Stop Watch

I began vacation with three noticeable tan lines on various patches of my skin. The strangest was the pale, zigzagging Z from Chaco straps across my feet. T-shirt sleeves had left a sharp divide between my office paper white shoulders and tanned arms. And then there was the oval marking the top of my left wrist, with a narrow band reaching around to the pale underside.

Most of the past two weeks before vaca had been spent outdoors on youth trips. We hiked in pine forests and did outdoor urban projects. Almost always, I was carefully watching my watch, managing the time of the group, calling out clock-based audibles for the rest of the day ahead: “4 minute bathroom break, then we’re off to high ropes,” or “Let’s try and be in and out of Culver’s in 30 minutes so we can make it home before dark,” or “We all need to shower by 8pm reflection times, so be quick.”

I spend a lot of my work days doing this frequent watch checking exercise. The job of pastor necessitates it. It would be easy for a hospital visit to stretch to over an hour; it would be simple for a lunch with a youth or member to carry on into the afternoon; it would be a gift to nestle in for a morning of reading and journaling and pay attention to nothing else. But the job always demands and invites such a variety of tasks that time must be managed, watches must be glanced at, Google calendars must be tracked with care. This is the life of figuring out how to be a full time intern pastor, a part time graduate student, a newish husband, and a new chocolate lab owner … and of course I also write this as someone who loves shooting hoops, tending my backyard garden, catching a West Wing episode, or exploring a new place in Des Moines. I write this knowing that we all, of course, do our own circus-like juggling acts, but with so many evenings taken by meetings, I find that I schedule most of my days from 7a to 9p.

So I arrived in Maine in early August after the trips and a full year of not taking consistent vacation days. We arrived late, crashed hard, and woke up in the morning to the sun rising at 5:30am on the Kennebec River. I laid in bed wondering about what it was like for centuries of humans who tracked time based on sunlight. I wondered how much truth there is to the tale that our own circadian rhythms function best when aligned with nature.

And so, I took off the watch. I put it in a pocket inside my backpack. It remained there for seven holy days.

It’s amazing what you notice when life is more than “tick, tick, tick…..” Birdsong. Grasshopper mouths chewing sideways. Eating when your body says “I’m hungry” rather than because a certain time says you should put some calories in your mouth.

Better yet, by the time we reached Acadia on Mount Desert Island, we dropped off the grid of cell service and experienced total freedom from distraction. I’m not exaggerating to say that my experience felt like waking from a screen-induced coma of small dopamine hits from email alerts or a new Instagram post or ESPN updates. Instead, we grasped the long lasting pleasure of oxytocin experienced through panoramic views of nature and revitalized relationships and the bonding experiences of a sweaty beautiful hike.

Taking off the watch has become a spiritual practice of off days for me. I plunge into uncharted time, let the ticking fade, and settle into a much more ancient way of living. Maybe that’s the whole point of calling certain days of the week “time off” – as in, literally remove it from your body. I know of no better way to heal in this over-functioning world. 

[Next to] Last Communion

I gave two people their last communion this past week.

For the first person, it was not a surprise. I could write many blogs about the small-scale holiness of communion in a hospice room—the firm grip of hands for the Lord’s Prayer when everything else is so weak, my delicate tipping of the little juice cup into the chapped lips of a dying human, the intensity and irony of the final prayer: “May the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ strengthen you, and keep you in God’s grace,” and the gently hushed and holy “amen.”

The second person was in more normal circumstances. I had brought communion to that back pew many times as an extension of the table for a pair who cannot easily do the pew shuffle and take the many quickened steps to come forward for communion. Again, it is such a wonderful and strange promise from Jesus—take my body, and may it strengthen yours. And gain: the soft-spoken, half-chewing-half-swallowing voicing of “amen.”

At St. Gregory’s Episcopal Church in San Francisco, they inscribed one of the charges leveled against Jesus onto the communion table in the center of their worship space: “This man welcomes sinners! And eats with them!”

It is lines like that and this weekly habit of communion which have built this strong image for me of Jesus as a waiter. If a title for the pope is the servant of servants, then Jesus is the servant of the servant of the servants. He is host and waiter and food all at once. And what is most interesting about him is who he prefers as his dining clientele—not those who will leave behind fat tips, but the hungry, and the meek, and the persecuted, and the lonely, and those who starve after justice, and those who cannot afford healthcare and are stripped of options, and those who suffer human trafficking, and those who are denied entrance to a promise land of opportunity because of the faith they practice... ”Come to me, ye weary,” says our waiter, “And I’ll feed you with my own body.”

Breaking bread with strangers is my favorite part of church. It’s one of the parts of worship that we really can’t mess up. The preaching may wander aimlessly, the music might be too loud or too slow, but we can’t mess up ripping apart pieces of bread and feeding the hungry masses. We certainly still try often to mess it up, saying someone needs a membership card in order to dine at the common meal. But if Jesus gave Judas communion, then who are we to ever say to anyone that she or he isn’t worthy or doesn’t understand or hasn’t earned it? Following Jesus is never about earning anything—grace, or acceptance, or a place at the table. Following the waiter is an apprenticeship of learning how to love—radically, relentlessly, extravagantly.

During the two funerals over the weekend, I was thinking about those last communion moments. But then I heard the ancient words of the prophet Isaiah read during one of those services:

“On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples
    a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines,
    of rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear.
⁷ And he will destroy on this mountain
    the shroud that is cast over all peoples,
    the sheet that is spread over all nations;
⁸     he will swallow up death forever.
Then the Lord God will wipe away the tears from all faces,
    and the disgrace of his people he will take away from all the earth,
    for the Lord has spoken.

How wrong it would be, I realized, to call those moments ‘last communion.’ We wait together for one more meal, the full communion of Isaiah’s promised mountaintop banquet feast of rich foods and well-aged wines. I look forward so strongly to that next meal which will be so much more than an ounce of juice and bit of stale wafer. These are just the appetizers, just the “foretaste of the feast to come.”

I have to admit—the carb-loving Italian in me loves it so much that this is the image of heaven we are promised: a banquet table with mountain views where bread will be broken and all will have a place. But of course, communion is never about the bread. It’s about the [plural] bodies becoming [singular] body. It’s about the miracle of connection and relationship that occur best through shared meals. It’s about this relationship-focused God who cannot wait to greet us at the restaurant entrance, who leaps forward with smiles and joy and enthusiasm to show us our place at the table, who delights us with divine food straight from the creator’s oven. Jesus is host, waiter, meal, and there’s no tab to cover or split, because God’s abundance reigns forever and ever and ever. Amen!

A picture is worth a thousand words (or, actually, 1,454 words)

“How was your trip?”

I’ve been asked that question over a hundred times since returning from the holy lands of Palestine and Israel. It is hard to describe any travel or vacation, because words sometimes fail us. They fail to describe the aromas of Dead Sea mud and the tastes of za’atar and the ringing sounds of the Muslim call to prayer. They fail to illustrate the emotion that comes with encountering new beauty or new culture.

So for this blog, instead of trying to cover all seventeen days with generalized experiences, I’m going small scale. Out of the 24,480 total minutes of our trip, I want to narrate an experience from a place we stayed for fifteen minutes total. Here was a view facing east from the Mount of Olives (the Old City of Jerusalem would be directly behind you):

Since you, devoted blog reader, do not have the luxury of a local guide talking into an earpiece as you look at this view, I will attempt to narrate!

This is a view of East Jerusalem. All of the land in front of you is East Jerusalem, up until the wall that can be seen going across the far back of the photo. Beyond that wall is the West Bank, also known as Palestine. The name comes from this being the land on the west bank of the Jordan River. Palestinians consider all of this land to be the West Bank and therefore belonging to Palestine; Israelis consider East Jerusalem to be a separate, annexed area outside of the West Bank.

Starting from the left, you will see an Israeli settlement. These have been named as illegal by the UN because they are a violation of international law; the land belongs to Palestine, but Israelis live there in a compound protected by military forces. Israel has the power to overtake these lands because their military (heavily funded by the United States) occupies the West Bank.  

What does the word “occupies” mean? It means that at any checkpoint between the West Bank and Israel, Israeli Defense Force soldiers stand guard. These are typically young Israelis between ages 18-22 (males are required to serve for four years, and females for three). All soldiers are armed with large weapons. This is a source of intimidation and harassment for Palestinians. The occupation also means that Palestinians cannot leave the West Bank. All are assigned ID cards, and Palestinian cars have a white/green license plate (Israelis have yellow). Israelis may drive into the West Bank as they wish. The occupation also means that large areas of rural farmland within the West Bank are controlled by the Israelis. The irrigation for this farmland uses a great deal of water. Meanwhile, Palestinians living inside the West Bank only receive running tap water once per week in the summer. All West Bank homes have black containers on the roof so that when the water is running, they may collect it for the rest of the week.  

For a helpful view of just how much land within the West Bank belongs to Israel, watch this two minute video (and keep in mind that settlement expansion has continued since 2008, and is currently booming. Obama did little to assist the Palestinians, donating billions to Israel – including a record $38,000,000,000 in military aid just this past September.  Trump’s ambassador pick to Israel is extremely pro-Zionist, meaning pro-settlement expansion) (also sorry for the dramatic “DO YOU???!!!” at the end): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ewF7AXn3dg

Okay, back to the left of the photo…

 Settlements are easily recognized because the construction is modern and typically highly symmetrical. Imagine highly manicured lawns in the middle of arid desert. They tend to be upscale areas. Again, the cost to build all this new construction and walls around the homes is certainly less of a challenge because of the great amount of the money pouring in from the United States every year.

There are currently an estimated 130 settlements – many are functioning cities – and the total Israeli population within these is above 400,000. Not included in this number are the 200,000 Israelis who live in East Jerusalem. This area of the city was annexed by Israel in 1967, but it was totally a Palestinian-owned area before that year. The settlement in this picture is an example of these East Jerusalem settlements.

To the right of the settlement, you will see some high towers beyond the wall. Here is a closer look –

These are living units for Palestinian refugees. We were informed that these were built without any construction inspection and will not survive a major earthquake, which are fairly common in Israel/Palestine.

Across the entire middle of the photo you will see a wall. Israel built this structure, which they call a security fence, around the entire West Bank. That is a deceiving statement, however, because the wall is twice as long as the actual border between Israel and the West Bank. Often the wall curves and dips into Palestine at places where the Israelis wanted to isolate Palestinian cities or reach natural water resources to claim on their side of the structure. The city of Bethlehem, for example, feels much like a prison because the wall surrounds multiple sides of the city, and settlements (communities surrounded by their own separate walls) are on the other borders of the city. Once inside Bethlehem, it is easy to feel surrounded by walls on all sides. The wall is nine meters (29.5 feet) high and topped with barbed wire. The cost of the wall is estimated to be between $2-4 billion dollars. It is not yet finished. The Palestinians call this the apartheid wall or annexation wall or colonization wall. 

The actual borders between Israel and the West Bank are meant to follow the 1949 “green line” or armistice line. In reality, the wall is built by Israel where Israel wants. To see a map illustrating the green line compared the actual wall route, go here: http://www.btselem.org/download/separation_barrier_map_eng.pdf. The map also shows how much land within the West Bank is controlled by Israel (Palestinian-controlled land is in tan, Israeli land in blue).

On the far right of the photo is a Palestinian village in East Jerusalem. This is not easily seen in this photo, but from the view we could see rubble where houses used to be in this village. Here is another magnified shot of the panoramic:

We were informed that Israel has standing orders on many Palestinian homes to destroy them whenever they want. Often, if a Palestinian is arrested for an act of violence or protest, Israel will respond by destroying the home of his/her family in addition to the punishment for the individual.

“So how was your trip?”

Well, this was fifteen minutes of seventeen days. It was an experience of so many superlatives – the deepest freshwater lake in the world, the lowest city on earth, the lowest point on earth, the location of the oldest city gate (5,000 years) in the world, the locations where Jesus taught and healed and rose again. But witnessing views like this makes it impossible to separate the spiritual pilgrimage from the injustice reality.

This is a conflict between oppressor and oppressed. This is a conflict between military machinery of tanks and automatic weapons vs ten-year-olds throwing rocks.

We learned during the trip that Jesus lived in areas that would have surprised many people who were expecting a messiah to come with great power. He grew up in Nazareth, a tiny town of 400 next to a rising glitzy metropolis called Sepphoris build by Herod Antipas. When he moved to Galilee, he made his home in Capernaum, known for being the Vegas of Galilee, with a Roman legion, prostitutes, working class folks, and for the record, Peter’s mom-in-law. He often visited Bethany, an area just outside Jerusalem which literally translates as “house of the poor." It was the home for all the lepers banished from Jerusalem. 

This is Jesus' style - to walk with the oppressed, the lost, the searching, the underdogs. He walks with the poor on the other side of the West Bank “security fence.” He suffers with the thirsty Palestinians on a hot summer day when the tap is dry. He organizes communities in despair with a message of hope.

And we must also remember this: Emmanuel, God-with-us, always means that God is also with “them,” no matter how we draw the boundaries or who we favor. God is at work promoting peace on both sides of the wall. 

There's a new cry for a wall in my own country - a new "security fence" that has intentions of intimidation and oppression. How many examples will we need before we stop building more walls? Was Berlin not enough? Is the West Bank not enough?

Walls fail. Love wins.