Plenty of Room in the Pew

Plenty of Room in the Pew

 

Lamentations 1:1-6

Jerusalem empty and destroyed 

 

1:1 How lonely sits the city that once was full of people! How like a widow she has become, she that was great among the nations! She that was a princess among the provinces has become subject to forced labor.

 

1:2 She weeps bitterly in the night, with tears on her cheeks; among all her lovers, she has no one to comfort her; all her friends have dealt treacherously with her, they have become her enemies.

 

1:3 Judah has gone into exile with suffering and hard servitude; she lives now among the nations; she finds no resting place; her pursuers have all overtaken her in the midst of her distress.

 

1:4 The roads to Zion mourn, for no one comes to the festivals; all her gates are desolate; her priests groan; her young girls grieve, and her lot is bitter.

 

1:5 Her foes have become the masters; her enemies prosper because the LORD has made her suffer for the multitude of her transgressions; her children have gone away, captives before the foe.

 

1:6 From daughter Zion has departed all her majesty. Her princes have become like stags that find no pasture; they fled without strength before the pursuer.

 

What an appropriate text for this week’s retirement sermon, given the revelation of the “Trump Peace Plan” for Gaza, Israel, and Palestine! It doesn’t take an historical or exegetical genius to understand that this Lamentations text is a cry of emptiness during the exile—in fact, the text actually SAYS so! Growing up in the church, and attending worship and Sunday School weekly, I can remember wondering what was so special about Jerusalem. It seems to show up in so many texts, is the “apple of the eye” of the Jewish people, down through history, and even became the shared “Holy City” with Muslims and Christians. For the Jews, it is the mythical “Zion” for which they cry, especially when they were driven out of it. For Christians, it was the capital city of Jesus’ ministry, is where he was crucified, and if you follow the dispensationalist philosophy, is where Jesus will “touch down” upon his return. Muslims have one of their holiest mosques there, the Al-Aqsa Mosque complex, which includes the “Dome of the Rock,” which they believe enshrines the very rock where Abram was to sacrifice his son, Isaac. Still, I never understood the preoccupation with Jerusalem. My seminary and “faith” education has helped inform this understanding, but having been there, I’m still thinking it’s a bit of an oversell. As I walked the streets of Jerusalem, I found it hard to imagine it as the place Jesus strolled with his little band, even when I tried imagining the numerous Israeli soldiers with their machine guns were the Roman guards mixing with the people in Jesus’ day. Of course, the streets I walked were many levels above the ones Jesus walked, so knowing this took some of the magic away, as well. Yes, the “mystique” of Jerusalem is somewhat lost on me, but certainly not for those of the major religions who continue to posture for control of their parts of the city, if not the whole enchilada. 

 

I suppose we should listen to our Jewish siblings who have such a “thing” for it. Ultimately, Jerusalem stands for all of the things the Jewish people have always longed for and never seemed able to have: prosperity; religious freedom; a secure land; and peace. The “Promised Land” God offered to them was already occupied by others, and in some cases, people who did NOT want to share the territory. Israel’s biblical history is one of wars over these things, exile and return, and then being chased out again, and, of course, fighting with God over whether they were following God’s law. Most anyone has heard the more recent history of how, after the second World War, the fledgling United Nations divided up the Mideastern parcel of land known simply as “Palestine,” relegating a fair portion of it to a newly created nation of “Israel,” while giving the collection of peoples who were currently living there—the “Palestinians”—a portion, as well. This didn’t sit well with the collection of “tribes” making up the Palestinian residents, and was even more irritating as the Jewish diaspora began to congeal in the new Jewish nation. For many Jews, this became the “return to Zion” they believed their holy scriptures had forecast for millennia. Jerusalem, with its various religions, was again the “capital city” of the resulting dispute over who was in charge, and how that was going to work. In 2016, a new American President put his endorsement on moving the capital of modern Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, “refreshing” the historic irritation over this question. One of the hardest things for Christians to understand is that Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israel—the political “nation state” created by the United Nations in 1947-1948—is NOT the same thing as “Israel” as the people of God we read about in the Hebrew Bible. It was actually heartening to see this week, as I write this sermon, that a majority of Americans have now come to realize this, and that empathy and support for the Palestinians of Gaza has eclipsed the “blind” support for Israel. At the least, we now believe these “Palestinians” have a right to exist and to have a homeland where they, too, can have some measure of security and safety.

 

I know I’ve related this before, but it is important for Christians to realize that the modern nation state of Israel has been quite hostile to the people of Gaza and the West Bank LONG before the current war spurred by Hamas’s deadly attack on Israel on October 7 of 2023. Many of us who have been on educational pilgrimages to the “Holyland” were also made privy to the horrifying stories of Palestinian Christians who had their legally built and owned homes simply bulldozed by Israel while they were at work, coming home to their school-aged children crying in the rubble of what had been their bedrooms. Why? Because Israeli Jews wanted the land for their own settlements. This has been going on almost since the United Nations divided the land, in the first place. Here is a map (about six years old) of what has happened as this “land stealing” has taken place:

 

 

While Hamas may be a terrorist organization, can we at least see why groups like the and Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) have taken such a dim view of “modern” Israel? One can argue the historical “hatred” between the people of Ishmael and the people of Isaac all you want, but clearly the events since 1947-1948 have stoked these historical fires. 

 

Yes, as the author of Lamentations relates, Israel has lived so much of its life in “lament” for what they have had and lost and then had again. The tears are real, even as they have been for the hostages captured and killed two years ago this month. As always, though, the “oppressed” in this case—Israel—must take responsibility for that part of their suffering which the writer is saying they must own. Was what happened in 2023 right or “fair”? Of course not, but one can see why Israel has been lighting the fuse on a powder keg for decades. 

 

Now, this week, we have a new plan for peace on the table. To our President’s credit (and I’m not one to give him much, I admit), he and his team has put something on the table that has a chance, or at least deserves serious consideration. This plan would bargain a peace by brokering concessions from Israel about backing off their incessant expansion into Palestinian territory, and from the “confederation” Palestinian peoples by cooperating with the United Nations, which would form an “apolitical” committee to supervise the rebuilding of Gaza. Obviously, the plan is much more complicated than this—after all, it is a 20-point plan—but this is the core of it. The news today is that Netanyahu has agreed to pursue it after a long meeting with President Trump and his team, but he will have to sell it to those back home who are even more hardline than he is, which is hard to imagine. A large and increasing number of the Arab nations have signed on to pursuing the plan, pressuring Hamas to agree to it, as well. One of the formerly “non-negotiable” parts of the plan is that a door would be opened to a Palestinian state, something typically referred to as the “two state” idea. Now the world waits to see what will happen. I know it’s quite premature, but if a peace IS brokered, and one that may eventually lead to a Palestinian state AND a retrenchment of Israeli expansion in the West Bank, our President may get and deserve that Nobel Peace Prize he so badly covets!

 

One cannot read this passage from Lamentations without “feeling the pain” of the original audience of the piece, and certainly recognizing that even modern people who have been exiled—or otherwise marginalized—must face. When I read it, though, once I got beyond thinking about Israel and Palestine, another “pained” group popped into my mind—the modern Christian church.

 

You see, we, too, have an “exile” going on. The tearful words, “How lonely sits the city that was once full of people,” can apply to the empty pews of most of our churches. (I know I’m taking the “allegory” route here, which we were scutched in seminary for doing!) As a retired pastor, I have been preaching in a number of United Methodist Churches, filling in for vacationing colleagues, representing the Mission Barn (team-speaking with Dara, who is a board member), and even serving part-time in a hurting church for a year. To look out upon pews meant to hold hundreds of worshippers “back in the day” and to see only a handful now DID invoke such a lament in my heart. There was a time when a majority of Americans attended church regularly just because it was a healthy place to raise a family, an opportunity to give thanks for one’s blessings, and a place to meet your neighbors, often ones of very different socio-economic or even racial backgrounds as you. Remember how, when things were going well for Israel in its long history, it tended to let arrogance trump gratitude? It’s happened to us, too. The last time I saw a church packed (other than a large church like St. Paul’s that would fill the pews on Christmas Eve) was when terrorists staged the horrible attacks of September 11, 2001. And after that largely blew over, things pretty much went back to normal. COVID became an “open door” for even more self-imposed exile from our churches, and in several of our Christian denominations, schisms over doctrines and “biblical authority” became another. “Judah has gone into exile with suffering and hard servitude; she lives now among the nations; she finds no resting place; her pursuers have all overtaken her in the midst of her distress.”

 

The churches that are filled tend to be ones that cater to the needs and desires of those who fill them. It’s much harder to fill the pews with people when your message and key efforts are about seeking justice, brokering peace between “warring” factions, and offering God’s grace to the hurting and tearful. These things, while gospel—literally—don’t sell out the room, anymore. Our arrogance, rooted in the belief that WE are the masters of our own prosperity, has stolen “the Lord’s Day” away from the church. Churches that either refuse to “prostitute” themselves on the altar of “giving the people what they want” (or, in some cases, just don’t know how), have plenty of room in the pews, and NO wiggle room in the church checkbook. I’ll be honest—I was optimistic that the “disaffiliation” movement in the United Methodist Church might lead to a true “reforming” of the remnant church, including a commitment to streamlining and “right-sizing” the church structure, aimed at truly focusing on what we believe. So far, I’m not seeing much of that. We have possibly fallen prey to the same “turf wars” and survivalism that others have faced in such schisms. At least we have opened the door to more inclusivism, especially for LGBTQ persons, but even that is highly tempered on an “individual church” basis. It is still not true that my gay friends can attend any UMC in the belief that they will be warmly welcomed. 

 

So, as Moses challenged the people of primitive Israel in Deuteronomy, we have two choices before us, as nations of the world, and as religious bodies such as the church. We can choose to continue down the path of selfishness, “exile” from one another, and eventually the destruction of our societies, or we can CHOOSE LIFE. Let’s all pray that the Trump Peace Plan succeeds in some form, AND that our churches will awaken to the challenge before them to meet the legitimate needs of the people in their neighborhoods, welcoming all, and offering them Christ, as Mr. Wesley said, without selling out to merely consumerist religion. 

 

After all, there’s plenty of room in the pew…Amen.