1.
All this week, all this month,
Jacob and Esau have taken their fraternal feud to places like Gaza and
Bethlehem, neighborhoods in East Jerusalem and Nazareth. They
rage at one another in the streets. They
kidnap one another’s children. Even
hospitals and mosques are target practice for sophisticated missiles paid for
by you and me. Since Tuesday, 174
Palestinians have been killed in Gaza alone.
And our friends at the “Jewish Voice for Peace” tell us that fully a
third are children. With names and
families and dreams. As most of you
know, I spent seven weeks in the region this spring and one particularly
poignant week with a Palestinian family in Nazareth. I want to share some of that experience with
you this morning and why it is that family’s become so important to me.
But first: let’s look at the old,
old story of Jacob and Esau and what it tells us about human conflict and the
possibilities of reconciliation. Because
there’s some very provocative material here.
And it speaks to both our frustration and our calling in a world of
unimaginable violence and cruelty. How
do we maintain hope? How do we reach for
a better world when hatred rages all around us?
2.
So, if the story of Jacob and Esau,
the twin sons of Rebekah and Isaac, is something like a three-act play, what
we’ve got this morning is the opening act.
And we see, in this opening act, that even in the womb these two
brothers are wrestling for control of their future, struggling for an upper
hand in the family. It’s interesting, I
think, that the bible is not terribly judgmental about all this. It seems to be the way it is and the way it
has to be.
So God says to Rebekah: “Two
nations are in your womb, and two peoples born of you shall be divided.” Now maybe the bible takes all this for
granted, but don’t you find it a little odd?
Maybe even a little cruel? That,
even as God answers this couple’s prayer, their simple prayer for a child, just
a child, God seems at the same time to stitch conflict into the fabric of this
family’s life. “The one shall be
stronger than the other, the elder shall serve the younger.” Does it have to be this way? Are Jacob and Esau forever destined for enmity
and distrust? Is what we’re seeing in
Jerusalem and Gaza this week simply the way things have to be?
This God—the biblical God—is a mystery, an enigma, with a curious feel for grace and providence. Blessing and crisis in the same breath. Birthing and feuding in the same womb. Brothers competing for love and attention. Parents playing favorites. God stitching conflict into the fabric of family life. This first act in the drama of Jacob and Esau is painful to watch, exasperating, and so very familiar.
Because it’s the way it is: for Rebekah and Isaac, and for Jacob and Esau, and for so many biblical families, from beginning to end. It’s the way it is, for Palestinians and Jews in the Middle East this week, for Protestants and Catholics in Belfast and Boston, for immigrants crossing Mexican deserts and so-called natives anxious to keep them out. It’s the way it is for brothers and sisters of the same parents, of the same landscapes, across generations and continents. For all the beauty in us, for all the creativity in the human heart, we are twin sons of the same mother, wrestling for control, struggling for an upper hand. Jacob’s story and Esau’s story is our story.
And in the text Rebekah senses the painful contradiction implicit in the lovely promise of these twin sons. Even in pregnancy she senses it. And God bless Rebekah for that. She asks the question mothers all over the Middle East are asking this morning, mothers all over Guatemala and El Salvador and Honduras are asking: Why? Why must Jacob and Esau claw at one another and bully one another? Why must brothers, twin brothers, deceive one another and defy one another and torment one another so mercilessly?
And before we have time enough even
to contemplate God’s answer, the twins are born. Esau comes out all red and hairy, and Jacob
comes out yanking on his brother’s heel.
Did you know that’s what Jacob’s name itself really means? “Yanking on his brother’s heel.” Jacob.
“Yanking on his brother’s heel.” There’s a bit of Jacob in every one of
us, if we’re honest. There’s something
of Jacob and Esau in every human family, every human community, every nation on
the planet. And again, the bible’s not
terribly judgmental around this. It
seems to be stitched into the fabric of family life. It seems to be the way our families do their
business. Wrestling for control and
struggling for an upper hand. Needless
to say, the God of Genesis is a mystery and an enigma. And, like Rebekah, we’re left to wonder why.
3.
Now this is just the first act, the first of the three. In the second act, we’ll find Jacob deceiving Esau yet again and then finding himself dreadfully estranged from his older, and hairier, brother. The two are separated by time and distrust, fearing one another from a distance. In the third act, Jacob ventures home again, working out his confession, wrestling with angels in advance, and finally coming to Esau in great humility and contrition. As painful as this story is, Jacob and Esau offer us some hope in the end. For just as conflict is part of our human makeup, just as we’re born to ‘yank’ on one another’s heels, so too is reconciliation in our blood. We have it in us to say ‘I’m sorry.’ We have it in us to reach out in forgiveness and love. We have it in us to reconcile with the brother or sister we gave up on long ago.
And this leads me back to Nazareth and my week with the Manasra family a month ago. For hundreds and hundreds of years, right up through 1948 and the Israeli War for Independence, the Manasra family lived in the Palestinian village of Ein Door. They lived in simple homes on a wooded hillside. They cultivated fruit trees of every imaginable variety. And they farmed the fertile fields of the valley below. If you need an image in your mind, think Sonoma County. Fruit trees and fields and vineyards. The Galilee is a lot like Sonoma County.
During my visit last month, my good
friends Ghassan and Abed Al Salaam took me out to this ancestral land. They wanted me to feel it beneath my feet, to
see it with my eyes. It was a sweet and
tender afternoon. No one lives there
anymore. Ein Door is no more. But the land’s often defended, just the same,
by armed Israeli guards. Making it clear
that no one’s coming back.
And there were tears in Ghassan’s
eyes that day, as he pointed to the broken foundations of Palestinian homes. To the footpaths his father and grandfather and
great-grandfather once roamed as children.
In 1948, the Manasras were evicted from Ein Door, from their lands, with
hundreds of thousands of others, and sent into permanent exile. Most of the Manasras fled to Jordan, some to
Nazareth. But all of them, all of
them long to this day to return to the land of their soul. To the fruit trees they’ve always loved. To the sacred rhythm of seed-time and harvest,
a rhythm bound to their DNA. I asked
Ghassan that question later that day. If
he imagined returning with his family to Ein Door, to the fields there. His tears came fast and flowed freely. He simply nodded. There were no words. Yes.
Yes. Yes.
What’s always moved me in this
family is the absence of all bitterness.
In their faith, in their profoundly Muslim faith, they find courage and
kindness and love so deep—that there is no room for bitterness. They weep for all the violence. They worry very much about their future. But they love one another and love all
humanity with a kind of courage that humbles me. There are fifteen of them living together now
in the three-story-home in Nazareth. And
I’ve rarely experienced so much love, so much happiness under a single
roof. Even in what amounts to a kind of
warzone. There is no bitterness there.
Just on Friday, Abed’s
nineteen-year-old brother Hashem narrowly escaped a kidnapping attempt just
down the street. If any of you saw the
little World Cup video I posted on Facebook last week, Hashem’s the fan leaping
for joy, screeching with glee when a penalty kick finds the back of the
net.
He’s a great kid; he finished first
in his high school class; and he’s aiming for college and medical school. But on Friday, angry Jewish militants,
cruising the neighborhood in a car with tinted windows, backed him into an
alley. And Hashem thankfully knew the
neighborhood better than they; and thankfully he kept his wits about him, so
that he was able to duck into a friend’s apartment and out of sight. But this is the climate these days in Israel,
and in Palestine; such is the enmity between Jacob and Esau, with bombs and
recrimination falling all over the place.
The Manasras are surrounded by danger.
Jacob and Esau yanking on one another’s heels. Kidnapping one another’s kids.
Just the same, Ghassan and Abed
reach out to Israeli Jews for prayer and dialogue and collaboration around all
kinds of shared concerns. Ghassan’s
writing a book with two Jewish psychologists on the resources of faith in the
midst of conflict. And the entire family
practices a kind of relentless loving—a relentlessness that extends hospitality
to neighbors and adversaries, Jews and Christian and Muslims alike. Ghassan doesn’t understand why his family
can’t return to their beloved and ancestral land. And he cringes when armed Israeli guards
prevent even a visit. But he prays for
them just the same. He looks on them
with love and treats them as brothers. I
asked Abed—who’s twenty-three and wise beyond his years—how he did all
this. Why he stuck with his dream for
peace through so much conflict and mayhem.
“My name,” he said. “Abed Al
Salaam. It means the Slave of
Peace. I am here to be a slave for
peace. I am on this earth to make peace
among my brothers.” It was that kind of
week for me. I found myself taking Abed’s
hand and saying, “I want to be a slave of peace too. I want to be a slave of peace just like you.”
4.
In that third act of the Jacob and Esau drama, Jacob turns toward home after years and years of self-imposed exile. He wrestles with his conscience, with the choices he’s made in the past, with the conflict in which he’s been a part. But he refuses to let the past define or limit the future. He longs for some kind of reunion, some kind of reconciliation with Esau. Maybe you remember the story, at just that point, of Jacob wrestling with a strange being through the night. How Jacob wrestles all night long with some kind of angel, some kind of calling—and how he realizes only in the morning that he’s been wrestling and dancing and contending with God.
In that third act, God gives Jacob
a new name: Israel. Israel meaning ‘one
who contends or strives with God and humans.’
And this is, I think, an immensely hopeful thing. This is a sign that even as conflict is all
around us and even inside us, we are capable of amazing change. We are capable too of forgiveness. We are capable too of reconciliation. Estrangement is familiar and painful, but
it’s not our destiny. We have it in us
to make peace.
Now this isn’t an easy thing, and
Jacob (or Israel) is even wounded in the process. But his night of struggle opens up a whole
new future: and reconciliation with the brother he’s always loved, but not so
convincingly. Jacob and Esau embrace at
last.
5.
5.
I've known Ghassan Manasra and his family for seven years now. In many ways, you all introduced him to me. And I’ve made other friends in Palestine and in Israel whose lives and families touch my faith in a very intimate and very powerful way. An Israeli family I visited outside of Tel Aviv has spent most of the last two weeks in a bomb shelter, anxiously avoiding the bombs launched daily from Gaza toward Israel itself.
I feel today, in the summer of
2014, that I’m called to do something more, maybe even something more political
in support of their shared dreams for peace.
Sitting still while my tax dollars fund violence and mayhem, while bombs
we’ve paid for target mosques and hospitals: it just doesn’t sit right. And there’s a kind of urgency in the Holy
Land that demands principled, coordinated action.
So I’ve decided to join a network of UCC activists, across this country, who are advocating for our denomination’s
participation in a coordinated program of boycott and divestment. You’re probably aware that our Presbyterian
friends voted through a series of resolutions this summer—aimed at divesting
Presbyterian investments from companies profiting from the illegal Israeli
occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
Those resolutions drew a very swift
and angry reaction from the Israeli right wing—which doesn’t want any pressure
and would happily continue occupying and disenfranchising Palestinian
society. I think that reaction’s an
important sign that nonviolent divestment could create conditions for
change. And I’d like to see the United
Church of Christ follow the Presbyterians lead and join a growing international
movement aimed at putting pressure on Israel in much the same way we pressured
South Africa and its Apartheid regime thirty years ago. This seems like principled nonviolence to me,
a reasonable strategy consistent with the gospel we practice and the values we
embrace.
I want you to know all this—because it may well be a struggle for me. I have Jewish friends—faithful Jewish friends—who have long resisted a strategy around boycott and divestment as hurtful to the Israeli cause. And I love these friends. I hear their concern and their commitment and their profound passion for a healthy and stable Israel. I share that passion. And the last thing I want to do is compromise these friendships and risk the dynamic energies I find in our collaboration.
But sometimes, like Jacob, we have
to struggle for the future. Sometimes,
like Jacob, we have to risk a new approach, a new dream, a reconciling
strategy. That’s what I’m hearing in the
text this week. I’m hearing an invitation
to courage and nonviolence. I’m hearing
an invitation to new engagement and new initiative. It may well mean striving in new ways with
God and with my friends. It probably
will mean long, long conversations, deep into the night. And it’ll probably mean some tears along the
way, and some agony between friends, and even a bruised hip or two.
But the promise here, the promise
in the bible, is that we who strive with God will know God’s blessing. The promise here, the promise in the church,
is that we who call ourselves “Slaves for Peace” will sow seeds of peace for
all the world to harvest.
I hope that you too will strive
with God. In whatever ways you can. In whatever ways you have to. I hope that you too will call yourself a
“Slave for Peace.” Whatever that may
mean to you. And let’s do it together
for the children: for the children of Gaza and Jerusalem, for the children of
Mexico and Arizona, for the children we know and the children we don’t. Amen.
