+ Samuel was confused. He could hear a call but he didn’t understand it.
I don’t know if Nathanael was confused, but he was certainly wary. I understand Nathanael’s wariness, his doubt…. for the Messiah wasn’t supposed to come from Nazareth, the Messiah wasn’t supposed to be some disciple of the crazy John the Baptizer. Nathanael heard Philip’s call, but he just couldn’t figure it out: it felt very important but it didn’t make any sense.
Oh how I understand that feeling.
One week ago, right now, I was on the last leg of my Pilgrimage to the Holy Land. After a 6-½ hour layover in Newark, I was getting ready to board the flight to Buffalo. The pilgrimage was ending.
Or maybe it was just beginning.
The Holy Land called me before I arrived, it called me while I was there, and it still calls me.
This trip, this walk through the land of our faith, presented me with a series of calls.
Calls I heard loud and clear, but calls which, much like Nathanael, told me things I didn’t expect, calls which, much like Samuel’s were difficult to hear and at times even more difficult to understand.
I have heard theses calls but like Samuel and Nathanael I’m not sure how to answer.
This pilgrimage was glorious. It was awesome. But it was also disturbing. It was difficult, it was disconcerting.
In the Gospel of Luke, as he gazes over the Old City of Jerusalem, Jesus wept. Crying over the effect of power run amok in the City of his faith, Jesus wept.
And so do I.
The city, a holy place of honor for Jews Xn’s and Muslims alike—all the children of Abraham-- is a mess. Divided East and West, divided into the haves –Israeli Jews who live in West Jerusalem—and the have nots, the forgotten, the denied Palestinian Christians and Muslims who live in East Jerusalem…it’s a powder keg, a place of contradictions and challenges. It’s tense. The historical Jerusalem, within whose walls so much has happened---is crowded, crowded beyond anything you can imagine, dirty, cold, dark and full of people who have, for generations, loathed each other. Jerusalem is tough. And it is also GLORIOUS.
Stunning in the history it presents, stunning in the warmth of the Palestinian merchants, stunning in the sheer magnitude of all that has occurred within her ancient walls.
While I feel called to Jerusalem, I also feel repelled.
Jerusalem represents the very best and the very worst of humanity…so while she called me to wander her old cobblestone streets, called me to walk the way of Jesus, called me to banter and bargain with the merchants, my answer, my response to her call is hard to decipher. At times, my response was joy, other times it was tears. Jerusalem disturbs me, she shakes me, she calls to me. Answering that call is trickier, answering that call is the processing I have begun and will continue for the next several weeks, months and years.
After a week in the city our pilgrimage shifted to the country, the wilderness, the desert of Judea and the rolling hills of Galilee.
A few minutes outside of Jerusalem, heading north, the landscape—both God-made and human made-- changes dramatically. Gone is the barbed wire, the noise, the bustle, the hustle, the lamenting. The Judean desert is foreboding. It is forbidding. It is stunning. It is holy.
And it is where I met Omar.
Omar is about six years old. He is a Bedouin, that ancient nomadic people who are no longer able to travel freely shepherding their sheep and setting up camp wherever they wished. Instead they make a meager living selling their wares to pilgrims who find their way to the desert camps the Bedouins now call home. On that mountaintop deep in the Judean wilderness I was charmed by a child of God, selling bracelets with a sweet call of “American American, bracelet? One dollar!” a boy whose sweet and gentle spirit reminded me that God, brought to us in the person of a boy much like Omar, calls to us in a variety of ways, just waiting for us to hear.
God’s call can come in the dark of night, in the light of day, in the very unpleasant human conflicts millennia in the making and seemingly impossible to solve, and on a mountaintop in the wilderness, where a young child, riding on a donkey, brought the fullness of the Holy Land, the fullness of God’s Love, the fullness of God’s desire for us into focus for me, a weary pilgrim. I am not sure how to reconcile the horrors of apartheid evident throughout the state of Israel with the sweet smile of God’s child Omar, but I do know that within these different images, somewhere deep within the inspiring, disturbing, hopeful and despairing images of The Holy I saw on this pilgrimage, God has called to and continues to call to me, to us.
My journey was one of birth, it was one of death, it was one of resurrection and re-birth. And it was one I took with each and every one of you.
As a small token of my gratitude, as a meager offering of thanks, I offer you these olive wood crosses, hand crafted in Bethlehem the birthplace of Jesus, anointed within the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, the site of Jesus death and Resurerection and now, with water gathered from the River Jordan, where Jesus was baptized and anointed as God’s beloved, blessed.
Let us pray:
Gracious and Loving God, every year we embark on a journey through the life death and resurrection of your son, the One who came to live as one of us, your beloved creation, bless these crosses for the people of this parish. May they be a reminder to us that we are always being called by you and that through the journey of your Son, we are able to hear and respond to the call to Be Your Light in this, the world you have given to our care. Bless the holy land, bless her people, bless her leaders and bless her children. Especially Omar, my friend, my call, my hope. Through Jesus Christ, Your son and our Lord, Amen.
