Isaiah 58 (Lent 5)
Note: In a deliberate and spirited congregational meeting on March 22, the Community Church of Durham voted 63-3 to adopt the Apartheid-Free pledge! This comes after a committed Palestinian Solidarity Team worked for weeks on efforts to educate and inspire the congregation. They are to be thanked! "By faith we can move mountains..."
1.
Many years ago, in a seminary ethics class, theologian Larry Rassmussen suggested to my classmates and me that the most important concept, and the most misunderstood, in all of Jesus’ teaching is not love, but power. I remember writing his words down, fast and verbatim, in my notebook that day. Larry insisted that Jesus confronts coercive power with collaborative power; that Jesus dismantles the logic of violence with practices like solidarity and compassion. The cross, then, isn’t a symbol of surrender, but an invitation to transformation, personal and communal, even global. Transformation and empowerment.
Jesus is committed to love, Larry said, not simply as an emotion or an impulse, but as a practice, a shared practice, and (perhaps most significantly) as a collaborative practice. And as a practice, as a lifestyle, as a purposeful life, love is all about empowerment. Not only the orientation of the heart: but our capacity for prophetic imagination, for mutual liberation, for prayerful blessing and social change. Love is power. A particular and countercultural kind of power. And to miss this is to miss Jesus.
And this is just one of the reasons why today’s discernment around the Apartheid-Free Pledge is so very important, urgently so—not only to our Palestinian and Israeli partners (who are indeed pulling for us), but to our American church which so often interprets Jesus in purely personal or private terms. But discipleship is not simply a matter of feelings and beliefs; and we know this here. Discipleship is just as importantly an invitation into networks of loving and creative resistance, a call to partnerships that move bravely to confront racism with love, and enact new worlds where human rights and justice prevail.
Jesus stands bravely, but vulnerably of course, in the prophetic tradition. The indigenous prophetic tradition of his Jewish Palestinian ancestors. And that prophetic tradition is poignant and clear. Free them. Free them. So Isaiah cries:
“The otherness you reach for is there,” says Isaiah. “The otherness you reach for is there.” Which is to say that faith tolerates no walls, no checkpoints, no apartheid regime. Anywhere. Which is to say that faith doesn’t simply acknowledge differences in culture, religion and experience. Faith insists on them. Celebrates them. Faith moves us then to solidarity and collaboration. Faith empowers us to work within diverse coalitions for a justice that honors us all. “Wake up to a day / beyond acting / for yourself.” “The otherness you reach for is there.”
1.
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| Graffiti on the Apartheid Wall |
Jesus is committed to love, Larry said, not simply as an emotion or an impulse, but as a practice, a shared practice, and (perhaps most significantly) as a collaborative practice. And as a practice, as a lifestyle, as a purposeful life, love is all about empowerment. Not only the orientation of the heart: but our capacity for prophetic imagination, for mutual liberation, for prayerful blessing and social change. Love is power. A particular and countercultural kind of power. And to miss this is to miss Jesus.
And this is just one of the reasons why today’s discernment around the Apartheid-Free Pledge is so very important, urgently so—not only to our Palestinian and Israeli partners (who are indeed pulling for us), but to our American church which so often interprets Jesus in purely personal or private terms. But discipleship is not simply a matter of feelings and beliefs; and we know this here. Discipleship is just as importantly an invitation into networks of loving and creative resistance, a call to partnerships that move bravely to confront racism with love, and enact new worlds where human rights and justice prevail.
2.
So our immigration ministry (for example) is not simply one small congregation helping out one beleaguered refugee. It’s our Community Church partnering with UCC congregations across New Hampshire to call out our government’s madness and celebrate instead all the ways “immigrants make New Hampshire great.” It’s our Community Church collaborating with the American Friends Service Committee and the Seacoast Interfaith Sanctuary Coalition and speaking truth to power. Together. And it’s our Community Church showing up in Somersworth and Manchester and Kittery, when we’re needed, to stand powerfully and tenderly for immigrant neighbors there. Love is power.
Our Open & Affirming commitment (then) is not simply one small congregation pushing back against homophobia and bigotry in American religious life. It’s our Community Church joining in covenant with over 1800 Open & Affirming UCC communities across the country, communities accounting for over 350,000 members. And together, as a movement, we manifest gospel values in community action, and collective power in protecting queer members and queer friends, and a whole new way of being church, of being human in America. One people, many ways of loving!
“Follow me,” Jesus says. “Follow me.” And every time he utters these words, every time he invites a new friend into his circle, he creates a new and diverse community of friends, a movement, empowered and powerful. And in that movement, Jesus challenges systems of power that dehumanize and demoralize and oppress. He grieves systems that enforce hierarchies of value and honor. And then—in that movement—Jesus reimagines godly power as collaborative and nonviolent, as relational and prayerful; and he rebuilds a community empowered to free captives and heal broken bodies and feed hungry hearts. A community empowered to praise God—through celebration, solidarity, and sacrifice! Together.
So the question before us this morning, then, is in part: “Will we choose godly power, collaborative and nonviolent, relational and prayerful—with over 1000 communities across the country—who have chosen to challenge Israeli apartheid lovingly and bravely and actively?” “Will we choose godly power, collaborative and nonviolent—with Pax Christi USA and the Presbyterian Peace Fellowship, with Jewish Voice for Peace and American Muslims for Palestine, with First Congregational UCC in Dallas and Claremont Congregational UCC in Southern California and hundreds of other churches and synagogues and communities?”
If what our friends (Palestinian and Israeli, by the way), if what our friends in the Holy Land are saying is true, if it is indeed apartheid that is erasing Palestinian culture day by day, and destroying generations in Gaza with sophisticated technologies, and facilitating the annexation of family farms and ancestral lands; if it is indeed apartheid, as international consensus has overwhelmingly determined that it is, will we make this pledge and join this movement and own our power to resist and heal and bless? Is that ours to do today?
3.
So our immigration ministry (for example) is not simply one small congregation helping out one beleaguered refugee. It’s our Community Church partnering with UCC congregations across New Hampshire to call out our government’s madness and celebrate instead all the ways “immigrants make New Hampshire great.” It’s our Community Church collaborating with the American Friends Service Committee and the Seacoast Interfaith Sanctuary Coalition and speaking truth to power. Together. And it’s our Community Church showing up in Somersworth and Manchester and Kittery, when we’re needed, to stand powerfully and tenderly for immigrant neighbors there. Love is power.
Our Open & Affirming commitment (then) is not simply one small congregation pushing back against homophobia and bigotry in American religious life. It’s our Community Church joining in covenant with over 1800 Open & Affirming UCC communities across the country, communities accounting for over 350,000 members. And together, as a movement, we manifest gospel values in community action, and collective power in protecting queer members and queer friends, and a whole new way of being church, of being human in America. One people, many ways of loving!
“Follow me,” Jesus says. “Follow me.” And every time he utters these words, every time he invites a new friend into his circle, he creates a new and diverse community of friends, a movement, empowered and powerful. And in that movement, Jesus challenges systems of power that dehumanize and demoralize and oppress. He grieves systems that enforce hierarchies of value and honor. And then—in that movement—Jesus reimagines godly power as collaborative and nonviolent, as relational and prayerful; and he rebuilds a community empowered to free captives and heal broken bodies and feed hungry hearts. A community empowered to praise God—through celebration, solidarity, and sacrifice! Together.
So the question before us this morning, then, is in part: “Will we choose godly power, collaborative and nonviolent, relational and prayerful—with over 1000 communities across the country—who have chosen to challenge Israeli apartheid lovingly and bravely and actively?” “Will we choose godly power, collaborative and nonviolent—with Pax Christi USA and the Presbyterian Peace Fellowship, with Jewish Voice for Peace and American Muslims for Palestine, with First Congregational UCC in Dallas and Claremont Congregational UCC in Southern California and hundreds of other churches and synagogues and communities?”
If what our friends (Palestinian and Israeli, by the way), if what our friends in the Holy Land are saying is true, if it is indeed apartheid that is erasing Palestinian culture day by day, and destroying generations in Gaza with sophisticated technologies, and facilitating the annexation of family farms and ancestral lands; if it is indeed apartheid, as international consensus has overwhelmingly determined that it is, will we make this pledge and join this movement and own our power to resist and heal and bless? Is that ours to do today?
3.
You’ll remember that I spent two months last spring with my friend Zoughbi Zoughbi in Bethlehem and his team at Wi’am: The Palestinian Centre for Conflict Transformation. You’ll remember that I brought a $6,000 gift—from all of you—that Zoughbi has since used to secure health insurance for his amazing team and a summer camping program for Bethlehem’s children. They were all so immensely grateful for that gift! Empowerment, that gift of faith offered in love.
As you can imagine, it was an extraordinary experience in a hundred ways. Zoughbi took me to his Melkite church where we worshipped and prayed and broke bread together. He walked me through the streets of old Bethlehem, introducing me to the best falafel joints and the best pita ovens and (of course) the best coffee. And he invited me to join him and his family at funerals and weddings: two weddings (once) on just one busy June afternoon!
And day after day, at Wi’am, I watched and listened as Zoughbi trained young Palestinian Christians in public life and nonviolence; as he encouraged Palestinian mothers to raise proud and resilient children forty miles from the Gazan genocide; and as he introduced me to Jesus, an indigenous Palestinian Jew, he said, whose every word, whose every choice was born of that land, that place, and that people.
One Sunday during my visit, Zoughbi discovered that he’d been given a rare “day pass” to visit Jerusalem; and he invited me to join him on a short bus ride into the city that’s (in reality) just a few miles away. Palestinians in the West Bank are rarely given permission to make that trip, though they all have family there and friends there, and Jerusalem (as you can imagine) is a sacred site beloved by peoples of so many traditions. If you’ve been there, you know that a huge apartheid wall now divides the West Bank and prevents Palestinians from moving freely into the city they call Al Quds which means, in Arabic, “the sacred” or “the sanctuary.” Al Quds.
And a series of checkpoints makes travel impossible without that “pass” and punishable if tried. Zoughbi had worked in Jerusalem for years as a young adult, with the World Council of Churches, and that Sunday (with that rare “day pass”) he was eager to show me a city he’d come to love. A city with such cultural and familial significance. We’d go to church. We’d walk the Old City. And we’d meet up with his sister and her family for Sunday dinner at their Jerusalem home.
However, before we could catch that bus to Al Quds, we had to cross the militarized checkpoint that separates Bethlehem and the West Bank from Jerusalem itself, a series of electronic gates and biometric stations and armed gatekeepers that keep Palestinians out of Israel and most often away from Jerusalem. The biometrics stations, Zoughbi told me, are new. And insulting. And dehumanizing. Hi tech—often engineered by American firms, deployed in Israel to control and intimidate.
Now Zoughbi is a remarkably gifted man, a former city councilor, and a giant in the ecumenical Christian community. These days he’s the international president of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, FOR. And in his own beloved Bethlehem, he’s recognized as a pillar, a brave and accomplished intellectual. And he’s also a large man.
But what that Israeli checkpoint did to him that Sunday will stay with me forever. How he shook with a combination of fear and anger as soldiers half his age questioned his credentials and his integrity. How he cowered, seemingly trying to make himself small, as we passed through long, gated hallways, and then waited for electronic gates to open whimsically. How he fumbled through his wallet to find the right card to use at the biometrics station. The whole process—the series of checkpoints and apartheid walls—is designed (clearly) to humiliate and discourage. And, for a few minutes at least, it did all of that and more. I was embarrassed for the young soldiers. And once again shaken by a realization that American politics and American aid and American companies make all this humiliation possible.
4.
And of course, that moment is but a single moment in a project that has played out in Palestine for 70 plus years. And it’s so much more than checkpoints and humiliation. It’s family farms in the West Bank—by the dozens—seized in the middle of the night by armed Israeli settlers from places like Brooklyn and Houston. It’s ten-year-old children kidnapped by soldiers (often from their beds at home) for throwing stones or less, and hidden in unmarked prisons for weeks before families can find them. It’s thousands of ancient olive trees cut down by settlers in Palestinian orchards to degrade families and scare them off their ancestral lands. And it’s a government peddling fear—yoked to American politicians indebted to their PACS—committing genocide in Gaza, and murdering at least 70,000 human beings (maybe twice that many) since 2023, with the force (according to one human rights advocate) of six Hiroshimas. Six Hiroshimas. A people with no place to go, and drones raining fire day after day after day. On hospitals and schools and journalists and children. Many, many, many children.
So again the question is: Will we choose godly power today--collaborative and nonviolent--with others who have chosen to challenge Israeli apartheid lovingly and bravely and actively? Is that ours to do today?
As you can imagine, it was an extraordinary experience in a hundred ways. Zoughbi took me to his Melkite church where we worshipped and prayed and broke bread together. He walked me through the streets of old Bethlehem, introducing me to the best falafel joints and the best pita ovens and (of course) the best coffee. And he invited me to join him and his family at funerals and weddings: two weddings (once) on just one busy June afternoon!
 |
| Zoughbi Zoughbi at Wi'am |
One Sunday during my visit, Zoughbi discovered that he’d been given a rare “day pass” to visit Jerusalem; and he invited me to join him on a short bus ride into the city that’s (in reality) just a few miles away. Palestinians in the West Bank are rarely given permission to make that trip, though they all have family there and friends there, and Jerusalem (as you can imagine) is a sacred site beloved by peoples of so many traditions. If you’ve been there, you know that a huge apartheid wall now divides the West Bank and prevents Palestinians from moving freely into the city they call Al Quds which means, in Arabic, “the sacred” or “the sanctuary.” Al Quds.
And a series of checkpoints makes travel impossible without that “pass” and punishable if tried. Zoughbi had worked in Jerusalem for years as a young adult, with the World Council of Churches, and that Sunday (with that rare “day pass”) he was eager to show me a city he’d come to love. A city with such cultural and familial significance. We’d go to church. We’d walk the Old City. And we’d meet up with his sister and her family for Sunday dinner at their Jerusalem home.
However, before we could catch that bus to Al Quds, we had to cross the militarized checkpoint that separates Bethlehem and the West Bank from Jerusalem itself, a series of electronic gates and biometric stations and armed gatekeepers that keep Palestinians out of Israel and most often away from Jerusalem. The biometrics stations, Zoughbi told me, are new. And insulting. And dehumanizing. Hi tech—often engineered by American firms, deployed in Israel to control and intimidate.
Now Zoughbi is a remarkably gifted man, a former city councilor, and a giant in the ecumenical Christian community. These days he’s the international president of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, FOR. And in his own beloved Bethlehem, he’s recognized as a pillar, a brave and accomplished intellectual. And he’s also a large man.
But what that Israeli checkpoint did to him that Sunday will stay with me forever. How he shook with a combination of fear and anger as soldiers half his age questioned his credentials and his integrity. How he cowered, seemingly trying to make himself small, as we passed through long, gated hallways, and then waited for electronic gates to open whimsically. How he fumbled through his wallet to find the right card to use at the biometrics station. The whole process—the series of checkpoints and apartheid walls—is designed (clearly) to humiliate and discourage. And, for a few minutes at least, it did all of that and more. I was embarrassed for the young soldiers. And once again shaken by a realization that American politics and American aid and American companies make all this humiliation possible.
4.
And of course, that moment is but a single moment in a project that has played out in Palestine for 70 plus years. And it’s so much more than checkpoints and humiliation. It’s family farms in the West Bank—by the dozens—seized in the middle of the night by armed Israeli settlers from places like Brooklyn and Houston. It’s ten-year-old children kidnapped by soldiers (often from their beds at home) for throwing stones or less, and hidden in unmarked prisons for weeks before families can find them. It’s thousands of ancient olive trees cut down by settlers in Palestinian orchards to degrade families and scare them off their ancestral lands. And it’s a government peddling fear—yoked to American politicians indebted to their PACS—committing genocide in Gaza, and murdering at least 70,000 human beings (maybe twice that many) since 2023, with the force (according to one human rights advocate) of six Hiroshimas. Six Hiroshimas. A people with no place to go, and drones raining fire day after day after day. On hospitals and schools and journalists and children. Many, many, many children.
So again the question is: Will we choose godly power today--collaborative and nonviolent--with others who have chosen to challenge Israeli apartheid lovingly and bravely and actively? Is that ours to do today?
Jesus stands bravely, but vulnerably of course, in the prophetic tradition. The indigenous prophetic tradition of his Jewish Palestinian ancestors. And that prophetic tradition is poignant and clear. Free them. Free them. So Isaiah cries:
wake up to a day
beyond acting
for yourself
the Lord’s voice speaks
for itself:
act for others
not with faces but hands
opening
locks of injustice
sophisticated knots
tied mentally and physically
around the poor and powerless
like a harness
to break their spirit
free them
"Free them."
Not only, my friends, is the Apartheid-Free Movement not antisemitic; it is instead profoundly faithful to the heartbeat of Jewish tradition, to the liberating energies of Moses and Miriam, to the prophetic courage and encouragement of Isaiah. Ask Ann Romney, who spent the better part of a day with us three weeks ago. Ask UC Berkeley’s Judith Butler and Exeter’s Ilan Pappe, who celebrate Jewish resistance and the Jewishishness of nonviolence itself. Ask Rabbi Brant Rosen, whose Chicago synagogue was early to join the Apartheid-Free Movement and whose Jewish liturgies insist that Yahweh’s passion for justice and reconciliation calls for emboldened Jewish participation in the Palestinian cause.“The otherness you reach for is there,” says Isaiah. “The otherness you reach for is there.” Which is to say that faith tolerates no walls, no checkpoints, no apartheid regime. Anywhere. Which is to say that faith doesn’t simply acknowledge differences in culture, religion and experience. Faith insists on them. Celebrates them. Faith moves us then to solidarity and collaboration. Faith empowers us to work within diverse coalitions for a justice that honors us all. “Wake up to a day / beyond acting / for yourself.” “The otherness you reach for is there.”
5.
One of the 20th century’s great prophetic voices belonged to Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who marched with Martin Luther King, Jr., and insisted on wonder and moral courage as the dynamic inheritance of Jewish communities (and faith communities) around the world. As we gather this morning, first here for worship, and then downstairs for discernment and action, Rabbi Heschel’s words are etched upon my heart. And maybe you’ll keep them close too. In 1972, he wrote this:
So today, dear ones, let us be responsible. Generously and powerfully responsible. Let us remember that love is power: not power that demeans and diminishes, but power that connects and collaborates. And then--let us dare to act powerfully and responsibly together. Because that's what love does.
Amen and Ashe.
One of the 20th century’s great prophetic voices belonged to Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who marched with Martin Luther King, Jr., and insisted on wonder and moral courage as the dynamic inheritance of Jewish communities (and faith communities) around the world. As we gather this morning, first here for worship, and then downstairs for discernment and action, Rabbi Heschel’s words are etched upon my heart. And maybe you’ll keep them close too. In 1972, he wrote this:
There is immense silent agony in the world, and the task of humankind is to be a voice for the plundered poor, to prevent the desecration of the soul and the violation of our dream of honesty.Our Palestinian friends—friends like Zoughbi Zoughbi and Rifat Kassis and Lucy Thaljieh and Dahlia Qumsiyeh and Munther Isaac: their agony is no longer silent, of course. And the violation of their dreams is no longer invisible to the world. We’ve all seen it now. Today, they ask us to take a stand for peace, to take a stand for liberation, to take a stand for their children. Even more, they ask us to choose love and power, to choose collaboration and nonviolence, to choose the patterns and teachings of their savior and ours. I imagine that Rabbi Heschel’s words would be welcome indeed around their tables today, and at their protests, and in their many movements. “There is no limit,” he said, “to the concern one must feel for the suffering of human beings; indifference to evil (he said) is worse than evil itself; and in a free society (he said), not all are guilty, perhaps, but all are responsible.” All are responsible.
The more deeply immersed I became in the thinking of the prophets, [he wrote] the more powerfully it became clear to me what the lives of the Prophets sought to convey: that morally speaking, there is no limit to the concern one must feel for the suffering of human beings, that indifference to evil is worse than evil itself, that in a free society, some are guilty, but all are responsible.
So today, dear ones, let us be responsible. Generously and powerfully responsible. Let us remember that love is power: not power that demeans and diminishes, but power that connects and collaborates. And then--let us dare to act powerfully and responsibly together. Because that's what love does.
Amen and Ashe.
