Faith on the Ground: One Family's Fight for their Land

Sometimes “faith” seems like just a word that we hear a lot of in religious communities. It becomes a reality when we have to struggle with it. Just a few days ago I saw faith at work in a more substantial way in a Christian Arab family that is fighting to hold on to their land. The Nassar family owns a tract of land near Bethlehem which the Israeli government is trying to confiscate to build settlements. Daher Nassar purchased this tract of land in 1916 when the region was under the Ottoman Empire. He did something quite unusual and considered not very wise at the time. He obtained a written title to the land; which meant he had to pay taxes on it. This has proved to be the family’s chief weapon in their court battles to hold on to the land.

The first thing one sees upon entering the compound is a sign that says “We refuse to be enemies.” No matter what happens they will not give themselves over to bitterness. We had a demonstration of this attitude the day we visited the place. Two days before we arrived they had received a demolition order from the Israeli government. In three days if nothing was done bulldozers would arrive to level everything. Three days!? That’s all they had to find their lawyer and then for him to do something about it!? The only real answer is to engage the situation as it comes and look for God in it.

This is not the sort of situation that we like to live in. We want guarantees. Because we spend a lot our time with our head in the future trying to secure it we miss the God of the present moment. To chew on the imaginations of a future dependent on our own self-determination can rapidly plunge one into hopelessness. In a land much in need of faith this hopelessness has caused many Palestinian Christians to move someplace else. For the Nassars, leaving is not an option. They constantly face challenges from a government that wants to get rid of them. So they trustingly walk through every situation as it comes. In this most recent crises God came through and froze the demolition order in court.

Faith is the opposite of what we often think solves problems. It is not to get going when the going gets tough. It is standing still. One finds a place of peace in standing in trust. Turmoil comes from what might be, not from what is. God’s peace is in the present moment. This was what got the Isrealites out of a jam at the Red Sea. As Moses told them, “The Lord will fight for you, and you have only to be still (Ex 14:14-15).”  Standing still requires courage. It does not, however, mean being inert. Just as the Israelites had to walk through on dry ground when God opened the Red Sea so the Nassar family walks through the openings that God makes in their situation. 

Will they eventually lose their land? For them that is not the question. They look only to what is on the slate for today. God has not resolved their situation. Faith is to find God in the situation not to prove God by its outcome. God, however, has done the unexpected. He has made this family an example of standing in faith which has international influence. The Tent of Nations is the organization that has grown out of their struggle. It is host to 5000 volunteers per year which come to work on the land and to learn and grow from what God is doing in this family.

Jerusalem: An Impossible Place

Tantur Ecumenical Institute

Our studies at Tantur Ecumenical Institute at Jerusalem began with a lecture entitled Living in the Middle East. The main point was that the situation in Jerusalem is, from a human standpoint, impossible to resolve. As we circuited the city the following day for an orientation tour of Jerusalem our Israeli guide described this region as sitting on a knife edge. The complexity of the political issues, the conflicts between and among religious factions and even the terrain and the climate of the area present a situation not easy, if actually impossible, to manage by human self-determination. The region presents itself as a place where only faith in God can make things work. It is thus truly a sacred place.

In their Egyptian slavery the ancient Hebrew tribes knew God only as a distant God. They did not yet know God as Yahweh; a God who is personally involved with their lives and who can and did respond to their oppression. As He delivered them out of their bondage He became a God in whom they must now trust. Slavery does not require faith in God. True freedom does. 

As we stood on various overlooks of Jerusalem I began to understand this as our guide read various passages from Deuteronomy, Isaiah, and Jeremiah. Our first stop was on a height  overlooking a beautiful and fertile land. Jerusalem is surrounded by rugged and rocky hills which do two things. It forms a sort of enclave which “channels” the rain into its fertile valleys and it protects the city from enemies. In contrast to the Nile valley which is watered by the dependable flooding of the Nile river Jerusalem is very dependent on rainfall. Thus the promise which God gave the Israelites in Deut 11:13-16 as they entered the Promised Land:

"And if you will obey my commandments which I command you this day, to love the Lord your God, and to serve him with all your heart and with all your soul, he will give the rain for your land in its season, the early rain and the later rain, that you may gather in your grain and your wine and your oil. And he will give grass in your fields for your cattle, and you shall eat and be full…”

If the early rain or late rain does not come there is drought.

One begins to understand the fragility of the land standing on top of Mt. Scopus where desert spreads out on the side opposite of the fertile valleys and hills surrounding Jerusalem. Were it not for the protecting hills Jerusalem itself would sit in barren land.

All of this, as our lecturer on Biblical Geography emphasized, makes Jerusalem a “land in-between.” It is a place where no people group has been able to establish a permanent nation. It has been taken in by empires of which Jerusalem and the land of Judea have always been on the edges. Yet it is at the center of things because it is an important connection; a place where the world passes through but where no earthly kingdom has been able to gain a foothold. This is where God chose to bring His kingdom into the world.

It is a land divided. Here people struggle with fundamental questions of possession.  Whose land is this really? There are deep questions of faith. Why did God lead His chosen people out of a land of regular harvests which had spawned one of the world’s greatest and earliest empires into a land so dependent on “water from heaven?” Why didn’t God just make Moses Pharaoh (he did have the chance)? The very nature of this area speaks the answer. It demands dependence on the Spirit of God for life itself.

I am coming to believe that God does not mean for this region to be owned by any specific nation. I see here a spiritual focal point on this earth; a region that points to God Himself who owns everything. Here the only solution to the human situation is trust in God. That spirit, I believe, is to reach out to all nations. It brings to mind a passage in Joel 3:1-3 which I offer without interpretation:

   

"For behold, in those days and at that time, when I restore the fortunes of Judah and Jerusalem, I will gather all the nations and bring them down to the valley of Jehosh'aphat, and I will enter into judgment with them there, on account of my people and my heritage Israel, because they have scattered them among the nations, and have divided up my land,…”


Jerusalem is the antidote for the self-determination that has evolved in the world; the idea that we can make our own future. It is, I believe, the developing pattern for the New Jerusalem described in Rev 21:2-3:

And I saw the holy city, New Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband; and I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, "Behold, the dwelling of God is with men. He will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain any more, for the former things have passed away."

Far from being discouraged by the “impossibility” that I find here, on the spiritual level it gives me great hope and comfort.

    

Rome: The Eternal City

Within the retreat centers, monasteries, and cathedrals that Linn and I have visited there is always a pervasive sense of holy presence. The sacredness of such places hangs thick in the air. Therefore I was eagerly expecting St. Peter’s at the Vatican to exude such divine presence as I have not yet experienced. But it was not there. I did not find the Vatican to be the “center of spirituality” that I thought it would be. Actually, because there is nothing of the substance of truth outside of the Spirit, all that is spiritual is center. In this sense the Vatican itself cannot be the “center” of spirituality. It is, however, a hub of that body of fallen believers struggling toward the redemption which the Spirit of Christ brings. It is the “church militant.”

My initial impression was one of officialdom; of institution, government, authority. And, indeed, the Vatican is the center of government of the Catholic Church. Judging by the statuary in St. Peter’s of popes sitting on “judgment seats” I even thought that this might be nothing more than a monument to human beings.

But as we spent more time around the Vatican something else was creeping up from underneath. I began to grasp the world-embracing scope of the Vatican. It came on me as we attended the pope’s Wednesday open audience in the Audience Hall. Here the pope acknowledged and addressed, each in their native language, groups of pilgrims from all over the world assembled together in an enormous hall. The brotherhood and sisterhood that comes together here under the cross of Christ, for the cross towers over all, becomes more than an idea or an ideal. One is absorbed into it.

I found here a strange admixture of personal intimacy conjoined with the world-embracing quality of the Vatican. Far from feeling lost within a global mass of humanity I felt my personal uniqueness actually being affirmed. I sensed a part of me coming alive that is not compartmentalized within an ego developed over a lifetime of living within an individualistic culture. Personal uniqueness finds its fullness within a sense of connection with the whole of God’s created order. Within a cultural context that is not so severely individualistic I began to understand that the Christ-Spirit is not individualistic, but neither can one properly call it collectivist. It is more like all-embracing. Only in our connection with essential “Humanity” as God has purposed humankind to exist does one find the fullness of one’s own human being. This is what I find the spirit of the Vatican to be; connectivity with “human being” as being restored through Christ. One understands that in Christ the divine quality of the human soul is overcoming its bondage to the world. In this sense Rome embodies the coming into being of the Church Victorious. 

A short taxi ride from the Vatican lie the ruins of the great Roman Empire. How ironic it seems that this once great empire held itself so superior to the seemingly insignificant body of believers that was the seedbed of the Christian Church. They were stamped as enemies of the state and dragged into the arena to be torn apart by wild beasts. You know, they really didn’t have very good organizational skills. The way you’re supposed to do it is to go out and find influential people in the community to form a board of directors who can promote your organization and get the funds coming in. It certainly doesn’t make much sense to go against the powers that be. By all rights this new organization should have fallen by the wayside long ago. But these who were the lowly and despised of the world had the eyes to see an unseen kingdom and the ears to hear an unheard message that is overcoming the world.

The final outcome of the weak in Christ

Rome is a place. Yet it is the eternal caught up within time and space. It is an historical proclamation of the eternal victory working in each of us. Here is where the apostle Paul was imprisoned and brought before Caesar, where Peter was bound in chains and crucified, where Christians were persecuted and martyred. Here the Church of Rome met secretly and defied the social conventions imposed on them to worship other gods. Here is where the mightiest empire on earth attempted to crush this neophyte community. Through the perspective of history the eternal victory pokes through. The splendor of the Roman Empire which exalted itself far above the “foolishness” of the gospel now lies in a heap of rubble below the monuments that today proclaim the faith of those early Christians.

Final outcome of the mighty of the world

What I sensed in Rome in the final analysis was the firm center of the church that has endured longer than any other organization on earth, which overcame the most powerful empire on earth (the very stones of the Coliseum and other buildings of the empire were confiscated and used to build the churches of Rome), which has endured sufferings and persecutions, has gone through times of corruption within itself – bad popes, selfish practices, the evils of the inquisition – yet continues to stand. One wants to entwine one’s life into its solid core. Such is not to sacrifice one’s self to religion but to expand into the liberty of its spirit.