International Conference

Shaping Communities in Times of Crisis 
Narratives of Land, Peoples and Identities

Opening Worship Service

Munib Younan, Bishop (ELCJHL)

My Identity is Rooted and Grounded in the love of Christ

Sisters and brothers in Christ, salaam and grace to you.
It is a great privilege for me to welcome you all to the conference: "Shaping Communities in the Time of Crisis: Narratives of Land, People and Identities." On behalf of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Jordan and the Holy Land, I welcome you to Bethlehem and this Holy Land. I hope that this conference will create fruitful discussion, deliberation and solid recommendations.

Who are we, as people of faith in this relatively new and complicated century, and how shall we live with one another? In a world where more and more people seem to be defining themselves and secluding themselves behind walls based on religion, nationality or ethnicity, how can we promote an identity based on the commonality of our shared humanity and the equal human dignity every people deserves? As this passage from Ephesians reminds us, we are all children of God, and we are, most importantly as Christian sisters and brothers, rooted and grounded in love, and we are here to explore how we can help to foster that love between peoples, ethnicities and nations without losing the God-given diversity that makes us who we are.

I am an Arab Palestinian Christian Evangelical Lutheran. I share my story to help you understand how our identity as Palestinian Christians has been shaped.

I grew up in the Old City of Jerusalem near the Church of the Redeemer in a family of refugees. My father taught me that the house of our forefathers was in Beer Sheva. I dreamt of seeing it, until one day we tried to go there and were chased off our own land by the new tenants. My father couldn't speak or eat for three days after that.

Bible study was our spiritual grounding, and I grew up with a strange tension of loving the Bible and the stories of the Old Testament but then becoming gradually aware that these same beloved scriptures were being used against my people to justify driving us off of our land. I began to wonder how we were connected to the land. Could God really support my people suffering and losing our land for the sake of another people?

I attended the Lutheran boarding section in Beit Jala, and the church continued to educate and embrace me. I was blessed with a good education, although it was very Western and European. I didn't know what to make of my Arab roots. Oftentimes, I was proud to be a Christian, but not an Arab or a Palestinian. When Israel occupied Jerusalem in 1967, my ambivalence about my Arab roots deepened. While the Israelis brought a certain novelty, our Arab neighbors brought nothing but empty promises. But a turning point came when an American pastor told me that the Israeli occupation of the West Bank was God's will because this land belonged to the Jewish people and this was the fulfillment of prophecy.

Because my church, the Lutheran church, took an interest in me, I was called to study theology in Finland. I still don't know what would have happened to me if the church hadn't embraced me. Then an even greater turning point came for me in Finland when I found the Lutheran Archbishop of Finland and the Finnish people publicly hoisting the Finnish Flag and praying for the protection of the motherland, its borders and its people. I began to ask myself: can one be a Lutheran Christian and a nationalist at the same time?

I began to delve into these questions as I entered a kind of identity crisis, as most Palestinian Christians have faced. These questions have become central for us Palestinian Christians - and for all of us in this modern world where nations and peoples strive to win over one another claiming that God is on their side. And we are here to reflect on them:

• How does our Christian (Lutheran) theology shape us in thinking about nationalism and relations with other people?
• How do we live in the tension between loyalty to the teachings of Christ and the quest for justice and human rights for one's country or people?
• Does God really support and bless one people at the expense of another?

We all need to answer these questions as we reflect on our identities.

For me, as an Arab Palestinian Christian, my identity is rooted and grounded in this land and in the Word made flesh, the Incarnation. My Palestinianity and Christianity kiss each other. My Palestinianity is deeply rooted in Biblical culture, both Old and New Testaments. Sometimes I think we are the living remnant of the biblical traditions. Palestine was, after all, the place in the world that our God chose to become incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth and where the Christian church was born. It was here the Holy Spirit came in great power upon the followers of Jesus and enabled them to preach the Gospel. The early church was a multicultural church that also preached in Arabic (Act. 2:11), and the apostles and believers were called to witness to Christ in Jerusalem, Palestine and all parts of the world. It was here that Jesus taught us to be peacemakers, to be light and salt and to share ourselves with others - no matter who they are. It was here Jesus challenged us to feed the hungry, welcome the stranger, care for the sick and liberate the oppressed.

My Christianity also extends to my Palestinianity. The incarnation has to do with relationships: the divine to the human, the human to the divine, the human to the human. In radical love and grace, God chose to break the boundaries between the human and the divine, and Christ broke boundaries by eating with sinners, tax collectors and prostitutes, by welcoming all to his table in love. Christ shows us our identity is to be inclusive and not exclusive - molded by love, forgiveness and reconciliation.

The incarnation also has to do with real-world realities. To those who are tempted to make faith and salvation strictly an other-worldly experience, the incarnation comes as a resounding affirmation that this earth and what goes on here is so important that God sent Christ into the midst of it to stand with us here and show us a different way. As Luther pointed out, we live in a world of Two Kingdoms that are always in tension with one another, but both just as real and important.

My identity is also rooted in being a refugee and living under occupation.
Most of us Palestinian Christians are refugees and come from families that were driven from their land and homes. I will always be a refugee, and I will always live in search of justice for the loss of our land and homes. We have been shaped as a people by that history.

As my theology evolved, I concluded that using the Scriptures to justify the power and privilege of any one people over another is to treat the Bible as a one-act play when it is in fact a complex narrative. And this narrative tells the story of a God of justice, compassion, reconciliation and healing for all people, even the whole of creation.

I studied theologians like Walter Bruegemann, who gave me tools for shaping a theology of land rooted in the love and justice we know in Christ. Bruegemann points out that the Hebrew word "eretz" was used in the scriptures for both "earth" and "land," one meaning the broader, idyllic creation that belongs to no one but God and the other also owned by God but inevitably intertwined with people, ownership and history. In the real world, these two notions must be held in constant tension, as Bruegemann points out:

"`Eretz' as land is always conflictive and at issue. It cannot be otherwise, because owned land is characteristically not peaceable. For when one owns land, one must do so in the presence of the many who do not own the land and who have been denied ownership, very likely by force and violence or by legal manipulation. Serious land theology is always about power and counterpower. None who owns land has an absolute or obvious claim."

As Psalm 24 begins:
"The earth is the Lord's and all that is in it, the world and those who live in it;"

The God of Israel created the land and the people to live in a covenant of faith and shalom/salaam, with justice, equality, righteousness and commitment to God and one another. When the people of Israel became enslaved by the Egyptian monopoly on power and privilege, God brought them out of bondage into freedom and promised to lead them to a new land. The Exodus is God's clear "no" to oppression and poverty at the hands of the powerful and the wealthy.

When Israel became rich and powerful in its own land, God sent prophets to remind Israel of it's calling to be a compassionate, just and righteous society. They were meant to be different from other nations by the way they lived in this covenant of justice and peace. They were to be a light to all nations and a blessing to all people. This time the words similar to those from the Exodus were not so welcome when heard by the unjust kings of Israel:


Is this not the fast that I choose?
To loose the bonds of wickedness,
To undo the thongs of the yoke,
To let the oppressed go free and to break every yoke?
To share the fruits of the harvest, to house, feed and clothe the hungry… Paraphrase of Isaiah 58:6-12

Today, we - and our land - are literally dying for peace, healing and justice. We must find a way, together, to beat our swords into ploughshares and live or we will die in a ravaged land separately. Bruegemann notes that Isaiah's call is as relevant today as it ever was:

Is that not what the arms race is all about? The debate of our time is over how many weapons one has to have to keep from losing the land. Into the discussion intrudes the awareness that such self-defense may in fact be a way to lose the land, not to guard it. The royal ideology always believes there is a way to keep the land without the Torah. But the Torah is uncompromising in its conviction that those who covet the land (in violation of Torah) are going to lose it."

Living under occupation has become part of our identity as Palestinians. The occupation has proven a sin against God, humanity and creation because it robs people – both occupier and occupied - of human dignity and turns God's creation into something to be manipulated and misused as an instrument of oppression. It breeds fear, mistrust, resentment and humiliation, but it also creates a yearning for liberation and justice, a relentless striving for freedom. It calls me not to accept the oppression and humiliation, but to find my identity in seeking liberation and trusting in a living God that is much stronger than any occupation will ever be, or any military power, even the US or Israel. It is this dialectical reality of the harsh oppression and simultaneous yearning for freedom that is an integral part of my Palestinian Christian identity. It is this part of our identity that prevents hopelessness and despair and calls us to preach the Gospel of hope, liberation and healing.

It is quite a challenge. But so it was for Jesus, a refugee, a poor carpenter living under Roman occupation and injustice, when he stood in the synagogue and laid out his identity, mission and ministry by quoting Isaiah: "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of God's favor." (Luke 4:18-19). Jesus came to turn things upside down. In a world that worshipped wealth and status, Jesus blessed the poor and lifted the lowly. He also came to challenge the religious standards of his day and to show that outward signs of religiosity and false piety were not what faith is all about. What mattered to Jesus was restoring justice, wholeness, salaam and shalom – right relations between people and their God and sharing the blessings of creation and the Land.

My identity is rooted in the Evangelical tradition:
1) in a theology of grace.
In the Holy Land, we have orthodox, oriental orthodox and many other Christian denominations, and all of us live side by side with Islam and Judaism that are steeped in the theology of merit. In both the Old Testament and the Koran, there is an emphasis on retribution and a God who must be pleased through works of merit. But, as Christians living in the theology of grace, we know the love of God in Christ which roots us and grounds us and fills us with the fullness of God. This radical love embraces us and all people – sinners, the marginalized, the oppressed and the oppressor. Through kerygma, diaconia and mission, the love of Christ is given to everyone and we become the church of martyria, the church of witness for hope and love in this broken world.

2) in the theology of the cross. It is in daring to love with such radical grace that Christ exposed himself to the cross and embodied the resurrection of hope. It is in the power of non-violence and vulnerability that God chose to show the greatest strength, though it is hidden in the mystery of suffering and standing with those who suffer. This humbles us so that we are not masters in our countries, but servants – servants not only for our own people but for others. As we are so loved, we are sent out to love with a radical grace that embraces saint and sinner, Palestinian and Israeli, oppressor and oppressed.

My identity as a Christian is rooted in the ministry of reconciliation.
And so we find our identity as Christians in loving and reconciling with our neighbors, including those of other faiths, Muslims and Jews. We all share a common humanity and commitment to preserve and honor human life and dignity, as we are all created in the image of God. In this prophetic interfaith dialogue we seek to unite in a common mission of reconciliation and healing. We need to learn about other religions as they want to be perceived and not as we think they are, and to celebrate our God-given diversity. A rich part of our identity here in Jerusalem is celebrating the feasts of other faiths. When Muslims celebrate Ramadan and other feasts, we are a part of it and we are enriched by it. We also enjoy feasts and sacred days with our Jewish sisters and brothers, and they with us. We treasure this as part of our rich heritage.

Prophetic interfaith dialogue promotes peace education and tolerance of the other prevents stigmatization, demonization and dehumanization. When people of faith name, recognize and repent the times when their religion has distorted God's loving intention, it heals bitter wounds and leads to reconciliation. The Middle East will be safer, richer, stronger, if dialogue with other religions guides us to build a just and peaceful new world order with security and reconciliation, freedom and tolerance, civility and a culture of peace.

As Lutheran Christians in this land, we celebrate our Reformation heritage and the world-wide community of Lutherans and reformers working together to create the ever-reforming, living church God calls us to be: instruments of radical love, brokers of just peace, bridge-builders between Israelis and Palestinians, accompaniers for unity among the Churches, initiators of dialogue among all three monotheistic religions, defenders of human rights, ministers of reconciliation and apostles of love. This is the true identity of the evangelical tradition, and we must raise this voice among some who would distort it into a narrow extremist evangelicalism that teaches hate and war.

We give thanks for those who have accompanied us from the beginning, especially those early missionaries who saw the importance of teaching the children, preaching the word and ministering to the local people. We ask you to continue walking with us through these difficult times. Our very existence as Palestinian Christians is threatened now with continued emigration of those tired of the harsh occupation oppression. Our hope lies in partnerships where we accompany one another in this ever-challenging ministry of reconciliation, peace-making and working for justice.

Stay with us on this journey, for just as we Palestinian Lutherans are literally rooted in this Holy Ground, we are all rooted in the love and holy ground of Christ's cross and resurrection that gives us the power to say:

"Here we stand: on the side of justice, justification by grace through faith, shalom and salaam and human dignity for all. We can do no other!""

May the peace of God which passes all understanding keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.

Amen.