Sermon Lent 2 - The Rev. Dr. Frank G. Kirkpatrick

February 21, 2016

Second Sunday in Lent

Trinity Church

Genesis 15:1-12,17-18

Philippians 3:17-4:1

Luke 13:31-35

The Rev. Dr. Frank G. Kirkpatrick

 

The scripture lessons this morning reflect a complicated and conflicted understanding of the value of land or territory in the Biblical story of God’s relationship to the people of the earth. Out of a complex ritual having to do with animals and birds, God makes a covenant with Abram that will give him land and fill the world with his descendants greater in number than the stars in the sky. And in the Gospel Jesus tells his followers that he must go on up to the physical space of Jerusalem to finish his mission by being put to death there.

In both stories the importance of land seems central.  God promises Abram and his descendants land if they will remain faithful to God. Jesus considers it his duty to God’s call to wind up specifically in Jerusalem, the city that kills prophets and stones those who are sent to it. In the first instance land is a gift: a place for Abram’s descendants to settle and live out their covenant with God. But in the second instance the land, the territory of Jerusalem, is a place of death. Between these two poles of land as a place of settlement and land as a place of crucifixion we get an eerie foreshadowing of contemporary conflicts and the conflicted status of land, especially for those who want to dwell in it and for those who have been driven from it. Land is both a place where people lay down healthy roots and pass it on to subsequent generations, and it is place with borders which are jealously protected in order to keep other people out. Land is both precious as a place to flourish and fraught with violence and oppression as people fight over it. Land is both that from which some people flee and it is that in which other people hope to live in safety for many generations to come. Land is both blessing and curse. 

In today’s state of Israel there are some who want to claim its land exclusively for the descendants of the Jews as a kind of reparation for the horrendous attempts by Christians to exterminate the Jewish people throughout European history and especially in the Holocaust. Some contemporary Jews, especially in the settler movement, appeal to what they call the Biblical mandate to justify their occupation and control over the territory they call Judea and Samaria, including the West Bank, an area which others call the occupied territories. Invoking this mandate has led to the oppression, daily humiliation, and second-class status of the Palestinian people whose ancestors have lived on that land for centuries long before the establishment of the contemporary state of Israel in 1948. The Jewish people are themselves often conflicted about what to do with the land they believe was originally given to them by God but which they now can control only by making the Palestinians second-class citizens, appropriating the land on which they have built their homes, or expelling them. Of course there are some Palestinians who would like to see the state of Israel disappear and for this reason Israel has built walls both physical and legal to keep the Palestinians under tight restrictions. The Israelis can enjoy being on the land some call their own by divine mandate only by keeping a close watch on their Palestinian neighbors, which only increases hostility and mistrust, hardly building blocks for enjoying the land in peace and comfort. Land in this context is both blessing and curse. 

Some folk in the western part of the United States have recently tried to occupy federal land without abiding by the laws which govern how that land is to be used. The outlaws in Oregon are claiming that the land belongs to them, not to the government. They forget of course that if original ownership of the land were the point, then the land should be returned to the Native Americans from whom it was taken by fraud and violence long ago. They also forget that public land is a blessing for the people of the country but a curse for those who want to occupy it for their own narrow selfish purposes.

 

The middle east outside Israel is also filled with people whose lives are being torn apart by bloody conflict over land and who will control it and determine who will live on it and under what conditions. The end result is the spiraling problem of refugees and migrants. This is a problem deeply rooted in the issue of land, territory, or geography. Our biblical passages once agains remind us that land can be both promise and death. 

What then can we say? What can the Christian faith contribute to the resolution of the conflicts over territory and land that blight the world today? First, and perhaps of most immediate relevance, we can remind ourselves and our nation that our first loyalty is to persons who have suffered from violence in their native lands and have been driven from it exile or expulsion. It is not ultimately about loyalty to lines or borders on a map demarcating who belongs in which territory. The refugees who are fleeing oppression in their own country are first and foremost our neighbors, children of the same God as us. In the eyes of God their identity is not given primarily through their national or ethnic affiliation. A few weeks ago Drew Smith drew a wonderfully moving picture of the holy family of Jesus as a clear prototype of the refugee family, one which had to flee Bethlehem to get to safety in Egypt and later Nazareth. They crossed borders not defined by their regional identity but known to God for who they were as persons. They were returning to a land whose traditions included welcoming the sojourner or immigrant to whom the Israelites gave the same rights as themselves, who were the present occupiers of the land and who themselves had been sojourners after leaving Egypt and settling in the land of Canaan (which one might remember happened only after the slaughter and expulsion of its original inhabitants, the Canaanites). Land as both blessing and curse. While there are legitimate concerns about where to draw the borders of nations and who to allow to cross those borders, there is for people in the biblical tradition always the overarching concern for the exile, the refugee, the migrant as one who shares a common humanity, if not always a common faith or physical territory with us. Stoking the fear of the immigrant is antithetical to our deepest Christian values because our ancestors, both in Biblical times and more recently were all migrants at one time or another. 

Our faith should also remind us that the occupation of the land and even our identity as citizens of a particular nation are provisional, not absolute, identities. National identity and the value of the nation of which we are members are contingent on an ever-changing history. They are always of lesser value than the imperative from God to treat all others, especially the refugees from war-torn lands, with love and acceptance, not with exclusion and discrimination.

Finally we can remind ourselves of the ancient Jewish and Christian virtue of hospitality, the gracious reception of others, especially travelers, who arrive at our doorstep unannounced and unexpected. Perhaps the greatest example of hospitality was found among peoples, such as the Bedouin who migrated in tents across the desert, ready to settle down temporarily or provisionally but always ready to pick up and move on as circumstances changed. They carried their identity from place to place with no fixed location. They could receive others with generosity because the defense of a fixed location was not central to their way of life.  

Perhaps in these days of conflict over land and national and ethnic identity we might try to recover some of the spirit of the Bedouin practice of hospitality on the move. We certainly have more than enough abundant resources to share with those migrants and refugees fleeing to us from war and strife. If any people on earth can afford to be hospitable to those in need it is surely we in the United States whose abundance is only limited by our imagination and our self-seeking. We do not need to be like the Jerusalem Jesus entered, a city whose self-image was so exalted that it felt it needed to put to death those whose mission challenged its sense of self-importance. Puffing up so-called American exceptionalism is completely contrary to the Biblical mandate, not to occupy land but to extend love and hospitality to everyone regardless of ethnic or national identity. It is, as Pope Francis recently said, more Christian when building walls to also build bridges.

 We do well to recall the words of Martin Luther King, recently echoed by our new Presiding Bishop, Michael Curry:

“We shall either learn to live together … or perish together as fools……The choice is ours, ‘chaos or community.’ 

 

Let’s opt for community: it’s part of our Christian DNA and it is the ultimate fulfillment of our souls and bodies.