Marlin & Sally in Jerusalem

Children of the West Bank

30 + kindergarten children in a one room school.  Beautiful.

The eyes have it!

You have to love this look.

Who are you?

This dad wants for his daughters exactly what you want for yours.  The difference between him and you is that you have options.

Pictures of Poverty

(All these picture were taken with the permission of the persons in them.)

I took this picture in a village called Fahma Igdida, meaning New Fahma.  Fahma is Arabic for charcoal.  The woman in the background is pregnant with her 10th child -- six have survived.

The people of this village are refugees from villages around Gaza.  In 1948 they were put out of their homes and ended up in a camp inside of Gaza.  In 1968, after the Six Day War in 1967, they came to this place and began life here as best they could.  An Israeli army base was established alongside of their village.  Because the army was there for protection, Palestinian collaborators with Israel were transported to live in this village with the folks from Gaza.  Of course, the village became associated with those who helped Israel in the Six Day War.  Sometime later, the army left this base and with them the collaborators left as well.  However, the stigma of treason stayed with the village.

Abu Machi, the head of the council says that they have worked very hard to establish good relations with their neighbors and to repair the name of the village.  He believes they have succeeded it this.

This is the youngest daughter of the woman pictured above.  She is a little over 1 year old.  She is not well.  Of course, there is not adequate medical care for her.  This is not acceptable!  You may wonder why one of the symtoms of poverty is large families.  I'll not pretend to know the answer, but one thing Mahmud, the father said may help.  He said, "Our children are our hope."  I hope this child lives.

Fifty-six people live in these two homes.

Sores on 16-year-old Mustafa's legs, the result of no water for bathing.  Every two days, there is no water to Fahma Igdida.

Who is to blame for this?  There is enough blame to go around.  What there is not enough of is compassion.

Hell

Hassan is 53 years old and lives and works in Hell.  That’s the description given by one of my traveling companions, a BBC Internet Journalist, on this excursion deep into the heart of the West Bank, Palestine.

“What is your life like?” Hassan was asked.

“My life is like death,” was his whispered reply.

Hassan works in the charcoal trade.  Every day he stands atop a pile of burning straw and fruit tree wood and tends the fire that turns the sweet wood into charcoal that is then shipped into the markets of Israel and the Occupied Territories to be used to grill the favored meat of the region – lamb, chicken and veal. This charcoal is highly valued here, and is used by restaurants, as well as street chefs and backyard barbequing dads.

To produce this charcoal, Hassan, and hundreds like him, are killing themselves.  The cancer rate among the people of this region, the villages of Ya ‘bad, is 25% higher than other villages in the area.  Among those who work around the sites where the charcoal is made, the cancer rate has to be much higher.  Hassan will die younger than he should, and that’s the price he pays to feed his family.  His life is death, so that he can help his wife and daughters live!  It is a high price to pay, but Hassan pays it because he feels he has no other choice.  Unemployment in the villages of Ya ‘bad is at 35 to 40%.

Ya ‘bad is close to Jenin, which is the Biblical site of Dothan, the place where Joseph’s brothers sold him into slavery.  Ironic, I think, as Hassan and thousands like him live in a kind of slavery to the Israeli Occupation.  They cannot travel freely.  They do not have choices in the kind of work they can do.  They do whatever they can to feed their families, and to have some kind of work that gives them the dignity of earning their own bread, something most Palestinian men, like most all men, and women too of course, long to do – earn your own bread, feed your own family.  Only the “work shy” want handouts, and most of the Palestinians I have met are not “work shy.”

This occupation must end.  It must.  For the sake of men like Hassan, but more than that for the next generation who deserve better choices than their parents and grandparents are given – this occupation must end.  During the summer months, children as young as 10 and 12 come to the charcoal pits to earn a few shekels to bring back to their families.

This occupation must end.  It must.  For the sake of those who use the charcoal that Hassan gives his life to produce, or who eat the meat cooked over these death-shadowed coals – this occupation must end.  It is tainted meat we eat, and no Rabbi’s kosher blessings can make pure that which is made impure by reason of oppression.

Tonight, at 45 minutes before sunset, the celebrations of Yom Kippur will begin.  Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, is the highest of the Jewish holy days.  Tons of lamb, and other meats, will be cooked over charcoal from the pits of Ya ‘bad.  The meat will taste sweet in the mouths of those who eat, but it will be a silent testament against the unjust treatment of those enslaved by the ongoing occupation of the Palestinian people – and it will not satisfy the hunger for God so evident in so many of Israel’s young.

Only an end to the occupation will begin a true Day of Atonement for all the people of this region.

Biting Back

“When you were in the States, did you own a dog?"

“Yes.”

“Did you teach it to bite?”

“No, of course not.”  (Well, there was Rusty, the Chihuahua, but I was just a kid.)

“But if you taught your dog to bite, what then?”

“The dog would bite.”

“Here, we teach our children to bite.”

He is a thirty-year-old shopkeeper in the Old City of Jerusalem.  He sports a neatly trimmed goatee that already has specks of gray in the mustache.  He speaks English perfectly, and no wonder, he spent four years at the University of Michigan.  (Our conversation began because he has a Michigan banner in the back of his shop.) He is a Palestinian Christian.  He is pretty much without any hope of any change any time soon.  He has two daughters that he is trying to teach not to bite.

“So what has to happen?” I ask him.

“Many things have to happen,” he said.  “Many,” he said it again, quietly, not quite under his breath.

I waited.

“Our children are not dogs,” he finally said.  “Maybe they will choose not to bite.  And maybe their children will make the same choice.  Maybe a leader will come out of the Jewish world, and another out of the Muslim world, and still another out of the Christian world, and they will lead us to peace.”

We stood in silence.

“Maybe the Wolverines will win a game this season.”

He looked at me like I had just farted in church.  Then he started to laugh. “I like you,” he said.

“I grow on people,” I responded.

“I’ll bet you do,” and we left it at that and talked about something else.

Last week Monday, three home-made rockets fired from Gaza by the Islamic Jihad militants, landed in Sderot, a small Israeli town near the Gaza Strip.  The rockets were fired on the second day of children going back to school.  They were timed to land as the children were walking to school, when they were least protected. The militants who fired the rockets declared them to be pay-back against Israel for the deaths of a number of children killed in Israeli air strikes the previous week.

You bite.  I bite you back.  Who bit first?  Who remembers?  Who cares, really?  It is a dogfight, and neither side feels they can stop biting and still win.  And, of course, winning is everything.  Just ask Lloyd Carr (Michigan coach).

As I was leaving the shop to go over to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre (Church of the Resurrection for locals), he said, “I’d tell you that Jesus is the solution, but you already know this, right?”

“Yeah,” I say.

“I wonder what that means,” he said.

“I don’t know,” I say.

“Right,” he responds.

He nods.  I nod back.  He turns to go into his shop.  I walk down the narrow street toward the Church that marks the spot where God pulled off the most marvelous, impossible, unexpected victory in all of human history.  I walk trough the huge wooden doors, stop, smile and quietly say my confessional statement for the day:  “If God could do this ….”

Prayer Beads

It’s Thursday afternoon – late – and I’m walking in the marketplace looking for fresh bread and a few vegetables.  The place is filled with Muslim men and women doing last minute shopping for tomorrow’s day of prayer.  A small boy is sitting on an orange milk crate playing with a set of Muslim Prayer Beads, the Masabha.  The Masabha is made up of three sets of thirty-three beads and one large one making one hundred in total, or just thirty-three beads with two small oval beads to set off each set of eleven beads. The Masabha the little boy is holding is of the smaller variety, is made of olive wood and is worn down from use. (The ninety-nine beads are used to say the ninety-nine names for God (Allah) during prayer. Muslims consider that repeating Allah’s name over and over brings them closer to Allah. They would call Allah by names such as; the Wise, the Compassionate, the Merciful, the Good or the Eternal. Sometimes Muslims recite the same few favored names over and over again.)

The boy is holding them, shaking them in order to hear them rattle.  His pale blue eyes stop me in mid stride.  I smile down at him.  He holds out the prayer beads as an offering of friendship to a peer.  I take this as a compliment and am immediately grateful to be pulled into his world – a world smaller and simpler than mine.  A world in which the lines are only drawn between those who smile at you and those who don’t even notice you sitting there, like a god on his throne.  As I kneel down to take this offering from his tiny hand, I am aware that several dozen pair of eyes are watching me, among them those of this boy’s father or grandfather to whom these beads belong.  Collectively, this crowd of people draws in and holds its breath.  I look down at the beads in my hand and study them for a moment.  I can see exactly the place where thumb has worn down the wood.  I can smell the scent of the person who has prayed them down so. 

I thank the boy as one thanks a one-year-old, and give his gift back to him, the giver.  As the child takes the beads back, the people in the crowd all exhale at once; I can hear it.

“Do you want to keep them?”  The man asking is a man about my age.  He is dressed in the white robe of a religious man, with a cream-colored skullcap on his head.  I wonder if he is an Imam, but I don’t ask him that question.

“Are they yours?” I ask, nodding toward the beads.

“They belonged to my grandfather.”

“And you’d give them to me?”

“No,” he said, his smile imperceptible, the corners of his month turning slightly upward.  Nodding toward the boy, he added, “But he would.”

“Yes,” I say, nodding my head and smiling his smile back at him – imperceptible exchange of grace.

He waits.

I ponder what to do. I pray, I think, I pray.  “One day he would regret giving them to me, I think.”

“Yes,” he said, “I think so too.”

With that, he reaches out a hand; we shake and I walk on.

“Hey,” he calls out.

I stop, turn around, and see him walking toward me.  In his hand is another set of prayer beads.  Someone from the crowd must have gone into a nearby shop and brought them out to him.  He holds them out to me, and as I look from the beads to his eyes, I see his grandson standing there in front of me, and I am weak in the knees.

I reach out to take them.  “Okay,” I say.  “Okay.  Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,"  he says.

I look around at the crowd.  There must be a hundred or more people standing and watching this little drama enfold.  I wonder if anyone in this crowd knows who I am.  I wonder if, after I walk on, someone will tell this granddad who I am.  I wonder who I am.  I wonder what he’s thinking right now.  I wonder if God is somewhere in the crowd, somewhere in the little boy, somewhere in the little boy’s grandfather, somewhere in me, in you, in this world somewhere and doing something good in this somewhere where God is – and is this one of those good things that God is doing?  Is a bridge being built – a flimsy little bridge?  Maybe.  Maybe not.  Maybe this is nothing.  Certainly this is not much more than an interesting story.

I don’t know the answers to all the questions that are arising around “them” and “us.”  But I think “us” being with “them” might mean that God is with “them and us” too.  That’s what I think.  But what do I know?  Not much, actually, and less and less every day.  But I do know this: That little boy was sure generous, wasn’t he?  Maybe I’ll say a prayer for him tonight.  Better yet, maybe he’ll say one for me.

Friday Prayers

Deut. 30:15-20

15 See, I have set before you today life and prosperity, death and adversity. 16If you obey the commandments of the Lord your God that I am commanding you today, by loving the Lord your God, walking in his ways, and observing his commandments, decrees, and ordinances, then you shall live and become numerous, and the Lord your God will bless you in the land that you are entering to possess. 17But if your heart turns away and you do not hear, but are led astray to bow down to other gods and serve them, 18I declare to you today that you shall perish; you shall not live long in the land that you are crossing the Jordan to enter and possess. 19I call heaven and earth to witness against you today that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you and your descendants may live, 20loving the Lord your God, obeying him, and holding fast to him; for that means life to you and length of days, so that you may live in the land that the Lord swore to give to your ancestors, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob.

Philemon 4-7

4 When I remember you in my prayers, I always thank my God 5because I hear of your love for all the saints and your faith towards the Lord Jesus. 6I pray that the sharing of your faith may become effective when you perceive all the good that we may do for Christ. 7I have indeed received much joy and encouragement from your love, because the hearts of the saints have been refreshed through you, my brother.

Luke 14:25-33

The Cost of Discipleship

25 Now large crowds were traveling with him (Jesus); and he turned and said to them, 26‘Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple. 27Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple. 28For which of you, intending to build a tower, does not first sit down and estimate the cost, to see whether he has enough to complete it? 29Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who see it will begin to ridicule him, 30saying, “This fellow began to build and was not able to finish.” 31Or what king, going out to wage war against another king, will not sit down first and consider whether he is able with ten thousand to oppose the one who comes against him with twenty thousand? 32If he cannot, then, while the other is still far away, he sends a delegation and asks for the terms of peace. 33So therefore, none of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions.

Psalm 1

1Happy are those
   who do not follow the advice of the wicked,
or take the path that sinners tread,
   or sit in the seat of scoffers;
2but their delight is in the law of the Lord,
   and on his law they meditate day and night.
3They are like trees
   planted by streams of water,
which yield their fruit in its season,
   and their leaves do not wither.
In all that they do, they prosper.

4The wicked are not so,
   but are like chaff that the wind drives away.
5Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment,
   nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous;
6for the Lord watches over the way of the righteous,
   but the way of the wicked will perish.

Let us pray:

Almighty God, hear our prayer.

•    We choose to love you; please help us choose to love our neighbor too.
•    We choose to obey you; please choose to forgive us when we do not.
•    We choose to follow you; please leave clear tracks.
•    We choose to daily pick up a bloody cross; please choose to come share the burden.
•    We choose to cling to you; please choose never to let loose of us.
•    We choose to love all the saints; please choose to give us power to love all the sinners too.
•    We choose faith; deliver us from fear.
•    We choose to do the good; help us to recognize the good that others do as well.
•    We choose to count the cost; on the day that we realize that we did not set the figure high enough, please give us strength to persevere.
•    We choose to finish that which is begun in us; please blind us from seeing too far ahead.
•    We choose to delight in your word, meditate on your word; make us like the tree planted above an aqua fore.
•    We choose life; kill in us any way of death.
•    We choose Jesus.

Amen!

Christianity Today

The magazine, Christianity Today, gets it.  They really do.  I appreciate the many articles that CT has published on the matter of justice and peace for this region of the world -- the Land of The HOLY ONE.  CT understands that the conflict here is not "too political" for the church, but rather deeply theological and as relevant to Christians as any other issue we face, including, and especially, those issues we label as "family value" matters.  The church family value of "care for the widow, the orphan and the alien" -- the powerless, the vulnerable, and the voiceless -- is foundational to our faith tradition, and CT gets it, and gets it right!

Please take the time -- it won't take more than 5 to 7 minutes -- to read this article in today's online edition of Christianity Today.  Please ... For the love of Israel.

Thanks!  And thanks for listening to voices like mine and those like it.

Mealtime Lessons

(The following is a brief excerpt for Sunday's sermon at the Lutheran Church of the Redeemer, English Speaking Congregation.  Click Download "Mealtime Lessons." to eat the whole thing!)

"And you see the lesson, right?  The blemished may not be welcome in the inner courts of the Temple, but they ought to be welcome at your table.  In fact, they should be your honored guests.   And why should they be honored guests?  They can’t pay you back.  You gain nothing from them because they have nothing to give.  They are not worthy to come to your table.  And they will probably embarrass you as well.  Their table manners will leave a lot left to be desired.  And they will eat every morsel you put before them, and they will want more.  Let’s not romanticize what Jesus is asking of us – yes, us.  The needy are just that, needy, needy, needy.  There is nothing glamorous about working with the needy.  You may not even receive thanks from the needy. But the needy might teach you a thing or two about humility, if you are humble enough to learn from the needy.  The needy know they are needy, and you (we) don’t.  That’s an important lesson to learn, right?  And, as we soon approach this, the Lord’s Table, we ought to remember that we come by gracious invitation.  We are standing in the back, and Jesus invites us to come forward.

What a lesson, huh?  And what good news as well."

A FIND!

One child follows mother
Without looking
No questions
No concerns … save
Staying in step.

Eyes ahead
Hand holding a part
Of the Hijab
That hides the flesh
Of the one who birthed
Her life.

Another child
Smaller, yet not by much
Same mom
Same eyes
Except these eyes
Wander
And wonder
And watch.

She lingers
Mom watches
And waits
“Stay by me!”
“Stay by me!”

Mother weighs
Worries … about
Her little wandering
Wonderer.

She waits too
This little one
Who dreams
... Awake
... Or not.

Upon whom
Does she wait?

What happens to her
This little wondering
Wanderer?

Who is she?
This tiny watcher ...

She is a poet
Who buries her poems.

She hides herself …
Within herself
And keeps her wonderings
To herself.

The little poet learns
To keep up
Yet longs
To linger back
... Just a step
... A small step
Or maybe two.

What will become
Of her Spirit
... Her soul
... Her self?

She’ll lose herself
To become her
Sister’s self.
And the loss
Will be
For all of us
To lose.

Seek her
Spirit of God
Find her
Finally
And free her
Fully.

She is a poet
And a prophet too.

She is
A FIND!
To fine
To lose.