The first is from the entryway to the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. Built in the 4th century by the Emperor Constantine to mark the place of Jesus’Äô birth, it is one of many Byzantine-era shrines constructed by 4th century pilgrims to mark holy sites associated with Jesus’Äô life and death. During the Ottoman period, the large doorway was reduced in size to prevent looters from entering the church with camels and carts, and came to be known as the ’ÄúDoor of Humility,’Äù because you now have to stoop to enter the church. That seems an appropriate posture with which to being speaking about the Middle East. There is perhaps no other place in the world that is so conflicted, and has such a contentious history, where every word, every turn of phrase, is laden with layers of meaning, often obscure to outsiders. After two weeks in the Holy Land, I am no expert, so I share today only out of a very limited perspective, and with great humility.

This is Hussain Shaheen. He is the former camp director in the Deheishe Refugee Camp in Bethlehem for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, an agency specifically set up to support Palestinian Refugees. He is one of 12,000 residents of the Deheishe camp, one of over a million Palestinian refugees who live in UN camps, one of nearly four million Palestinian refugees worldwide. The camps were established in 1948, following Israel’Äôs war of independence. The history of that time is a major bone of contention. Some claim that the Israeli army simply displaced thousands of Palestinians from their ancestral lands in a bold, ruthless, unprecedented grab for land that did not belong to them. I believe a more reasoned history shows that most Jewish immigrants to Palestine came legally and appropriately, buying land from absentee owners, and establishing settlements in areas that had not been previously settled. When the Arab world at the close of World War II universally rejected their effort to establish a Jewish state in areas where they were in the majority, they fought back, and in the ensuing battles between Jewish and Arab forces, thousands of Palestinians lost their homes when Israel established its own boundaries. However you read that contentious history’Äì which the Israelis celebrate as Independence Day, and the Palestinians mourn as the Great Catastrophe’Äì this much is clear. Prior to 1948, Hussain Shaheen and his family lived in a village that is now a part of the State of Israel. For more than fifty years’Äì more than a generation’Äì they have longed to return to their homes. They lived first in tents, then in make-shift shelters, then in cinder block homes with corrugated roofs, then finally in permanent homes, but in such conditions of overcrowding that you can only appropriately describe the camps as a ghetto. It is true that before 1948 there was no ’ÄúState of Palestine.’Äù But that does not mean that no one lived in the land now constituting the State of Israel. The West has long ignored their cries. Hundreds of thousands of Christians come to the Holy Land every year, and only a fraction even know that there are thousands of Christian Palestinians living in desperate circumstances just miles away from the sites they have come to visit. The Arab world has been no better to the Palestinian Muslims, resisting any efforts to absorb them in to their own countries, and claim them as their own. They are, as one Palestinian acerbically described them, ’Äúthe Jews of the Arab world.’Äù How can there be peace with such longing, nurtured by two generations of struggle and suffering? Yet even the most generous proposal for a two-state solution does not include returning Hussain Shaheen and his family to the village where he was born.

This is a plaque I saw on the grounds of the ancient ruins known as Herodion, an ancient palace complex built by Herod the Great around the time of Jesus’Äô birth. It is six miles east of Bethlehem, fully twelve miles inside the borders of the West Bank. The historic site is controlled by Israel. Several Jewish settlements are within viewing distance. The area is a hot-bed of Palestinian resistence. After the death of Herod’Äôs son, Archelaus, the site was abandoned by the Romans, only to be taken over by Jewish resistance fighters during the great revolt in the year 68 and again during the Bar Kochba revolt in 135. Without a trace of irony, the archeological markers laud the sagacity of the Jewish resistance fighters who fought valiantly’Äì but ultimately in vain’Äì to resist Roman occupation, while the current government denounces all Palestinian resistance as terrorism. The plaque commemorates the death of an Israeli soldier shot at the site in 1982. There is an old saying that just because you’Äôre paranoid, it doesn’Äôt mean they aren’Äôt out to get you. Jews have been the pariah of the Western world for millennia, no more so than in the 20th century, from the pogroms in Russia to the ’Äúfinal solution’Äù of Auschwitz and Berkenau. Whatever the legitimate aspirations of the Palestinian people, there has also been a steady undercurrent of antisemitism in the struggle for statehood, which Hamas certainly personifies. One of the members of our delegation was a survivor of the Holocaust. When the President of Iran rants about pushing Israel into the sea, she said, his words are often dismissed in the West as the meaningless rantings of a madman. The Jews believe him.

Yet fearful people do not always act even in their own best interest. In our own history, for example, the threat of Japanese aggression after Pearl Harbor was real, but that did not justify the forced internment of Japanese Americans. Likewise, Israeli concerns for security are also real. Terrorist threats and Arab hostility can hardly be over exaggerated. For most of its existence, Israel’Äôs neighbors have refused to acknowledge their very presence. Tragically, this has led some Israelis to deny the legitimate grievances of Palestinian refugees who also lost ancestral homelands. So here on this site, deep within Palestinian territory, the death of this soldier is linked to Jewish aspirations for greater Israel based upon a biblical promise to Abraham nearly four thousand years ago. The quote is from the 8th century prophet Amos, whose village of Tekoa was just a stone’Äôs throw away. ’ÄúI will plant them upon their land, and they shall never again be plucked up out of the land that I have given them, says the LORD your God.’Äù How can you now negotiate land, without betraying the memory of those who have died? How can you give up land, when your sacred texts tell you that it is a gift from God? Yet a two-state solution, even the most generous to Israel, will require the Jewish people to forever forgo the dream of greater Israel.

 This is a site just outside Bethlehem. On one side is the wall, euphemistically called the separation barrier. On the other a barbed wire fence, enclosing a grove of olive trees and an abandoned building that appears to have had a church-related function. It is an appropriate symbol of the context in which Palestinians in the Occupied Territories are now living, and the situation in which Palestinian Christians now seek to witness to the love and justice of Jesus Christ. I don’Äôt believe that the disputed histories and the generations of bitter acrimony of the Jewish and Palestinian people will ever fully be resolved. The only way ahead is a two-state solution, with both the Jewish and the Palestinian people behind safe and secure borders. This has been the consistent call of the Presbyterian Church for more than four decades, calling Israel to dismantle the settlements, withdraw from the Occupied Territories, and return to the pre-1967 borders with a shared Jerusalem. The new Prime Minister of Israel, Ehud Olmert, has declared his intent to unilaterally determine Israel’Äôs borders with Palestine, largely along the security wall, leaving large Jewish settlements within the West Bank intact. What the American people need to know is that this proposal will in no way enable a viable Palestinian state. The wall, the check points, the security barriers around the settlements, the systems of roadways built in the West Bank for Israeli use only to carry the settlers from Israel into the West Bank’Äì all these have divided up the West Bank into a series of cantons that utterly prohibits any hope for a viable Palestinian economy. Unemployment in the West Bank and Gaza now approaches 70 percent’Äì and that was true before the recent Palestinian elections. Many Israelis described the wall as a necessary evil. Perhaps it is. God forbid that any of us should have to live with the worry of watching our children board a bus for school in the morning and wonder if they will make it home safe at the end of the day. But a security barrier does not need to be built on Palestinian land. The wall does not need to be built, as it is now, completely surrounding the city of Jerusalem, cutting if off from Arab east Jerusalem. The 400,000 Israeli settlers in the West Bank are not there for security reasons. The Prime Minister’Äôs proposal calls for the consolidation of the settlements, not their dismantling. However you read the history of Israel, whatever you think of Hamas, however strongly devoted you are to Israel’Äôs security, this proposal is not just. It will not bring peace. It will not bring resolution to the conflict. And justice-loving people everywhere must oppose it. All you have to do is go and see it with your own eyes.

I confess that at times I despair that there can ever be a resolution to the conflict in Israel. Then I remembered a lecture a few weeks ago by professor of theology at Union Seminary, Christopher Morse. He was contrasting popular notions of heaven with usage of the word in the New Testament. In popular culture heaven is that place of serenity that you go to after you die. You know, if you are a golfer, you go to that ’Äúbig golf course in the sky.’Äù It’Äôs often contrasted with the real world. You can dream about pie in the sky in the by and by, but we have to life in the real world, the world as it is. In contrast, in the gospels Jesus talks about the kingdom of heaven or the kingdom of God. This is what is real. What we call ’Äúthe real world, the way things are,’Äù is unveiled as passing away. The kingdom of God, present in Jesus’Äô own ministry, is coming into being, is at hand, if we but have the eyes to see it. Jesus spoke of the kingdom as something that is ’Äúat hand,’Äù Morse said, but not ’Äúin hand.’Äù We are given but a glimpse, a foretaste, a vision on the horizon. As God’Äôs people we are called to be ’Äúon hand’Äù to that kingdom that is ’Äúat hand,’Äù but not ’Äúin hand.’Äù In the midst of the world as it is, we are called to bear witness to the world as it should be, and to place our trust in the promises of God.

On the last day of our time in Bethlehem, we planted trees at the Dar al-Kalima school, a ministry of the Christmas Lutheran Church. Here in the midst of the hopelessness of occupation, at a time when Christian Palestinians by the scores are fleeing the West Bank, this little congregation in Bethlehem has built a school, a wellness center, a center for the arts and culture, an artists’Äô co-op, and a center for interfaith dialogue, peacemaking and nonviolence. All together, their ministries have become the second largest employer in the city of Bethlehem. According to the dictates of the real world, what they have done should not have been possible. But this is the faith of an Easter people. As Mitri Raheb, the pastor of the Christmas Lutheran Church reminded us, when the women went to the tomb on Easter morning, they worried about who would roll away the stone. But when they looked up they saw that the stone, though it was very large, had already been rolled away. Faith, as the letter to the Hebrews puts it, is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. I bear witness today of what I have seen and heard. Even in the midst of the violence, the misery and the hatred, there are signs of hope if we but have eyes to see them. The media rushes to the scene when there is a suicide bombing, but it does not even take notice when Jews, Muslims and Christians come together for dialogue, as is happening through out Israel and the West Bank. It does not tell of Rabbis for Human Rights, who enter the West Bank daily to protect Palestinian farmers from the hostile attacks of right-wing settlers. It does not tell of the teachers at St. Joseph’Äôs school for girls who helped their students express their pain by recording diaries that have now been published and performed on the stage worldwide. It does not tell of the beauty of the Palestinian dancers who are struggling to preserve Palestinian culture from the onslaught of Islamic fundamentalism. It does not tell of the scores of Christian pastors and church members who daily witness to the love and justice of Jesus Christ, as a minority among a minority, an outcast among outcasts, yet without giving up hope.

Martin Luther once wrote, our Lutheran host reminded us as we walked up the hill to Dar al-Kalima, ’ÄúEven if I knew the world was coming to an end tomorrow, I would go out today and plant a tree.’Äù Earlier that same day, Sara Lisherness, associate director of the Presbyterian Peacemaking Program, reminded us of the words of Oscar Romero, the same quote that graced the inside cover of our centennial booklet two years ago. It’Äôs entitled, ’ÄúThe Long View’Äù

It helps, now and then, to step back and take the long view.
The kingdom is not only beyond our efforts,
it is even beyond our vision.

We accomplish in our lifetime only a tiny fraction of the
magnificent enterprise that is God’Äôs work.
Nothing we do is complete,
which is another way of saying the kingdom always lies beyond us.

No statement says all that could be said.
No prayer fully expresses our faith.
No confession brings perfection,
No pastoral visit brings wholeness.
No program accomplishes Christ’Äôs mission.
No set of goals and objectives includes everything.

This is what we are about:
We plant seeds that one day will grow.
We water seeds already planted, knowing they hold future promise.
We lay foundations that will need further development.
We provide yeast that produces effects far beyond our capabilities.

We cannot do everything,
and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that.
This enables us to do something, and do it very well.
It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way,
an opportunity for the Lord’Äôs grace to enter and do the rest.

We may never see the end results,
but that is the difference between the master-builder and the worker.
We are workers, not master-builders, ministers, not messiahs.
We are prophets of a future not our own.

© 2006 Jeffrey K. Krehbiel