Global Mission Sunday Sermon: February 2, 2014

Sermon preached February 2, 2014  +  Bethany Lutheran Church (Crystal Lake, IL)

Matthew 5:1-12

1 Corinthians 1:18-31

The Rev. Dr. Robert Smith

ELCA Global Mission

It is a great honor to once again bring a message to Bethany Lutheran on a Global Church Sunday. I suppose it’s a little like hosting Saturday Night Live—if they invite you back, it wasn’t so bad the first time!

Some of you might not know exactly who I am and how I’m connected to Bethany. Beyond the privilege of being Pastor Carrie’s spouse, I am an ELCA pastor serving in the Global Mission Unit of our churchwide offices in Chicago. I am the Area Secretary for the Middle East and North Africa. My primary responsibility is to maintain the official relationship between the ELCA and churches throughout that region.

One of my central responsibilities is tending to church interests in Israel and Palestine. Lutherans have been present in Jerusalem since the mid-1800s. The Evangelical Lutheran Church inJordan and the Holy Land became an autonomous, Palestinian-led Lutheran church in the late 1970s. The church is now led by Bishop Munib Younan, who was recently elected as President of the Lutheran World Federation. With congregations and ministries in Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Amman, Jordan, our connection with the ELCJHL and its members involves us directly in the most basic details of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

With all of that in mind, I begin my sermon to you in the way the Apostle Paul addressed the church in Corinth when he drafted his first letter to the Corinthians:

“To the church of God that is in [Crystal Lake, Illinois], to those who are sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints, together with all those who in every place call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, both their Lord and ours:

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

I give thanks to my God always for you because of the grace of God that has been given you in Christ Jesus, [who] will also strengthen you to the end.”

Like Paul when he thought of the church in Corinth, an ancient city in Greece, I give thanks for Bethany Lutheran Church. I thank Bethany’s Global Mission Team for your work connecting this congregation to Lutheran Christians around the world. And I thank you for the courage to commit four Sundays to the situation in Israel and Palestine. It’s never an easy topic, but you’ve decided to take it on directly.

I also give thanks for this congregation’s consistent support for Danae and Steve Hudson serving in Jerusalem and the Stubbs family serving in Tanzania, as well as for your mission support dollars and World Hunger contributions—all of which fund the collective work around the world we simply couldn’t accomplish separately.

Greetings from Danae and Steve

Global Church Sunday is a good opportunity to remind ourselves that we are not Bethany Lutheran Church, alone in the world. As Paul wrote to the church in Corinth, we are “the church of God that is in [Crystal Lake, Illinois] … together with all those who in every place call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, both their Lord and ours.” We are the church of God, connected with all people everywhere who call on Jesus’ name.

Jesus told his disciples that wherever “two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them” (Matt. 18.20). To use a phrase made famous by Martin Luther King, Jr., in his call for a war against poverty, we are “tied in a single garment of destiny.”

All who have been baptized “have been united with [Jesus] in a death like his” and have the promise that they “will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his” (Rom. 6.5). Christ is not divided! The presence and promise of Jesus can be found in the Presbyterian Church located just off Tahrir Square in Cairo and in the Greek Orthodox Church in the center of Homs, Syria. 

In his sermon for the Week of Christian Unity preached last Wednesday, Bishop Younan reminded his fellow church leaders of the wise saying, “though one might prevail against another, two will withstand one. A threefold cord is not quickly broken” (Eccl 4.12). Christians throughout the Middle East, seeing the violence around them on every side, need spiritual strength. Their message to us today is that their help will come not from worldly power, but from the strength Christ alone provides.

The events of the past three years have caused many Christian communities in the Middle East to wonder if they will continue to exist in the lands of their foremothers. The crisis is presently most acute in Syria. Syrian Christians are deeply conscious that, as Acts 11:26 says, “it was in Antioch that the disciples were first called ‘Christians’.”

Even in the midst of the acute suffering in Syria, Christians there point to the continuing injustices occurring in Palestine and their destabilizing effects on the region. In Israel and Palestine, Palestinian Christians find themselves surrounded on all sides by an Israeli state possessing great economic, legal and military power.

Waving the banner of national security, the Government of Israel enacts policies that disenfranchise, dispossess, and drive out Palestinians from land over which it wants to guarantee Jewish control.

The Israeli practice of home demolition is just one of those destructive policies. The reason given for this policy is that the structures were built or improved without proper permits; adding a new handicap-accessible bathroom or pouring concrete for a new porch can lead to your entire home being flattened by a militarizedbulldozer.

The United Nations reports that 2013 saw “a significant rise in demolitions and displacement,” especially in Arab East Jerusalem. Additionally, in 2013, there was a 127 per cent increase in Jordan Valley demolitions compared to 2012, with Bedouin and herding communities have been worst affected. Last year, the Government of Israel destroyed 663 Palestinian structures, displacing a total of 1,103 people.

1,103 people. Bethany Lutheran has a membership of about 1400. The equivalent of about three-fourths of Bethany’s members had their homes demolished in Palestine last year in East Jerusalem and the West Bank alone.

There is no evidence that this pace of highly personal destruction will decrease in 2014, especially in the Jordan Valley, where Israel wants to maintain a military presence. This past Thursday, Israeli authorities “demolished 36 structures, 15 of them residential, belonging to 12 Palestinian families … in the northern Jordan Valley on the grounds that they lacked an Israeli building permit. As a result, 66 people, including 36 children, were displaced.”

So what are Christians called to do in the face of this manifest injustice? Keep in mind that the policies are designed to maximize Israeli control over certain areas so that land will be awarded to Israeli at the end of current peace talks. It’s like the Oklahoma Land Run of 1889. Now, as then, people whose families have lived on the land for generations have no say. From where is their help to come?

Hear this from today’s reading from 1 Corinthians: “Consider your own call, brothers and sisters: not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. ²⁷But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong.” God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong. 

One of my favorite stories of Palestinian resistance comes out of the First Intifada, or Palestinian uprising, which began in 1987. The Palestinian Christian village of Beit Sahour—a suburb of Bethlehem, of sorts—engaged in a form of nonviolent resistance. Refusing to pay taxes that help pay for Israeli occupation, village leaders refused to support taxation without representation. In response, the Israeli military put the town under 42 days of curfew, blocked food shipments, cut telephone lines, and imprisoned 40 residents, including my friend and local Lutheran church member, Rifat Odeh Kassis. Carrie and I attended his son’s wedding a little over two years ago.

Most dramatically, the military conducted house-to-house raids, confiscating money and property belonging to over 350 families as payment for back taxes. They took everything, loading it onto flatbed trucks.

One story recalls how one grandmother, sitting on a cheap plastic chair in her nearly empty home, caught the attention of a young soldier. Pointing toward the window but looking him straight in the eye, she said, “You forgot the curtains.”

God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong.

This is the witness of our Christian sisters and brothers in the Middle East. It is the witness of the Cross.

‘Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

‘Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.

When you are feeling your weakest, you are most blessed, for God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong. At your weakest moments—whether you are overwhelmed by the injustice of the world or comforting the families of Kathy Williams and Jim Stupar—you are blessed by the presence of Christ and the comfort of a great cloud of witnesses.

God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong.

In our world, we are taught to cling to the powerful and the strong, to maximize our security and our wealth at all costs. The Evangelical Lutheran Church in Jordan and the Holy Land is a very small church of not even 2500 members—that’s less than twice the size of this congregation alone. It has very little real estate and is in near-constant financial crisis. But it is precisely that condition that allows Bishop Younan and other ELCJHL pastors to raise their voices, speaking out for the good of their communities, unafraid of the political consequences that might come.

In the face of historical defeat and increasing poverty, this young church’s advocacy for peace with justice has never been stronger. “Not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth,” Paul reminded the disciples in Crystal Lake. “But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong.”

Amen.