A reflection by our pastor, Wendy, after visiting Palestine.
When Jeff and Janet invited me on their most recent trip to Palestine, I immediately started to rearrange my schedule so that I could go. They've been inviting me to come and see for almost three years now, but this was the first time that I could make it work.
They were upfront with me from the beginning: this wasn't a tourism trip. Yes, we'd be staying in Bethlehem, and we'd likely visit Jerusalem, but the week would center around Kairos Palestine, and the conference they were hosting to premier their second document: a theological treatise on genocide and a call for the global Church to respond.
Folks came from all over the world to participate - members of the India Palestine Solidarity Forum, pastors from Chile and Uruguay, activists from Norway and the UK, and so many more. We came to hear directly from the Palestinians, to bear witness to apartheid and genocide, and to respond to their call for costly solidarity.
My time in Palestine was hard, and it was holy. It was full of grief and full of beauty.
We heard from a twelve-year-old young girl displaced from the Jenin Refugee Camp, the only home she'd ever known, now doing school online and living in a 77-room dorm with 500 other people. I couldn't help but think of the 12-year-olds here at Heart of the Rockies as she spoke.
I met students at Bethlehem University who desperately want to stay in the land of their parents and their grandparents and their great-grandparents, who can articulate the importance of the Christian presence in Bethlehem, Beit Jala, and Beit Sahour, especially as pilgrims from around the world come to visit the Holy Sites, and yet they worry that if they go to graduate school elsewhere, they may no longer want to come back. Too many friends, neighbors, siblings have done the same.
We ate lunch at a farm in Beit Jala, and had some of the best food I've ever eaten, but the farm is surrounded on all sides by Israeli settlers, who regularly attack the farm and cut down decades-old olive trees, all with the support of the IDF. The family doesn't know how much longer they can stay.
These are only some of the stories. My heart breaks remembering them, and I got to come home. I'm safe at home, with water from the tap that won't be shut off for days at a time by a government that still manages to supply consistent water to the settlers, with the right to move freely across the country I was born in and that my family has lived in for generations.
As I heard these stories, and then visited the Mount of Olives and the Garden of Gethsemane, I couldn't help but imagine Jesus in these lands, living under occupation by the Roman Empire, his movement regulated, his words monitored, ultimately detained and executed by the state.
The prayer that Jesus taught his disciples - "For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever" - felt even more important. To claim that God's is the kingdom and the power and the glory - not Rome, not Israel - is a powerful claim of resistance and of defiance.
The life that the Palestinians lead, where they are denied the right to travel from one city to the next, denied the right to plant a tree in their yard, denied the right to live in the home of their great-great-grandfather, is not a life of abundance. And yet we remember Jesus' promise: "I come that you may have life, and have it abundantly."
The Palestinian Christians we met have something important to teach us - all of us, from India or Chile or Uruguay or Norway or the UK - about what our faith is all about, if only we have ears to hear. And as we listen, may we join in the work of Jesus, in the costly solidarity of Jesus: to name systems of injustice and opression, of apartheid and genocide, and to pressure our governments to preserve the dignity of all people, including and especially the Palestinians.
You can read the full Kairos Document,
A Moment of Truth: Faith in a Time of Genocide, here: https://www.kairospalestine.ps/images/Final_Kairos_document_II_English.pdf