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Easter Sunday was a different — and unexpectedly rewarding — experience this year. The livestream from our parish church in Springfield wasn’t working, so Debi and I wound up watching the livestreamed video from the Easter communion service at Christmas Evangelical Lutheran Church in Bethlehem. We’ve worshiped with them before, so it was a logical choice.
They’re seven hours ahead of us in Palestine, so the Easter morning service was already archived on Facebook. It was in Arabic, but the Lutheran liturgy was entirely familiar. And we found a translation of Saturday’s Easter Vigil sermon, so we had both word and sacrament1, a sermon to read with the liturgy (even though it wasn’t the exact same sermon), and everything worked out as well as if we’d planned it that way.
In fact, it gave me a new understanding of what Easter is all about — and a reminder that in America we have, at best, a very limited understanding of what’s at stake in the conflict in Israel and Palestine.
(But first, some background: We weren’t celebrating Christmas on Easter Sunday! Christmas Church [Weinachskirche in German] was founded by 19th-century Germans who set up schools and hospitals in the Holy Land. Debi and I visited there in 2012. So when we were surfing social media looking for church services, it was a natural choice.)
Both services at Bethlehem were part of a very traditional Easter celebration. The Easter Vigil is the Saturday night of Holy Week, harking back to ancient practice when observance of a holy day began at sundown, and worshipers celebrate Christ’s resurrection by lighting fires and/or passing out candles to commemorate the moment. (We have a vestige of it in Protestant sunrise services, and liturgical churches in the West are returning to the Easter Vigil tradition.) This year at Christmas Lutheran, the service was repurposed as an Easter Vigil for Gaza, and it took on a distinctively somber tone.
The tone fit the occasion. You can’t have Easter without Good Friday, and the combination of watching the Sunday service and reading Saturday’s Easter Vigil homily was powerful.
Christmas Lutheran’s Pastor Munther Isaac (pronounced eet-SAK) is an outspoken critic of Western governments — and churches — and in English translation, his homily makes uncomfortable reading.2 After we watched the Sunday morning service, Debi found the text of Isaac’s Easter Vigil sermon (available HERE on Facebook). “We searched for God in this war,” Isaac said from the pulpit:
We cried out to Him, and there was no answer, it seems, until we encountered the Son of God hanging on the cross, crying out: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Why did you let me be crucified? Alone? While I am innocent?
This is the cry of feeling abandoned. I am sure this is how Gazans feel today. Abandonment from the world leaders, not only Western, but also Arab and Muslim leaders abandoned us. Many in the church also watched from a distance, like Peter did when Jesus was arrested. Peter wanted to be safe; he lacked the courage … similar to many church leaders today, who say one thing behind closed doors, and another in public. [Elipsis in the original]
Yet, Good Friday leads to Easter. Isaac also said at the Saturday night vigil:
It is so hard to speak of the resurrection now. We are mourning. Our siblings in Gaza are literally dying from starvation. But we CANNOT lose our faith in God. This is our last resort. As such, we have to fight to keep this faith. We cannot lose our faith. We have to look at the empty tomb. We must remember the empty tomb.
Sunday’s service was entirely in Arabic. Because of the war, the pilgrims who ordinarily flock to Bethlehem and East Jerusalem are cut off from visiting. (The economic impact on tourism is devastating.) So there was no need to translate parts of the liturgy into English and German for tourists, as they did when we visited in 2012. (I blogged HERE about the experience of worshiping in different languages, which was a bit like Pentecost.) I could only pick out a few words Sunday. Alleluia, of course. Amen (pronounced ah-MEEN). And, since it was Easter, Al-Maseeh Qam (Christ, or the Messiah, is risen). But we could follow the ebb and flow of the liturgy. And the singing was emotionally evocative.
Some of the hymns were familiar. I recognized “Christ the Lord Is Risen Today” and a German chorale I couldn’t quite place, along with an upbeat revival hymn I think I remember hearing back in Tennessee. “We Are Marching to Zion?” (It begins at 1:12:00. If you know it, please let me know in the comments below.) Even when the hymns weren’t entirely familiar, they were evocative as the congregation belted them out in Arabic.
The same went for the service music. Even when I wasn’t quite sure whether I was hearing the Kyrie, the Gloria or something else, the plainsong cadences sounded familiar and the singers’ voices conveyed something I think we lost when American Protestants stopped chanting. All in all, I felt like we were in communion with the worshipers in Bethlehem.
A vigil for Gaza
Pastor Isaac is the author of a book titled The Other Side of the Wall: A Palestinian Narrative of Lament and Hope and a powerful emerging voice for Palestinians. In addition to Christmas Lutheran, he is pastor of the Lutheran church at nearby Beit Sehour (Shepherds’ Field, where the angels appeared to the shepherds in the traditional Christmas story); he is also academic dean at Bethlehem Bible College and director of the ecumenical Christ at the Checkpoint conferences held periodically in Bethlehem. He got worldwide attention at Christmas when he installed a nativity scene at the church in Bethlehem depicting the Christ child in rubble left by an Israeli bomb (you can see it in this brief report by the Associated Press).
Isaac can sound angry, as he did in his Easter Vigil sermon, and he has been accused — I think unfairly– of antisemitism. He presents one side of what Robert Cathey of McCormick Theological Seminary, in a book review in Studies in Christian-Jewish Relations, perceptively calls the “conflicting claims and grievances of two traumatized people (Palestinians and Israelis) who are both victims of an ongoing conflict that has regional and international dimensions.”3 But in The Other Side of the Wall, Isaac called for a “shared-land theology” in a Holy Land “where Jews, Muslims, and Christians share the land and its resources, have the same rights, and embrace each other as fellow human beings and be reconciled with one another.”4
But, let’s face it, at the moment he has reason to be angry. Gaza City is 45 miles from Bethlehem, about half the distance from Springfield to St. Louis. If somebody were carpet-bombing Carlinville and destroying the cropland in Macoupin County, I think we’d get mad too. Christians in the West Bank have friends, relatives and colleagues in Gaza; they don’t have to be reminded of their common humanity, as so often we do an ocean away from the fighting.
“Yesterday I watched with anguish a cruel scene of a child pulled from under the rubble,” Isaac said. “He miraculously survived the bombing, and while he was being pulled out, he was saying: ‘Where is the water, I am thirsty’.” He continued:
This reminded me of the words of Jesus on the cross, when he cried out: “I am thirsty”. He cried out “I am thirsty” in solidarity with those being massacred by famine, siege and bombardment. Jesus stands in solidarity with all the victims of wars and forced famines, caused by unjust and tyrannical regimes in our world. It is the cry of everyone oppressed by the injustice of power, and humanity’s silence and inability to put an end to tyranny and injustice.
Jesus shouted, “I am thirsty,” so they gave him vinegar to drink. They added more pain to his pain, more anguish to his anguish. Today, while Gaza screams, “I am thirsty,” they drop aid from the sky, stained with the blood of innocents. Some were killed by drowning while trying to pull the dropped aid from the sea. How cruel. Gaza is thirsty, and they give Gaza vinegar.
Pastor Isaac’s anger wasn’t confined to Western governments. Without naming names, he said churches in. the West have largely been. silent:
There are some church leaders who are willing to sacrifice us for comfort, the same way they offered us as an atonement sacrifice for their own racism and anti-semitism — repenting on our land over a sin they committed in their land!
That one I’ll have to think about, but it hit home.
One justification for establishing a Jewish state of Israel after World War II was to provide a homeland for the Jewish people where, it was argued, they would not be subject to the kind of antisemitism they had endured in Europe for centuries. And, especially, the Shoah or Holocaust in Nazi-occupied Europe. As a Christian, and especially as a Lutheran, I can’t help but think we have 2,000 years of history to atone for.
That, I believe, puts a heavy burden on us. Perhaps the best approach, certainly the one closest to my way of thinking, is Robert Cathey’s in his Studies in Christian-Jewish Relations book review of Isaac’s Other Side of the Wall:
For we who live outside the region, we can make a contribution to the possibility of greater justice and peace by listening patiently to all sides without demonizing one against the other, by giving of our resources to civil society organizations in the region that work toward mutual recognition and reconciliation, and trusting that whatever compromise to the conflict that may emerge, it will take both the Palestinian and Israeli peoples and others in the region to make
reconciliation a reality.
Notes
1 I came across this post today (Oct. 14, 2024) while I was working on another project, and realized I never quite got around to finishing it, editing it and uplinking it to Ordinary Time. So I immediately set about atoning for that omission.
2 Isaac also recorded his Easter Village homily, March 30, 2024, and uploaded it to YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgKytWyc0EI; he later spoke with Amy Goodman about the homily and the difficulty of celebrating Easter this year in Jerusalem and the occupied territories at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgKytWyc0EI.
3 Robert Cathey, “Munther Isaac, The Other Side of the Wall” [review], Studies in Christian-Jewish Relations 17, no. 1 (2022) https://ejournals.bc.edu/index.php/scjr/issue/view/1249. Cathey notes that: “The author strongly dissociates himself from antisemitism and Islamophobia,
acknowledges the horror of the Holocaust, and seeks to live at peace with both Israelis and the Muslim majority of his own people.” But adds that he “fails to address the fact that Palestinians and other Arab peoples have resisted the Jewish return to sovereignty not only nonviolently but also with lethal force in multiple wars and acts of terrorism.”
4 Munther Isaac, The Other Side of the Wall: A Palestinian Narrative of Lament and Hope (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2020): 218-19, 227-28.
[Revised, edited and uplinked Oct. 14, 2024]
Ordinary Time 
Well done.
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