MARKET SQUARE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH'S MINISTRY

WITH CHRISTIANS IN ISRAEL AND THE WEST BANK

 

Rev. James D. Brown

Temple Ohev Sholom

March 25, 2007

I want to begin by thanking Rabbi Peter Kessler and the members of Ohev Sholom for inviting me to speak at tonight from your bema on the subject of the ministry of Market Square Presbyterian Church with Christians in Israel and the West Bank.  This is not your normal fare for a Friday night, so let me set the stage by saying a word about what has led to my being here and to Rabbi Kessler speaking at Market Square this coming Sunday.  And by the way, you are cordially invited to both the Adult Forum at 9:30 and the worship hour at 11 when Rabbi Kessler will talk about the creation of the state of Israel.  We would be honored by your presence.

Over the past several years there has been ongoing discussion between Presbyterians and Jews over the stances of our respective communities regarding the tension between the security needs of Israel and the urgent need for Palestinians to have a homeland of their own.  My denomination, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) provoked consternation in large segments of the Jewish community with a call for divestment of Church funds from companies like Caterpillar that have had a role in supplying equipment for such things as demolishing the homes of Arab families. 

This action of three years ago was tempered at last June's General Assembly of our denomination, with a call for supporting companies beneficial to Israelis and Palestinians alike.  Presbyterians are still in dialog with companies like Caterpillar about their business practices in the Middle East, but for the moment the friction between Presbyterians and the Jewish community has diminished.  But I dare to say there is still a sense of dis-ease in our relationship, and your rabbi and I have felt an itch to engage in public discourse about matters vital to the well being of our faith communities and the larger world. 

So here I am—honored to be speaking with you tonight.  As I have pondered what to say, I have concluded that the tenor of what follows will fall into the category of testimony.  I imagine you have to be wondering where I'm coming from as a Christian parson speaking from the pulpit of Ohev Sholom about the Middle East.   Let me share two formative experiences out of my past, and then tell you about my trip to Israel and the West Bank three years ago.

First, a word about my theology as it relates to Christians and Jews.   In my seminary years at Princeton I had a professor of Old Testament—or Hebrew Scripture—who set me on a new path for understanding the relationship between our Jewish and Christian traditions.  Much of Christian history has been marked by supersessionism.  That is to say, the claim has been made that the Christian story somehow supersedes the  ancient Jewish traditions, transcends them, so to speak.

My professor introduced his students to Rabbi Abraham Heschel and his work on the prophets1.    For Heschel, prophets like Jeremiah and Isaiah  were filled with God's love and God's passion for the world.  Heschel helped me understand that when Isaiah cries out about the abundance of God's steadfast love (hesed), I am put in touch with the same God that I experience when I read from Jesus' Sermon on the Mount about the blessedness of the merciful who reflect God's steadfast love. 

From my seminary days on I have felt myself being tugged steadily in the direction of common ground instead of a claim of some sort of religious superiority.  To my way of thinking, Market Square Presbyterian Church and Temple Ohev Sholom, at our best, know ourselves to be sacred repositories of God's hesed, God's loving mercy that spills beyond our walls as a blessing for the whole of the human family.

Having said this, there is a second experience that is crucial to my outlook on the Middle East, especially as it relates to the founding of the state of Israel.  This has to do with the summer of 1967 after I had just graduated from seminary.  Nina and I went to Europe, and along the way decided to visit Dachau. 

I had no idea what we were in for.  Making our way through that abomination of abject inhumanity, I felt I was being swept up in a dark cloud of evil.  War is always hell, but the systematic efforts of the Third Reich to exterminate whole peoples leaves one shaking from the horror of it.

A few years later I was called to be the pastor of the First Presbyterian Church in Santa Fe, NM, and there came to know and love a doctor in the congregation by the name of Marcus Smith. I was amazed to learn that he was the lone medical doctor assigned to DP (Displaced Persons) Team 115, a unit of ten US infantrymen sent into Dachau the day after it was liberated on August 29, 1945.  

Marcus Smith, years later, wrote a book about his experiences, Dachau:  The Harrowing of Hell 2.   In it he tells of what it was like to try to minister to the needs of the 32,000 emaciated, malnourished, disease plagued patients he found in the barracks of Dachau.  At one point in his book he reflects that whereas before he had used the tools of his profession to face down death for at least a while, at Dachau he encountered the actual presence of Death with a capital D, against which he felt helpless and empty.  It's no wonder this caring, sensitive radiologist I came to know and love carried with him all his days a touch of melancholy, a look of having seen and felt more than his heart and soul could bear.

The reason for this lengthy testimony about our shared theology and about my experience of Dachau is to reassure you that I and other Presbyterians have not lost sight of our common roots, nor have we forgotten the anti-Semitic horrors of the last century that spurred the formation of the state of Israel as a haven for the Jewish people.

What I now want to address is something that may have led some of you to question the friendship and solidarity between Presbyterians and the Jewish community.  It is this "something" that Rabbi Kessler and I have labored to define over several long lunches.  It is this "something" that has brought me here tonight.

In an attempt to put my finger on a major source of this "something," let me now tell you about my trip to Israel and the West Bank three years ago.  As with seminary and Dachau, my first experience of being on the ground in the Middle East stirred me and changed me.  I went under the auspices of an organization called the Holy Land Christian Ecumenical Foundation.  If you visit its website you will find that it exists, unabashedly, to support the dwindling, beleaguered Christian community in the Holy Land.

We flew into Amman, Jordan and after visiting with representatives of the Christian community there, we made our way across the Allenby Bridge and up to Bethlehem.  At that time the 25 foot barrier or wall between Jerusalem and Bethlehem was still under construction, standing as a yet unfinished beacon of alienation.  We made our way through the check point and into a city of about 30,000 people where the Church of the Nativity is located, long a destination for Christian pilgrims. 

What I was unprepared for was the grim reality of life in a place like Bethlehem in the aftermath of the second intifada.  In the wake of the second intifada the Israeli government decided to cut off much of the normal coming and going in a place like Bethlehem—with concern for the safety of Israelis being the primary reason that is given.  Life there is almost at a standstill.  Tourism is Bethlehem's primarily source of income, and the hotel where we stayed, which has several hundred rooms, had only 25 occupants.  Today unemployment is well over 50%, and there is an air of despair as to how families will survive.

While in Bethlehem we met with a psychiatrist who lives in Jerusalem, and because she is an Israeli citizen she is able to make her way to and from Bethlehem five days a week to counsel with both Muslim and Christian children who are experiencing enormous stress, along with their families.  In talking with her, with the mayor of Bethlehem and others, I became aware of what it is like to live one's whole childhood and even one's whole life under occupation.   Throughout my pilgrimage I was afforded a taste of the grim reality that had become daily life for Christians and others caught in the vise of seemingly endless conflict.

In talking with Rabbi Kessler about my experience, he said that the plight of Christians in the Middle East is something rarely mentioned in the circles in which he moves.  This led to his suggesting that you might want to know more about this small segment of the Palestinian population.  Now for a few facts:

One of the places we visited was the little town of Jifna, not far from Ramallah.  Jifna may well be the town referred to as "Ofni" in the territory allotted to Benjamin as chronicled in Joshua.  While there I stayed in the home of a family who were members of St. Joseph's, a Latin Rite or Roman Catholic Church.  There is no public education available in the town, so the church sponsors a parochial school.  I had a chance to meet the priest and teachers and some of the students, with one of the outcomes being the sponsoring of a more than a dozen of the students by members of Market Square Church.  Currently fifteen of us are signed up to leave for Tel Aviv late in June, and one of our destinations is Jifna, where we will stay with parishioners and take part briefly in the summer camp they are holding for 150 young people.   St. Joseph's has become our sister church, and we will be delivering a banner for their sanctuary testifying to our bond of solidarity with them.

Back a while I said that "something" has gotten in the way of our friendship as Presbyterians and Jews.  In large measure  this "something" is tied to trips like the one I took three years ago.  It has occurred to me that over the past twenty years or so we Presbyterians and Jews have begun to travel in different circles.  Good friends that we are, we are experiencing a distance between us because of the company we keep. 

For example, some of you have wonderful, life giving visits with family and friends in modern places like Tel Aviv, a city safer than a few years back because, in large measure, of walls and fences.  At the same time, I venture to guess that few or none of you will make your way through Ramallah to Jifna, taking the beaten up side roads left to the Palestinians who watch others speed through the West Bank on highways reserved for cars bearing special license plates.  I say this not to criticize, but to underscore the impact on friends of keeping different company.

Because of their long-standing bonds with Christian communities in the Middle East, many Presbyterians who make pilgrimages to the Holy Land  are having close encounters with the "living stones" who make up the dwindling church there, and their Muslim neighbors as well.  Our hearts go out to them and we become impatient with the collateral damage being done by the seemingly unending security measures and settlements and separate roads that are turning the West Bank into a patchwork of despair.  Keeping different company helps explain how the General Assembly of a denomination opposed to supersessionism and supportive of the founding and well being of the State of Israel could take actions calling for divestment from companies playing a significant role in the occupation of the Palestinian territories.  It's no wonder you have had misgivings about us.  And it's no wonder that Presbyterians sometimes have deep misgivings about the policies of the State of Israel. 

I was heartened, as I hope you were, by the December joint statement by leaders of American Jewish Religious Movements and the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).  It was signed by the leader of our General Assembly, Rev. Clifton Kirkpatrick, Rabbi Jerome Epstein of The United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, Dr. Carl Sheingold of the Jewish Reconstructionist Federation, and Rabbi Eric Yoffie of the Union for Reform Judaism.  In it the signers give thanks to God that we have arrived at a "new season for dialogue and understanding," and call for congregations like ours to come together for fellowship and study.  This takes gumption, and I'm so glad we're doing this—through events like those of this weekend, an ongoing study group made up of Christian, Jewish, and Muslim women, a quiet parlor conversation others of us have  been part of, and the normal, everyday discourse we engage in as friends, like Peter and I have done over lunch and as several of us did in the home of Lee Spitalny earlier this evening.

We are also called to affirm that, in the words of the joint statement, "peace for Israel and the Palestinians should be built on the foundations of security, justice and the establishment of two viable states."  The joint statement notes that "our specific approaches to peace differ, but we believe that we can, and must, be strong advocates together—and together with other  Christian and Muslim colleagues—for a renewed peace process."

This we must do, for the lives of Jews and Christians and Muslims hang in the daily balance.  The current standoff in the Middle East is not acceptable for the people of Jifna and Bethlehem and Jerusalem and Tel Aviv and Gaza.  God's hesed, God's steadfast love, compels us to work unceasingly for shalom, for a time when the wolf shall live with the lamb, and no one will be hurt or destroyed on God's holy mountain, a time when the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.

Thank you for having me here.  And please come to Market Square on Sunday.  We will welcome you with open arms.

___________________

1.  Abraham J. Heschel, The Prophets, Parts I and II, Harper Torchbooks, 1962.

2.  Marcus J. Smith, Dachau: The Harrowing of Hell, University of New Mexico Press, 1972.  I believe the book is now out of print, but a copy is available in the Library of Market Square Presbyterian Church.

MARKET SQUARE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH

MSPC at Temple Ohev Shalom