Hope and despair

Commissioning service, Rev. Praic Ramonn

Ezekiel 34.11-16, 20-24, Psalm 100, Ephesians 1.15-23, Matthew 25.31-40
Longniddry Parish Church, Presbytery of Lothian, November 18 2014
Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it
with patience. Romans 8.24f
*
Its the morning of the day before Thanksgiving in the West Wing, and White House press secretary CJ Cregg is done.
That is, until she is told there are Indians in the lobby. They had a meeting scheduled with Jacob Cutler from
intergovernmental affairs on an application thats been hanging fire for 15 years; but he stood them up.
Theyre not leaving until they get satisfaction, there are press correspondents everywhere, and the Washington Post is on
speed dial.
So she goes see the Indians two Stockbridge Munsees named Maggie Morningstar-Charles and Jack Lonefeather.
This is gonna have something to do with us screwing you out of your land, isn't it? she asks.
Yes, says Maggie.
In the apartment I inherited in Jerusalem, I inherited a bunch of DVDs. These range from The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, a
subtle and moving Holocaust film I urge you all to rush out and watch, to a boxed set of Desperate Housewives.
They also include The West Wing, my all-time favourite American political drama. The episode Im quoting comes from
season 3.
*
Our service tonight is modelled on what we do in St Andrews Scots Memorial Church at 10am every Sunday. This sermon
is a partial exception. For one thing, its 20% longer. For another, its not a sermon Id ever preach in Jerusalem, although
Ill put it on my blog. And its not precisely a sermon, although if you look carefully, youll see Gods head poking above the
parapet.
*
I found myself lately becoming less and less hopeful about the possibility of peace for the Israelis and
Palestinians... Where before I had eagerly read all of the news reports and political analyses, I now lack the
emotional energy to absorb any more stories of stalled peace processes or the latest in the all-too-familiar
pattern of violence avenged by more violence.
If youre wondering how I got burnt out after 10 weeks in Jerusalem, or whether the World Mission Council hasnt made a
huge mistake sending me there, fear not.
This is not me: its Carol Birkland of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. Im quoting again.
Birkland wrote these words in her introduction to a book of interviews published by the World Council of Churches in
1987, the year that ended with the outbreak of the first intifada, the year before Yasser Arafat persuaded the Palestine
National Council publicly to support a two-state solution. Its called Unified in Hope: Arabs and Jews talk about peace.
She interviewed 19 Israelis and Palestinians who were convinced that peace was possible, who had managed to escape
the hate and fear that imprisoned so many others, and who exhorted their fellow Israelis and Palestinians to find new
ways of relating to each other before it was too late.

2
Her final question to each of them was, Are you hopeful that peace will come? All said yes. Many responded with
another question, What choice is there other than hope?
Their hope was a hoping against hope, a radical hope that refused to die even when surrounded by hopelessness, a hope
that defied despair.
*
There are times when, as the Irish poet Seamus Heaney says, hope and history rhyme. But looking back on these
interviews almost four decades later, its not hard to see why hope and history in the Holy Land have yet to do this, why
peace has yet to break out.
The second of the 19 interviews is with Mordechai Bar-on, a native son of German parents.
I killed Arabs, Bar-On tells Birkland.
During the truce between the two independence war campaigns, I was in charge of guarding one part of the
demarcation line, and some of the Palestinians who had been chased out or had fled from some of the villages
that were now on our side of the line would go back and try to reap the wheat or take some fruits We would
ambush them, and in one of these ambushes there was a whole convoy of camels and donkeys coming back
across the border from where they had taken their fruits or whatever. There were two or three men in front of
the caravan making sure the road was clear, and when I rose up to stop them, one man was only a yard away
from me. Later on we found out that he was not armed, but I did not know that at the time.
He embraced me because he wanted to be close enough not to be shot, and I had to shoot him with my
revolver. I killed him at very close range because he was almost on top of me, and I was frightened that he was
attacking me.
This was the war, Bar-On says. It did not in any way make me angry or hateful.
I believe him. The war, and his two decades of distinguished military service following the war, did not make him angry or
full of hatred. They just made him a killer of Arabs.
His interview ends with a statement that deserves quoting at length:
To ask for forgiveness does not necessarily include repentance. If I ask you for forgiveness, it means that I am
aware that I did something wrong. Even if I know that by the very fact that I was, that because I existed in a
certain place, wrong was done to you, I still want to ask for your forgiveness even though the wrongs were
wrongs I could not avoid.
I cannot and I do not want to repent for the Zionist project. I can give you a whole lecture about why I think
Zionism was justified, but even supposing the Zionist project was wrong, so what? I had not way of avoiding that
wrong because I was born in this country. There is nothing in me that could have prevented my doing the things I
have done: from fighting, from killing Arabs, or from participating in the Israeli army for 22 years and wanting to
defend the state of Israel. Its an existential matter, and therefore I have no way of repenting and I dont want to
repent. If I had to go through all of this again, I would do the same things.
I am, however, fully aware of a very important element in peace-making: it is that a basic wrong was done to the
Palestinians. They suffered from the fact that we Jews returned to this place. They paid a high price that they
shouldnt have had to pay, but couldnt help but pay. Therefore, I know that if and when they will accept that I
cannot be but who I am, a Zionist living a Jewish existence in this land, then I will go down on my knees and ask
for their forgiveness because they deserve it, and I think that is the only way they will ever realize that I did what I
did because I had to.
This was said when Mordechai Bar-On was a leading spokesman for Peace Now; and it is bad on so many levels.

3
To ask for forgiveness is to repent, otherwise its just a pious fraud. And what Bar-On says is a classic example of false
human consciousness. Its a denial of human responsibility, a denial of human agency. Existence is not fate; it is choice. It
is only because Bar-On was and is committed to the Zionist project of creating a Jewish state for a Jewish people, without
regard to the rights or dignity of the others who lived in the land, that he could not avoid doing what he did.
Israeli Jews are, like people everywhere, a choosing people. They chose to kill Arabs or chase them out. They chose to
create and defend the state of Israel in its present form. They could have chosen otherwise. They still can.
*
Over breakfast in St Andrews Scottish Guesthouse in September, a Jew in the Reform tradition who teaches religious
studies in the US gave me a beguiling image that would gladden the heart of St Paul. In 1949, he said, the world put Israel
on trial and found the new state not guilty; in 1967, the state of Israel said, Try me again.
The world is increasingly inclined to find the state of Israel guilty on the second count but seems unwilling so far to revisit
the first charge.
Writing last month in Haaretz, the Israeli equivalent of the Guardian, the admirable Amira Hass said this:
As the descendants of a people [that] was banished throughout history from its homes and various homelands,
we Israelis have developed our own expulsion skills skills that would not embarrass the kings, nobles and
officials of the goyim. Our contribution to the family of banishing nations is great, especially considering our short
existence as a sovereign entity.
She gives us an inventory of nine methods of overt or covert expulsion currently in use, camouflaged under many legal
definitions or concealed under various circumstantial theories. Its a fascinating illustration of the bureaucracy of evil.
But her most important point comes, almost in passing, in the paragraph following the words I just quoted. Since 1948,
the state of Israel has made do with smaller expulsions. In 1947-48, in what Mordechai Bar-On calls the war of
independence and Palestinians call the cataclysm, the catastrophe, the Nakba, the emerging state of Israel expelled
between 700,000 and 800,000 Arab inhabitants of Mandate Palestine from their homes, their towns, their villages
roughly 80% of the Arabs living in what became the state of Israel.
This was the big expulsion, says Hass. This was the mother of expulsions.
*
Its the evening of the day before Thanksgiving in the West Wing, and pretty much everyone has gone home; but the
Indians are still in the lobby.
What were the Munsees doing in 1778? CJ asks them.
Fighting in George Washington's army, they say.
And whose land was it in the first place? CJ asks.
Ours, they say.
I'm gonna have the park police escort you from the building, CJ tells them, it'll take me a few minutes, so you can make
whatever calls you need to make. Or you can come back to my office right now, we'll make an appointment for Monday
and the White House will cover your expenses
They plump for option B.
As CJ leads them to her office, she asks, How do you keep fighting these smaller injustices when they're all from the
mother of injustices?

4
And Maggie says, What's the alternative?
*
I am the Lord your God, says the first of the ten commandments. This means that we are not to go whoring after false
gods, including the false gods of nationalism. Jesus is Lord, says the New Testament. This means that no one and nothing
else is. Christ is king, as we shall remind ourselves on Sunday. This means that we look forward in hope to the day when
the kingdom of our broken world becomes the kingdom of our God and his messiah.
However tempted we may be to despair, we do not lose heart.
And dont hold your breath, but its just possible that in the land we ironically call holy, we may be on the brink of a real
conversation about the mother of injustices.
Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it
with patience. Romans 8.24f