBC news on public TV.
Because that way
I get to hear things
from two different perspectives.
Find out what is going on,
and pray.
And pray for the diocese of Jerusalem,
for the work of the bishop and clergy and people
as they try to bring hope
to a community caught up in war.

And on a local level,
try to work for peace.
Try to be a person
who doesn't get caught up
in promoting division and conflict.
Try to be a person
who builds bridges,
who keeps communication open
who doesn't demand
that there be winners and losers.

And practice forgiveness.
Because in the end
it's the grudges,
the long held pain of centuries
that feeds the flame of conflict.

It's not easy. But it's what God calls us to,
to be people of peace.

Peace be on Israel.
Peace be on us all.

 

Sermon ©Raewynne J. Whiteley 2006