All Saints’, Dorval
December 8, 2024
Israeli bombing in the Valley of the Christians, Syria, December 9.
For God has ordered that every high mountain and the everlasting hills be made low and the valleys filled up, to make level ground, so that Israel may walk safely in the glory of God. The woods and every fragrant tree have shaded Israel at God’s command. For God will lead Israel with joy, in the light of his glory, with the mercy and righteousness that come from him.
Israel, Israel, Israel.
We want to love these words uncomplicatedly. We want to imagine them in costumes from Bible times, as something exotic and historical, familiar and comforting.
But the headlines make that impossible.
The horrendous war in Gaza is dragging on into its fifteenth month, with no resolution in sight. And while I am not particularly qualified to pronounce on the geopolitical issues at stake, I can speak with authority on the interpretation and use of Scripture.
It is certainly not the only factor in the situation, but one of the justifications the modern state of Israel uses for its behaviour is the assertion that God has bestowed this land on them in the Bible (and plenty of western evangelicals, for purposes of their own, concur).
It makes our use of these texts, as Christians, in a different part of the world, far more challenging. But we can’t just keep reading and preaching on them the same way we always did, and pretend there’s no connection to the genocide in Gaza.
So we’re actually going to start this morning with the Gospel reading, and then work backwards.
Luke’s account of John the Baptist begins with a list of rulers. Emperor Tiberius; the governor, Pilate; the tetrarch, Herod; Philip, Lysanias, the high priests Annas and Caiaphas – the number of different people governing different patches of territory in different capacities in the region of Jesus’ birth, underscores the fact that political and religious power have been contested and complicated in the Holy Land for a long, long time.
The list is a mishmash of Romans, Greeks and Jews, and I think we can safely say that most of the population of first-century Palestine, regardless of language or ethnicity, would have been deeply suspicious of all of them. Rulers were people who could tax you within an inch of your life and order you flogged out of their way if you got in front of them on a public street. It’s a crucial reminder that how we think about the actions of the government of Israel and of Hamas, is not a reflection of how we should think about the actions and attitudes of the ordinary people of Israel and Gaza, any more than Pilate or Herod reflects the actions and attitudes of the disciples and crowds in the scriptures. People are not their leaders.
With all that being said – it is crucial for us to understand, and to say publicly, that the scriptures about God promising the land of Israel to the “chosen people” are not a blank cheque.
In our Advent readings, we get the happy parts of the prophets, the good and comforting parts. “Prepare the way of the Lord.” “Comfort, comfort ye, my people.” “He shall rejoice over you with loud singing.” “Israel may walk safely in the glory of God.”
These are the songs of a people returning joyfully home from exile, reclaiming the land from which they had been driven into slavery.
But these passages of joy and restoration are inseparable, in the prophetic books from which they come, from the passages that describe how they ended up in that situation in the first place: because they forgot God’s laws, grew greedy and selfish, oppressed the poor, abused the stranger, and exploited the land. The exile was not the undeserved suffering of innocents; it was the natural consequences of sin.
Chosenness is not a get out of jail free card. It is a calling. It is an invitation from God to always be reflecting, always learning, always doing better. If God’s people become the bad guys, it doesn’t mean that God is now on the side of the bad guys; it means that God’s people need to shape up and do better, or face the consequences of their actions. The way that the Netanyahu government is currently handling their response to the October 7 terrorist attacks is unworthy of God’s chosen people, and needs to change. (And if I speak less to the question of how the Palestinian leadership has behaved during this crisis, it’s because I am less well versed in the ins and outs of that tradition and its text, not because they are in any way innocent.)
And in any case, God doesn’t have only one chosen people. The whole point of how we read, pray, and sing these texts in Advent is that the whole world suffers along with Jerusalem in her degradation and exile, and rejoices with her in her restoration and homecoming. Which is why it’s so painful to see these beloved passages twisted to justify destroying homes and starving children.
God is always on the side of those who are hungry, homeless, and in need of help and comfort. And there is no role of authority, or degree of “chosenness,” that ever makes it OK to be the one inflicting the suffering.
In a very different scenario, but one that raises similar moral questions, the CEO of an American healthcare insurer was gunned down on a public street this past week by a killer who has not yet been apprehended* and whose motive appears to have been sheer outrage at the fate of millions of people who have literally died or been driven into bankruptcy by the policies of the company this man led. One can condemn premeditated murder while also sympathizing with the impulse to exact vigilante justice in circumstances in which any other form of justice appears to be unattainable – and asking the question, where do we draw the line, given that we consider Bonhoeffer, who planned to assassinate Hitler, a hero and a saint?
The world is full of sin and suffering; that’s why we need Advent in the first place, the season that gives voice to our cries to be saved. Just this morning we woke up to the news of the overthrow of another government in the territory once called Ituraea and Trachonitis, and we both rejoice at the downfall of a murderous tyrant and wonder whether what replaces him will be any better, and when humanity will learn to sort out its affairs without violence.
And we are called to love these scriptures, yes, but also to wrestle with them, as the original chosen people have been doing since they were given to them, to ask the hard questions, to look for the power dynamics, to always be seeking to do better.
Because in the world of Advent, the “chosen people” is not Israelis, or Americans, or Christians, or any other identifiable group: it is simply those crying out for rescue for whatever reason – victims of terror, children under siege, all those who are denied the basic necessities of life by the powers and principalities of their day.
Luke’s account of John the Baptist begins with a list of rulers. And then it shifts to one man in the wilderness, who has rejected all the comforts and trappings of ordinary life in favour of putting himself on the side of those who have nothing, and who comes to call everyone, high and low, to account.
Next week we will hear John the Baptist’s strident call to repentance. This week, we hear the words of the prophet that foretell that call: “Prepare the way of the Lord; make his paths straight … and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.”
Our salvation comes not when a particular nation or people possesses a particular piece of territory. It certainly doesn’t come when innocents are killed and suffering is inflicted on a mass scale. It comes when the faithful wrestle with God’s word, when the powerful are held to account, when all people hear the summons to repentance, and when to be God’s chosen people is understood to be a calling to live up to, a calling to bring restoration and peace. Then, truly, God will lead Israel – and all of us – with joy, in the light of his glory, with the mercy and righteousness that come from him.
Amen.
*This was true at the time this sermon was preached.
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