September 27, 2009 Sermon

Our Pilgrim Coats: A Re-turning (Micah 4: 1-7; Mark 9: 38-41)

Dr. Jane Power

My pilgrim coat is stamped with the word Lebanon -- twice, and in red.

Thirty years ago this June, Jack and I spent a week in Beirut. We were in a group of about a dozen Americans from different organizations, visiting UN refugee camps in the area. There lived the families of some 100,000 Palestinians who had fled from their farms in the Galilee as the state of Israel was being established, in ferocious battles, in 1948. They had been in Lebanon, then, for more than three decades already: farm families without land, unwelcome sojourners, social outsiders -- denied citizenship, forbidden to work outside the camps, not allowed to buy property, discouraged from improving their very primitive homes. In the preceding decade, the Palestinian national organization, the PLO, had built up institutions in the Lebanon camps: clinics, workshops, courts, a radio station, a national archive. Everything was ready to set up a state in the West Bank and Gaza as soon as PLO diplomatic missions -- then doing well everywhere but North America -- bore fruit.

All of that -- the aging, depressed villagers; their angry children; their uncomfortable surroundings; their hopeful new institutions -- was what Jack and I saw in Beirut in June 1979.

The situation would get worse. Here's a brief summary (the dates don't really matter, but the events do). The factions in Lebanon's civil war -- one right-wing, mostly Christian, the other left-wing, mostly Muslim -- kept on killing and destroying, as they had since 1975, until 1989. The Israeli army invaded briefly just after we were there, then, in 1982, came to stay (the last troops were withdrawn eighteen years later, in 2000). In September 1982, the PLO's fighters were forced to leave Lebanon. A week later, Israeli forces sealed the Beirut refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila while a Christian paramilitary group called the Phalange killed -- by hand, family by family -- more than 1,000 children, women, and old men. Later, for more than two years in the mid-'80s, a Shi'ite Muslim militia assaulted and blockaded Shatila camp, cutting off water, food, and electricity. People were killed; people starved; people's homes were reduced to rubble -- and they couldn't get out.

Thirty years after our first visit, I turned again -- re-turned -- to Lebanon. The occasion was a commemoration of the 1982 massacre, an annual pilgrimage organized by a group of Italians who support social services in the camps, this year shared by Spaniards, Brits, and a couple of North Americans. Mostly, our group visited bright, spacious family centres -- housing kindergartens, mothers workshops, music classes, art therapy projects, vocational courses -- in the camps. We met bright, dedicated social workers whose enthusiasm was kept strong by their sense of the urgency of preserving their nation. We heard addresses by Lebanese and Palestinian politicians and officials expressing their commitment to end party strife and work together for the people's good.

But we also saw living conditions and heard stories far worse than any I'd encountered in 1979. By now, more than 400,000 Palestinian exiles -- about a tenth of the total -- live in Lebanon. In 2007, the Lebanese army leveled an entire camp in the north of the country, Nahr al-Bared, after a group of heavily armed Islamists, mostly from the Gulf, embedded themselves there and used the camp as a base to attack the army. Now the camp’s former residents huddle nearby in tin-roofed temporary huts-- cold in winter, hot in summer -- that they fear will become their permanent homes.

Not only have the refugees lost the hopeful national institutions of 1979, but the physical infrastructure, as well as the Palestinian community's administrative, moral, and family structures, have crumbled or are crumbling under repeated assault.

The picture is not unfamiliar. The toxic earth and water and the lack of jobs reminded me of what we hear of our own Northern First Nations communities, while, in some camps, the hair-trigger tensions, always ready to release an exchange of gunfire, go far beyond the little gang wars of our Lower Mainland. The contrast between Beirut's affluent, many from the Gulf, and its poor also dwarfs our alarmingly wide and spreading income gap: parts of Beirut make Yaletown look like the Downtown East Side; other parts make the Downtown East Side look like Yaletown.

And in the meantime, of course, the world has had Gaza: blockaded by Israeli forces since the election in January 2006, then murderously assaulted for three weeks at the beginning of this year. The exiles in the Lebanon camps are not cut off from news of the outer world. They know what happens. One resident, Alaa el-Ali, recently wrote, in the newspaper al-Akhbar (The News), Here, in Sabra, the start of a painful path and Gaza and massacre. And over there, in Palestine, the end of a painful path and Gaza and massacre, never ending. Only the dates change. The names and faces, the victims and executioners, the sympathizers and the silent conspirators -- voluntarily or forcibly, or desperately -- they do not change. How, then, with all the checkpoints confronting us -- of oppression and resentment; of injustice and bitterness; of grief -- are the nations to flow together to God's holy mountain? How to study war no more?

First, this is not the UN we're talking about. When the Hebrew Bible speaks of nations, it speaks not of the nineteenth-century-style nation-states we know today, but of communities of people who share a culture and institutions. Flexible or rigid, they're not the same as governments. Then, our gospel lesson this morning tells us that whoever is not against us is with us and we are with them, for no one can condemn someone for doing the same work as themselves. As we turn towards the holy mountain to try to discern God's will, no one is shut out.

The person who invited me to join her on this trip is an old friend from Washington, DC, who has done more to seek restorative justice for the Palestinians than anyone else I know. When the people of Sabra and Shatila camps were being slaughtered in 1982, Ellen was volunteering as a registered nurse in the camps' hospital. Like our own Romeo Dallaire, she saw things in those three days that no one should ever have to see. Then, when the Christian militia tired of killing the camp residents, they lined up the foreign hospital volunteers -- whose colleagues, the Palestinian and Lebanese staff members, had already been killed -- and prepared to shoot them. At that moment, an Israeli officer appeared and gave an order, and the foreigners were freed. Our friend lived to re-turn -- to the US and to Lebanon.

Ellen had gone to that hospital during Israel's 1982 invasion to contribute her medical skills; to show the Palestinians that people outside the camps knew and cared about them; but also to testify, before them and the world, that some Jews would uphold the traditional principles of their faith, regardless of the behaviour of the government of Israel. Ellen had visited Lebanon before, and has re-turned many times: her pilgrim coat is stamped "Lebanon" -- in red -- not twice, like mine, but perhaps two dozen times. This year, in Beirut, in every public meeting we had, she would bring the message of Leviticus 19:16: "Do not stand idly by when your neighbour's blood is being spilled." She would continue, "As Jews and people of conscience, we can no longer stand idly by Israel's collective punishment of the Palestinian people in Gaza."

Our friend invited everyone who heard her to join a Jewish fast for justice (Ta'anit Tzedek), dedicated to Gaza. The third Thursday of each month, participants fast with water only (or in whatever way is possible for them) from sunrise to sunset. They send the money they save on food to an American aid organization that buys milk for Gaza. When you look at the list of participants in the Jewish Fast, you find people of many nations -- rabbis, right reverends, and very reverends, along with lay people whose names we think of as Jewish, as Irish, as Arab, as British. All, I believe, happy to flow, uphill, around the checkpoints, to the holy mountain to learn God's will.

People are, of course, still studying war, both as an investment and as a solution to their problems or their frustrations. They're afraid to let go of their swords and spears (and if only it were just swords and spears!) in return for farm implements. Partly as a result, very few in this world have enough of the necessities of life, let alone a vine and a fig tree to call their own.

A fast won't change that. But to witness before God and creation, to work for justice -- in humility, according to our strength, in whatever ways and with whatever companions appear before us -- is the most, and the least, that each of us can do. The Lebanons of the world, faraway and close at hand, are ready to receive our pilgrimage.


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