South Africa | hughdbryant

Sermon preached by Hugh Bryant at St Peter’s Church, Old Cogan, on 14th January 2024

Jerusalem the Golden

Isaiah 60:9-22 – https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=572149666

‘Jerusalem the Golden with milk and honey blest’. I have to share with you that when I was little and I first heard this hymn, of course I was struck by how joyful and beautiful everything in it was, but nothing was more striking to me than the fact that Jerusalem was the home of my favourite biscuit.

I’m not sure that you can get them any more, but Jacob’s Milk and Honey, in those days, was the biscuit that I really liked. It was a bit like a jammy dodger, but it was oval rather than round. ‘Jerusalem the golden, with milk and honey blest’. Whatever else this wonderful place had, it had the best biscuit. Also, of course, chapter 60 in Isaiah, which Bernard of Cluny must have had in mind when he was writing our hymn in the 12th century, originally in Latin, had some very memorable lines for a little boy, which the compilers of the lectionary have chosen to omit tonight. We have started at verse nine, but I think you ought to know what you are missing. Here is some of the beginning of chapter 60 of Isaiah.

’60 Arise, shine; for thy light is come, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee.
2 For, behold, the darkness shall cover the earth, and gross darkness the people: but the Lord shall arise upon thee, and his glory shall be seen upon thee.
3 And the Gentiles shall come to thy light, and kings to the brightness of thy rising.
……..’
And then this immortal verse:

‘6 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; and they shall shew forth the praises of the Lord.’

The dromedaries of Midian and Ephah: dromedaries, please: not ‘young camels’ as the modern translation limply puts it. But that might have been all right when I was eight or nine years old, but what about ‘Jerusalem the golden’ today?

I wouldn’t be surprised if you had a slight feeling of unreality when I started talking about childish enthusiasms for particular types of biscuit, in the context of Jerusalem. Equally, the visions of Jerusalem shown to the Jews in Isaiah’s prophecy, on their return from exile in Babylon at the beginning of the sixth century BC, when scholars think Isaiah 60 was likely to have been written, just seem totally different from what we see today.

Jeremy Bowen, the BBC Middle East, editor, has written that, following the war of independence of Israel in 1948, and the Six Days war in 1967, ‘the Jews and the Arabs went about their business and the weight of the conflict never lifted. Israelis scrabbled to build a new state while Palestinians mourned the loss of the one they never had.’ [Bowen, J., (2022), The Making of the Modern Middle East, London, Picador; page 45].

The holy places of the three monotheistic religions, the religions of the book, so-called, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, are all in Jerusalem, right on top of each other. For as long as most of us can remember, the Holy Land has not been entirely peaceful. there have been major wars, the Six Days War, the Arab-Israeli war.

The occupied territories on the West Bank, which did belong to Jordan, were seized by Israel in 1967: the United Nations resolutions, forbidding the Israelis from creating settlements in the occupied lands, have been ignored, and there has been a constant undercurrent of violence. When Mr Guterres, the United Nations Secretary General, indicated that he believed that the trouble had not started on seventh October, he was pointing to the terrible history of violence between the Israelis and the Palestinians over many years.

Specifically in Gaza, in 2009 Israel bombed the Gaza Strip systematically over a period of 22 days in a campaign which they called Operation Cast Lead. It killed 1400 Palestinians and on the Israeli side there were 13 casualties. What is going on now is even worse.

I have been following the proceedings in the International Court of Justice, where South Africa has started a case against Israel alleging that Israel is guilty of genocide in Gaza, and that ‘provisional measures’ to preserve the rights of either party, as they are defined in the statutes of the International Court, article 41, are being sought, which would have the effect, if the parties would obey such an order, of bringing about a ceasefire.

The Israelis have sent a full team of lawyers to appear in the Hague before the court, including several leading British barristers. They say that South Africa’s claim that Israel is guilty of genocide is wrong, for three reasons. First, that under the Genocide Convention 1948, there needs to be an intention to bring about genocide. Israel has no such intention, they say. Second, the Convention requires that there be a dispute between the parties which has not been resolved, and, they say, there is no dispute in being between South Africa and Israel. And then, finally, that what Israel is doing is self defence and not genocide.

Probably the most powerful speech from the South African side was by an Irish barrister, Blinne Ní Ghrálaigh KC, who made the most powerful speech [see https://youtu.be/yhsWyBWGoCU?si=GjVSf6PyqnHYEoC%5D, which ended up quoting a sermon which was preached at Christmas by the Reverend Dr Munther Isaac, the minister at the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Bethlehem, who is a Palestinian.

The sermon is called “Christ in the rubble.” It is available to see on YouTube and I highly recommend it. [See https://youtu.be/aEGiANa0-oI?si=whdmciTT00C6is-t%5D South Africa’s counsel, Blinne Ní Ghrálaigh KC, quoted this at the end of her address.

‘I want you to look in the mirror and ask, where was I when Gaza was going through a genocide?’

She produced staggering figures of the numbers, killed and injured, including 9000 children killed by the Israeli army, and a number of quotations from Israeli politicians suggesting that they want to drive all Palestinians out of Gaza and raze it to the ground. Dr Isaac, in his sermon, raised the issue of complicity: that Western nations, that he characterised as ‘the Empire’, (by analogy with the Roman Empire) are standing idly by or even supporting genocide, by providing arms and other support.

Clearly, there are strong arguments on both sides, but one thing which we must surely agree on, is that the current situation has nothing to do with that golden Jerusalem, with milk and honey blest.

Isaiah’s prophecy is so different.

‘I will appoint Peace as your overseer  and Righteousness as your taskmaster.  Violence shall no more be heard in your land,  devastation or destruction within your borders; you shall call your walls Salvation,  and your gates Praise.  The sun shall no longer be  your light by day, nor for brightness shall the moon  give light to you by night; but the Lord will be your everlasting light,  and your God will be your glory.’

What a wonderful vision that is. Now all we need to do is to turn it into a realistic hope.

What shall we do to bring peace to the Middle East? I think that bringing things before the International Court of Justice is a good and constructive step. Others have suggested that there should be boycotts for as long as the genocide goes on.

If you agree with Dr Isaac and many other commentators, indeed, that it is genocide, then maybe there should be no more pilgrimages to the Holy Land, and we should stop buying Jaffa oranges. As the author Naomi Klein has pointed out, a campaign of boycott, divestment and sanctions was very effective in bringing about the ending of apartheid in South Africa. [See https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/10/only-outside-pressure-can-stop-israels-war-crimes?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other%5D

As Prof. Vaughan Lowe, KC, one of the counsel for S. Africa, said to the International Court of Justice, however awful the attack on October 7 was, 9000 Palestinian children killed, and countless others maimed, and continuing to be killed and maimed, along with tens of thousands of their mothers, cannot under any circumstances be justified as self defence. [See the verbatim record at https://www.icj-cij.org/sites/default/files/case-related/192/192-20240111-ora-01-00-bi.pdf%5D

Let us pray.

Let us pray to you Lord, that your will be done and that you will bring about peace in your Holy Land, and in particular, in Gaza, today.

Amen.

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.

Jerusalem the Golden

The Lawfulness of Love