Faith is not what we believe. Thats belief. Rather faith is the willingness to take a risk to act on what we say we believe. Thats faith.

So if communities become increasingly risk averse there is no way they can be communities of faith, regardless of what they say they believe.

Abraham is the father of the faith (in fact the father of three faiths) because he was willing to follow the call of God even though he didn’t know where he was going, was willing to provide hospitality for strangers who came to his tent even though he didn’t know who they were and was willing to ride out to rescue his relative who had been kidnapped even though he did not know how he was going to do it.

The disciples were encouraged to become people of faith by responding to Christ’s call to stop being ‘fishermen’ (which they knew how to do) and start becoming ‘fishers of men’ (which they didn’t know how to do) trusting that over time they would learn how to do it. And the good news for them and for us is that, in the end, in spite of the many ridiculous mistakes they made  - they were actually able to do it.

I think we know what we are called to do: to love God and love our neighbour. Most of us (in all three faiths) would say that we believe that these are in fact the greatest commandments. If we have faith, we will take the risk to live that out in our in the way we relate to everyone, in ever increasing concentric circles of care, starting with our family, then our community, our church, our work, our world.

Okay. We don’t know how to do it. But like the disciples we should trust the Lord that over time we will be able to learn how to do it if we try.

But I would like to make one proviso. So we do not do too much damage when we make the mistakes we will make learning to love God and our neighbour.

While love is willing to sacrifice for others, it should only sacrifice its own. You only have the right to sacrifice your time, your energy, your money – not an other’s or what you owe to an other. If your sacrifice impacts an other, then you need to have their permission to proceed. You have no right to sacrifice what belongs to an other in the name of love, because it is not loving at all.

Take care, Dave

In a much-cited article entitled “Resist not evil:” Conservatism in The Sermon on the Mount, published in The Busy Signal, J.A. Meyerson states that ’The main thrust of the Nazarene’s doctrine is: if you the poor are abused, exploited, stolen from, made to suffer or otherwise racked with injustice, grin and bear it. Those concerns are worldly, and you ought instead to be focused on heaven. This life, after all, doesn’t matter, and in the next one, you will be rewarded and your tormentors punished. So keep your head down, take your punches and deal with it!’

Meyerson says ‘Christ begins his sermon by issuing the beatitudes, probably the most fertile grounds for leftist quotations, but with the least reason. “Blessed,” Christ proclaims, “are the poor in spirit,” “they that mourn,” “the meek,” “they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness,” “the merciful,” “the pure in heart,” “the peacemakers,” “they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake” and “ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake”.’ Then he says, ‘The blessings he heaps upon the poor are all very nice, but he does not end them by saying, “and woe to those who have put you in this position; let’s topple their order and establish a more just society!” Instead he counsels, “Rejoice, and be exceeding glad: for great is your reward in heaven: for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you.” (Matthew 5:12) Cry me a river, folks; this is your lot in life. Trust that things are going to be better once you’ve died’.

So Myerson sums up Jesus’ ‘thesis, expressed in the Sermon on The Mount’, as essentially conservative, basically saying ‘workers of the world: suck it up.’ [1]

I enjoyed reading Meyerson’s article because of its energetic engagement with many of the things that I care about, and because of the substantive issues it raised. And I would like to make some comments about some of those issues.

The first issue is about Meyerson’s (mis)representation of Jesus view of ‘heaven’. It is clear Meyerson sees ‘heaven’ as ‘life after death’ and suggests Jesus is saying, as many conservative Christians do, ‘that things are going to get better when you die’, ‘you ought to be focused on heaven’; ‘this life doesn’t matter’; ‘in the next one you will be rewarded and your tormentors punished.’ Which aids and abets the status quo.

Now in the Bible there are four books with four versions of the gospel story. And the one thing that they all agree on is: that the ‘gospel’ according to Jesus is all about the ‘kingdom of God’  – or as it is sometimes called ‘the kingdom of heaven’.

The core message of Jesus is the ‘gospel of the kingdom of heaven’. That’s why Jesus began his famous Sermon on the Mount with the words ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven’. (Matt. 5.3) In the sermon Jesus calls on his disciples to ‘seek first the kingdom’, to make it a priority, and to continually pray that the ‘kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven’.(Matt.6.33,10)

All throughout his ministry Jesus constantly preaches and teaches about the ‘kingdom’. All his parables are basically earthy stories about ‘the kingdom of heaven’. Only John records Jesus saying anything about ‘born again’ – twice on one occasion. Matthew, Mark, and Luke never record Jesus saying anything about being ‘born again’ at all. But all the gospel writers record Jesus speaking about the ‘kingdom of heaven’ again and again – some 114 times!

In the beatitudes, it is clear that, for Jesus, the ‘kingdom of heaven’ is a place where the meek ‘inherit the earth’ (Matt.5.5); where those who give mercy will ‘receive mercy’ (Matt.5.7); where the hungry will be ‘filled’ (Luke 6.21) and those who hunger and thirst for justice will be ‘fulfilled’ (Matt.5.6). It is a place where those who mourn will be ‘comforted’ (Matt.5.4) and those who weep now will ‘laugh’ once more (Luke 6.21). It is a place where peacemakers will walk proudly as ‘sons and daughters of God’ (Matt.5.9) and all those who are pure in heart ‘will see God’ (Matt.5.8)

So, as far as Jesus is concerned, heaven is a way of life; and it is a way of life that people should be able to experience here and now, on earth, in this life, as well as in the next. Which is why he uses the present tense, rather than the future tense at the beginning and the end of the beatitudes, saying ’yours is the kingdom of heaven’, so take it and make it your own. Jesus teaches his disciples to pray ‘May your kingdom come, may your will be done on earth as it is heaven’ every day (Matt.6.10) so that people can see God face to face, live as God’s children, be filled and fulfilled, find the comfort and the mercy that they need, wipe away their tears and have a smile that no one can wipe off their face, here and now, on earth, in this life, as well as in the next.

The second issue is Meyerson’s (mis)representation of Jesus view of the ‘system’. Incredibly, Meyerson tries to suggest Jesus ‘puts a happy face on the political and social systems which oppress’. When in fact, nothing could be further from the truth.

Jesus says we are faced with a choice: to be – or not to be – the change we want to see. And in Luke’s account of the beatitudes, Jesus makes the choice – and its consequences for us – painfully clear.

‘Looking at his disciples, he said:

20″Blessed are you who are poor,

for yours is the kingdom of God.

21Blessed are you who hunger now,

for you will be satisfied.

Blessed are you who weep now,

for you will laugh.

22Blessed are you when people hate you,

when they exclude you and insult you

and reject your name as evil,

because of the Son of Man.”

23″Rejoice in that day and leap for joy,

because great is your reward in heaven.

For that is how their ancestors treated the prophets.

24″But woe to you who are rich,

for you have already received your comfort.

25Woe to you who are well fed now,

for you will go hungry.

Woe to you who laugh now,

for you will mourn and weep.

26Woe to you when all people speak well of you,

for that is how their ancestors treated the false prophets.”

Luke 6. 20-26

In Luke’s account of the beatitudes Jesus is using classic Jewish parallelism to  compare and contrast two completely different positive and negative scenarios.

So Jesus is saying that we need to think about the consequences of our choices.

Jesus calls us not to aid or abet the status quo, but to be poor, and be with the poor in spirit; to be hungry, and be hungry for justice; to be sad, because we are weeping with those that weep; and to be unpopular, because we are committed to follow the way of Christ with integrity, struggling to challenge the system and change the system.

The third issue is Meyerson’s (mis)representation of Jesus view of the ‘struggle’. Meyerson tries to suggest that Jesus did not encourage people to struggle against the system, but only to struggle to accept the system and comply with the system. Meyerson interprets Jesus saying, “Resist not evil” as meaning ‘Take it easy, you Saudi women who are stoned for the crime of having been raped, you American Indians who have been infected by disease and anguish while your land is stolen and your family murdered, and you Ugandan homosexuals who fall in love under the threat of execution, flogging and incineration’. ‘This is your lot in life’. ’Suck it up.’

People like Meyerson make assumptions about the way to bring about change. Because Jesus didn’t share their assumptions about the way to bring about change, they tend to assume that Jesus was not really interested in bringing about change. The most common way of trying to change a system has always been to mobilise  a group of disenfranchised and disaffected people at the bottom to overthrow the people at the top, and, thereby, institute a change of regime. This can be done either violently, by revolution; or non-violently, by election. Either way, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Because no matter how many times you may change the regime, the system remains. Jesus’ much more innovative, alternative stratagem – was not trying to change the regime – but changing the system itself!

 Jesus wasn’t interested in ‘resisting evil’, ‘reacting to evil’ or ‘retaliating against evil’. He was interested in ‘overcoming evil with good’. Jesus’ basic stratagem was to deny hierarchy, advocate mutuality, and reframe all his relationships, over time, in terms of equality. Time and time again Jesus told the people who were with him to reject any kind of hierarchical modus operandi and embrace the practice of genuine mutuality (which, we know, is the only thing which can create the space for the transformation of the oppressive American, Saudi, and Ugandan relationships that Meyerson cites.)

Jesus told his disciples: ‘You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant…just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.’  (Matt.20: 20-28) ‘You are not to be called ‘Rabbi,’ for you’ve only one Master and you are all equals. And do not call anyone on earth `Father,’ (even if you are a Catholic!) for you have one Father, in heaven. (And you are all brothers and sisters). The greatest among you will be your servant. For whoever exalts themselves will be humbled, and whoever humbles themselves will be exalted’. (Matt.23: 8-12)

To start with, the disciples related to Jesus as their ‘Rabbi’, as servants to their master, but over time, he reframed his relationship with all of them in clear, radically egalitarian terms. But after three years, Jesus said to them: ‘I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you.’ (John 15:15) Knowledge is power and in sharing power they became friends.

The kind of changes we need involve system change, rather than regime change. So Jesus said that rather than spend all our time fighting the current regime, we need to be working slowly but surely for transformation of the entire system, by implementing his strategy of white-anting hierarchy, building up mutuality, and reframing inequality in terms of equality, one relationship at a time. As far as Jesus is concerned, there is no fast track, no quick fix, only a long ongoing pro-active struggle for total revolution.

Jesus publicly associated with the synagogue – by attending and participating, ‘as was his custom’, in congregational meetings. (Luke 4:16) But, Jesus never attempted to move up in the system. He moved out on to the edge. And, locating himself ‘on the side-lines’, rather than ‘in the main game’, gave Jesus some great advantages.

One, it gave him perspective. From the sidelines he was able to see the whole field, and see what needed to be done to improve the game. Two, it gave him opportunity. On the sidelines he was far enough away from the game to be beyond its immediate control, yet close enough to affect the way it played out. Three, it gave him time. On the sidelines he was able to develop his short-term alternatives to the system while he worked on his long-term transformat-ion of the system. Four, it gave him space. On the sidelines he was able to demonstrate the alternatives he developed in the eyes of everyone, so they could assess for themselves whether they wanted to adopt them – or not. Five, it gave him a position from which he could advocate change, without being in a position to impose the change he advocated on anyone. So people knew they were truly free to adopt the change – or not to – as they desired. And because that made the change process much less threatening to the people in the synagogue it gave Jesus greater freedom to experiment in his struggle for change.

For Jesus, the struggle for peace and justice involved five different tasks: confronting injustice in society; delivering the poor from exploitation by the rich; liberating the powerless from oppression by the powerful; freeing people from cycles of violence and counter violence which are a constant threat to vulnerable populations; and creating just communities which are intentionally committed to including outcasts. [2]

Many people say Jesus said a lot about love, but little about political, economic and social justice.  But Jesus constantly confronted the injustice in his society. Meyerson says disapprovingly that ‘In Matthew 4:24, we find Christ healing people for the first time, but asking no questions about why they should be sick while the rich have their health and demanding no aid to the ailing from an empire that takes no pity on the luckless and which callously allows ill-health to run rampant’. But in John 5:1-13 Christ goes out of his way to heal a man on the Sabbath – deliberately breaking the Sabbath law – in order confront a society with its obsession with the kind of piety ‘which callously allows ill-health to run rampant’ without lending a helping hand. In the synoptic Gospels – not counting the parallel passages – there is a clear and unmistakable record of Jesus specifically and repeatedly confronting both Roman and Jewish authorities with the injustices they perpetrated in Israel – 40 times!

Jesus followed on from John the Baptist in denouncing the exploitation of the poor by the rich. John told the armed forces: “Don’t extort money and don’t accuse people falsely – be content with your pay.” And he told the tax collectors: “Don’t collect any more than you are required to”. He said: “The man with two tunics should share with him who has none, and the one who has food should do the same.”  (Luke 3.11-14) Jesus confronted Zacchaeus. an infamous tax collector, personally about his extortion. As a result of this encounter, Zacchaeus promised Jesus to give “half of my possessions to the poor”, and “if I have cheated anybody out of anything, I will pay back four times the amount.” (Luke 19.8)

Jesus not only consistently denounced the oppression of the powerless by the powerful, he also actively advocated liberation of disempowered groups of people through the empowerment of the Spirit. Jesus attacked the key religious leaders of the day, as “lovers of money”(Luke16.14-15),who would maintain a façade of sanctity, by saying long prayers in public, but would “devour widows’ houses”. When he saw a widow “put everything – all she had to live on” – into the collection box, Jesus condemned the temple for extorting the last coin from the kind of person it was set up to protect. (Mark.12.38-44) Jesus broke the monopoly on forgiveness that the temple had developed through the sacrificial system  it controlled, by baptizing people in the Spirit and giving them the authority to forgive sins. “Receive the Holy Spirit,” Jesus said; and “if you forgive anyone his sins, they are forgiven.” (John 20.22-23).

Jesus advocated communities with leadership that would serve the people rather than oppress them. He said to his disciples: “You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be your slave – just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”(Matt.20.25-28)

Jesus demonstrated the practice of active, radical, sacrificial nonviolence, that would free people from the cycles of violence and counter violence which are a constant threat to vulnerable groups of people. He said, “I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. The hired hand is not the shepherd who owns the sheep. So when he sees the wolf coming, he abandons the sheep and runs away. Then the wolf attacks the flock and scatters it. The man runs away because he is a hired hand and cares nothing for the sheep. I am the good shepherd…and I lay down my life for the sheep.   All who ever came before me were thieves and robbers. I am the gate; whoever enters through me will be saved. He will come in and go out, and find pasture. The thief comes only to steal and destroy;  I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.” (John 10.8-18) Jesus turned to his friends and said: “Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends”. (John 15.13)

Jesus created communities that were committed to doing justice to the marginalized and disadvantaged. The dominant value of Jewish society was “purity” – but the dominant value of Jesus was “inclusivity”. While the Jews despised Gentiles, Jesus declared “my house shall be called a house…for all nations.” (Mark 11.17) While the Pharisees ostracized “sinners”, Jesus invited “outcasts” to his parties. (Mark 2.16) Jesus said, “When you give a luncheon or dinner, do not invite your friends, your brothers, (sisters) or relatives, or your rich neighbors; if you do, they may invite you back and you will be repaid. But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed.” (Luke 14.12-14)

“Let your light so shine before men, that (Meyerson and friends) may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven.” (Matthew 5:16)

By Brian Wheeler BBC News, Washington

Thousands of Iranian Jews and their descendants owe their lives to a Muslim diplomat in wartime Paris, according to a new book. In The Lion’s Shadow tells how Abdol-Hossein Sardari risked everything to help fellow Iranians escape the Nazis.

Eliane Senahi Cohanim was seven years old when she fled France with her family. She remembers clutching her favourite doll and lying as still as she could, pretending to be asleep, whenever their train came to a halt at a Nazi checkpoint. ”I remember everywhere, when we were running away, they would ask for our passports, and I remember my father would hand them the passports and they would look at them. And then they would look at us. It was scary. It was very, very scary.”

Mrs Cohanim and her family were part of a small, close-knit community of Iranian Jews living in and around Paris. Her father, George Senahi, was a prosperous textile merchant and the family lived in a large, comfortable house in Montmorency, about 25km (15.5 miles) north of the French capital.

‘Trembling’

When the Nazis invaded, the Senahis attempted to escape to Tehran, hiding for a while in the French countryside, before being forced to return to Paris, now in the full grip of the Gestapo.”I remember their attitude. The way they would walk with their black boots. Just looking at them at that time was scary for a child, I think,” recalls Mrs Cohanim, speaking from her home in California.

Like others in the Iranian Jewish community, Mr Senahi turned for help to the young head of Iran’s diplomatic mission in Paris. Abdol-Hossein Sardari was able to provide the Senahi family with the passports and travel documents they needed for safe-passage through Nazi-occupied Europe, a month-long journey that was still fraught with danger. ”At the borders, my father was always really trembling,” recalls Mrs Cohanim but, she adds, he was a “strong man” who had given the family “great confidence that everything would be OK.”

Unlikely hero

The 78-year-old grandmother has lived for the past 30 years in California with her husband Nasser Cohanim, a successful banker. Mrs Cohanim has no doubt to whom she and her younger brother Claude owe their lives.

“I remember my father always telling that it was thanks to Mr Sardari that we could come out. My uncles and aunts and grandparents lived there in Paris. It was thanks to him they weren’t hurt. The ones that didn’t have him, they took them and you never heard about them again.”

Of Mr Sardari, she says: “I think he was like Schindler, at that time, helping the Jews in Paris.” Like Oskar Schindler, the German industrialist who saved more than 1,000 Jews during the Holocaust by employing them in his factories, Sardari was an unlikely hero.

Nazi propaganda

In his book In the Lion’s Shadow, author Fariborz Mokhtari paints a picture of a bachelor and bon viveur who suddenly found himself head of Iran’s legation house, or diplomatic mission, at the start of World War II. Although officially neutral, Iran was keen to maintain its strong trading relationship with Germany. This arrangement suited Hitler. The Nazi propaganda machine declared Iranians an Aryan nation and racially akin to the Germans.

Iranian Jews in Paris still faced harassment and persecution and were often identified to the authorities by informers. In some cases, the Gestapo was alerted when newborn Jewish boys were circumcised at the hospital. Their terrified mothers were ordered to report to the Office of Jewish Affairs to be issued with the yellow patches Jews were forced to wear on their clothes and to have their documents stamped with their racial identity.

But Sardari used his influence and German contacts to gain exemptions from Nazi race laws for more than 2,000 Iranian Jews, and possibly others, arguing that they did not have blood ties to European Jewry. He was also able to help many Iranians, including members of Jewish community, return to Tehran by issuing them with the new-style Iranian passports they needed to travel across Europe.

A change of regime in Iran, in 1925, had led to the introduction of a new passport and identity card. Many Iranians living in Europe did not have this document, while others, who had married non-Iranians, had not bothered to get Iranian passports for their spouses or children. When Britain and Russia invaded Iran in September 1941, Sardari’s humanitarian task become more perilous. Iran signed a treaty with the Allies and Sardari was ordered by Tehran to return home as soon as possible.

Racial purity

But despite being stripped of his diplomatic immunity and status, Sardari resolved to remain in France and carry on helping the Iranian Jews, at considerable risk to his own safety, using money from his inheritance to keep his office going.

The story he spun to the Nazis, in a series of letters and reports, was that the Persian Emperor Cyrus had freed Jewish exiles in Babylon in 538 BC and they had returned to their homes. However, he told the Nazis, at some later point a small number of Iranians began to find the teachings of the Prophet Moses attractive – and these Mousaique, or Iranian Followers of Moses, which he dubbed “Djuguten,” were not part of the Jewish race.

Using all of his lawyer’s skill, he exploited the internal contradictions and idiocies of the Nazis’ ideology to gain special treatment for the “Djuguten”, as the archive material published in Mr Mokhtari’s new book shows. High-level investigations were launched in Berlin, with “experts” on racial purity drafted in to give an opinion on whether this Iranian sect – which the book suggests may well have been Sardari’s own invention – were Jewish or not. The experts were non-committal and suggested that more funding was needed for research.

Lonely death

By December 1942, Sardari’s pleas had reached Adolf Eichmann, the senior Nazi in charge of Jewish affairs, who dismissed them, in a letter published in Mr Mokhtari’s book, as “the usual Jewish tricks and attempts at camouflage”. But Sardari somehow managed to carry on helping families escape from Paris, at a time when an estimated 100,000 Jews were deported from France to death camps. The number of blank passports in Sardari’s safe is estimated to have been between 500 and 1,000. In his book, Mr Mokhtari suggests that if each was issued for an average of two to three people “this could have saved over 2,000 individuals”.

Sardari never sought recognition for his work during his lifetime, insisting he had only been doing his duty. He died a lonely death in a bedsit in Croydon, south London, in 1981, after losing his ambassador’s pension and Tehran properties in the Iranian revolution. He was posthumously recognised for his humanitarian work in 2004 at a ceremony at the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Los Angeles.

Mr Mokhtari hopes that by telling his story, through the testimony of survivors, including Mrs Cohanim, he will bring it to a wider audience but also shatter “popular misconceptions” about Iran and the Iranians. ”Here you have a Muslim Iranian who goes out of his way, risks his life, certainly risks his career and property and everything else, to save fellow Iranians,” he says. ”There is no distinction ‘I am Muslim, he is Jew’ or whatever.” He believes the story illustrates the “general cultural propensity of Iranians to be tolerant” which is often overlooked in the current political climate.

Virginia Tilley

14 December 2011

The Archbishop of Canterbury has warned that the Arab Spring is 
threatening the safety of Christian communities in the Middle East.[1] He 
did not realise it, but this public warning—much as President Obama’s UN 
speech in September[2] struck the death knell for US credibility in the 
Middle East—has dealt another fatal blow to a central Middle East actor: the 
world’s Christian Churches, already suffering from a wobbly posture 
regarding ethnic and religious relations in the Middle East. For those 
within the faith, it impels a collective “j’accuse” to Christian leaderships 
and an unqualified call for principled action. For it must now be said 
plainly, and confronted honestly: it is morally unacceptable for the Christian 
churches to continue to dither and wander morally on sectarian relations 
in the Middle East by ducking the question of Palestine.

Anyone familiar with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict knows the painful back 
story to the Archbishop’s concerns. The Middle East is a pastiche of 
religions and sects which have coexisted mostly peacefully through the 
millennia, except when some exogenous factor stirred things up. Invading 
empires and crusades occasionally have done so, from the Persians through 
the infamous US interventions in Iran (1953) and Iraq. But one such sin has 
stood for the past century as a seeping sore, aggravating sectarian tensions 
and provoking religious polarisation throughout the region. That is the 
creation of Israel as an ethnic state in the Levant and the resulting 
Palestinian-Israeli conflict which springs from explicitly religious bigotry. 
For a Church leader of the Archbishop’s stature to pretend that this conflict 
does not enter the Arab Spring equation is both disingenuous and 
unacceptable.

For decades, it has been a quiet scandal that individual Christians and 
Christian projects regarding the Palestine-Israel conflict, labouring on 
doggedly with courage and principle, have been consistently crippled by 
pabulum statements, strategic over-caution or sheepish silence by the major 
Church leaderships. This silence has not reflected any lack of information. 
It’s certainly no secret to Christian Palestinians, and therefore the Church 
leaders to whom they report, that Israel has deliberately sabotaged the 
ancient Christian axis of pilgrimage between Jerusalem and Bethlehem. 
Thus shattering Christian community and impoverishing the old Christian 
mercantile sectors, Israel has also systematically and deliberately stoked 
tensions between Muslim and Christian Palestinians over the years. The 
combination has impelled steady Christian emigration in recent decades, 
reducing the once-formidable and culturally rich Christian community from 
some nineteen percent of Jerusalem’s population in 1944 to just over two 
percent today. As a package, Israel’s policies have indeed brought Christian 
Palestinians in the occupied territories under a sense of local siege and 
threat they have not experienced for centuries, while aggravating sectarian 
tensions with their Muslim neighbours in ways that have polarised and 
poisoned sectarian sentiments throughout the Middle East. Cries of alarm 
about this trend have issued from Christians in Palestine for decades and 
with increasing alarm.

It has further agonised those faithful who treasure Palestine’s 
awe-inspiring biblical landscape to see the Christian Churches stand silent 
while Israeli settlements and security installations pave that landscape 
over. Just twenty years ago, Christian pilgrims could still walk to the old 
city of Jerusalem or Rachel’s Tomb on ancient trails laid down over five 
thousand years among the rocky hills of Judea, following the footpaths of 
prophets and disciples that wove among the springs and valleys of biblical 
legend. Just twenty years ago, shepherds still tended their flocks by night 
around the hills of Bethlehem, playing on wooden flutes. Now these sacred 
landscapes[3] are paved over, blocked off, and the West Bank is an uglified 
mess of four-lane highways, broken up by hideous concrete barriers and 
electrified fences, the old olive terraces crushed and buried under acres of 
monolithic Jewish-only apartment blocs. The shepherds are arrested, 
harassed and gone. The ancient trails are gone forever. Millennia of 
humanity’s historical heritage, razed and effaced in a scant few decades, to 
serve not natural population growth but an artificial state-sponsored project 
to take over land in the name of an exclusive ethnic nationalism. The loss 
is heartbreaking on so many levels that it cannot be expressed.

And the world’s great Churches, whose cathedrals are nested in all this? To 
Israeli authorities, quiet pleas, in stiff meetings behind closed doors, 
tactical manoeuvres to keep privileges and access. To the world, silence or 
token gestures, even as Israel’s construction and archaeological excavations 
press up against their churches’ very walls.

Some may quickly protest that the Christian Churches have not been silent. 
The World Council of Churches has regularly met, denounced, and called for 
action on Palestine. The Catholic Church has expressed concern in various 
ways. The Presbyterian Church launched some broad discussions. The 
Evangelical Lutheran Church has called for prayer, investment and education. 
Yes, yes. But a close read of Church statements finds in most of them a 
disturbing vagueness, language calculated not to offend, punches 
consistently pulled. The net effect? Complicity, and a spiritual crisis.

Examples of this net effect are myriad, but two will illustrate the problem: 
first, a small one, the Palestine Israel Ecumenical Forum’s It’s Time[4], which, 
despite a bold title, manages never to bruise the toes of the Israeli 
government. Take, for example, its gentle idea that “It’s time to assist settlers 
in the Occupied Palestinian Territories to make their home in Israel” while 
not saying why or how. Or, “It’s time for people who have been refugees for 
more than 60 years to regain their rights and a permanent home,” yet 
carefully not specifying where those homes should be. At some point, It’s 
Time slips into morally offensive symmetry that also violates common sense: 
e.g., “It’s time for both sides to release their prisoners and give those 
justly accused a fair trial.” While adopting the profile of a call for action, the
whole piece leaves one spiritually anaesthetised and bemused, as the 
illusion of real spiritual fortitude is derailed into vaporous ideals amounting 
to non-action. Over-all, the effect is like reading one of those pastel 
Sunday-school pamphlets.

Or, for a far more influential example, take the 2009 Kairos Palestine[5], 
which has drawn thousands of Christian signatures and the endorsement of 
some Christian world leaders, including Archbishop Tutu. Composed by 
a formidable line-up of theologians, it does offer some firm statements: e.g., 
“the military occupation of our land is a sin against God and humanity”. But 
the first warning flag arises in the first sentence of the preface, which refers 
blandly to “difficult times that we still experience in this Holy Land” and 
other vapid calls to “stand by” the Palestinians without saying much about 
how. Otherwise, it gives the bad impression of a co-written document whose 
moral momentum was curtailed by some timid gatekeepers. The bulk of 
Kairos Palestine is a recital of Israeli human rights abuses and a long-winded 
theological treatise on “hope”, “love” and “mission”. Alas, the journey 
thus suggested never gets anywhere. For example, under the subsection, 
“word to the Churches of the world”, we find an appeal: “We ask our sister 
Churches not to offer a theological cover-up for the injustice we suffer, 
for the sin of the occupation imposed upon us.” But instead of a clear call for 
action and an incisive statement of principle, this passage then waffles 
away to drain all but the mildest energy: “Our question to our brothers and 
sisters in the Churches today is: Are you able to help us get our freedom 
back, for this is the only way you can help the two peoples attain justice, 
peace, security and love?” The call to “Jewish and Muslim religious leaders” 
is equally void: “Let us together try to rise up above the political positions 
that have failed so far and continue to lead us on the path of failure and 
suffering.” But “rise up” how? And what action is urged regarding 
Jerusalem, which is affirmed to be “the foundation of our vision and our 
entire life”? None at all, except to urge that Jerusalem be “the first issue to 
be negotiated”. After a page or two of this fog, the mind numbs over 
and moral energy fades and turns inward to prayer circles and polite 
discussion groups.

Lest it seem rude to denounce so well-meaning an effort, consider that the 
1985 Kairos[6], composed by Archbishop Tutu among others, targeted 
precisely this kind of slippery religious language as deployed by the major 
South African churches and the South African state to defend apartheid. For 
real Christian inspiration regarding Palestine, this famous Christian 
document from South Africa’s anti-apartheid struggle should be reread in 
full, but a selection is worth reproducing here just to show just how 
clear-headed Christian activism can get when it truly girds its loins. The 
1985 Kairos had no truck with empty talk of “peace”, “reconciliation” and 
“dialogue” and its reasoning on this point is worth quoting at length 
(readers are encouraged to substitute “Palestinians” for “South Africans” to 
suggest the comparison):

In a limited, guarded and cautious way [mainstream Church Theology 
in South Africa] is critical of apartheid. Its criticism, however, is 
superficial and counter-productive because instead of engaging in an 
in-depth analysis of the signs of our times, it relies upon a few stock 
ideas derived from Christian tradition and then uncritically and 
repeatedly applies them to our situation. The stock ideas used by almost 
all these Church leaders that we would like to examine here are: 
reconciliation (or peace), justice and non-violence. …

Church Theology’ takes ‘reconciliation’ as the key to problem resolution. 
It talks about the need for reconciliation between white and black, 
or between all South Africans. ‘Church Theology’ often describes the 
Christian stance in the following way: “We must be fair. We must listen 
to both sides of the story. If the two sides can only meet to talk and 
negotiate they will sort out their differences and misunderstandings, 
and the conflict will be resolved.” On the face of it this may sound very 
Christian. But is it?

The fallacy here is that ‘Reconciliation’ has been made into an absolute 
principle that must be applied in all cases of conflict or dissension. 
But not all cases of conflict are the same. We can imagine a private 
quarrel between two people or two groups whose differences are based 
upon misunderstandings. In such cases it would be appropriate to talk 
and negotiate to sort out the misunderstandings and to reconcile 
the two sides. But there are other conflicts in which one side is right and 
the other wrong. There are conflicts where one side is a fully armed 
and violent oppressor while the other side is defenseless and oppressed. 
There are conflicts that can only be described as the struggle between 
justice and injustice, good and evil, God and the devil. To speak of 
reconciling these two is not only a mistaken application of the Christian 
idea of reconciliation, it is a total betrayal of all that Christian faith has 
ever meant. Nowhere in the Bible or in Christian tradition has it ever 
been suggested that we ought to try to reconcile good and evil, 
God and the devil. We are supposed to do away with evil, injustice, 
oppression and sin–not come to terms with it. We are supposed to 
oppose, confront and reject the devil and not try to sup with the devil.

In our situation in South Africa today it would be totally un-Christian to 
plead for reconciliation and peace before the present injustices have 
been removed. Any such plea plays into the hands of the oppressor by 
trying to persuade those of us who are oppressed to accept our 
oppression and to become reconciled to the intolerable crimes that are 
committed against us. That is not Christian reconciliation, it is sin. 
It is asking us to become accomplices in our own oppression, to become 
servants of the devil. No reconciliation is possible in South Africa 
without justice.

The 1985 Kairos Declaration is especially clear-headed about the true meaning 
of peace: “It would be quite wrong to try to preserve ‘peace’ and ‘unity’ 
at all costs, even at the cost of truth and justice and, worse still, at the cost of 
thousands of young lives. As disciples of Jesus we should rather promote 
truth and justice and life at all costs, even at the cost of creating conflict, 
disunity and dissension along the way.” And where Kairos-Palestine, It’s Time 
and other Christian Church resolutions skid around in “both sides’ 
language, the 1985 Kairos explicitly rejects any false symmetries and focuses 
on the central issue of oppression: It would be quite wrong to see the present conflict as simply a racial 
war. The racial component is there but we are not dealing with two 
equal races or nations each with their own selfish group interests. The 
situation we are dealing with here is one of oppression. The conflict 
is between an oppressor and the oppressed. The conflict between two 
irreconcilable causes or interests in which the one is just and the other is 
unjust. … This is our situation of civil war or revolution. The one side 
is committed to maintaining the system at all costs and the other side is 
committed to changing it at all coasts [sic]. There are two conflicting 
projects here and no compromise is possible. Either we have full and 
equal justice for all or we don’t.

With this noble language before us, we must finally see the truth and drop 
the charade. Most Christian Church statements regarding Palestine are 
embarrassing fluff by comparison.

Why the weak and woolly stance by Church leaderships in Palestine, where 
the moral issues are so stark and Christian concerns so keen? The reasons 
are too well known. The world’s major Churches have long walked on eggs 
with Israel. Some of this caution reflects well-warranted (if confused) guilt 
about centuries of anti-Semitism. Local churches may restrain themselves 
out of kindly and principled concern not to offend and ruffle relations with 
Jewish neighbours. Less noble motives include conservative concerns to 
preserve Church real estate and privileges in Jerusalem, Bethlehem, the 
Galilee and other Biblical sites, where an irate Israel can sever Christian 
access in an instant. It is also Not Done to criticise other Christian 
denominations, so even those Churches who view Israel’s practices as 
abhorrent will still avoid challenging the whole Zionist project, as this 
would insult the Zionist theology of evangelical churches that have fallen 
for Israel’s (cynically deployed) story of collective Jewish redemption of the 
Holy Land. Given that actual Christian life in Palestine is being graphically 
destroyed, however, one does not have to be a 666-er to see that Zionist 
propaganda has “led Christians astray” by successfully attaching Jewish 
state-building in Palestine to misty visions of Jewish life in a Biblical 
landscape and confusing Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinians (even 
Christian ones) with messianic prophecies about the End Times.

Some historically minded cynics might object here that Christian timidity 
and confusion about the conflict in Palestine should not be singled out. 
Courageous priests and Christian activists have always stood forth in the 
world’s conflict zones in selfless and sometimes martyred defence of the 
weak, and do so in Palestine, but the uncomfortable truth is that these heroic 
figures and groups have always been outliers. Overwhelmingly, over 
past centuries the major Christian churches have either linked their futures 
and finances to whatever states they operated within or simply operated in 
an illusory sphere of detached spiritual practice where they absolved 
themselves of moral responsibility for the suffering around them, except by 
offering spiritual solace to endure it. Here one might recall the old state-
church alliance in Latin America, a system of totalitarian social control that 
has stood for five centuries as the edifice glowering over those grassroots 
liberation-theologians whose courage is always cited as the Church’s 
redeeming example, yet whose noble work the last Pope outlawed. Hence, 
for long-time observers of the conflict, it has been no surprise but still a 
bitter pill that the Archbishop of Canterbury, like most Church leaders, has 
been conspicuously silent, vague or reserved about Israel’s physical ruin 
of the Holy Land landscape and its progressive decimation of Christian 
community in Palestine.

Yet it is really too much that this same Archbishop now blames the Arab 
Spring, of all things, for an anti-Christian tilt that his own Church has, 
through neglect and caution of the Palestinian problem, systematically 
aggravated. For it is indeed a bitter scandal that the official Churches in 
Palestine, with their great properties embedded in the Jewish state and their 
slumbering but immense moral authority on the world stage, who could 
delegitimize and end Israel’s occupation overnight with one unified public 
denunciation, instead have opted—from timidity, caution, conservatism, 
internecine rivalries or merely a sloppy moral compass—to enable it. That 
this choice has fed heavily into the present sectarian mess in the Middle East 
is a given. The Archbishop may well worry that Christians in Egypt and 
elsewhere now feel “exposed and uncertain”, but he would do well to 
consider how much responsibility for those fears traces to his own desk.

It is up to the entire Christian community to end this confusion, abandon 
feeble caution and unintended hypocrisy, and reconsider the example of 
Jesus as set forth in the 1985 Kairos and in the Gospels themselves. The tasks 
in Palestine have long been plain. The evangelical Christian right must be 
approached about its gullible equation of a modern military state with 
spiritual rebirth. Israel’s instrumental deceit about Jewish life in the Holy 
Land constituting a path to Christian salvation must be exposed. The sins of 
ethnic cleansing and state-sponsored bigotry must be confronted. The 
malevolent whispers circulated by Zionist plants in Jerusalem and Palestine, 
which attempt to demonise Islam for Christians and Christianity for 
Muslims, must be openly and unanimously denounced. In the spirit of the 
1985 Kairos, the true meaning of Christian love must show its moral fist to 
reject false symmetry and the sinful notion of reconciliation with oppression.

Each Christmas, it has become a seasonal ritual for Christians to call for new 
care and action on Palestine. Each subsequent year, the same empty, 
circumscribed, ineffectual gestures result. The courage of the Arab Spring 
exposes this shameful ritualised cycle of moral failure as a spiritual 
imperative. This year’s Christmas must be a time for spiritual renewal, 
frank self-examination, fresh insight, and new courage to set aside sanitised 
pleas and empty prayers, stop listening to the internal gatekeepers, reject 
Israel’s manipulation of Christian theology to serve militaristic ends, 
and demand that all Church leaderships, with one clarion voice, call for true 
justice in Palestine. If the teachings of Jesus mean anything today, surely 
they mean this: the salvation of all three Abrahamic faiths from the false 
gods of mutual fear and the scourge of oppression. The alternative is to 
stand before the Cross at Christmas 2012 with a deepening and well-earned 
sense of shame.

 Links
1. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/dec/12/arab-spring-christians-archbishop-canterbury 
2. http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2011/09/21/remarks-president-obama-address-united-nations-general-assembly
3. http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520234222
4. http://tinyurl.com/84z5y93
5. http://www.kairospalestine.ps/?q=content/document
6. http://www.sahistory.org.za/article/kairos-document-1985-0

Virginia Tilley is a former professor of political science and international 
relations in the US. In 2005, she took leave to conduct research in South Africa 
and in 2006 was appointed Chief Research Specialist at the Human Sciences 
Research Council of South Africa. In that capacity she led the inquiry which 
examined whether Israel’s practices in the occupied Palestinian territories 
had assumed characteristics of colonialism and apartheid. It produced 
the 2009 report “Occupation, Colonialism Apartheid?: A Re-assessment of 
Israel’s practices in the occupied Palestinian Territories under International 
Law.” She is author of “The One-State Solution” (London Review of Books, 
Nov. 6, 2003)* and The One-State Solution (Univ. of Michigan Press, 2005) and 
numerous articles and essays on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Email: 
virginia.tilley@gmail.com

Peter, and his wife Adrienne, wanted to go to work in Vietnam. But, as often happens, things didn’t work out the way they had hoped they would. So, instead of moving to Hanoi, this Kiwi couple decided that they would move to Sydney and work with the Vietnamese community in Cabramatta.

When they arrived in Cabramatta, Peter and Adrienne joined Urban Concern, a faith community that was supportive of Servants work – not just overseas, but  back home- encouraging people to practice the Be-Attitudes in our own backyard.

Through Urban Concern Peter and Adrienne were introduced to Cabramatta and soon got to know not only the Vietnamese but also the Cambodians – and refugees from Former Yugoslavia as well. The whole world was on their doorstep!

In late 1999 Peter and his friends began to discuss the idea of ‘doing some-thing together’ in the community. By January 2000 the idea of ‘doing some-thing together’ in the community had resolved itself into the idea of ‘a community garden’. In February 2000 the Hughes Street Playground had been identified as the preferred site. And in April 2000 a formal proposal was submitted to lease a portion of Hughes Street Playground as the site.

Now the Hughes Street Playground was a notorious place. It had been taken over by the ‘smack squad’ a long time ago. But Peter and his friend Jeremy thought it was the perfect place for local people to begin to take back some of their space and put it to good sustainable community use.

They not only got permission to use Hughes Street, but also a grant from the Fairfield City Council of $10,000 to fund the initial set-up of the garden. And they got together with a group of local representatives over a twelve-month period to work out the details as to how to proceed with the project.

The group came up the idea of having an ‘Open Day’, to share the dream of the garden with the community, and to invite people of various ethnic backgrounds – especially those people on the ‘margins’ – to join in and work on the project together. Invitations were given out in seven different languages through community radio and a letter-box drop, and about two hundred people turned up for the ‘Open Day’ in March 2001. Ninety filled in forms with their suggestions.

In June there was an excursion to other community gardens round town. In August there was a training day on ‘organic gardening’. And in October there was the first on-site work-day. So by December 2001 the first eight plots were planted – and by January 2002 the first crops were harvested. And by July 2002 all twenty-three plots had been completed and allocated.

The construction of the garden has been dependent on the people in the project who are prepared to work for benefit of the whole garden, not just their own patch. And a committee of three people has been elected from each of the three language groups represented to manage the project.

The garden has been a great success on a number of significant levels. It has restored the park. The play area that had fallen into disuse is now being used again by families. The plots are fully subscribed and well maintained and people can gather fresh herbs and vegetables on a daily basis. Moreover, the garden provides a productive therapeutic occupation for a group of retired, unemployed or underemployed Cabramatta migrants and refugees. And it also provides a safe place for people to forge reciprocal  relationships of acceptance and respect across the cross-cultural divide – a symbol of what many of us believe is the ‘community of heaven on earth’.

Peter and Adrienne show us that we don’t need to be stars in order to be light, all we need to do is to reflect the light of God’s love in our lives. We need to simply think of the ‘good things’ we can do that can bring some ‘light into the darkness’, and keep on doing them come what may. It doesn’t matter whether the ‘good things’ we do are big or small, what matters is they embody the Be-Attitudes.

As they say – lighting a candle is a much better option than cursing the dark!

Dave Andrews

From Hey, Be And See (Authentic)

The Occupy movement is the force that will revitalize traditional Christianity in the United States or signal its moral, social and political irrelevance. The mainstream church, battered by declining numbers and a failure to defiantly condemn the crimes and cruelty of the corporate state, as well as a refusal to vigorously attack the charlatans of the Christian right, whose misuse of the Gospel to champion unfettered capitalism, bigotry and imperialism is heretical, has become a marginal force in the life of most Americans, especially the young. Outside the doors of churches, many of which have trouble filling a quarter of the pews on Sundays, struggles a movement, driven largely by young men and women, which has as its unofficial credo the Beatitudes:

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are they who mourn, for they shall be comforted.
Blessed are the meek, for they shall possess the earth.
Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for justice, for they shall be satisfied.
Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.
Blessed are the pure of heart, for they shall see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons and daughters of God.
Blessed are they who suffer persecution for justice sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

It was the church in Latin America, especially in Central America and Augusto Pinochet’s Chile, which provided the physical space, moral support and direction for the opposition to dictatorship. It was the church in East Germany that organized the peaceful opposition marches in Leipzig that would bring down the communist regime in that country. It was the church in Czechoslovakia, and its 90-year-old cardinal, that blessed and defended the Velvet Revolution. It was the church, and especially the African-American church, that made possible the civil rights movements. And it is the church, especially Trinity Church in New York City with its open park space at Canal and 6th, which can make manifest its commitment to the Gospel and nonviolent social change by permitting the Occupy movement to use this empty space, just as churches in other cities that hold unused physical space have a moral imperative to turn them over to Occupy movements. If this nonviolent movement fails, it will eventually be replaced by one that will employ violence. And if it fails it will fail in part because good men and women, especially those in the church, did nothing.

Where is the church now? Where are the clergy? Why do so many church doors remain shut? Why do so many churches refuse to carry out the central mandate of the Christian Gospel and lift up the cross?

Some day they are going to have to answer the question: “Where were you when they crucified my Lord?”

Let me tell you on this first Sunday in Advent, when we celebrate hope, when we remember in the church how Mary and Joseph left Nazareth for Bethlehem, why I am in Liberty Square. I am here because I have tried, however imperfectly, to live by the radical message of the Gospel. I am here because I know that it is not what we say or profess but what we do. I am here because I have seen in my many years overseas as a foreign correspondent that great men and women of moral probity arise in all cultures and all religions to fight the oppressor on behalf of the oppressed. I am here because I have seen that it is possible to be a Jew, a Buddhist, a Muslim, a Christian, a Hindu or an atheist and carry the cross. The words are different but the self-sacrifice and thirst for justice are the same. And these men and women, who may not profess what I profess or believe what I believe, are my brothers and sisters. And I stand with them honoring and respecting our differences and finding hope and strength and love in our common commitment.

At times like these I hear the voices of the saints who went before us. The suffragist Susan B. Anthony, who announced that resistance to tyranny is obedience to God, and the suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who said, “The moment we begin to fear the opinions of others and hesitate to tell the truth that is in us, and from motives of policy are silent when we should speak, the divine floods of light and life no longer flow into our souls.” Or Henry David Thoreau, who told us we should be men and women first and subjects afterward, that we should cultivate a respect not for the law but for what is right. And Frederick Douglass, who warned us: “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.” And the great 19th century populist Mary Elizabeth Lease, who thundered: “Wall Street owns the country. It is no longer a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, but a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street, and for Wall Street. The great common people of this country are slaves, and monopoly is the master.” And Gen. Smedley Butler, who said that after 33 years and four months in the Marine Corps he had come to understand that he had been nothing more than a gangster for capitalism, making Mexico safe for American oil interests, making Haiti and Cuba safe for banks and pacifying the Dominican Republic for sugar companies. War, he said, is a racket in which newly dominated countries are exploited by the financial elites and Wall Street while the citizens foot the bill and sacrifice their young men and women on the battlefield for corporate greed. Or Eugene V. Debs, the socialist presidential candidate, who in 1912 pulled almost a million votes, or 6 percent, and who was sent to prison by Woodrow Wilson for opposing the First World War, and who told the world: “While there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.” And Rabbi Abraham Heschel, who when he was criticized for walking with Martin Luther King on the Sabbath in Selma answered: “I pray with my feet” and who quoted Samuel Johnson, who said: “The opposite of good is not evil. The opposite of good is indifference.” And Rosa Parks, who defied the segregated bus system and said “the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.” And Philip Berrigan, who said: “If enough Christians follow the Gospel, they can bring any state to its knees.”

And the poet Langston Hughes, who wrote:

What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
Like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
Like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
Like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

Chris Hedges, whose column is published Mondays on Truthdig, spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from more than 50 countries and has worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The DallasMorning News and The New York Times, for which he was a foreign correspondent for 15 years.