Texts: Genesis 21: 1-21; Matthew 10: 24-39
As part of my coursework at Hartford Seminary for my doctorate, I signed up for a course that was an emotional and spiritual mindblower. There were thirty of us in the class: ten Jews, ten Christians, ten Muslims.
“We are not here to make nice,” said the rabbi, and when I realized that in my group that I was the only Christian to have knowingly spoken with a Muslim, I realized the importance of what we were doing. “Yes,” said the chaplaincy student, “I understand the historical importance of the Holocaust, but what about the nabka?” using the word for the expulsion of Palestinians from their homes in Israel. Click here to read about the nabka.
“The Arabs left their lands willingly; they just didn’t want to stay,” countered Esther. And then she went on, “But I understand that to have peace, there must be justice.” Whose justice, I wondered as I watched the exchange between the upper middle class Farmington Jew and the Muslim from Dallas.
And then there was the eye-opener from the evangelical Christian who was like a fish out of water. I kept wondering how she got here. She began to spew dispensationalist theology -- in case you didn’t know, it’s the point of view that when David’s kingdom is fully restored, Christ will come again. When I told the rabid Zionist that she meant he would end up in hell!, he looked at me incredulously until our evangelical said, “Oh. Yes, the children of Israel who do not accept the Lord Jesus Christ as their personal Savior will be condemned and suffer tribulation….” The Muslims laughed.
Bill Clinton once quipped, “Too much history, too little land,” and although we may smile at his sharp comment, it’s not too far from the truth. Fresh from the Holocaust, European and refugee Jews cried for a homeland. The problem was, of course, that the land was occupied by someone else and thus occurred what Palestinians call the nabka, or the catastrophe.
When I visited Palestine and Israel in 2007, I met an old Palestinian woman who had fled her village near Nazareth -- yes, that Nazareth -- because she heard the stories of Israelis raping and murdering women and children. She only wanted to visit her parents’ grave; they had been killed because they did not flee, but as a nabka survivor, even at the age of 78, she will never get a visa to go to Israel although as a Palestinian, she is hostage to an Israeli occupation.
The roots of the conflict go deep, probably back to the time of Isaac and Ishmael, the two half-brothers who struggled for their father’s blessing. The Qur’an has Ismail as the proposed sacrifice, not Isaac, and when Ibrahim, as he is called in Arabic, dies, both sons bury him at the place now known as the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron. And that was the last time they did anything together.
We in the West have been raised on a whole of myths about Islam. I remember seeing a movie on a television rerun when I was a teenager. As the New York Times put it, “The Crusades” was a movie about history that did not happen. The movie began with Muslim pillage and carnage of Jerusalem -- not historically accurate -- and ends up with a benign Richard the Lionhearted chasing Loretta Young. The only people the historical Richard chased were the pages in his service. Richard had no children for good reason; his marriage was probably never consummated. Before the spate of anti-Muslim films, there was The Sheik,” a Rudolph Valentino classic and an image of a man who had to be a Muslim -- but you would never know it.
The film images of heroic Jewish refugees creating a garden out of the desert also stick in our minds. The first time it ever occurred to me that there were two sides to the story of Israel and Palestine was when I was in college. I had been watching an old Kirk Douglas film, “the Juggler,” about a Holocaust survivor who experiences flashbacks. In this film, Douglas’ character stakes out a piece of land on the ruins of a house.
When I commented on the film to an upstairs neighbor in our married student housing, he looked at me and said, “Yes, that was the kind of village where my parents lived.” I blinked and thought, “My God, he’s right. There were people living there before.”
The problem is, of course, is that our images become our reality. Many of us have negative images of Muslims although intellectually we may not admit to such. Those images are enhanced and reinforced by the media, which, by in large, reflect our fears. Just think about how we cast our siblings in our minds. Rarely are we able to deal with them as real human beings; rather, they are either part angel or part devil depending on how we have gotten along or not gotten along with them.
To a large extent, the underlying story of the biblical and qur’anic traditions tell the truth. The two brothers battled each other for their father’s love, their father’s blessing, and ultimately for the land he gave them. The real question for us today is how we as the third religion to spring from this land can be instruments of peace building rather than instruments of conflict.
Although we in the class of 30 realized we could never solve all the problems that exist between us, we did realize that there needs to be peace; there needs to be justice, there needs to be reconciliation. Without one, the other two are doomed to failure.
Let us pray: O God who creates peace, O God who opens to us the ways of peace, help us be instruments of your peace between your warring children who are our brothers and sisters. In the name of the One who speaks for peace, even Christ Jesus our Lord, Amen.