And the Call to Partnership in Nonviolent Resistance
1.
In the beginning of our story; in the beginning of our many commitments to the church, to the planet; in the beginning of the tradition that takes us to a cross, and then an empty tomb, and then a lovely, hungry world; in the beginning of all this are these two words: “Follow me.” He’s a teacher without credentials. A priest without a temple. A revolutionary without a manifesto. And just two words. One human being to another. An invitation to community. “Follow me.”
And the plain truth is this: that there is no Christianity without discipleship, and there is no good news, no gospel apart from our willingness to listen and respond and go. “Follow me,” he says. At every lakeside. In every garden. To every parishioner in every pew. If we are to fully grasp the shockingly imminent truth of God’s love in Christ, if we are to be fully grasped by that love—we listen for his voice in the stories others tell us, in their cries for hope and friendship, and then we go where Jesus takes us. No credentials. No temples. No manifestos. Just Jesus.
And I’m not talking now about the “Christian” Jesus, or the domesticated Jesus, or even the theological Jesus. Two thousand years in the making. I’m talking now about the Jesus of the gospels, the one who meets us in the other, in the neighbor, in the confounding coworker and the beleaguered poor. “Follow me,” he says. “Take me seriously,” he says. “Put your hand in mine,” he says. Discipleship is all about our willingness to listen, our intention to hear one another out, our human capacity for relationship, partnership and care. So Jesus walks along the beach, at the lakeside, and he calls out to Simon and Andrew: “Follow me.”
Years ago, Dietrich Bonhoeffer famously distinguished cheap grace from costly grace, comforting grace from healing grace. And the difference seems critical in our own time: “Costly grace,” he wrote, “is the gospel which must be sought again and again, the gift which must be asked for, the door at which one must knock.” That’s powerful enough, but he went on. “Such grace is costly,” he wrote, “because it calls us to follow, and it is grace because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ. It is costly because it costs us our lives, and it is grace because it gives us the only true life.” And, of course, costly grace determined Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s own resistance in the bitter days of Hitler’s Germany, and inspired him to offer up every last breath in the struggle against hatred, tyranny and antisemitism. “Such grace is costly because it calls us to follow.”
2.
This morning I’d like to offer my thoughts on the Apartheid-Free resolution that comes before us next Sunday; and I’d like to offer up these reflections as a way of exploring discipleship, our capacity for compassion as we take seriously the cries for hope that come from friends around the world. Jesus meets us in the guise of the other—and speaks to us from the experience, hope and pain of the other. And it’s that encounter that serves as our invitation. It’s that encounter that issues God’s call for faith and mercy, decisive action and generous love. “Follow me,” he says. I want to think about the resolution in those terms.
And this speaks to the heart of our own United Church of Christ. It’s one of the reasons I’m most committed to the Apartheid-Free Movement itself. You see, our United Church of Christ is built around a dynamic commitment to the importance of covenant, the urgency of relationship and partnership within and beyond the Body of Christ. From the very beginning, it’s been our shared belief that the Holy Spirit speaks to us within communities of persevering devotion. We covenant as churches and ministries—because we celebrate the Spirit’s desire for communion, affirmation, mutual aid.
And all these things take root and mature in covenanted peoples, in communities of persevering devotion. Where commitments are prayerfully made and prayerfully kept. This kind of thing is in our denominational DNA, in the deepest, sweetest currents of our history and practice. Jesus speaks to us, cries out for us, invites us to courage and ministry—through the voices we hear in the here and now, in the stories we encounter in the streets and broken places of our own time, along the beach, by the lake, beside the singing mountain streams. “Follow me.” Discipleship is a matter of responsibility and covenant.
And this has a particular kind of relevance to our UCC’s notion of world-wide mission. We’ve learned to resist and even repent of the old missionary practices of Christian evangelism and colonization—where US congregations sent missionaries out into the so-called “mission field” to bring the gospel to nonbelievers, or even to bring American culture to unenlightened peoples. To be sure, we’ve had to struggle to learn all this, we’ve had to pray and listen and repent over a thousand missionary misadventures; but this is not our way anymore.
Instead of mission fields to be exploited, we now look for partners and collaborators. We look to local leaders for guidance and direction. We listen carefully. Only then, only in covenant and friendship, do we begin to imagine ministry in their particular places. We commit, with these partners in places like Israel and Palestine, in places like Turkey and Germany, to listening and learning, to building respect and thinking collaboratively about ways to express our commitments to justice and peace and mutual aid. And very often, we invite our partners abroad to come back to the States, to bring their traditions and hopes to our pulpits and congregations, to stretch our understandings of their faith and their particular traditions and practices. We learn and grow together.
And, again, all of this emerges in a denomination, in a community committed to the notion that the Holy Spirit speaks to us within communities of persevering devotion, that ministry and faith take root in covenant relationships among friends and believers. And Jesus calls out from within these dear and sacred partnerships: “Follow me.” “Follow me.”
3.
The Apartheid-Free Movement, then, has developed over these last three, four years, in the midst of partnerships like the ones I’m describing. It’s not an American movement; it’s a movement generated by the hurt and hope of Palestinian friends and their Israeli allies. And it comes to us, it comes to the United Church of Christ, it comes to our Community Church this month, by way of our own covenant partners. They include the YWCA of Palestine, Wi'am's Conflict Resolution Centre in Bethlehem, the Episcopal Diocese of Jerusalem, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Jordan and the Holy Land, the Kairos Palestine Initiative, the Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Centre, and B’tselem (The Israeli Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories). This last, by the way, B’tselem, is an Israeli nonprofit, staffed by Israeli Jews committed to the notion that human rights can be protected and cherished, equally, for all who live between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. Israelis and Palestinians, alike. Jews and Muslims and Christians and Druze, equally. Human rights are not a national thing, not a racial thing, and certainly not a religious thing; they’re a human thing. B’tselem is a UCC partner in Tel Aviv.
And from all these partners—and in many cases these relationships go back decades—from all these partners we now hear an urgent cry for hope and a thoughtful call for action: The Apartheid-Free Movement. “Call it what it is,” they say. “Challenge your government—which funds this madness to the tune of 4 billion dollars a year—challenge your government,” they say, “to turn from violence and segregation to human rights and freedom.” “Boycott companies that profit off of all this violence,” they say, “and divest, resist, don’t participate in cruelty for profit.”
And running through this whole initiative, permeating each word and idea: “We need your help.” We need your help. Again, this isn’t just politics for us, not in the United Church of Christ. This is Holy Spirit stuff. When a partner, a weary and anxious partner says, “We need your help,” we hear Jesus say: “Follow me.” At least, we have to wrestle with that possibility. We have to account for Jesus’ pain, Jesus’ presence in the oppressed themselves. So is this the case now? That’s the question before us next week. Is this the case now? Is Jesus crying out in our Palestinian and Israeli partners, through their pain, with their words, for us? Is this a “Follow me” moment?
So let me tell you about one of the moments when all of this got real, very real, for me.
Ten years ago, I led a delegation of Jews, Christians and Muslims on a peacemaking trip to Jerusalem and the West Bank. One night, in an East Jerusalem hotel, we met Rami Elhanan, an Israeli Jew and graphic designer, and his dear friend Bassam Aramim, a Palestinian activist and student. It was an amazing evening—heartfelt and hard. These two men spend almost all their free time traveling the world, telling their stories. The love between them—an Israeli and a Palestinian—is palpable. The way they watch one another. The way they finish one another’s sentences. The way they weep at the same moments.
Rami Elhanan is a Jew with deep roots in the land and a family story that is splintered with loss, and forever marked by the Holocaust and its madness. Twenty-some years ago, his own teenage daughter was riding a city bus in Jerusalem, when her bus was blown up by a suicide bomber. A Palestinian kid with nothing to lose. And to this day, you can see the grief, the shock, the exhaustion of all this—in Rami’s eyes. A father whose daughter was murdered.
Bassam Aramim is a devout Muslim, and a converted Palestinian pacifist. He’s an equally remarkable human being. Fifteen years ago, his seven-year-old daughter was going to the store for candy—when she was shot dead by an Israeli soldier patrolling their West Bank town and looking for trouble. In Bassam’s eyes, too, you can still see the unresolvable pain of a father who’s lost everything. And that night ten years ago, they sat together, Bassam and Rami, and told us their stories. And asked for our help. Begged, in fact, for our courage and partnership.
Rami and Bassam are a bit like Cain and Abel—that is, if Cain had chosen not to kill his brother, but instead to reject violence altogether; if Cain had chosen not to cancel his brother’s future, but instead to turn with compassion to the one he feared and envied. Brothers joined by human kindness, family ties and geography.
In East Jerusalem that night, both talked about a choice they faced in the days after their daughters’ deaths. At one point, Rami turned to Bassam directly and said: “On that eighth day, after our sitting shiva seven days, I knew I had to get out of the house.” And then he wiped a tear from his eye: “I knew that I could either grab a weapon and find somebody to hurt...or I could get to know the people who did this to my family.” Bassam reached out and touched his friend’s arm. They were both weeping.
Miraculously, Rami chose, all those years ago, to join a support group for Israeli and Palestinian parents who’d lost children to violence and occupation. And there, he eventually met Bassam, whom he feared at first, but quickly came to love and trust as a brother.
4.
And that night, with our American delegation, they talked about humiliation. What humiliation does to a man. What it does to a people. Rami leaned into the table and looked around the room. “When a people is humiliated,” he said, “as consistently and systematically as we’ve humiliated Palestinians here, there will inevitably be eruptions of violence.” Now remember—this is the Israeli speaking. The Jew who’s lost dozens of family members in the Holocaust, and a daughter on a blown-up bus. He talked about humiliation as Israeli public policy. Humiliation as its very purpose. He talked about huge walls separating Palestinian farmers and families from their ancestral fields, and the strategic destruction of Palestinian villages, and the high-profile razing of Palestinian homes. As Palestinian children watch and their parents wail.
I remember noticing how exhausted Rami seemed that night: to be telling us all this, to be rehearsing it all over again, another American audience, another night in another conference room. Bassam, too, seemed depleted, drained of all hope.
But, just the same, their call to action that night was urgent and clear and focused. And that’s why they’d come to see us. Sacrificed time with their families. Again Rami spoke first. He said: "Seventy years ago, the free and civilized world did nothing as cruelty enveloped Europe and my people were slaughtered. Seventy years later, the free and civilized world does nothing today, as cruelty and occupation envelop this land.” Now remember: this is 2014, and it might well have been 2012, 1996, 2020, you name it. Rami went on: “What we demand of you is not that you are Pro-Israeli or Pro-Palestinian, but that you are PRO-PEACE.”
And this was a key moment for me, a key moment, a ‘kairos’ moment, even a “follow me” moment: across the many years I’ve thought about this conflict and sought to help others end this conflict. What’s important—what’s crucial—is not that we are Pro-Israeli or Pro-Palestinian. It’s not that we take one people’s side, or another’s. After all, they’re all the same people. They’re all brothers, sisters, siblings, Semites. One family.
What’s important—what’s critical—is that we are PRO-PEACE, urgently and creatively committed to human rights for all these peoples, urgently and creatively committed to nonviolence and nonviolent strategies, urgently and creatively committed to a world where Palestinians and Israelis are healthy together, and engaged in democracy, and safe from busses blown up in city streets and children shot dead on their way to get candy at the corner store. “But make no mistake,” Rami said that night, “American money and American politics make all of this happen. American money and American politics make all of this possible.”
And that was the moment that shook me hard. That was the moment I woke up. Two fathers, their faces grooved by fatigue and grief, asking for help, insisting their American audience understand what they understand. That our money, that our politics, that our deadly weaponry and our surveillance technology sustains an immoral, illegal and deadly occupation—and that we have a role to play in changing all of that; that we are responsible for liberating American politics from its devastating consequences and the horrendous violence in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. “You can come back,” Bassam said that night, “but before you do, tell the truth to your people. Before you do, make sure your Congress knows what it has done, and what it’s doing.” In other words, we’ll do our work. You do yours.
5.
So that’s where the Apartheid-Free Movement comes from: from fathers like Bassam Aramim and Rami Elhanan, from partners like the YWCA and the Sabeel Center, from heart-broken Jews and Palestinians crying out for hope.
Should we join this movement? Should we join our United Church of Christ in embracing this Apartheid-Free Movement? Three quick points as I finish up.
1.
 |
| Icon on Wall: "Our Lady Who Takes Down Walls" |
And the plain truth is this: that there is no Christianity without discipleship, and there is no good news, no gospel apart from our willingness to listen and respond and go. “Follow me,” he says. At every lakeside. In every garden. To every parishioner in every pew. If we are to fully grasp the shockingly imminent truth of God’s love in Christ, if we are to be fully grasped by that love—we listen for his voice in the stories others tell us, in their cries for hope and friendship, and then we go where Jesus takes us. No credentials. No temples. No manifestos. Just Jesus.
And I’m not talking now about the “Christian” Jesus, or the domesticated Jesus, or even the theological Jesus. Two thousand years in the making. I’m talking now about the Jesus of the gospels, the one who meets us in the other, in the neighbor, in the confounding coworker and the beleaguered poor. “Follow me,” he says. “Take me seriously,” he says. “Put your hand in mine,” he says. Discipleship is all about our willingness to listen, our intention to hear one another out, our human capacity for relationship, partnership and care. So Jesus walks along the beach, at the lakeside, and he calls out to Simon and Andrew: “Follow me.”
Years ago, Dietrich Bonhoeffer famously distinguished cheap grace from costly grace, comforting grace from healing grace. And the difference seems critical in our own time: “Costly grace,” he wrote, “is the gospel which must be sought again and again, the gift which must be asked for, the door at which one must knock.” That’s powerful enough, but he went on. “Such grace is costly,” he wrote, “because it calls us to follow, and it is grace because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ. It is costly because it costs us our lives, and it is grace because it gives us the only true life.” And, of course, costly grace determined Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s own resistance in the bitter days of Hitler’s Germany, and inspired him to offer up every last breath in the struggle against hatred, tyranny and antisemitism. “Such grace is costly because it calls us to follow.”
2.
And this speaks to the heart of our own United Church of Christ. It’s one of the reasons I’m most committed to the Apartheid-Free Movement itself. You see, our United Church of Christ is built around a dynamic commitment to the importance of covenant, the urgency of relationship and partnership within and beyond the Body of Christ. From the very beginning, it’s been our shared belief that the Holy Spirit speaks to us within communities of persevering devotion. We covenant as churches and ministries—because we celebrate the Spirit’s desire for communion, affirmation, mutual aid.
And all these things take root and mature in covenanted peoples, in communities of persevering devotion. Where commitments are prayerfully made and prayerfully kept. This kind of thing is in our denominational DNA, in the deepest, sweetest currents of our history and practice. Jesus speaks to us, cries out for us, invites us to courage and ministry—through the voices we hear in the here and now, in the stories we encounter in the streets and broken places of our own time, along the beach, by the lake, beside the singing mountain streams. “Follow me.” Discipleship is a matter of responsibility and covenant.
And this has a particular kind of relevance to our UCC’s notion of world-wide mission. We’ve learned to resist and even repent of the old missionary practices of Christian evangelism and colonization—where US congregations sent missionaries out into the so-called “mission field” to bring the gospel to nonbelievers, or even to bring American culture to unenlightened peoples. To be sure, we’ve had to struggle to learn all this, we’ve had to pray and listen and repent over a thousand missionary misadventures; but this is not our way anymore.
Instead of mission fields to be exploited, we now look for partners and collaborators. We look to local leaders for guidance and direction. We listen carefully. Only then, only in covenant and friendship, do we begin to imagine ministry in their particular places. We commit, with these partners in places like Israel and Palestine, in places like Turkey and Germany, to listening and learning, to building respect and thinking collaboratively about ways to express our commitments to justice and peace and mutual aid. And very often, we invite our partners abroad to come back to the States, to bring their traditions and hopes to our pulpits and congregations, to stretch our understandings of their faith and their particular traditions and practices. We learn and grow together.
And, again, all of this emerges in a denomination, in a community committed to the notion that the Holy Spirit speaks to us within communities of persevering devotion, that ministry and faith take root in covenant relationships among friends and believers. And Jesus calls out from within these dear and sacred partnerships: “Follow me.” “Follow me.”
3.
The Apartheid-Free Movement, then, has developed over these last three, four years, in the midst of partnerships like the ones I’m describing. It’s not an American movement; it’s a movement generated by the hurt and hope of Palestinian friends and their Israeli allies. And it comes to us, it comes to the United Church of Christ, it comes to our Community Church this month, by way of our own covenant partners. They include the YWCA of Palestine, Wi'am's Conflict Resolution Centre in Bethlehem, the Episcopal Diocese of Jerusalem, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Jordan and the Holy Land, the Kairos Palestine Initiative, the Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Centre, and B’tselem (The Israeli Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories). This last, by the way, B’tselem, is an Israeli nonprofit, staffed by Israeli Jews committed to the notion that human rights can be protected and cherished, equally, for all who live between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. Israelis and Palestinians, alike. Jews and Muslims and Christians and Druze, equally. Human rights are not a national thing, not a racial thing, and certainly not a religious thing; they’re a human thing. B’tselem is a UCC partner in Tel Aviv.
And from all these partners—and in many cases these relationships go back decades—from all these partners we now hear an urgent cry for hope and a thoughtful call for action: The Apartheid-Free Movement. “Call it what it is,” they say. “Challenge your government—which funds this madness to the tune of 4 billion dollars a year—challenge your government,” they say, “to turn from violence and segregation to human rights and freedom.” “Boycott companies that profit off of all this violence,” they say, “and divest, resist, don’t participate in cruelty for profit.”
And running through this whole initiative, permeating each word and idea: “We need your help.” We need your help. Again, this isn’t just politics for us, not in the United Church of Christ. This is Holy Spirit stuff. When a partner, a weary and anxious partner says, “We need your help,” we hear Jesus say: “Follow me.” At least, we have to wrestle with that possibility. We have to account for Jesus’ pain, Jesus’ presence in the oppressed themselves. So is this the case now? That’s the question before us next week. Is this the case now? Is Jesus crying out in our Palestinian and Israeli partners, through their pain, with their words, for us? Is this a “Follow me” moment?
So let me tell you about one of the moments when all of this got real, very real, for me.
Ten years ago, I led a delegation of Jews, Christians and Muslims on a peacemaking trip to Jerusalem and the West Bank. One night, in an East Jerusalem hotel, we met Rami Elhanan, an Israeli Jew and graphic designer, and his dear friend Bassam Aramim, a Palestinian activist and student. It was an amazing evening—heartfelt and hard. These two men spend almost all their free time traveling the world, telling their stories. The love between them—an Israeli and a Palestinian—is palpable. The way they watch one another. The way they finish one another’s sentences. The way they weep at the same moments.
Rami Elhanan is a Jew with deep roots in the land and a family story that is splintered with loss, and forever marked by the Holocaust and its madness. Twenty-some years ago, his own teenage daughter was riding a city bus in Jerusalem, when her bus was blown up by a suicide bomber. A Palestinian kid with nothing to lose. And to this day, you can see the grief, the shock, the exhaustion of all this—in Rami’s eyes. A father whose daughter was murdered.
 |
| Bassam Aramim and Rami Elhanan |
Rami and Bassam are a bit like Cain and Abel—that is, if Cain had chosen not to kill his brother, but instead to reject violence altogether; if Cain had chosen not to cancel his brother’s future, but instead to turn with compassion to the one he feared and envied. Brothers joined by human kindness, family ties and geography.
In East Jerusalem that night, both talked about a choice they faced in the days after their daughters’ deaths. At one point, Rami turned to Bassam directly and said: “On that eighth day, after our sitting shiva seven days, I knew I had to get out of the house.” And then he wiped a tear from his eye: “I knew that I could either grab a weapon and find somebody to hurt...or I could get to know the people who did this to my family.” Bassam reached out and touched his friend’s arm. They were both weeping.
Miraculously, Rami chose, all those years ago, to join a support group for Israeli and Palestinian parents who’d lost children to violence and occupation. And there, he eventually met Bassam, whom he feared at first, but quickly came to love and trust as a brother.
4.
And that night, with our American delegation, they talked about humiliation. What humiliation does to a man. What it does to a people. Rami leaned into the table and looked around the room. “When a people is humiliated,” he said, “as consistently and systematically as we’ve humiliated Palestinians here, there will inevitably be eruptions of violence.” Now remember—this is the Israeli speaking. The Jew who’s lost dozens of family members in the Holocaust, and a daughter on a blown-up bus. He talked about humiliation as Israeli public policy. Humiliation as its very purpose. He talked about huge walls separating Palestinian farmers and families from their ancestral fields, and the strategic destruction of Palestinian villages, and the high-profile razing of Palestinian homes. As Palestinian children watch and their parents wail.
I remember noticing how exhausted Rami seemed that night: to be telling us all this, to be rehearsing it all over again, another American audience, another night in another conference room. Bassam, too, seemed depleted, drained of all hope.
But, just the same, their call to action that night was urgent and clear and focused. And that’s why they’d come to see us. Sacrificed time with their families. Again Rami spoke first. He said: "Seventy years ago, the free and civilized world did nothing as cruelty enveloped Europe and my people were slaughtered. Seventy years later, the free and civilized world does nothing today, as cruelty and occupation envelop this land.” Now remember: this is 2014, and it might well have been 2012, 1996, 2020, you name it. Rami went on: “What we demand of you is not that you are Pro-Israeli or Pro-Palestinian, but that you are PRO-PEACE.”
And this was a key moment for me, a key moment, a ‘kairos’ moment, even a “follow me” moment: across the many years I’ve thought about this conflict and sought to help others end this conflict. What’s important—what’s crucial—is not that we are Pro-Israeli or Pro-Palestinian. It’s not that we take one people’s side, or another’s. After all, they’re all the same people. They’re all brothers, sisters, siblings, Semites. One family.
What’s important—what’s critical—is that we are PRO-PEACE, urgently and creatively committed to human rights for all these peoples, urgently and creatively committed to nonviolence and nonviolent strategies, urgently and creatively committed to a world where Palestinians and Israelis are healthy together, and engaged in democracy, and safe from busses blown up in city streets and children shot dead on their way to get candy at the corner store. “But make no mistake,” Rami said that night, “American money and American politics make all of this happen. American money and American politics make all of this possible.”
5.
So that’s where the Apartheid-Free Movement comes from: from fathers like Bassam Aramim and Rami Elhanan, from partners like the YWCA and the Sabeel Center, from heart-broken Jews and Palestinians crying out for hope.
Should we join this movement? Should we join our United Church of Christ in embracing this Apartheid-Free Movement? Three quick points as I finish up.
1. There is no doubt that what Israel has created and enforced between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River—with American money and technology—is a system of apartheid. Apartheid is defined, clearly and unmistakably, in international law, through the United Nations General Assembly, and through the International Criminal Court. And there is no doubt that the system of segregation, occupation and humiliation that now exists in the Holy Land is apartheid. Amnesty International put out a 200-page report affirming that this is so. Human Rights Watch did the same. And B’tselem—the Israeli Center for Human Rights—did the same. Just years ago, Desmond Tutu himself agreed. Apartheid.
2. Our UCC partners in the Holy Land have asked for our help. And they have asked not only for resolutions, and prayers, and well-crafted sermons; they have asked for consequential action and discipleship. These are partners who have hosted UCC leaders in places like Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Ramallah. Together we’ve created projects on the ground, schools and rec centers, drama programs and feeding initiatives. Together. These are partners who have preached in our churches here at home. And we are connected to them not just in a tangential way, as faraway curiosities, but through covenants of care, compassion and ministry. We listen carefully. We take them seriously. We share one another’s hopes and hurts.
3. And finally, and I think this is super important theologically and morally, the Apartheid-Free Movement imagines resistance and equips communities there (in the Holy Land) and here (in the West) for nonviolent action and nonviolent creativity in the midst of a violent conflict and an increasingly violent world. We abhor violence and cruelty. We abhor terrorism and destruction and humiliation as strategies for social change. And we follow the Christ who consistently and creatively chose nonviolence and love as his practice, as his life, as his witness to the promise of a better world.
Our Palestinian partners—the ones I’ve named today and so many others—are likewise committed to nonviolent resistance, to nonviolent and loving witness, to nonviolent practices like economic boycotts and divestment campaigns. They are likewise committed to the gritty democratic work of making a case for justice, changing the minds of ‘electeds’ in this country and others, and getting money out of politics so ideas can do their work. They too reject terror and weaponry and humiliation as strategies for meaningful change.
And with this Apartheid-Free Movement, they are asking us—again THEY are asking US—to hear their cry, to receive their witness, and to support their organized, nonviolent efforts to end apartheid, to elevate human rights for all Palestinians and all Israelis, and to bring this horrific chapter in their peoples’ history to a close.
So, yes, I want to say: “This is a ‘Follow me’ moment.” Will it test us? Of course. Will it force us to speak truth to power? Of course. Will it cost us something? Of course. But that’s the point, Bonhoeffer said, all those years ago. That’s the point. In every ‘Follow me’ moment.
But there’s also this. It’s also our tradition, and it’s also our practice, to do this kind of work together. In congregational discernment. In covenant community. It’s also our tradition to rely on the Holy Spirit to move through our conversation and debate. To seek Jesus’ direction in one-to-one discussions, and letters swapped around by email. It’s also our tradition and practice, in the United Church, to make space for God to speak and whisper and move us—in the circles we create when we pray and gather, and when we seek God’s direction and grace.
So we get to do this together next week. No, let’s be precise. We are called to do this together next week: called to listen, called to care about every voice within the church, called to account for the voices of partners so far away, called to discern God’s passion for our ministry and our future.
And it's a beautiful thing; it’s often a hard thing, and a demanding thing, but it’s a beautiful thing. And whatever comes of our deliberation and prayer next week, I will give thanks for the church that listens. For the church that listens for the voice on the beach that says to us, and to Simon and Andrew, and to the church in every age, “Follow me.”
Amen and Ashe.
So we get to do this together next week. No, let’s be precise. We are called to do this together next week: called to listen, called to care about every voice within the church, called to account for the voices of partners so far away, called to discern God’s passion for our ministry and our future.
And it's a beautiful thing; it’s often a hard thing, and a demanding thing, but it’s a beautiful thing. And whatever comes of our deliberation and prayer next week, I will give thanks for the church that listens. For the church that listens for the voice on the beach that says to us, and to Simon and Andrew, and to the church in every age, “Follow me.”
Amen and Ashe.
1.21.24
Durham, NH
NOTES/LINKS/VIDEOS:
Explore the following links, for further reading and discernment...because each of us can make a difference...
1. What the United Nations has to say, and why it matters: UN Special Rapporteur Franscesca Albanese.
