2 The people who
walked in darkness
have
seen a great light;
those
who lived in a land of deep darkness —
on
them light has shined.
3 You have
multiplied the nation,
you
have increased its joy;
they
rejoice before you
as
with joy at the harvest,
as
people exult when dividing plunder.
4 For the yoke of
their burden,
and
the bar across their shoulders,
the
rod of their oppressor,
you
have broken as on the day of Midian.
5 For all the boots
of the tramping warriors
and
all the garments rolled in blood
shall
be burned as fuel for the fire.
6 For a child has
been born for us,
a
son given to us;
authority
rests upon his shoulders;
and
he is named
Wonderful
Counselor, Mighty God,
Everlasting
Father, Prince of Peace.
7 His authority
shall grow continually,
and
there shall be endless peace
for
the throne of David and his kingdom.
He
will establish and uphold it
with
justice and with righteousness
from
this time onward and forevermore.
The
zeal of the LORD of hosts will do this.
HOMILY
Each day, I debated going to the
wall. I didn’t want to be one of those voyeur tourists, like the groups busing
the Ninth Ward after Katrina, or ogling Detroit’s abandoned neighborhoods after
the city’s economic collapse. I didn’t want locals to be able to say, “All she
did was come, take pictures, and leave.” I knew the conflict between Israel and
Palestine was so much bigger than my camera, then my Christian Pilgrimage, and
my preparatory few days of Middle Eastern study. I knew this, but the sentiment
about the wall seemed different when I arrived.
Upon crossing the border, my
Palestinian taxi-driver offered to take me, and showed me a postcard of images
by Bansky, the international artist whose politically-charged murals, critique
current affairs and social injustice. I had barely set foot in the country,
hadn’t even walked a foot, and I was faced with the nexus of being an
American Christian in the, “Holy Land,” today. I needed to get my bearings, but
took the driver’s number, and his encouragement, that the art on the wall was a
significant part of Palestinian present day culture.
I disembarked, still believing
politics wasn’t the intention of my sabbatical grant; and so I did what
Christian tourists do in Bethlehem, I visited the sites, except I did so on
foot, and stayed in the country each night, instead of crossing back over the
checkpoint into Jerusalem. I walked around the whole city of Bethlehem, almost
forty miles in four days, and tried to get to know it from the ground up.
Each morning, from my hostel just
outside the city, I walked toward town, past the rubble of homes and their
rebuilding sites, evidence of the two countries’ ongoing conflict, over that
place and it’s progeny, exacerbated by our global posturing,
which has pulled and plagued each side. We have helped create a battlefield of
what multiple religions consider sacred space, as if cathedral bells, a Hebrew
cantor, and the Call to Prayer were instead calls to war, rather than notes to
harmony. Walking, I wondered, how different might the journey into Bethlehem
have been for Mary and Joseph. They too were foreigners, having traveled
between seventy and ninety miles in about four days, the distance depending on
if they chose the shortest route through hostile Samaria, or the extra twenty
miles around it. They were Jews traveling to Bethlehem in order to be counted
and taxed by the census of imperial Rome. In this mix of borders and
authorities were there checkpoints and walls? Were there mural-ed depictions of
being ruled over by outsiders to their Jewish homeland? Were there prophesies
for the throne of David to reign once more, and prayers disguised as protests
for peace? Did Mary and Joseph too need to tread lightly and seek to gain bearings
in a tumultuous land?
As so I walked some more. My first
stop was the Shepherd’s Grotto and adjacent field. In that region, in the
outskirts of the city, in the fields and on hills, the shepherds would have
lived, and in part, still do. And from this place, on that night, an angel must
have stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone all around them. I
wondered, how far on the open landscape the light of their glory might have
stretched, like a full moon shadow on chalky yellow, rocky, rolling, terrain.
From here, a multitude of the heavenly host, would have been praising God and
saying, “Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace.” How far,
likewise, might those words of peace have stretched over the hills and out into
the night? Would they have reached the present day wall? What must it have been
like, to travel up and down hills under starlight, to find the babe and would
the wall have been touched by starlight too?
I continued up the long road, past
the Shepherd’s Field, up to Bethlehem, on the way to the Church of the
Nativity, where Jesus was said to be born. As I went, small, spray-painted
stencils on sides of streets echoed the underlying unrest: a little girl was
depicted jumping rope with barbed-wire, a small boy playing basketball - the
ball, a ball and chain a-fixed to his ankle, a Bansky mural of a man, throwing
a bouquet over the wall instead of a Malatov cocktail.
Upon arrival to the Church of the
Nativity, I found a walled fortress surrounding a basilica created first in
333B.C.E., and after destruction, recreated in 565. “The church (was) owned by
three church authorities, the Greek Orthodox (most of the building and
furnishings), the Armenian Apostolic and the Roman Catholic (each of them with
lesser properties). The Coptic Orthodox and Syriac Orthodox (holding) minor
rights of worship at the Armenian church in the northern transept, and at the
Altar of Nativity.” Inside, the sanctuary was decorated with intricate gilded
murals, an enormous ornate engraved alter, and a hundreds of red glass lanterns
hanging in the air, all partitioned by second story high ached windows. Nowhere was the Inn, or an inner room which kept animals at night, nowhere was
the raw hewn wood of a manger to make a rude cradle. Nowhere were there bands
of cloth. Instead, monks with white beards and black religious hats and robes,
bustled about with papers, and decorative paraments, and pungent incense while
attempting do their duties, as tourists milled about attempting to do theirs,
with their accoutrements of cameras, and questions about maps, and for some
kneeling and prayer, and for myself, getting in trouble for entering the nave
which apparently had a line that I couldn’t figure out even after having been
reprimanded. Unsurprisingly, “there have been repeated brawls among monk
trainees over quiet respect for others' prayers, hymns and even the division of
floor space for cleaning duties. (So much so that) the Palestinian police have
been called in to restore peace and order.” It was hard to believe in that
basilica that a child had been born for us, Prince of Peace. Did Mary and
Joseph sit there and say prayers for peace and blessings for Emmanuel, God with
us? Did Joseph and Mary stand at that very place and ponder the future into
which their child would be born? Did they ponder what he would grow up to be
and do? Did they surmise he would be one to tear down walls?
Following the Church of the
Nativity, I walked still upward, following more stencils of children, a toddler
blowing a bubble of barbed wire, a swing of barbed wire, breakdancing with a
ball and chain, scootering with a ball and chain, an observation tower the
ladder of a child’s slide.
Eventually, I found myself at noon,
on a Friday, at the highpoint and center of the city. The mosque and adjacent
square were filled with hundreds of men listening to speakers boom out
teachings and prayers from the Quran. Then bowing over on ritual red rugs they
folded forehead prostrate all the way to the ground. The tourist office was at
the end of the square and walking to it, I had to fight away my fear of being
the only woman, and my xenophobia amidst such a different culture. Was I being
judged, or checked out, or perhaps worst of all, was I intruding, and insulting? Yet, I
realized that no eyes followed me, and the focus of the men was on worshiping
God. Therefore, I was able to tiptoe along the edges of the square from the
tourist center to a side road. Was this how the Magi from the East might have
looked entering that same center of town, clearly foreign, clearly following a
different faith from the Roman residents and the baby they sought, having asked
the Roman King Herod where to the find the one who had been born King of the Jews?
Were they also momentarily, afraid, but wanted to pay him homage?
The last morning, my Palestinian
host brought a breakfast of hummus and olives, tomatoes, and olive oil, yogurt
and jam, pita and butter and babbaganoosh, and grapes, and she asked me if I
had been to the wall. It is safe, she said, except for after Friday afternoon
prayers after the mosque when the men get stirred up and throw stones and
explosives over the wall, with tear-gas in response, but all has been peaceful
for awhile. She too explained in her gracious broken English that I should see
the wall in order to understand.
It took me all four days and a dozen
interactions, to recognize, that to skip the wall, was to be the voyeur
tourist. That to come and only take pictures, visit Christian holy sites, and
leave, without ever engaging in the drama of the conflict, was to miss the
reality of the oppression and perhaps its bearing on the Christmas story
for today’s time. I had planned to go to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem,
why not also the wall? To miss either was to miss the history of the
current realities of both peoples.
And so, on the last day, with an
early afternoon bus to catch, I woke early and walked the five miles toward the
wall. I passed the Christian sites, the Shepherd’s Field, the Church of the
Nativity, and town center with its minareted mosque. The closer I got to the
wall, and the contested territory, the more the daily life of Palestinians
abutted and adjoined the conflict. Men sat outside protest mural-ed shops
sipping small cups of Palestinian cardamon coffee. Evacuated houses and
businesses within artillery distance slowly crumbled. A Bansky image of a peace
dove holding an olive branch with a bullet proof vest and a gun’s target circle
faced off against the entrance road toward the wall. Attendants pumped gas
beside the entrance tower. I passed small stencils, a little boy in a baseball
cap in a toy car, his teddy bear and rifle as cargo and a pony-tailed little
girl with a hula hoop of razored barbed-wire. Yet, as provocative as these
images were, they in no way prepared me for the monstrosity and atrocity of the
border wall. Cornered by a three story observation tower, and sheer concrete
walls topped with a chain link fence overhung with barbed wire, it felt like a
prison. With violence on both sides, I understood the need for safety, but
recognized who had the power to keep whom out. I also saw that attempts for
peace would be impervious to four-hundred miles of concrete. I was scared as I
approached, my senses heightened more than they already were as a traveler in a
foreign land, and yet, I also wondered if the color of my skin and clear
Westernness of my dress kept me safe from whomever might be in the tower or
whatever violent protest might uproar from those on the land.
As I came closer, my fear settled as
I watched tourists irreverently selfie in front of the wall. As if what was
important to the place was their being there and not the beliefs of it’s
devotees. Had they done this in front of crucifixes and alters, (the Aron
Hakodesh) the Torah Ark, and the niches of mihrab’s pointing toward Mecca? Yet
my thought was, “If ones as ignorant as these could be safe here, then how much
more might I?” Trying not to do anything equally insulting, I began to walk
along the wall. More stencils repeated, two boys pulling a barbed-wire tug
of war, a boy skateboarding over barbed-wire, and a little girl with a
heart-shaped balloon of barbed-wire. Interspersed between these images were
quoted stories of the Palestinian people. Some described land seized, homes
invaded, medical access denied at border checkpoints resulting in deaths,
others described violent Palestinian retaliation, still others shared witness
to cooperation and compassion between opposing sides. The images continued,
knowing their audience, the depictions of children - Western, the words
English, the commentaries, in part, critiquing our own country, and historic
colonialism, and even capitalism - a Nike swoosh underlined with the words,
Just Remove It, or a bumper sticker looking quote that read, “I went to
Palestine and all I got was this stencil.” It was a lot to take in, a literal
collage of painting and stories reaching halfway up the wall, but still, as a
pastor, having become numb to so many people's tribulations, I felt more
uncomfortable than I did grieved.
Finally, I came to one of Bansky’s
works. High above the others two cherubs pulled at a crack in the concrete, as
if to try to separate it. While staring up, from behind me, I heard music
playing O Little Town of Bethlehem and I tried to place the
tune and the lyrics began to come,
O little town of Bethlehem,
How still we see thee lie!
Its lullaby tune disarmed and
unhinged the wall in me, as if cherubs were pulling me apart tears began to
pour out as I recited the verse…
Above thy deep and dreamless sleep
The silent stars go by.
How, how in this place, where Jesus
was born, was there still no peace? Was that not the promise? If peace could
come anywhere, why was it not here, in this little town of Bethlehem, this town
I’d imagined since childhood as quiet, and dark and serene.
Yet in thy dark streets shineth
The everlasting Light;
The song, playing from Banky’s
hotel, felt like a crude joke. He got me, here I was, cognizant of the irony. I
was exactly for whom that song was intended, the Christian Pilgrim walking
along the wall, the ignorant tourist, coming to take it all in. The pastor, who
would go home and preach it on Christmas.
And so here I am, and it’s hard to
know what to do about a text as beloved as the birth of Jesus, and a place as
fraught as Israel/Palestine today. But our Christian story has no bearing, if
the birth of our Lord cannot speak to our corporate sin of violence and its
tragedy for all people. There is no point to the Prince of Peace, if the
nativity is merely a bedtime story, and O Little Town of Bethlehem, a
lullaby.
The reason Mary and Joseph are traveling at all, is by decree of an opposing Emperor. This is how the Jesus story starts out, and this birth narrative will end with Mary and Joseph and the baby fleeing to Egypt because King Herod wants to commit genocide against the Jews. This Bible story is no better, and perhaps worse than the realities of today. And in that, lies its true bearing.
The images on the Bethlehem wall
were two-fold, they were lament and they were hope. Moreover, it was striking
how many depicted peace and how few, how very few, encouraged violence. It
seems to me, if one is going to paint a mural on a wall, that act - in and of
itself, bears hope. In the same way, to tell this biblical story, year after
year, is also an act of hope. Moreover, each uses images of children to contrast a
hopeless situation. How different is a ponytailed girl with a watering can
growing flowers through barbed-wire, than a baby born in a manger, welcomed by
strangers from foreign lands. None, none at all. No different at all.
And this, is the hope that was born
that day, in the city of David. This is hope that meets us at the wall - and
sings,
The hopes and fears of all the years
Are met in thee tonight.
This hope meets us, and in that
meeting, the Savior is born.
