To Be Torn in Two
Image Credit: Dan Knight
At its June 2023 Special Convention, delegates passed a Resolution on Peace and Justice in Palestine and Israel. The resolution reaffirmed the commitment "of our churches to the pursuit of peace with justice for all in Palestine and Israel." As part of that commitment the resolution encourages churches to
"provide safe spaces in Canada for conversation and collaboration in pursuing truth . . . and to pursue possibilities for greater interaction with Palestinian Christians and those of the Muslim and Jewish faith who see a just peace in the region."
Guided by this resolution which encourages our Church to take concrete steps to live out the gospel values of compassion justice and peace, Gloria Dei invited Shadia Qubti, a Palestinian Christian and scholar to speak to us about the struggles Palestinians face living under occupation.
In preparation for Shadia's visit Pastor Vida wrote the following letter to the congregation. You can also download the letter as pdf.
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January 16, 2025
Dear members of Gloria Dei,
I write this in the first hours following the announcement of the first phase of a Hamas-Israel ceasefire which will see the release of a significant number of hostages as well political prisoners. Together with people of goodwill across the world I am relieved that the ordeal of the hostages and their families as well as the unfathomable suffering of the people of Gaza after a fifteen-month long campaign of genocidal violence will soon come to end (contingent on ratification by the Israeli Knesset). However, this moment while hopeful is also a fragile one. A long journey, fraught with much uncertainty, still lies ahead. The leadership of both Israel and the Palestinian people will have to put their peoples' interest ahead of their own before a just and lasting peace is achieved for both Israel and Palestine.
When news of Hamas' brutal attacks broke on October 7, 2023 I was stunned and appalled, as we all were, at the unspeakable atrocities and criminal acts. I imagined the terror and dread that Israelis must be feeling and waited with unease, for the military response that I knew would come as the Israeli state exercised its right to self defense. However, the scale of the bombing campaign which in the first few weeks of the war dropped 25,000 tons of bombs (equivalent to two nuclear bombs), the targeting of schools, hospitals and designated safe areas on a population with no safe places to flee, the blocking of supplies of food, water, fuel and other necessities amounted to collective punishment and not self-defence. As Israel's relentless bombing campaign and indiscriminate shooting of civilians and children continued, human rights organizations, international law experts and scholars of genocide began to investigate whether Israel was committing genocide. In addition to the ruling by the International Court of Justice that there were plausible grounds that Israel's actions in Gaza could amount to genocide, last December, Amnesty International also concluded that Israel was indeed committing genocide against the Palestinian people. Against these judgements, "Israel has repeatedly argued that its actions in Gaza are lawful and can be justified by its military goal to eradicate Hamas." But as human rights and international law practitioners point out:
Self-defense is not an excuse to commit genocide. Self-defense must conform to international humanitarian law, which requires an armed force to meet the criteria of necessity, proportionality, and distinction. Israel’s actions fail the tests of humanitarian law.
As a pastor, beginning first with Russia's full-scale illegal invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and then followed by the Israel-Hamas war, I have struggled in discerning how much emphasis of these conflicts and their attendant moral questions to place in my sermons and in the design of our Sunday liturgies. I know that for some, any emphasis is too much—the church should stay clear of any political discourse and focus on our personal relationship with God. But the faith our God calls us into is not a private or exclusive faith. The God we worship and pray to commands us to love our neighbor. Indeed, our professed love of God is proven by love for our neighbor (1 John 4:20). Yes, that means supporting food pantries, and donating to humanitarian aid, but it is not limited to acts of charity. In our Affirmation of Baptism (ELW, p. 236) we make promises to be faithful to God and the gospel by attending to the Scriptures and prayer, but it doesn't stop there. We also promise to follow the example of Jesus to "strive for justice and peace in all the earth." How do we understand this promise we make? In the gospel of Luke, Jesus inaugurates his ministry by quoting from Isaiah . . .that the Spirit of the Lord has anointed and sent him "to proclaim freedom for the prisoners, to recover sight for the blind and to release the oppressed." He is not simply talking about freeing people from the oppression of personal sins, but freeing people from systems of sin that dehumanize and de-spirit them.
As in the days when Jesus walked the roads controlled by an occupying army. . .as in the days when Indigenous children were torn from their mothers' arms by agents of the state. . .as in the days when a Jewish girl by the name of Anne Frank hid from the Gestapo behind a bookcase in her secret annex in order to escape the gas chambers. . .and down to our own days where minority people like the Uyghurs of China get detained to suffer the indignities of re-education camps, and Ukrainians are imprisoned and tortured for simply being Ukrainian, and Palestinian children are arrested and kept in detention for months and even years simply for the crime of throwing rocks at soldiers of an occupying army, or for no crime at all . . .
. . .As in all these days and times and places, the systems of sin Jesus came to release people from include oppressive systems of government and political regimes that are architects of repression and sponsors of state terror, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. Jesus' way of overturning these oppressive systems is not by military conquest but through love for all people, including our enemies, and in solidarity with the oppressed.
I was struck by how the words of a Eucharistic prayer captures this solidarity with the oppressed:
In the fullness of time,
you sent your chosen servant to peach good news to the afflicted,
to break bread with the outcast and despised.
--Eucharistic prayer VIII, ELW, p. 67)
Who are today's outcast and despised? Where are today's outcast and despised? To be faithful to our baptismal covenant, to strive for justice and peace entails advocacy on behalf of those suffering human rights violations and engaging with those who have influence and power to bring more justice and peace into the world. When the church speaks out on human rights violations it is not being partisan. It is aligning itself with humanity and those suffering among us.
Canadian author and physician Gabor Mate, who is Jewish and a Holocaust survivor, said this in answer to the question, "Why is it important to support Palestinians?"
It's important if you care about justice, it's important if you care about truth. It's important if you care about the emotional, spiritual, physical well-being of all people around the world, including the Jewish people. It is not a question of taking sides, it's a question of being concerned with the fate of humanity. And Palestine right now is a focal point. It's a focus for all that is troubling and threatening humanity. So, in supporting Palestinian rights one is supporting human rights for everybody around the world.
When we hear Gabor Mate's words through the lens of Luke's gospel, in supporting Palestinians' human rights, we are striving for that reign of justice and peace - which Jesus' ministry inaugurated.
The former Rector of the Tantur Ecumenical Institute in Jerusalem in the 1980s - the late Donald Nicholl offered this profound observation from his time in Israel and Palestine when commenting on a Christian response amidst the conflict. This is what he said:
The task of the Christian is not to be neutral—but to be torn in two.
To be torn in two, and I would add, to also have the courage to speak up about serious moral issues. To speak and act in the public square in ways that are consistent with the theology and ethics of our faith.
We are a small congregation, with not a lot of political capital or social influence. What can we do that can make a difference?
In his sermon following the election of Donald Trump and titled "In Difficult Times We Find Out What Kind of Christians We Are," Michael Wolf, pastor of Lake Street Church in Illinois, pointed out that:
Scripture tells us that it is not the big things that actually count to God: “Whoever gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones in the name of a disciple — truly I tell you, none of these will lose their reward” (Matthew 10:42).
He astutely observes that to give a cup of water to a little one is to see their humanity.
According to the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, we know God — the Sacred — when we encounter the face of the other. He wrote:
The face is the other who asks me not to let him die alone,
as if to do so were to become an accomplice in his death.
Beloved Ones of God, the Palestinian people and our Palestinian Christian siblings are asking us to see them and not let them die alone. They are asking us to see them, even as the first tentative steps toward a permanent ceasefire are being taken. We're never too small or too old to recognize our common humanity or to recognize the suffering and pain of another as if it were our own.
It is in this spirit that I ask you to join together in welcoming Shadia Qubti to our learning forum this Sunday as she tells us her story of what it means to live as a Palestinian Christian in the world today and in the context of the Palestinian struggle for freedom and self-determination.
Yours in Christ,
Pastor Vida