THE FRAGILITY OF GOODNESS

 A Sermon by Rev. James D. Brown

Market Square Presbyterian Church

July 8, 2007

 

Scripture:  Luke 9:51-62

 

Thirteen of us boarded the plane for Tel Aviv late in the evening on June 21, excited that our long-awaited pilgrimage to the Holy Land was underway.  Well, almost underway.  It turned out that our pilot had been delayed by weather in Baltimore.  So there we sat for an hour or two—waiting for the person who could pilot us toward our destination.

 

It was then that I heard my name over the intercom.  One of the stewardesses was asking, “Is James Brown on board?  We don’t have him on our printout.  Is James Brown on board?  Please come forward if you are.”  At this point people around me were nudging themselves and giggling as they asked in various accents and languages, “Is James Brown on board with us?”  This is your lot in life when you have the same name as the late James Brown, the soul-singing man of renown.

 

I hopped out of my seat and located the stewardess, who was in the roped off area of first class passengers.  “I’m James Brown.”  She stared into my eyes and asked, “But are you really James Brown.”  For a moment I had thought this was a serious matter of confirming that I was indeed on board.  Later, after returning to my seat to the smiles and gentle hoots of my fellow passengers, I came to realize that the stewardess was just trying to lighten the tedium of our long wait on the tarmac.

 

Finally, we were off on our nine-hour plane ride to Tel Aviv.  Upon arrival we were met by our guide, Ghassan, and taken by bus to Bethlehem.  He turned out to be just the shepherd we needed to guide us from Bethlehem on the West Bank to Jerusalem and Haifa and Nazareth and the Sea of Galilee, and then back into the West Bank Village of Jifna and our sister congregation, St. Joseph’s Latin Church.  There we were to stay with families, take part in worship just last Sunday, and then on Monday join over 100 young people in the summer camp we helped to sponsor, and which I have highlighted in the Time with Children.

 

It is what happened in worship that will form the substance of my sermon this morning.  Father Emil had told me the night before that he would like me to preach the sermon for the day in advance of the presentation by Margee Kooistra of the banner we had brought them—a copy of which hangs in the entrance to our Atrium.  

 

The lesson for the day was one that read as if it was intended for just that moment, just that gathering of Christians.  As Martin Luther often put it, I didn’t so much read the lesson as have it read me—read all of us who were there.   

 

The lesson opens with an encounter between Jesus and his followers and the residents of a Samaritan village, which in Jesus’ day would have been to the north of Jifna.  Jesus was headed for the Temple in Jerusalem.  Samaritans, who had forged a religious outlook that was a mix of Judaism and other cultic practices, had their own worship center, and thus Jews and Samaritans were often at loggerheads. 

 

James and John sound so very contemporary when they ask Jesus if they can call for fire from heaven to be rained down on the heads of the Samaritans—today we would talk about Sidewinder missiles or primitive rockets used in the seemingly unending struggles that mar the Holy Land and the rest of the Middle East. 

 

Jesus rebuked James and John, just as he rebukes us.  Father Emil, in commenting on passages like this, made the shocking statement that Christians are taught to be stupid.  He then smiled and said that what he meant was that in a world of pay back and revenge and settling score after score, Christians are taught to forgive, to show mercy and love, to be kind. 

 

In The Lemon Tree, a book that formed a centerpiece for reflection on the Middle East for those of us on the pilgrimage, Sandy Tolan refers to Salem Fanous, a Christian minister who “had been held as a prisoner of war by the Israeli army after the occupation of al-Ramla [a Palestinian village to the west of Jerusalem] in 1948.”  Years later he told his son, “Christianity is love.  I didn’t want you to hate the Jews.  They are your neighbors.”

 

“His lands were taken away,” [his son] recounted.  “He woke up to a different life, a different culture, a different reality.  He was in jail for nine months.  And he felt a stranger in his own home.  And all the time he was talking about Jesus.  And he never had hatred for all the people who hurt him.  It’s amazing.”[i]

 

As I have reflected on both this passage of Scripture and the experiences of the past two weeks, I have found myself in awe of those in the Holy Land who, to use an expression of Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, breathe the air of Jesus, common folks for whom Christ becomes the atmosphere in which they live their daily life.  Christians, who comprise less than two per cent of the population of Israel and the West Bank, more often than not come across as persons who, in Williams’ words, “have been immersed in Jesus’ life, overwhelmed by it, …[who have] disappeared under the surface of Christ’s love and reappeared as different people.”[ii]

 

The rest of our lesson paints a telling picture of what living in the atmosphere of Jesus is like for our brothers and sisters in Jifna.  Let’s look again at what Jesus has to say to them and to us.  First, he tells a would-be follower, “Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.”  In so many words Jesus is saying that if you are ready to live with no safety net, no social security, no real amenities, then come, follow me.

 

Nina and I stayed in the home of a Ghanem and Rand and their three children, Simon, Anton, and Maria.  Rand is Jordanian, Ghanem a Palestinian.  Because Rand’s ID is Jordanian, she is a person without a country in the West Bank community of Jifna.  She and 150,000 persons like her have been told by the Israeli government that if she ever leaves the West Bank, she will not be allowed back in.  Period.  This means that she cannot go to Jerusalem, ten miles away, or to Jordan for her sister’s wedding, or to the Sea of Galilee or the Mediterranean.  She is stuck in Jifna and Ramallah and the surrounding countryside of the West Bank.  The Israeli government has a clear policy of wanting to limit the number of people like Rand on the West Bank, making life difficult for them in the extreme.

 

Rand is a college graduate who speaks Arabic and English and French and Spanish.  Right now she teaches kindergarten in the parish school in the neighboring town of Birzeit.  One night her social and political entrapment got to me, and I blurted out, “Where does the political situation leave you—what is to be the outcome?”  She quickly answered, “If I thought about it all the time I would go mad.  So I focus on each day, loving my husband and Simon and Anton and Maria—and the Church, which is my home.” 

 

Nina and I were blessed to be guests in their house, which is just a short walk from the Church.  At the dinner table Rand described how she stuffed the grape leaves from her arbor with rice and chicken and told us that all the other dishes “were made by my own hands.”  Food never tasted so good, and family love never seemed so deep.  One of my favorite memories is asking Anton, who is 12, the name of a particular bird I heard singing in their yard.  He scrunched his face, thought a minute, and then banged his face against his hand until I got it—it was a woodpecker!

 

Jesus’ next point is like unto his first.  Another would-be follower asks to go and bury his father before joining Jesus and his disciples.  Jesus reply is on the surface perplexing, to say the least.  “Let the dead bury their own dead.”  That makes no sense at all.  Only the living can bury the dead.  Jesus goes on, “But as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God.”

 

I read these words last Sunday to the congregation in Jifna.  And when I looked up I saw clearly something I had only vaguely perceived up until then.  Their sanctuary has a balcony at the back like our choir loft.  Only there the balcony is reserved for the young people in the congregation.  The five or six rows were packed with young children and teenagers.  When it came time for communion, they came down as a group.  Those who had had their first communion were given the wafers; those who hadn’t were given a blessing by Father Emil.

 

As the service progressed I realized with a start that this must be what Jesus is talking about—that we are to attend to the living, to our children, to showing our love and our mercy and peaceful hearts to a wounded and often bloody world.  We will of course bury our dead.  But we will quickly return to the work of building a kingdom for the living. Our attention will be drawn especially to the young and defenseless.  We will model a way of life worthy of our calling as followers of Jesus.

 

Jesus’ third and final teaching is more of the same.  When someone asks for a bit of time to say goodbye to his family, Jesus tells him that “no one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.”  Even those of us who aren’t farmers can understand the practical side of this lesson.  The very minute you look back over your shoulder to admire your latest pass with your lawnmower, that’s when you go astray and chew up a flower bed.

 

Jesus is calling for a level of focus and devotion that is downright troubling.  It almost makes us tired to listen to him.  And yet, we know he’s on target, we know that the atmosphere he is creating is one in which we have the opportunity to breathe deeply of life’s goodness.

 

Living as we did for a few days in the land of occupiers and the occupied, in a zone of seemingly endless conflict, new clarity emerged about the things that matter.  Rowan Williams, in his article on “The Gifted Church” to which I’ve been referring, says this about the good life to which we have been called:

 

The good life is one is which we have learned how to be for

each other, and in so being to live fully as ourselves.  If lying,

killing, adultery, greed and so on are sinful, it is because we

couldn’t imagine a community, such as the body of Christ is

meant to be, in which such things went unchallenged.[iii]

 

One of the lessons I’ve learned all over again is that the choices we make do matter, that each day we have opportunities to have an impact for good.  There is an account in The Lemon Tree about the actions of two leaders of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church who helped save the lives of over 40,00 Jews who were slated to be deported and killed by the Nazis.  The phrase “the fragility of goodness” is used to describe “the intricate, unforeseeable weave of human actions” that were involved in the struggle to save the lives of Jewish men, women and children faced with annihilation.[iv]

 

Early on in our trip I had the opportunity to bring greetings to the congregation of the Christmas Lutheran Church in Bethlehem.  I used the expression about the fragility of goodness to describe my reaction to the challenges facing the people of the Holy Land.  The pastor, Mitri Raheb, looked as bit perplexed as he labored to translate the expression into Arabic.  He kept rubbing his fingers together as he talked, trying to squeeze out the meaning of the phase.

 

Later I asked him how he translated it.  He said that it’s hard to find an equivalent Arabic word for “fragility.”  The one he chose was the technical term for osteoporosis—where bones become brittle.  Goodness is like that too.  It can be broken into little pieces, or it can be nurtured and tended to—so that our common humanity is enhanced.

 

After the sermon on Sunday we exchanged banners.  Margee Kooistra made a loving, warm presentation to the Jifna congregation of the beautiful one created by Kelly’s mother, and then a elderly woman in the Jifna congregation came forward to present the one that is hanging on our pulpit this morning.  It took her, along with a friend who assisted her, two months of steady work to embroider it—just think of it.  Father Emil said she finished it the day before we arrived.  As I looked out I saw tears in the eyes of our pilgrims and members of St. Joseph’s Latin Church as well.

 

In his remarks to the congregation Father Emil referred to the “twinning” of our two congregations.  Whereas we talk of being sister or partner churches, he talks about our being twins.  I’ll have to ask him about the Arabic roots for this.   But for now I’ll cherish this image of twins who even when separated by great distance know how the other is feeling, a relationship full of the mystery of knowing for certain “that there is nothing good for the one that is not good for both, nothing bad for one that is not bad for both—that fullness of life is necessarily a collaborative thing,” to use again the language of Rowan Williams.[v]

 

What a trip.  What an experience.  Thank you for your support and especially for your prayers as we followed in the steps of Jesus across a land holy to Jews and Moslems and Christians.   Who knows where this collaborative thing will lead us in the days ahead?

MARKET SQUARE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH

Fragility of Goodness