‘Sumud’: The political gets personal — and spiritual — with a Lutheran social justice program in Palestine

We’re halfway through Lent already, but I’m adding another Lenten meditation to my reading list. It’s put out by the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, in cooperation with its counterpart in Palestine, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Jordan and the Holy Land. It’s called Sumud, an Arabic word that translates as “steadfastness.” It comes with videos and a discussion guide, and it’s about how you keep the faith under an oppressive, often capricious military occupation.

It’s also the new name for an ELCA program formerly known as Peace Not Walls, now rebranded as Sumud: For Justice in Palestine and Israel. In 2012, Debi and I visited the Holy Land with a Peace Not Walls tour group from St. John’s Lutheran in Rock Island, Ill., and it was a life-changing experience in ways I never could have anticipated.

So this is one of those cases where the personal gets political and the political gets personal, and there’s a lot to unpack.

Let’s start with the word itself. According to Wikipedia, it has come to signify “a Palestinian cultural value, ideological theme and political strategy that emerged in the wake the 1967 Six-Day War among the Palestinian people as a consequence of their oppression and the resistance it inspired.” The 1967 war, of course, is when the Palestinian territories were occupied by Israel.

Sumud has come to represent a middle way between violent resistance and collaboration. Rather, it seeks to build Palestinian cultural, economic and educational institutions to replace those shut down by the occupiers. The announcement of ELCA’s program defines it as “resistance through existence” and explains:

Our new name recommits the ELCA to advocacy and awareness-raising grounded in accompaniment of the Palestinian people who are our primary partners in the region, and especially Palestinian Christians, an Indigenous minority community whose ministries of education, health care, social service, justice work, and intellectual and cultural leadership are integral to Palestinian society. Sumud follows the guidance of our Palestinian church partners in updating its name to reflect the truth of the situation on the ground: that only when justice prevails in the Holy Land — when the occupation ends and human rights are restored to Palestinians — can there be a true and lasting peace for all Palestinians and Israelis.

Sumud connects ELCA members to our companions in the Holy Land and seeks to follow the guidance, support the leadership and amplify the voices of our Palestinian partners. Together with our Lutheran companions, we accompany Palestinians and Israelis, and many other Jews, Christians and Muslims, in working to establish the justice required for peace.

Sumud predates ELCA’s involvement. Like the olive tree so often used as a Palestinian symbol, it is rooted in the soil.

In November 2015, Munib Younan, then the Lutheran bishop of Jordan and the Holy Land, spoke of it at an ecumenical gathering in Bethlehem, just after what World Council of Churches news release delicately referred to as “Israeli incursions into the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound,” an ongoing provocation to Muslim worshipers at the Jerusalem holy site. (An incident involving “Jewish settlers” and Israeli police in the month before required military intervention, according to Al Jazeera.) But Younan invoked a spiritual dimension to sumud as he spoke to a Council for World Mission theological colloquium in Bethlehem. As the Council of Churches reported:

Bishop Younan said “sumud” is the word used in Arabic to describe the steadfastness of the olive tree, firmly rooted in the soil.

“In order to stand firm with sumud, we need a spirituality of prayer. Our resistance to the forces of empire must be sustained with this spirituality of prayer”, he emphasized.

Clearly there’s more than a simple rebranding going on here, especially after the atrocities on Oct. 7 and the Israeli war of attrition on Gaza that followed it. At least Sumud offers a vision. A voice, if you will, crying in the wilderness. But at least a voice.

Lutherans in Palestine? The political gets personal

Typically, I didn’t know what we were getting into at first. The personal, the political — and the spiritual — began to collide one day in 2012 when Debi and I were having lunch at an ethnic restaurant downtown by the Illinois state capitol called the Holy Land Diner. On the wall, we noticed a flier advertising a tour sponsored by the local Catholic diocese. We were intrigued. We’d both retired in the past year, and it looked like fun.

So when we got home, we looked around online. (I Google everything.) And we found a Peace Not Walls tour being organized by St. John’s Lutheran in Rock Island. Debi and I met in Rock Island, and it seemed like a sign and a wonder, if not a miracle.

We signed up, and in November 2012 we did a standard tour of Christian holy sites in Galilee, the Jordan River, Jerusalem and nearby Bethlehem. Since we were a Peace Not Walls group, we also visited Augusta Victoria Hospital in occupied East Jerusalem and several Lutheran NGOs in over the wall in Bethlehem, as well as a nearby UNRWA refugee camp, the Temple Wall and the Holocaust memorial at Yad Vashem. A friend of the tour’s organizer at the Quad-City Jewish Federation even clouted us a briefing with the Israeli ministry of foreign affairs, which holds the portfolio for minority religions. I think we got a balanced perspective — and a sense of the deep-seated grief and anger on all sides of the conflict.

In Bethlehem, we were hosted by the Evangelical Lutheran Christmas Church (Weinachtskirchen in German), established in the late 1800s by German missionaries sent by Kaiser Wilhelm II, who had a strong personal interest in the Holy Land (Augusta Victoria is named for his wife). There’s a fascinating historical overview on the ELCJHL website of Lutheran involvement around Jerusalem, and with Palestinian refugees in Jordan and the occupied territories since the Nakba in 1948.

Bethlehem is where the personal and the political became spiritual in my mind. (I blogged about it HERE at the time.) It’s a world-class tourist destination, and at Christmas Church that Sunday we worshiped with tour groups from Oregon, California and Germany. The service was in Arabic, but they had transliterated bulletins so we could recite the general confession, the Kyrie and the Gloria along with the congregation.

At first I had trouble with the hymns, artfully selected chestnuts like “Beautiful Savior” and “How Great Thou Art.” We all knew them by heart, of course, but I like to follow the music in hymnals and I couldn’t get the melody to work out right. Then I realized the key signatures were on the right of the page, and remembered that Arabic reads from right to left. (I think there’s a message in that somewhere, but I’ll pass it along without comment.) Once I knew I wasn’t in Kansas (or central Illinois) anymore, I was reminded of the first Pentecost.

And then something magical happened:

As we came to the Lord’s Prayer, the service bulletin noted, “You are invited to pray in your own language.” We did. And the cadence, in English and Arabic alike, blended together perfectly. I’ve been told that always happens, no matter what the languages, whenever the Lord’s Prayer is recited. The effect, again, was profoundly moving.

And that’s why today’s war on Palestinian civilians in Gaza leaves me heartbroken.

Sumud: Prayerful resistance

ELCA has been involved for two decades in “accompaniment, advocacy and awareness-raising with our partners in the Holy Land and in the United States” under the Peace Not Walls initiative. In October 2023, its churchwide office in Chicago announced that “following an in-depth review by ELCA staff and leadership from the Palestinian Lutheran church, Peace Not Walls would be renamed and reconfigured as a new initiative, Sumud: For Justice in Palestine and Israel” (boldface type in the original). ELCA’s webpage spells out what it means by “accompaniment.”

Our church’s primary companion church in the Holy Land is the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Jordan and the Holy Land (ELCJHL). This Arabic-speaking community of faithful Lutherans is the primary relationship through which the ELCA sees the situation in Palestine and Israel. Both our churches belong to the Lutheran World Federation (LWF), a global communion whose vital Jerusalem-area program has pursued projects related to health, education and humanitarian aid in the occupied Palestinian territories for over 65 years.

The ELCA, the ELCJHL and the LWF share a long history of nurturing relationships among Jewish and Muslim communities in the Holy Land. The ELCJHL was instrumental in creating the Council of Religious Institutions of the Holy Land, whose faith leaders encourage and advocate for the moderate voices for justice and peace among their own people. The Rev. Mark Hanson, former presiding bishop of the ELCA, was a founding member of the National Interreligious Leadership Initiative for Peace in the Middle East, a group of Jewish, Muslim and Christian faith leaders who work toward a common vision of a just peace in the Middle East. ELCA Presiding Bishop Elizabeth Eaton continues to be involved with the initiative. The ELCA has long and deep relationships with Jewish and Muslim communities that foster mutual understanding and that challenge all to embrace justice, peace and nonviolence. [Links in the original.]

What I like about ELCA’s Sumud initiative is its ecumenism, its relationships with Jewish and Muslim communities and its willingness to follow the lead of Palestinian Lutherans in embracing sumud as an organizing principle. Its webpage includes links to the Lenten video series (which focuses on events throughout Jesus’ ministry and isn’t just for Lent). It also incorporates a bullet-point list of goals beginning with: “Equal human rights and human dignity for all people in the Holy Land. And it ends with what I would consider a combined vision statement and appeal letter:

Through Sumud, the ELCA supports a viable, contiguous Palestinian state; a secure Israeli state at peace with its Arab neighbors; and a shared Jerusalem with equal access and rights for Jews, Muslims and Christians. To achieve this justice, we need your support!

Join us in this call to walk alongside our sisters and brothers in the Holy Land by raising awareness and advocating in your hometown, congregation, school or synod.

Sumud’s webpage (apparently an update of an earlier Peace Not Walls page), is available online at https://www.elca.org/our-work/publicly-engaged-church/peace-not-walls.

Links and Citations

“Clashes as Israeli soldiers storm storm Al-Aqsa compound,” Al Jazeera, Sept. 15, 2015 https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2015/9/13/clashes-as-israeli-soldiers-storm-al-aqsa-compound.

Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, “Sumud (formerly Peace Not Walls),” ELCA.org https://www.elca.org/our-work/publicly-engaged-church/peace-not-walls.

Evangelical Lutheran Church in Jordan and the Holy Land,” “Overview,” ELCJHL.org https://www.elcjhl.org/overview

“Lutheran bishop advocates for “resistance of prayer” amid Palestinian-Israeli violence,” WCC News, World Council of Churches, Nov. 12, 2015 https://www.oikoumene.org/news/lutheran-bishop-advocates-for-resistance-of-prayer-amid-palestinian-israeli-violence.

Wikipedia articles on Nakba and Sumud.

Also my blog post, “Worshiping in Arabic at Christmas Lutheran Church in Bethlehem,” Hogfiddle, Nov. 15, 2012 https://hogfiddle.blogspot.com/2012/11/christmas-lutheran-bethlehem.html.

[Uplinked Feb. 26, 2024]