April 28 - May 10, 2014
conference blog
MAY 4, 2014: The worshiping community under occupation
This morning was our first Sunday in the Holy Land. Several members started the morning listening to a presentation by Nathan Stock, husband of PC(USA) mission co-worker Kate Tabur, who works here with the Cater Center. He gave a brief overview of the history of the conflict in Israel/Palestine from a US perspective, particularly focusing on the role the US has played in the peace process and what options seem viable for the future. Many members of our group mentioned that this was a helpful way of framing the conversation and seeing what role we as individuals can play in the public sphere when we return home.
We worshiped this morning at the Evangelical Lutheran Christmas. It was a wonderful experience for our group to worship side by side with Palestinian Christians. The service was conducted in Arabic, the local language, but the staff printed bulletins for us in English so that we were able to participate. Singing the same hymn or praying the same prayer of confession together in two different languages was an incredibly meaningful experience that moved many of us to tears. Particularly powerful was partaking together in the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper – letting the physical sign and seal of our communion in Christ bind us together across the barriers of language and nationality.
The sermon was based on John 10:11-16, Jesus’ description of himself as the Good Shepherd, and while it was preached in Arabic, we received a short English summary afterwards. The preacher talked about how the word for shepherd in this context could also be used to describe a political leader. He explained how such a reading of Jesus’ words about the Good Shepherd versus the hired hand who abandons the sheep makes John 10 a controversial political critique that sets Jesus firmly on the path to the cross.
He also talked about a connotation of the word “shepherd” that was more familiar to many of us – the shepherd as the pastor of a church. He talked about the difficult decisions facing pastors in conflict zones, like Syria and Gaza, as to whether or not to abandon their flocks. Addressing us as U.S. Christians, he said, “We are here because we don’t want the Holy Land to become like a Christian theme park, a place where pilgrims come to visit, but there is no real Christian community. I assure you, we at Evangelical Christmas Lutheran Church are here to stay.”
After lunch, our group split into three groups to tour different sites. Some of us went to the Palestinian city of Battir, some to tour the Herodian, where Herod’s Palace was believed to have stood and others, self included, to Mar Saba, an active Orthodox Christian monastery hidden in the western hills of Palestine. The rule of the community only allowed for men to enter the monastery itself, so the women in the group (self included) went on a separate tour around the hills, where we could see the caves where the desert fathers of ancient Christianity used to live in solitude.
The two groups that went to Mar Saba and the Herodian also had the opportunity to visit Shepherds Field, the area where tradition says that the angels appeared to the shepherds on Christmas night when the angel appeared to them. At the suggestion of former mission co-worker Doug Dicks, our group gathered in the small chapel built on the site and sang a few Christmas hymns together. Some combination of our voices, the chapel acoustics, and the significance of the location gave me goose-bumps as we gently sang choruses of Silent Night and Angels We Have Heard On High.
Our evening ended with a panel discussion on the Kairos Palestine Document. Our panel consisted of Rev. Dr. Mitri Raheb, who we met yesterday and Rev. Dr. Yohanna Katanacho, Academic Dean of Bethlehem Bible College. The document, which I mentioned in my first blog post, is an ecumenical call from Palestinian Christians first to their own people and then to Christians worldwide to work in solidarity and not to stand silently by in the face of suffering and oppression.
Both panelists introduced their work with the Kairos Document by telling a bit of their personal stories as Palestinian Christians. Rev. Katanachodescribed his struggles growing up with a theology that said God loved the Jews, but had nothing to say Palestinian Christians like himself. He struggled to understand how God could be a just God, particularly with Jesus’ call to love one’s enemies in the Sermon on the Mount. He had to learn to understand love as an action rather than an emotion in order to love the people who were oppressing him on a daily basis. Over time, he told us that he learned, “Love is not an excuse to abandon justice, it is an opportunity to pursue justice.”
This has been a guiding principle every since. He said that in many ways, the story of Palestinian Christians under Israeli occupation reminds him of the story of Hagar in Genesis 16 & 21. As he tells it, Abraham and Sarah were the holy family that were supposed to bless the whole world, but they couldn’t even bless Hagar, who lived in their own house. And yet, when Hagar runs away, she is the first person in the whole Bible to whom the angel of the Lord appears. Hagar becomes a messenger of the God who sees and who heals, Rev. Katanacho told us, and he seeks to become the same.
Rev. Dr. Raheb told us how he grew up in Palestine and then moved to Germany to get his Ph.D. in theology. He came home to Palestine with an attitude that he had to unlearn; while he had been taught in Germany that there was “real” theology and “contextual” theology, back in Palestine, he re-learned that all theology is contextually conditioned. In his work with the Kairos Document, he sought to help articulate just such a contextual theology for Palestinian Christians.
The structure in which they presented mirrored the structure of the Kairos Document itself: beginning with the story on the ground and moving into the theological implications. Theology for Palestinian Christians, they said, must address the reality of people who live under occupation and go through checkpoints every day. Rev. Raheb compared the Palestinian Christian context to that of the Prophet Jeremiah, who refused to join the chorus of his people crying, “‘Peace, peace’ when there is no peace.” (Sound familiar? Even before Patrick Henry’s famous speech calling for the American Revolution, those words came from Jeremiah 6:14 and 8:11!). Kairos Palestine names occupation as a sin from which both Israelis and Palestinians must be liberated. The document is then divided into three sections according to the three cardinal virtues from I Corinthians 13: faith, hope, and love.
In the section on faith, Rev. Raheb told us that the document addresses the need to repent of and rethink Christian theology of the last 50 years in relation to Israel/Palestine. He said that, while the international community - including the U.S. - provides what he called the “hardware” of the occupations (weapons and settlement materials), the Church has provided what he called the “software” of the occupation: A Christian pop-theology that fails to distinguish between Biblical Israel and contemporary Israel and therefore paints all Palestinians as enemies to God’s chosen people.
The second section of Kairos addresses hope and seeks to speak hope to a situation that seems hopeless. It points, Rev. Raheb told us, to the distinction between optimism – what we see in reality – and hope – what we do to change that reality. To those Palestinians who see one political figure or another as the key to peace in the Holy Land, Rev. Raheb says, “As a Christian, our messiah was born 2000 years ago – why wait for another? He said what needed to be said and did what needed to be done – the ball is in our court now!” “The situation here is hopeless,” he said, “which means we have work to do!”
The final section of Kairos Palestine discusses love and how it relates to resistance. Rev. Raheb told us that Kairos calls for creative resistance, which is even more than nonviolent resistance. He said that truly loving our enemies means keeping them from harming themselves and others, giving the example of how truly “loving” a friend driving drunk is stopping that friend, not letting him or her keep up the dangerous behavior. It is in this section, he said, that Kairos brings up the Boycott, Sanctions, and Divestment Movement (BDS) as one form of creative resistance. He said that this is the part of the document over which the authors have been most strongly criticized.
Our group then had some time for questions and answers with the two panelists. As the PC(USA) General Assembly will again face the question of whether or not to divest from 3 companies that MRTI (Mission Responsibility Through Investment) has reported are operating in non-peaceful ways in the West Bank – Caterpillar, Motorolla, and Hewlett-Packard, many of our questions understandably had to do with this question of BDS. This was not the first time BDS has been addressed by our speakers this trip: one American Jewish speaker and one Israeli Jewish speaker both spoke briefly about it in their presentations.
The American Jewish speaker argued against BDS because she said that the right of return involved in the official BDS movement would make a majority Jewish Israel impossible. Rabbi Naamah Kelman at Hebrew Union College spoke against the BDS movement because she saw it as an extreme voice, and her argument was not to listen to extremists on either side. She did mention, however, that there are plenty of Jews living in Israel who themselves abstain from purchasing products made by settlers in the West Bank as a matter of conscience.
When our Kairos Palestine panelists were asked to speak more about BDS, they spoke of it as one form of creative resistance. Rev. Katanacho emphasized that the point of BDS is not revenge but rather bringing justice. He also pointed out that BDS is not the entirety of Kairos theology, as some have argued, but is rather one tool it invokes, one means of creative resistance to achieve justice. He posed the question to us, “You’ve visited our land and seen our situation – what would you do?”
Rev. Raheb, who has attended many Presbyterian General Assemblies, brought up the point that our current divestment question is ultimately less about what Palestinian Christians stand for and more about PC(USA) values and what we as American Presbyterians stand for. He said that, according to our own policy, the PC(USA) works not to invest in anything that harms people, giving the examples of our categorical divestment from alcohol, tobacco products, and military contractors. He told us we must ask ourselves: Does the occupation harm people? (His answer: of course!) If so, we should not be invested in it.
He also brought up the idea of positive creative investment, something the 220th General Assembly called for and which the president of the Presbyterian Foundation addressed yesterday. Rev. Raheb spoke in favor of this positive investment, but said positive investment and divestment should not be seen as an either/or question but as two sides of the same coin – both/and.
Finally, Rev. Raheb reminded us of something that he said at the very beginning of the presentation: Kairos Palestine is addressed first and foremost not to the PC(USA) and the international community, but to the Palestinian Christians themselves. He said that much of the intention of BDS in Kairos Palestine is to ask Palestinian Christians to think before they buy when they go to the local store. A recent study, he said, found that only 15% of the goods Palestinians themselves consume are Palestinian-made, the other 85% being imported, mostly from Israel. He said that if that if they could increase that 15% to 25%, it would create 300,000 new job opportunities in Palestine, where Israeli occupation has brought high unemployment levels and an incredibly slow economy.
However, in the same breath, he reminded us Kairos calls for Christians worldwide to live and act in solidarity with Palestinian Christians. I think I speak for many in the group when I say we found ourselves wrestling with the question – what does this then mean for us and our faithful discipleship?
We know our social witness policy thus far: to promote a just peace in the Middle East, to act in solidarity with Palestinian Christian mission partners, to work to end the Israeli occupation, and to advocate for the rights of both Israelis and Palestinians to live in peace and security. Where do the ideas of Kairos Palestine, BDS, positive investment, and other acts of creative resistance fit into this picture?
