Sermon: Dispatch from Jerusalem

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Dispatch from Jerusalem

By Charles Rush

March 9, 2008

[ Audio (mp3, 13Mb) ]

just returned from an incredibly rich 8 days in Israel and the West Bank meeting with leaders from the Israeli government, the army, representatives from the PLO, Arab Christians… all the while rockets were flying overhead and the Arabs shut down all their shops to protest the Israeli invasion of Gaza that left 126 people dead, some of them children. I happened to be walking alone through East Jerusalem in the Christian and Muslim quarter when the Arabs were shutting down their shops. This bustling, ancient souk, streets just slightly wider than a truck, suddenly all locked up, almost completely deserted and I'm the only European. The TV is filled with Arabs seething with anger, vowing revenge, all of them collectively in grief, rapidly forming solidarity around the poisonous brotherhood of frustration and helpless victimhood. The air has a palpable fear unto dread that something very, very bad could happen at any moment. These are the burned over social fields which are necessary before the seed of martyrdom will drop and germinate into its pernicious still born fury.

I stood down in the Kidron valley [slide_01] looking up at the ancient walls of Jerusalem, standing in pretty much the same place that Jesus stood when he prayed for Jerusalem 2000 years ago, standing in pretty much the same spot that David stood 3000 years ago when he decided to establish a wee capital city in his wee kingdom. The word Jerusalem literally means ‘The foundation of peace' and yet it is, and has been so full of violence. And there is no question that as a Christian, especially as a Christian Minister and Academic, it is sobering to reflect on the fact that this one square kilometer of spiritual real estate has been fought so many times in the name of religion, that even today you can fairly well compress the multifarious tensions of our world into the ones that reside on the Temple Mount.

Despite the violence, despite the guys hawking rosary beads outside every site that pilgrims visit, Jerusalem is a place that is spiritually thick. Personally, it was very moving for me to be there. I prayed at the Wall when I was 19 and to stand there again at 50. It is just very moving and complex.

I thought I might explain to you just why this place is so problematic and why religion is such a source of conflict. It is hard for Americans to get a feel for this because we have a tendency to project what we mean by religion onto other people and presume that, more or less, we are talking about the same thing. But we are not. And it is important to at least to have some rudimentary appreciation of these realities because-whether we like it or not- this is going to become pivotal for our whole world for the next several decades.

What is the religious significance of this city? And why can't these three faiths- Judaism, Christianity, and Islam- all just get along? Don't they worship the same God?

Some history simply has to be explained here but you will probably find this more than slightly interesting. 3700 years ago, a man named Abraham, born in what is today Iraq, heard God speak to him in a dream that God would bestow upon him a promise of land and a future of people. But he was elderly and had no children. How could this be?

Eventually, his wife Sara has a son Isaac, but not before Abraham complicates the story by having another son Ishmael with a slave woman Hagar. As one Arab remarked to me this week, in the middle of the conflict, ‘we are here today because one man tried to solve his problems by taking two women.' But I cannot digress. Abraham moves to what is today the West Bank and when his son Isaac is a teenager, Abraham again hears God telling him to take this son, this precious son through whom this people will be born, and to take him up to Mt. Moriah. [slide_02] That is where Jerusalem is today. He gets up to the top of the mountain which is full of craggy rocks and olive trees and there is an outcropping of stone there that is kind of a natural altar.

The story itself if probably significant religiously because the story is told in a way that God wants to test Abraham's commitment to God. How devoted is Abraham? If he had to choose between his only son… the bible actually uses a three fold repetition to make the point. It says, ‘his son, his only son, the son whom he loved'… If he had to choose between his only son and God, which would he choose? Is he that devoted to God?

He chooses God and in the process, God saves his son too. I think it is probably very significant that this one story is the Ur Story, the story of origin for all three Abrahamic religions- Judaism, Christianity, and Islam- because it is a story that juxtaposes ‘trusting faith' in some significant ways with the ‘reasonable bonds' that tie us to family. There is a dramatic tension in the text because God is asking Abraham to sacrifice his son. God is asking Abraham to do something immoral as an expression of his obedient devotion. At a minimum it seems to place obedient devotion above even normal ethical constraints, at least on the surface. Certainly this text has fostered a certain spiritual disposition in all three traditions that have elevated faithful obedience in dangerous ways. Or maybe we could say that extremists in every age find partial justification for their fanatical devotion by referencing texts like this whatever their subtle meaning actually was originally.

But this story got handed down, handed down again. The descendants of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Esau eventually grew numerous, get enslaved in Egypt, come out of Egypt with Moses, settle again near this place. [slide_03] And one day, around 1000 b.c. they actually control enough of the area that you could say they were a small nation with a king, named David. He decides to build a capital and he chooses the place where Abraham nearly sacrificed Isaac. Right below that spot, he starts to build a city. He dies.

His son, Solomon, becomes the king. He decides that the people need a Temple to worship, [slide_04] a central Temple that people can come to from all around, so he builds this Temple right over the rock that Abraham used to nearly sacrifice Isaac. Indeed, this Temple has two buildings- really a building within a building. The inner building is called the “Holy of the Holies”, where the priests alone enter and pray and inside this area is this big stone.

500 years later, Jerusalem is utterly destroyed by people that live in what is today Iran. Everyone, literally everyone, is sent to exile as slaves, most of them living in what is today Teheran. Couple hundred years go by, the Persian empire degrades and a bunch of these exiled Jews move back.

A couple hundred years after that Rome conquers the whole Mediteranean and the local King of the region, Herod, [slide_05] offers to rebuild the Temple at Jerusalem following the tradition of the Romans who sought to give local people as much of their culture and religion so as to develop good will and prevent constant rebellion. He builds a much bigger area, including, so Roman, a military outpost right on one side and the governmental buildings on the other. That is the way that it was at the time of Jesus and part of those walls are still the standing today. I might add, simply very impressive work.

About 30 years after Jesus died, the Jews revolted against the Romans but the revolt didn't last long. The Romans sent in massive troops, absolutely smashed the rebellion as was the Roman way, ripped down the Temple they had built and most of the other buildings in Jerusalem. Then they rounded up the people of the area, enslave a great group of them, and drove the rest into either what is today Turkey or Spain, both Roman outposts. This is what Jews call the Diaspora. They were dispersed to the ends of the empire.

The Roman Empire started to fall apart over the next few centuries and Jerusalem was just empty for almost 600 years, except for many groups of Christians who started coming there from all over the Roman empire right after the time of Jesus. Pilgrims would come to the area and the Christians developed monasteries in the places where Jesus was born, the places where Jesus grew up, the places Jesus went that are mentioned in the bible. Of course, all of the places in Jerusalem itself where Jesus went during Holy Week, the week that he died. During this period, a few Jews moved back. But it was largely Arab Christians, Christians from practically every nation in Europe who were Monks in little communities here and there. The Dark Ages were descending.

In the 7th Century, Arabs started following the prophet Mohammed and they fanned out from what is today Saudi Arabia and either converted or conquered land after land in the Middle East. Jerusalem is not actually mentioned in the Koran, apart from the fact that it was a well known capital in the ancient world. But there is a Hadith that says that Mohammed ascended into heaven from- and this is critical- from the very rock on which Abraham nearly sacrificed Isaac, the very rock that was in the Holy of Holies in the Temple. Hadith is the earliest body of Islamic scholarship that interprets the Koran. It is like the Talmud is to Judaism. It carries a lot of authority.

So the Arabs decided to conquer Jerusalem and they did. Entering the Temple Mount area, they found the stone exposed. Naturally, they decided to put a Mosque over it. And, more or less, it has been standing there ever since.

I say, more or less, because the Christians tried to re-conquer this area. They held it for a while, lost it, held it, lost it- Crusdaers that, trust me, didn't look a thing like Orlando Bloom, Liam Neeson, or Sean Connery. [slide_06]

But, long story short- the last thousand years- Muslims and Christians and now Jews again- we've been fighting over a rock. Let me correct myself, a sacred hunk of rock… but it is a rock. Obviously, the labyrinthine motivations and the Byzantine justification for why these complex groups do what they do is much more complicated if you want to understand all of the nuance. But at the end of the day, all of the sacred sites in the Walled city of Jerusalem comprise 1 square kilometer, with one single rock in the middle of it.

I could say a lot more but I won't. I just want you to know this broad history. If you don't, you should!

[slide_07] Now, you will ask the obvious American question, ‘Why can't they just share?' ‘Why can't we all just get along?' Or if we were to put it in terms of the language of international diplomacy, ‘Why don't we just make the Old City of Jerusalem and international City, supervised by representatives from the UN with participation of the religious leaders of [slide_08] each of the major faiths, so that each of the Holy Sites is respected by each other, and everyone can use this as a place for worship in dignity?' Western Jerusalem, outside the old walled city, could then be the capital of Israel and Eastern Jerusalem, named Al Quds by the Arabs, outside the old walled city, could become the capital of Palestine. It could happen. It is a reasonable solution.

But, this is also where the moral of our story comes back again. It favors ‘rather uncritical-unqualified complete obedience' to God over ‘reasonable' compromises that we make to meet the needs of many different people.

We don't understand this in America because of our unique history. Last week I heard the same comment from Orthodox Jews, Orthodox Muslims, and Christian Arabs that makes this point. Each one of them said that they were jealous of us Americans. They aren't jealous of our wealth, although they are too. They aren't jealous of our power, although they are too. They are jealous… that we don't drag behind us this thousand years of feudal history that they cannot completely transcend. We Americans just bounce along like every complex problem can be resolved if we can just figure out how to appeal to everyone's enlightened self-interest and develop a creative compromise. We don't get it.

I was standing in Bethlehem with a couple of Americans and our Christian Arab speaker, making small talk. One of the Americans asks him how long his family has lived in Bethlehem. [slide_09] We Americans say, “Oh, we've lived in Summit for 20 years now.” Our Arab speaker says, ‘Well, my family sold this field in 1750 but we actually lived here until until the 2nd World War. And my clan has lived here for 2000 years.”

I was amused by this so I said, ‘so who did your family support when Saladin invaded?' [slide_10] Saladin was a Muslim, the Sultan of Egypt, around 1180 when he conquered Jerusalem in the name of Allah that provoked the 3rd Crusade. Without missing a beat, he said, “Saladin… and most Western Christians find that surprising.” Now, in America, if you can trace your family back 200 years, that is a big deal. And I doubt you've ever heard of Saladin or know anything about him at all. This guy can tell you what his family was doing…. 900 years ago. We simply do not have baggage like that to drag around and we certainly don't have an identity that is rooted in place and culture to go with it.

Which brings me to religion… We have a tendency, naturally, to think that religion here functions like religion there, only a little differently, maybe a little older, but pretty much the same. You would be wrong.

The first thing that strikes you in the Middle East is how religion functions in society [slide_11] and here I would like to take the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community simply because we see these people in our area. More and more of them have moved to Israel and they tend to take over whole neighborhoods much like they do here so that they can keep their religion without having to make compromises with their non-Orthodox neighbors. [slide_12]

They dress in clothes that are rooted in a fashion from a couple hundred years ago. That is because their religious orientation looks backward towards an age when things were purer than they are today. And they believe that one of our primary tasks in this life is to develop such purity as we can in our personal life and in our communal life. [slide_13] In order to achieve that, they not only live in communities of tight proximity that create, so to speak, a hedge around them. And they also engage in a pretty comprehensive study- of course, overwhelmingnly oriented to men, who are the leaders.

[slide_14] In the Yeshiva, they take Torah study (the first 5 books of the Bible), study of Talumud (the long tradition of interpretation that goes back over 2000 years), Jewish philosophy and Jewish cultural thought. They generally keep up a full time course of study like this until they are in their 30's and do not have time to work which is why these communities are poor. [slide_15] The women are the principal breadwinners and they also have families that average 6 children.

Some of these students are very, very bright. But they are not educated in the Western sense of that word. They don't take liberal arts courses, science, business, political thought. [slide_16] But they are deeply immersed in Medieval thought forms that guided the great scholars like Maimonides who lived in the 13th century. So they often have this really admirable ability to memorize large tracts of text and they can quote Rabbinical thinkers from 150 b.c. in the original tongue and translate it for you. But they have a way of speaking about these long dead scholars like they are just recently deceased and they are only interested in engaging the modern world that is [slide_17] all around them to the extent that it is required for them to negotiate a place for their community to live it's internal life which is their principal spiritual imperative.

Jerusalem is much fuller of the Orthodox today than it was 30 years ago, and more so then than at the founding of the state in 1948. [slide_18] Because of that, I noticed this time, as a minority goyim, the way that the ultra-Orthodox have a way of looking past you, not making eye contact. Part of this, obviously, is that Jerusalem is a big city and people don't make eye contact as much in big cities. But also have a spiritual disposition that filters and segregates between the inner community and everyone else. And they are relatively comfortable talking about this. Certainly it is not the first thing that comes up in conversation, but if you ask them about the future they envision were a two state solution to be developed, they will tell you that they are not interested in living with Arabs in the Sesame Street sense of a multi-cultural block of integrated people from various backgrounds held together by a mutual respect and interest in intermingling with one another. It is more of a détente, a respect where you and your people are free and safe to develop your neighborhood over there as long as you let us live free and safe over here and we only occasionally interact at all.

[slide_19] Now it is true that only 20% of Israeli society is actually ultra-Orthodox. Something like 70% of Israeli society doesn't really go to synagogue except for the High Holy Days or a Bar Mitzvah. But there is a saying in Israel, you hear over and over and over and it is this. “The Orthodox synagogue is the one I don't go to.” It is a very complex statement that partly acknowledges that Orthodox Judaism is true strength Judaism, even if they can't live it. Partly it acknowledges that you can get enough religious feeling just living in a state that accommodates the Orthodox by having almost everything stop on Sabbath, the High Holy Days, and every major hotel that keeps kosher, etc.. And partly, it is also the fact that there simply aren't very many Reformed or Conservative synagogues. In the U.S. probably 90% of the synagogues are Reformed or Conservative. In Israel, probably 93% are Orthodox. It is a very different world.

I can't explain all of the reasons that this is the case but I would mention one really big one. The first one is important for Christianity also. [slide_20] Israel has been a land of pilgrimage for 2000 years for Christians and even longer for Jews. Within 100 years after the time that Jesus died, Christians started coming to the area to walk in his steps and infuse themselves with the ethos that gave rise to his profound teaching. [slide_21] Jews also have returned periodically to visit Jerusalem and other holy sites to Jews like the tomb of Jacob, to see the place that Abraham first got a vision from God, or these days to see Masada, where they held off the Romans until they were about to be overwhelmed and chose death rather than slavery.

[slide_22] Pilgrims want to get back to the original source. They want to see the real deal. They want to see the genuine edition before it got dumbed down, compromised, and acculturated. They want ruins. They want artifacts. They want things ancient. The closer to the original source, the more authentic and authoritative. [slide_23] And this pilgrimage mentality permeates the whole area since thousands of them are wandering around the country every day and really have been pretty much every day for the past 2000 years.

slide_25 This ethos also shapes the spiritual faith of the people that live in the region. Like all of the pilgrims around them, they tend to look back to the source for inspiration and authority. This is the root meaning of conservative, wanting to conserve the past tradition for the future. [slide_24]

So this is what you see at the Church of the Holy Sepuluchre in Jerusalem. This is the Church that is built over the place where Jesus was buried. It is right near one of the sights where the Romans used to crucify people, so there is also an altar that remembers Calvary and a place where pilgrims can kneel and kiss the ground for a blessing. [slide_25] And there is a stone that commemorates the place that they laid the body of Jesus after he died and where they anointed him for burial.

[slide_26] It is run by the Greek Orthodox Church, the Armenian Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church. They have had monasteries here since the very beginning and have stayed throughout the dismal centuries. Each of these groups trade off saying Mass. At this Church and at the Church of the Nativity where Jesus was born in Bethlehem, there is pretty much a mass going on all day long. [slide_27]

Only these don't have sermons because they are more for the prayers that pilgrims can join in with. These churches are old, built on ruins of other churches that were destroyed and rebuilt many times during the Crusades. [slide_28] Their liturgies are old too. The languages that they are spoken in no one any longer understands: Russians use a Slavonic language from the 7th century; Roman Catholics use Latin; The Greeks an ancient Greek that modern people can no longer understand any more than our High School students can read early English like ‘Beowoulf'. [slide_29] So it has a look and feel of performance art which can be very off putting to people deeply immersed in modernity or it can be appealing if you are looking for an earlier, more mystery-filled sense of sacramental blessing.

slide_31 [slide_30] I might also add that pilgrims encourage this as they come usually either looking for a personal sense of renewal and conversion or bearing some particularly poignant prayer request. So with regularity, you will see people prostrate in prayer or you will see someone touching a scarf to the holy tomb, hoping that it's healing power will bless someone back home in the Ukraine when they return.

This is not the part of the Church that is leading the charge to engage the Modern world in constructive dialogue. In fact, they have a kind of schizophrenic relationship to the modern world. [slide_31] They want cell phones, lap tops and ipods. But they do not want commercial advertizing that promotes secular lifestyle. They live in a democratic society but they organize themselves strictly segregated men from women, with men having almost all important decision making, and they follow the lead of the religious leader. (This last statement is simply true for every Orthodox group-Jew, Christian, Muslim… They aren't congregational or democratic and view this arrangement as a threat). They may take tithes from people that made that money in capitalist enterprises but they themselves are aesthetics devoted to learning and liturgy.

slide_33 [slide_32] I was having a discussion with a learned Palestinian Muslim who was explaining that we in the West need to be patient with Muslims in the area because they have not yet had a Reformation like we have had in the West and their faith needs to engage in that critical self-reflection in order to have more constructive interfaith dialogue. He made a very good point. I raised my hand for a comment. After acknowledging that this is very important, and with all sincere respect, I pointed out that the Reformation was 500 years ago. And we also had the Renaissance and we also went through the Enlightenment that produced the secular world we co-inhabit today.

This is a big gap. [slide_33] I mention all of this because it is important to understand that we don't just have 3 religions with competing truth claims that have to get along. In the Middle East, we are also talking about faith traditions that are largely, if not exclusively, pre-modern in their orientation all having to accommodate themselves to the modern world or not. And none of them is motivated to engage the modern world, few of them see the need to really take this discussion up with any substance.

[slide_34] To date, the Interfaith Religious Council in Israel has been conducting extensive dialogues- exposing leaders from Islam, Judaism and Christianity to each others faith traditions, their homes, their holiday celebrations. They are doing very important trust-building work so that they can be constructive in the midst of future crises. But to date, they have only been able to agree on one item that I am aware of. Mutually, all of them condemned a Gay pride march in Jerusalem a couple years ago. The one dimension that they share in common is they view these modern movements- like gays out of the closet- as a threat spiritually and culturally. They have substantive friction with the modern world.

Can the Orthodox be a force for reconciliation? Can they lead in forgiveness, repentance and peace? Perhaps, but we also need to be realistic, even within the Christian tradition, we've always been better at the work of forgiveness and reconciliation within our small group than we have more broadly with other Christian traditions.

[slide_35] And you can see this right in the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, where Jesus was reportedly born. This Church is also administered by the three traditions: The Greek Orthodox, the Armenian Orthodox, and the Roman Catholics. These are three of our oldest Churches, each of them tracing themselves right back to the first century in terms of apostolic succession [slide_36] (they can name their bishops going right back to the beginning practically) and liturgy.

[slide_37] We happened to be there early in the morning before the madding crowd. At the Church, you walk down under the chancel, down 6 steps to the crèche, the stone room where Jesus was reportedly born in a stone stable. Again, there is pretty much a continuous Mass going on throughout the day, first Roman Catholic, then Greek Orthodox, then Armenian Orthodox. The day we were there, we had to wait because the cleaning of the steps hadn't been done and it has to follow a particular order. [slide_38] The top couple steps are cleaned by the Roman Catholics, the middle couple are cleaned by the Greek Orthodox and the bottom couple by the Armenian Orthodox. By the way, they get very grumpy with each other and with you if you don't appreciate this arrangement.

If we were to grade these people on Kindergarten report cards: in that section that says ‘shares toys with others and co-operates at play-time', we would have to mark the slot that reads, ‘needs improvement'.

But these are not just churches, they are also faith traditions that represent nations. And these nations have come to blows in the past over these Holy sites. [slide_39] Actually, in the late 1850's there was a substantial fight over who controlled the keys to the front door of this church- the Greek Orthodox Church had control over the keys and the Roman Catholic Church wanted control. Eventually, the Russians got involved on behalf of the Greek Church and the French got involved on behalf of the Roman Church, the British got dragged in, [slide_40] the Ottomans also as they represented the Muslims that also make pilgrimage to this church, then the British and it led to the Crimean War. Now wars are fought over many deep, complex things but control of the Holy sites was right up there among the most important reasons.

[slide_41] I'm standing there watching this Aremenian monk wait irritably for the Romans to be finished with their chores and I'm thinking that all of the national tensions and the world frictions are just concentrated down right here on these few steps… leading… of all places to the birthplace of Jesus who taught us that the life of reconciliation, compassion, understanding and peace is more important than religious purity and rectitude. There you have it.

[slide_42] Religion has not been a major force for reconciliation in the past. Or at least put it like this, religious people have the same issues of control that seem to plague everyone else. And more than that, there are some powerful impulses within their communities, as they operate in pre-modern ways that promote a certain insularity and purity rather than inclusivity and compromise. We need to be realistic about this, even if we don't condone it. [slide_43]

But, if you think you can go around these people or you can just ignore them and create a political solution without asking them to participate and work it through, [slide_44] you would also be hopelessly naïve. I give great credit to those that are supporting interfaith dialogue, difficult as it is. Profound reconciliation is not easy, quick work.

[slide_45] But it is absolutely necessary to break the impasse. Something has to be done to stop the swirling vortex of revenge that sucks us all down into ever deepening violence and ill will. This swirling vortex is moving apace and getting more extreme.

Meanwhile, the pace of change within the Orthodox community is very slow and subtle. I asked one Ultra-Orthodox Rabbi to comment on change within his community in the midst of the modern world. He said, ‘You know, it is like having an antique wardrobe in your attic. If you want to move it, you can't just push it across the floor or you will break it and what is the point of that. Gently and with a lot of support, you have to slowly move it little by little.' It is a good point.

But the modern challenges move with increasing speed like new advances in technology. It is just hard to see how we are going to have enough time to wait, even if we have no choice.