A Meditation on Matthew 7
Sunday, October 22, 2017
1.
We are so blessed, here
at Peace United, by the gifts and passions of so many in our midst. Every day I come to work, I’m stunned by the
variety of ways you embrace the gospel and follow Jesus. As activists and artists. As parents and lovers. As servants and rabble-rousers. There’s that little parable in the reading
this morning, about hearing Jesus’ words and acting on them, about the
spirituality of integrity. Jesus is big
on the spirituality of integrity. I look
around this sanctuary, I look across this congregation—and I see a whole host
of disciples who build their spiritual homes on solid rock. Hearing Jesus’ words and acting on them. Embracing the gospel and embodying the
gospel. We are so blessed.
This morning, I
want to say a special word of thanks to Dave Dodson and Beverly Brook and Pam
Roby and all those who’ve planned next Sunday’s Anti-Semitism Workshop at
Temple Beth El. These three, in
particular, have invested precious energy and sensitivity in relationships
within the Tent of Abraham, with special care and concern for our local
synagogues. And I know that many of us
will want to attend and participate in next Sunday’s workshop. It gets to the heart of the kind of church we
want to be.
After all, when we
talk about discipleship at Peace United, Christian discipleship, we’re talking
about meeting bigotry head-on and doing all we can to release its grip on our
politics, our communities and even our churches. So I thank you, Dave (and Beverly and Pam
too), for your commitment and persistence, and your faith in the possibility
and promise of these precious friendships.
You’re inviting us to build our spiritual homes on solid rock. And we give thanks for labors of love like
yours.
During my tenure
here in Santa Cruz, I’ve taken special care to preach on anti-Semitism at least
once a year, and sometimes as often as two or three times a year. As so many of you are, I’m very serious about
this. Because there’s just no doubt in
my mind, and in my heart, that anti-Semitism lingers, dangerously, in Christian
thought and practice. This is our history,
our tradition. Going back generations,
centuries even, our tendencies are (a) to misrepresent Judaism as antiquated
and its God as vulgar and crude, and (b) to demonize Jews and project our own shame
and weakness onto them.
How easily we talk
about the angry God of the Old Testament and the Loving (and Better) God of the
New! How quickly we interpret Jewish motivation
and behavior in terms of age-old stereotypes.
And of course, these very tendencies have manifested in horrific
violence and persistent bigotry even and especially in the supposedly
enlightened West. There is important
work ahead of us, as Christians, if we’re to root anti-Semitism out of our
tradition and build deeper and resilient alliances with Jewish friends and
institutions. We’ve taken that work
seriously at Peace United, over many years and decades. And we must continue. So next week’s workshop is a crucial step on
a much longer journey.
2.
Last year, for the
first time in my life, I was confronted with accusations of anti-Semitism
myself. After years of doing what I
could to expose it, and heal the church of its poison. Nothing in my years of ministry, really
nothing in my life, prepared me for the conflict generated by our ‘Justice for
Palestine’ conference in April 2016. We
believed—and I still believe—that the conference highlighted a principled and
nonviolent campaign, organized by Palestinian leaders for the Palestinian
people. But others found the same
gathering distasteful at best, and anti-Semitic at its core. We had crossed a line, they said. Sustained criticism of the State of Israel
inspires anti-Jewish prejudice, they said, and authorizes it even here, in our
community.
In every way, our
conference was committed to human rights, democracy and liberation for
all. But that message didn’t
translate. And I found myself in the stormy
middle of an old, old conflict. Colleagues
I trusted refused to take my calls. Friends
saw me coming and crossed the street, rather than saying hello. I was accused of betrayal in one synagogue
and called an anti-Semite in local papers.
All of this
prompted intense soul-searching on my part.
I was certainly defensive at times, no doubt about that. There’s that part of me that responds to any
criticism defensively. But I want to say
that I pushed through that, to a deeper kind of reflection. It stings when good people—friends I
trust—call my integrity, my decency even, into question. I don’t know if this happens to the rest of
you; but it stings when it happens to me.
So I spent a good bit of 2016 thinking hard about these things, reading
up on anti-Semitism and looking at my own behavior. Were my actions consistent, really and honestly
consistent, with my beliefs? Were the
choices I made at odds in any way with my values and commitments, even my
faith? Big questions, about ethics and
integrity.
This kind of
soul-searching is not the kind you do alone, in isolation. I mean, there’s some of that. I prayed, and prayed hard, to discern my
motivations and question my priorities.
Prayer’s been huge for me through all this. But I needed people too, conversational
partners who could challenge me thoughtfully and listen to me deeply, and help
me understand what was happening. What
it meant. I discovered new friends, and bold
ones, in a group called the Jewish Voice for Peace. I visited with its founding rabbis in
Berkeley and talked to activists in Portland, Oregon. I reconnected with Palestinian organizers by
phone and visited some of them in the West Bank just last summer.
With all these
friends, I questioned whether our work—around the Boycott and Divestment
Movement—has cast an anti-Semitic message or stirred bigotry in any way. I really wanted to know. We wondered, together, whether the
initiatives we considered nonviolent and grounded in human rights could somehow
replicate ancient and malicious feelings toward Judaism in general and Jewish
neighbors close to home. These are big
questions. Important questions. And I was blessed to find friends and
colleagues who honored them, and understood their importance. From a variety of perspectives.
3.
Through all of
this—through the conflict, through the loss of friendships, through all of
it—I’ve kept the Sermon on the Mount close.
In my satchel going out the door.
At my fingertips in the office.
On my mind. At the heart of
today’s reading, I think, is Jesus’ insistence that we wrestle with our
choices, and with our ethics, and with our priorities in just this way. He doesn’t particularly mince words on
this. He sets up this one parable simply
and provocatively. Either I build my
house on solid rock, and it stands the tests of storm and flood and rain and
wind. Or I build my house on shifting
sand, and it collapses when the wind comes hard and the rain falls fast.
I really don’t
think Jesus’ intention is to scare me, or you, or anyone really. I don’t hear this as a threat of condemnation
or punishment in any way. But it is a
closing argument, of sorts; his last words in the Sermon on the Mount. Either I build my house on solid rock, or I
build my house on shifting sand. Are my
actions consistent, really and honestly consistent, with my beliefs? Are my priorities and choices at odds in any
way with my values and my faith? Jesus
isn’t kidding around. He wants us to
live with his teaching, his example, all the days of our lives. He wants us to love as he loves, to pray as
he prays, to forgive as he forgives. His
point isn’t to scare us, but to challenge us.
Lovingly, to be sure, but firmly.
Because integrity is the solid rock.
This whole process
took me back to Palestine last summer, where my daughter and I visited a
community center in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan. In ancient times, pilgrims would wash in the
pools of Silwan before climbing the steep slope to the Temple. Today, Silwan is a Palestinian neighborhood, densely
populated and colonized by aggressive Jewish settlers intent on driving
Palestinian families away. Palestinian
homes face a torrent of demolition orders and the economy in Silwan is
handcuffed and hopeless. It’s a pretty
tough place.
We were encouraged,
Fiona and I, to visit Sahar Abbasi at the community center, which was founded a
decade ago to help Palestinian families meet the intense challenges of
occupation and police harassment. Sahar
is a truly amazing woman, generous and strong, focused and compassionate; and
her work with children and families offers encouragement in a climate of
extreme frustration and despair.
She describes for
us how Israeli police raid Palestinian homes at 2 in the morning, in the dead
of night; how they bang on Palestinian doors and terrorize women and children
and anyone else they find there. Tears show
in her eyes as she describes the way Israeli police grab Palestinian children
from their beds, some as young as 8 years old, and drag them off to detention
centers and prisons. She tells us about
mothers who have no idea where their children are taken, or how to even find
out. And she tells us it’s getting worse
all the time. More raids. More police.
Most nights.
Sahar devotes her
waking hours to these children and their parents. When they’re taken away, she moves heaven and
earth to find out where. When they
return at last, if they return, she counsels them and comforts them and offers
them hope and love. This is a woman who
walks her walk. This is woman who
cares. Integrity is her solid rock.
We talk a bit about
opportunities for political resistance and in Jerusalem. What can be done? She talks about anger in the streets, rising
levels of frustration and fear.
And then, Sahar
sits up and says to us: “Violence will get us nowhere. Violence will only come back to hurt my
people and do us unimaginable harm.” And
your alternatives, we ask? What can you
do? “We can survive,” she says, with
hurt and pain beyond my imagining. “We
can raise our children with dignity and art and love.” And then Sahar Abassi offers the line I still
think about every night when I’m falling asleep and every morning when I’m
sitting down at my desk. “For us,” she
says, “existence is resistance.”
Existence is resistance. “So we
raise our children. And we say our
prayers. And we just survive.”
As we’re leaving
that morning, Sahar takes us out to the street and shows us garbage piled high,
bags and bags of stinking garbage. The government
could care less about Silwan and its Palestinian community. The government refuses to pick up their
garbage or provide schools for their kids.
It’s something like collective punishment, punishment of an entire
people simply because they’re Palestinian or Muslim or Arab or Christian. Which apparently makes them the enemy.
As our time
together winds down, Sahar asks us what brings us to Silwan; and I tell her a
bit about other trips we’ve taken and our more recent efforts to support the
Boycott and Divestment Movement. We talk
for a while about anti-Semitism. And she
tells us about the brave Jewish peacemakers who come to her center every week,
to help out, to cook for the kids, to show they care. “I am angry at the Israeli who oppresses me,”
she says proudly, “but these Jews are my friends.” And then: “We can build a better life
together. Jew and Muslim and Christian
together!”
As we turn to go,
Sahar says, “Wait, wait.” And she places
a small stone in my hand, and another in my daughters. “What you’re doing gives me hope,” she
says. “What you’re doing in the States
gives me and my people hope.” For a
moment, we talk about the Boycott Campaign, we talk about international
attention, and we talk about worldwide pressure. “We are being punished every day,” Sahar
says, “and the world must know. You must
continue to tell the world.” And as
we’re walking away, waving to our friend, she calls out: “And I know that you will.” And I know that you will.
5.
I hope—I really do
hope—you’ll take advantage of both opportunities on your insert this morning:
the Anti-Semitism workshop on Sunday and the important presentation by Jewish
activist Mark Braverman the following Wednesday evening. I think the two events, together, encourage a
deeper conversation about what anti-Semitism is and what it isn’t. One without the other really isn’t
enough. So I hope you’ll make a point of
attending both events. And paying attention. Listening closely. Opening your hearts.
For what it’s
worth, here’s where I’m at, at least right now. I don’t find that there is anything
anti-Semitic about the work we’re doing with Palestinian activists and Jewish
allies to end the Israeli occupation of the West Bank. I don’t find that there is anything anti-Semitic
about partnering with Sahar Abbasi in Silwan and Sam Bahour in Ramallah and
Issa Amro in Hebron to put economic pressure on a mighty nation that oppresses
an entire people and regularly dispossesses them of their lands and
culture. My new friends in the group
Jewish Voice for Peace remind me, in fact, that the most Jewish thing in the
world these days is the action that critiques and subverts the occupation of
Palestine and the shackling of Arab bodies and spirits. What’s more Jewish, they ask, than human
rights work? What’s more Biblical than
the struggle for liberation from domination systems and bureaucracies of
harassment and intimidation?
So let’s make a
distinction—and many are making it now—between the anti-Semitism we abhor and
the principled criticism of a corrupt nation state. Let’s make a distinction between anti-Jewish
bigotry (which is real, even here in America) and organized resistance to
oppression, occupation and militarism.
If we make that distinction, and we must, we can continue to work
bravely and boldly against anti-Semitism in our own country and for the
liberation of Palestine and the just peace that Israelis and Palestinians
deserve. We can do both. We have to do both. We can dismantle anti-Semitism and divest
from an immoral occupation at the same time.
We have to.
I know this has all
been a little long-winded, but let me just finish by bringing all this back to
Jesus and the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus
imagines a community of disciples willing and courageous enough to choose a
narrow gate, to take a difficult road to peace and justice and human
healing. He knows, because he lives this
way, he knows that discipleship is risky.
Turning the other cheek is a risky way to live. Going the extra mile is going to wear you
down. But he also knows that the power
of God, the love of God, the resilient spirit of God is our constant companion
on this road. The rains may come hard,
the winds may blow fierce, and the storms my crash loudly on our house. But love will see us through. God will be our guide. And that, my friends, is what I’m learning on
the way. Love will see us through.
Amen.
