Archives for posts with tag: Balfour Declaration

Comfortable Words in Gaza

By hughdbryant
October 13, 2024 //
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If you come across a terrible situation, what does it feel like to the people involved? And if it is a truly terrible situation, what does God feel about it?

We hear about Joshua leading the people of Israel into the promised land, and taking over the city of Jericho, in a very theatrical way, at the blast of a trumpet. It did occur to me that the priests who blew the trumpets, and blew the trumpets continually, must have been supremely fit, because they were walking round the city and blowing their trumpets at the same time, for seven circuits of the city. I have no idea how that compares with the effort required to undertake the half marathon, but I suspect that it is in the same league. To do that, while blowing the trumpet flat out is pretty impressive.

I’m very edgy about reading Bible stories about the Israelites entering the promised land at the moment, because I can’t get away from thinking about what is happening in the Holy Land today. In a sense we are looking at the consequences of the Israelites entering the promised land all over again, in 1948, or possibly you could trace it back to the Balfour Declaration, in 1917. If you want to know more about the history, there is a very good film which we saw the other night, courtesy of Christian Aid, called The Tinderbox.

Either way, they were displacing the indigenous Palestinians and now, in the conflict in Gaza, the International Court of Justice has ruled that Israel is to take steps to avoid genocide. I was listening to the BBC Today programme yesterday morning, and I would like to read to you what I made notes of from the programme and from Jeremy Bowen’s report.

Introducing the topic, the presenter Justin Webb said,“Israel’s operation in Gaza is intended to destroy Hamas. Now the medical charity MSF says the bombardment is turning neighbourhoods into uninhabitable ruins. There are still 400,000 Palestinian civilians in northern Gaza, the UN says.” He introduced a report from Jeremy Bowen.

“JB: ‘Israel has upped the military pressure on northern Gaza once again…. Just a few miles away on the other side of the wall is Jabalia Camp, where Palestinian families were fleeing on the orders of the Israeli army. Some of them were hit by bullets.’

“A Palestinian, a woman called Manar al-Bayar, who was rushing down the street carrying a toddler, says: ‘They told us we have five minutes to leave the Fallujah school. Where do we go? In southern Gaza there are assassinations. In western Gaza they’re shelling people. Where do we go? O God! God is our only chance.’

“JB said: ’The Israelis don’t allow journalists in [to Gaza] except with the army in very restrictive circumstances.… the Israelis are doing a major military operation. They are working in virtual privacy there, secrecy. They are moving, they say, after elements of Hamas, but of course there are terrible things happening to the civilian population who have already lived under massive pressure for a year.’

“He introduced Liz Allcock, of Medical Aid for Palestinians, who said: ‘It’s been apparent for some time that this has been a deliberate systematic attempt to present an existential threat to the Palestinians, particularly in the north of Gaza, by making life unliveable but at the same time issuing these forced displacement orders, and then when people try to flee, direct targeting of those people while they are under the impression that they will be provided safe passage.”

JB asked how she could prove they were being aimed at deliberately. “After all, it’s a war zone”. She said, “When we are receiving patients in hospitals, [there are a] large number of those women and children and people of, if you like, noncombatant age, receiving direct shots to the head, to the spine, to the limbs -[which is] very indicative of direct, targeted, attack.’

JB: “At the Kamal Adwan hospital in northern Gaza, the director is posting daily updates from his intensive care unit. It is filled with wounded children on ventilators.

He says Israel is blocking fuel deliveries for his generator and bringing the hospital and its patients close to catastrophe.

JB: “On Israeli TV, … a retired general has launched an idea that he believed can finally deliver victory to Israel in Gaza. The IDF is gradually adopting some or all of this new tactic, to clear northern Gaza, known as the “Generals’ Plan”. It was proposed by a group of retired senior officers led by General Giora Eiland, who is a former national security adviser. His idea is to tell civilians to leave, and if they don’t, to impose a siege. No food or water, and treat everyone left as a legitimate target.”

What does it feel like to be a Palestinian in Gaza right now? Could it be a bit like being an inhabitant of Jericho when Joshua and the Israelites were walking round blowing their trumpets? There’s no hope. Destruction is all around you. What did you do wrong? Isn’t it striking that the voice of the woman from the heart of northern Gaza appeals to God. Only God can help.

I can’t help feeling that somehow we should not be just leaving this to God. We should be doing something to stop this killing and this desolation. We should certainly bring this to the Lord in our prayers, but also what Jesus said about the unrepentant cities should resonate with us, surely.

That’s what Jesus felt. He was looking for repentance, for the minds of the people where he had done the deeds of power, his miracles, to be changed, and for them to follow his commandment of love.

We must repent, change our minds, and change the minds of the people in those terrible places. At the very least we should be writing to our MP to join the calls to our government to stop supplying weapons to Israel.

Because, after all, how hard is it? How hard is it to follow Jesus’s commandments? The answer is what we have traditionally called one of the ‘Comfortable Words’. ‘Come unto me all that travail and are heavy laden, and I will refresh you’. ‘For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light’.

If people really believed that, and if they did something about it, then a lot of the suffering in the world, if not all of it, would go away. Because they don’t, really they are like the cities in Galilee that Jesus condemned in frustration. Is what we do better than the genocide? What would Jesus say?

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The Lawfulness of Love

By hughdbryant
October 16, 2023 //
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Sermon at Evensong on 15th October 2023 at All Saints Church, Penarth

Bible readings referred to:

https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=564029064

Writing a sermon this week has been a challenge. In the face of the terrible events in Israel and Palestine, it doesn’t seem right for me just to give you a more or less academic, measured exposition of two Bible lessons, coupled with some observations on the words of the psalm, unless that analysis and exposition in some way bears on how we as Christians should respond to the crisis in the Middle East.

I am not going to add much to the huge number of more or less wise words which have been written or said by commentators, journalists and scholars, who all know far more than I do. 

But starting with our Bible readings; how can a sentence such as the beginning of our new Testament lesson, “See what love the father has given us, that we should be called children of God”, say anything about the bestial violence perpetrated by Hamas and the disproportionate retribution meted out by Israel? I honestly think that the only thing we can say is that two wrongs do not make a right. But that doesn’t take away the wrongness of either of the wrongs.

I suggest that there will be no chance of restoring peace unless the parties understand where the actions being taken are supposed to lead. What is the ultimate objective? Granted, of course, that Israel has the right to defend itself, what should that mean, precisely? Does the objective justify breaking international law? Cutting off fresh water, food and power, and forcing the civilian population of an area to leave, are said, by representatives of the United Nations, of the World Health Organisation and of the EU, to be breaches of that law.

Everybody can trade historical references. Moses leading the Jews into the ‘promised land’. The Balfour Declaration in 1917, according to which there would be created a national home for the Jews in Palestine, on the express understanding that no harm would be done to the indigenous inhabitants, to the Palestinians, by the arrival of the Jews; the creation of the state of Israel, following a revolt against British rule, carried out by what we would regard as a terrorist organisation, the Stern Gang, in which Yitzhak Shamir, who became the prime minister of Israel, figured prominently, in the end of the 1940s; The Six-Day War; the Yom Kippur War; the Camp David agreement; the two state solution; they are all earnestly rehearsed by somebody or other in relation to this crisis.

Not all – not many – Palestinians are terrorists; they don’t all belong to Hamas. Not all Jews are Zionists, supporting the occupation of settlements on the West Bank in contravention of United Nations resolutions. 

But the world stands by. 

What does it mean for a government to say they ‘stand with’ Israel? Does it mean that they turn a blind eye if the international law against making war on civilians is ignored? They are happy to condemn Hamas for exactly the same crime, for that is the nature of Hamas’ terrorism, that they made war on civilians.

So what does St John say in his first letter? He says that ‘everyone who commits sin is guilty of lawlessness’, and that ‘sin is lawlessness’. It’s not specified in the Greek text which law is being referred to, just ‘law’. The New English Bible dares to say that it is the law of God. Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength. And thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. 

That is the essence of the law of God. But it doesn’t actually say that here. It just says that committing sin is to be lawless, is to break the law. So that could also be the law of man, including international law. So you could say that, according to St John’s first letter, a lot of what is going on in the Middle East, on both sides, is sinful.

But, as the editor of the Church Times, Paul Handley, says in his editorial this week, ‘The conventions of war are fictions. They apply a veneer of civilisation to violence, but they lure people into the confused business of judging relative guilt and innocence. There is, of course, no difference between an infant in Kibbutz Kfar Aza, stabbed to death by a Hamas militant, or an infant in a flat in Gaza City, killed by a retaliatory Israeli missile strike.’

Our psalm today is that wonderful vision of God knowing every bit about us, even before we were made, and saying that we are “fearfully and wonderfully made”. But looking at what’s going on in Gaza, and just outside, that isn’t really the psalm that we would choose.“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” – Psalm 22, seems much more apt. But, maybe, there is still ground for hope. 

Recent history has at least two wonderful examples, where people who were mired in conflict, bitterly hating one another, and committing atrocities, found ways to bring about peace; in apartheid South Africa, and in Northern Ireland during the time of the troubles. In Northern Ireland they made the Good Friday agreement, and in South Africa, Nelson Mandela got Archbishop Tutu to run the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Just as Saint John says, “What we will be has not yet been revealed“, rather in the way that St Paul said, in his first letter to the Corinthians, that, although today we see ‘as through a glass, darkly’, then we shall see him face-to-face: so John also says, “We must not be like Cain who was from the evil one and murdered his brother…. We know that we have passed from death to life because we love one another”. Can we bring love back to the Middle East?

The former Israeli ambassador in London, Mark Regev, was interviewed on Newsnight by Mark Urban. When asked how he would justify invading Gaza and killing civilians as well as Hamas fighters, he said, ‘What else would you do? If the world sees that Hamas can attack Israel and Israel does nothing, Israel will no longer be safe’.

But what if there was truth and reconciliation? What if Israel made Gaza something other than a giant prison camp; what if the Palestinians were able to travel freely and engage in economic activity without restraint? Then surely Israel need no longer feel threatened by what the editor of the Church Times describes as ‘a young Gazan man, brutalised from childhood by the deprivations inflicted by Israel and infected by the murderous ideology of the Hamas organisation’.

Then I believe we could have sure and certain hope, that we will see the present things as sinful as they are; hope that we will see ourselves as the Lord sees us, and that peace will come again through the lawfulness of love. 

Let it be so: Lord, hear our prayer.

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Milk and Honey for Dromedaries

By hughdbryant
May 1, 2018 //
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Sermon for Evensong on the Fourth Sunday after Easter, 29th April 2018

Isaiah 60:1-14, Revelation 3:1-13

I’m not sure whether Jerusalem is a good thing. ‘Jerusalem the golden, with milk and honey blest’: as some of you will know, always puts me in mind of my favourite biscuit when I was little: Huntley and Palmer’s Milk and Honey biscuit, which was a bit like a superior jammy dodger. No, what I have in mind now is that the idea of Jerusalem covers all sorts of things. It is a place: for sure it is a place today, which President Trump has designated as the place where the United States will have its embassy, as though it were the capital of Israel – although it isn’t. There is the place in ancient times which Isaiah, the third of the three authors who together make up the book of the prophet Isaiah, writing in the sixth century before Christ, made the more or less mythical capital of the promised land, the city of the Lord, the ‘Zion’ of the holy one of Israel. Zion is the name of the hill on which the city of David, the centre of Jerusalem, was built. It was the place for the temple and was, in a sense, where God lived.

So it goes on to have a meaning as the heavenly city, the kingdom of heaven; which is the idea in our reading from Revelation. ‘Him that overcometh’, the elect, the chosen ones, ‘him … will I make a pillar in the temple of my God, … and I will write upon him the name of my God, and the name of the city of my God, which is the new Jerusalem, which cometh down out of heaven from my God’. We still talk about people being ‘pillars’, ‘pillars of the church’. They are the stalwarts, the usual suspects, on the PCC and Deanery Synod.

That mythical new Jerusalem was adopted by William Blake, of course, in his great hymn,” And did those feet in ancient time, walk upon England’s mountains green? … I will not cease from mental fight, nor shall my sword sleep in my hand, until we have built Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land.’

In some ways that all sounds very admirable and harmless. The picture in Isaiah of the holy city, ‘The multitude of camels shall cover thee, the dromedaries of Midian and Ephah; all they from Sheba shall come: they shall bring gold and incense’ is a wonderful picture. You may wonder, of course, what a dromedary is. And I have to tell you that Hilaire Belloc, in his ‘Bad Child’s Book of Beasts’ gets the dromedary completely wrong. He says,

The Dromedary is a cheerful bird:

I cannot say the same about the Kurd.

Hilaire Belloc, Complete Verse, collected edition (1954), reprinted 1991, London, Pimlico, p.237 n

A Kurd, you know, people who live on the borders between Turkey and Iraq: Kurds, not animals at all! But also, dromedaries are not birds, not birds at all. They are a sort of small camel. Mind you, The Bad Child’s Book of Beasts is probably not a good source of zoological information. I can’t resist reading you what Hilaire Belloc says about the tiger, just before the entry about the dromedary. It comes after his description of the lion.

The Tiger on the other hand, is kittenish and mild,

He makes a pretty playfellow for any little child;

And mothers of large families (who claim to common sense)

Will find a Tiger well repay the trouble and expense.

Oh dear. Well, Isaiah correctly thought of dromedaries as a species of camel. ‘The multitude of camels shall cover thee, the dromedaries of Midian and Ephah’. Everyone will come to the holy city, not only the Jews but also the Gentiles: ‘The Gentiles shall come to thy light.., the forces of the Gentiles shall come unto thee.’

‘Therefore thy gates shall be open continually; they shall not be shut day nor night; that men may bring unto thee the forces of the Gentiles, and that their kings may be brought.’

This is a clue to the problem which I want to go into now. It’s the idea of a homeland or nationality; it’s a very strong idea in many people. Scotsmen go all over the world but keep their Scottishness; they always celebrate St Andrew’s Night and Burns Night. But nationality is not an entirely benign idea. The problem seems to come when people are on the move. Obviously, as we are in church, we can think of the Jews, the people of Israel, leaving the land of Egypt and the land of Babylon –

‘By the waters of Babylon

We sat down and wept: when we remembered thee, O Sion.’ Psalm 137.

They longed for the Promised Land. Then, as we know, the promised land story was effectively repeated, but without any parting of the Red Sea or anything, following the Balfour Declaration of 1917. Palestine was declared to be a national home for the Jews – and there’s been trouble ever since, between the Israelites and the people they displaced, the Palestinians.

In this country, maybe William Blake’s new Jerusalem has to some extent already been built. I noticed that an MP called Kemi Badenoch, whose parents were Nigerian, was saying on ‘Any Questions’ on Friday that she thought that Britain was a very attractive country for people to come to and settle in; and that we are a welcoming people. I have to say, having heard the awful stories of what has happened to many of the ‘Windrush people’, I thought she was being rather generous; but nevertheless, the idea is there. It seems to be a similar one to the one in Isaiah: that if we have ‘built Jerusalem, in England’s green and pleasant land’, then not only the Israelites, but also the Gentiles will be welcome to it:

‘.. thy gates shall be open continually; they shall not be shut day nor night’

so presumably that means that not only the people who were born here, but also other people from outside – in this context, the ‘Gentiles’ – should be able to get into the Holy City.

But then again, perhaps the Holy City is spiritual, a spiritual concept rather than a literal, physical one, so we should rather look at the sort of vision that St John the Divine shares with us in Revelation. A place for the people who prove worthy of salvation:

‘Because thou hast kept the word of my patience, I also will keep thee from the hour of temptation, which shall come upon all the world..’

If you are one of the saved, then you are going to be welcome in the City of God, new Jerusalem. This new Jerusalem is in heaven, or it ‘comes down from heaven’. I think that, as soon as you see the word ‘heaven’, it’s a signal that this is a spiritual concept rather than a literal, physical one.

The Son of Man, Jesus, appearing to St John the Divine, telling him to write down his letters to the Seven Churches of Asia, is a sort of preparation for the Day of Judgement. Watch out! ‘I know thy works’. You aren’t everything that you’re cracked up to be. Be careful, if you want to go to the new Jerusalem.

So I wonder whether the idea of the new Jerusalem resonates with us at all today. Is it in ‘England’s green and pleasant land’? If so, are the Gentiles allowed in – with their camels and dromedaries, bringing their gold and silver? Who are the ‘Gentiles’ today? Are they just us, who happen not to be Jewish? or should we be like the church at Philadelphia – by the way, you know what ‘Philadelphia’ means in Greek: it means ‘brotherly love’ or ‘brotherly affection’ – and of course that includes sisters too. Αδελφός means a brother, and αδελφή a sister, so Φιλαδέλφεια means brotherly or sisterly love.

So are we going to be like the people in Philadelphia? Although they have ‘a little strength’, they’re not very strong, they have ‘kept my word’ and have not ‘denied my name’. They will be welcome in the new Jerusalem. We know what we have to do. Open the gates!

L

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