Hope and despair Commissioning service, Rev. Páraic Réamonn Ezekiel 34.11-16, 20-24, Psalm 100, Ephesians 1.15-23, Matthew 25.31-40 Longniddry Parish Church, Presbytery of Lothian, November 18 2014 Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience. – Romans 8.24f

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It’s the morning of the day before Thanksgiving in the West Wing, and White House press secretary CJ Cregg is done. That is, until she is told there are Indians in the lobby. They had a meeting scheduled with Jacob Cutler from intergovernmental affairs on an application that’s been hanging fire for 15 years; but he stood them up. They’re not leaving until they get satisfaction, there are press correspondents everywhere, and the Washington Post is on speed dial. So she goes see the Indians – two Stockbridge Munsees named Maggie Morningstar-Charles and Jack Lonefeather. “This is gonna have something to do with us screwing you out of your land, isn't it?” she asks. “Yes,” says Maggie. In the apartment I inherited in Jerusalem, I inherited a bunch of DVDs. These range from The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, a subtle and moving Holocaust film I urge you all to rush out and watch, to a boxed set of Desperate Housewives. They also include The West Wing, my all-time favourite American political drama. The episode I’m quoting comes from season 3.

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Our service tonight is modelled on what we do in St Andrew’s Scots Memorial Church at 10am every Sunday. This sermon is a partial exception. For one thing, it’s 20% longer. For another, it’s not a sermon I’d ever preach in Jerusalem, although I’ll put it on my blog. And it’s not precisely a sermon, although if you look carefully, you’ll see God’s head poking above the parapet.

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“I found myself lately becoming less and less hopeful about the possibility of peace for the Israelis and Palestinians... Where before I had eagerly read all of the news reports and political analyses, I now lack the emotional energy to absorb any more stories of stalled peace processes or the latest in the all-too-familiar pattern of violence avenged by more violence.”

If you’re wondering how I got burnt out after 10 weeks in Jerusalem, or whether the World Mission Council hasn’t made a huge mistake sending me there, fear not. This is not me: it’s Carol Birkland of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. I’m quoting again. Birkland wrote these words in her introduction to a book of interviews published by the World Council of Churches in 1987, the year that ended with the outbreak of the first intifada, the year before Yasser Arafat persuaded the Palestine National Council publicly to support a two-state solution. It’s called Unified in Hope: Arabs and Jews talk about peace. She interviewed 19 Israelis and Palestinians who were convinced that peace was possible, who had managed to escape the hate and fear that imprisoned so many others, and who exhorted their fellow Israelis and Palestinians to find new ways of relating to each other before it was too late.

2 Her final question to each of them was, “Are you hopeful that peace will come?” All said yes. Many responded with another question, “What choice is there other than hope?” Their hope was a hoping against hope, a radical hope that refused to die even when surrounded by hopelessness, a hope that defied despair.

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There are times when, as the Irish poet Seamus Heaney says, hope and history rhyme. But looking back on these interviews almost four decades later, it’s not hard to see why hope and history in the Holy Land have yet to do this, why peace has yet to break out. The second of the 19 interviews is with Mordechai Bar-on, a native son of German parents. “I killed Arabs,” Bar-On tells Birkland.

“… During the truce between the two independence war campaigns, I was in charge of guarding one part of the demarcation line, and some of the Palestinians who had been chased out or had fled from some of the villages that were now on our side of the line would go back and try to reap the wheat or take some fruits… We would ambush them, and in one of these ambushes there was a whole convoy of camels and donkeys coming back across the border from where they had taken their fruits or whatever. There were two or three men in front of the caravan making sure the road was clear, and when I rose up to stop them, one man was only a yard away from me. Later on we found out that he was not armed, but I did not know that at the time. “He embraced me because he wanted to be close enough not to be shot, and I had to shoot him with my revolver. I killed him at very close range because he was almost on top of me, and I was frightened that he was attacking me.”

“This was the war,” Bar-On says. “It did not in any way make me angry or hateful.” I believe him. The war, and his two decades of distinguished military service following the war, did not make him angry or full of hatred. They just made him a killer of Arabs. His interview ends with a statement that deserves quoting at length:

“To ask for forgiveness does not necessarily include repentance. If I ask you for forgiveness, it means that I am aware that I did something wrong. Even if I know that by the very fact that I ‘was’, that because I existed in a certain place, wrong was done to you, I still want to ask for your forgiveness even though the wrongs were wrongs I could not avoid.” “…I cannot and I do not want to repent for the Zionist project. I can give you a whole lecture about why I think Zionism was justified, but even supposing the Zionist project was wrong, so what? I had not way of avoiding that wrong because I was born in this country. There is nothing in me that could have prevented my doing the things I have done: from fighting, from killing Arabs, or from participating in the Israeli army for 22 years and wanting to defend the state of Israel. It’s an existential matter, and therefore I have no way of repenting and I don’t want to repent. If I had to go through all of this again, I would do the same things.” “I am, however, fully aware of a very important element in peace-making: it is that a basic wrong was done to the Palestinians. They suffered from the fact that we Jews returned to this place. They paid a high price that they shouldn’t have had to pay, but couldn’t help but pay. Therefore, I know that if and when they will accept that I cannot be but who I am, a Zionist living a Jewish existence in this land, then I will go down on my knees and ask for their forgiveness because they deserve it, and I think that is the only way they will ever realize that I did what I did because I had to.”

This was said when Mordechai Bar-On was a leading spokesman for Peace Now; and it is bad on so many levels.

3 To ask for forgiveness is to repent, otherwise it’s just a pious fraud. And what Bar-On says is a classic example of false human consciousness. It’s a denial of human responsibility, a denial of human agency. Existence is not fate; it is choice. It is only because Bar-On was and is committed to the Zionist project of creating a Jewish state for a Jewish people, without regard to the rights or dignity of the others who lived in the land, that he could not avoid doing what he did. Israeli Jews are, like people everywhere, a choosing people. They chose to kill Arabs or chase them out. They chose to create and defend the state of Israel in its present form. They could have chosen otherwise. They still can.

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Over breakfast in St Andrew’s Scottish Guesthouse in September, a Jew in the Reform tradition who teaches religious studies in the US gave me a beguiling image that would gladden the heart of St Paul. In 1949, he said, the world put Israel on trial and found the new state not guilty; in 1967, the state of Israel said, “Try me again.” The world is increasingly inclined to find the state of Israel guilty on the second count but seems unwilling so far to revisit the first charge. Writing last month in Ha’aretz, the Israeli equivalent of the Guardian, the admirable Amira Hass said this:

As the descendants of a people [that] was banished throughout history from its homes and various homelands, we Israelis have developed our own expulsion skills – skills that would not embarrass the kings, nobles and officials of the goyim. Our contribution to the family of banishing nations is great, especially considering our short existence as a sovereign entity.

She gives us an inventory of nine methods of overt or covert expulsion currently in use, camouflaged under many legal definitions or concealed under various circumstantial theories. It’s a fascinating illustration of the bureaucracy of evil. But her most important point comes, almost in passing, in the paragraph following the words I just quoted. Since 1948, the state of Israel has made do with smaller expulsions. In 1947-48, in what Mordechai Bar-On calls the war of independence and Palestinians call the cataclysm, the catastrophe, the Nakba, the emerging state of Israel expelled between 700,000 and 800,000 Arab inhabitants of Mandate Palestine from their homes, their towns, their villages – roughly 80% of the Arabs living in what became the state of Israel. This was the big expulsion, says Hass. This was the mother of expulsions.

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It’s the evening of the day before Thanksgiving in the West Wing, and pretty much everyone has gone home; but the Indians are still in the lobby. “What were the Munsees doing in 1778?” CJ asks them. “Fighting in George Washington's army,” they say. “And whose land was it in the first place?” CJ asks. “Ours,” they say. “I'm gonna have the park police escort you from the building,” CJ tells them, “it'll take me a few minutes, so you can make whatever calls you need to make. Or you can come back to my office right now, we'll make an appointment for Monday and the White House will cover your expenses…” They plump for option B. As CJ leads them to her office, she asks, “How do you keep fighting these smaller injustices when they're all from the mother of injustices?”

4 And Maggie says, “What's the alternative?”

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I am the Lord your God, says the first of the ten commandments. This means that we are not to go whoring after false gods, including the false gods of nationalism. Jesus is Lord, says the New Testament. This means that no one and nothing else is. Christ is king, as we shall remind ourselves on Sunday. This means that we look forward in hope to the day when the kingdom of our broken world becomes the kingdom of our God and his messiah. However tempted we may be to despair, we do not lose heart. And don’t hold your breath, but it’s just possible that in the land we ironically call holy, we may be on the brink of a real conversation about the mother of injustices. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience. – Romans 8.24f