Sermon delivered by Janet Patrick on March 7 2010: Lent 3

A voice crying in the wilderness

The real gospel of Jesus starts not in Bethlehem but in the wilderness. There John the Baptist preached repentance and baptised his followers in the waters of the Jordan. There in that wilderness Jesus was drawn to him and his message and submitted to his baptism. There in the wilderness Jesus withdrew for a period, fasted, and was tempted.

Close your eyes and imagine that wilderness. What is the terrain like? Ravines, crooked paths, and rough roads: just sand and stones. What is there to drink? Neither water nor wine. What is there to eat? Just locusts and wild honey. And what might there be to wear? Garments made of camel's hair with a leather belt. Not a place of comfort. Not a place of company. Pretty grim.

Deserts or wilderness places are unfamiliar to us living comfortably in our urban society today. Most of us will meet them only in the advertisements for adventure holidays and explorations. Few will actually go to experience them.

However, deserts or wilderness places were only too familiar to the people of the Bible in their pre-industrial and largely rural culture.

Moses was in the wilderness tending sheep when he was called by God from the burning bush. That was the start of an adventure that saw him lead his people from slavery in sophisticated urban Egypt back out to wander in the wilderness. For the proverbial 40 years they experienced a different sort of hardship, and the words that come to mind are rock, serpent, cloud and fire. They quarrelled and fought each other, they rebelled against Moses’ leadership, and they forsook their God. But there they were given God’s Law: there in the mountains and desert the Commandments were received and a new start began.

The idea that God was to be found in the desert was the source of Isaiah’s inspired prophecy a thousand years later. He said [40:3]: Listen to the voice of one crying in the wilderness ‘Prepare ye the way of the Lord.’ He was claiming that the voice of God still comes from the desert. And not only that, the present crisis will be resolved and the nation’s fortunes restored, just as “The wilderness shall rejoice and blossom like a rose [35: 1, 6].”

Another 600 years later, John the Baptist was also bringing a message from the wilderness: “Repent ye: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” He knew his scriptures and quoted Isaiah directly, claiming to be “the voice of one crying in the wilderness, ‘Prepare ye the way of the Lord.’” So that wilderness became the starting-point for the ministry of Jesus: a comfortless place of loneliness and hardship; an infertile desert where nothing grows; a lifeless and even hopeless environment.

But that place became a place of testing, revelation, and development. It was the place where Jesus learned self-discipline. It was the place where Jesus worked out his Messianic calling. It was a place where God was found.

Another three centuries later, Christian hermits abandoned the cities of the pagan world to live in solitude in the deserts of northern Egypt. Some were fleeing chaos and persecution of the Roman Empire. For them, the privations of the desert were a means of learning stoic self-discipline. The desert was called Scetes, and from these Desert Fathers we take our word ascetic. The monastic tradition of the church owes its origin to this movement. Those Fathers believed that desert life would teach them to eschew the things of this world and allow them to follow God's call in a more deliberate and individual way.

A 20^th century follower of that tradition, Thomas Merton, wrote ‘One has to be alone, under the sky, before everything falls into place and one finds his own place in the midst of it all.’

So, although the wilderness is a forbidding desolate place, living and working there provide opportunities for self-realisation, self-discipline and communion with God.

Where can we find comparable wilderness today? Well, in the very same place in Palestine on the west Bank of the Jordan. We don’t need reminding of the political history of that troubled region, since the founding of the State of Israel in 1948. There was the forced removal of the resident Palestinians from their homes, and the establishment of vast refugee camps which are still there 60 years later. There have been wars and conflicts between Jew and Arab on and off: rockets from one side, illegal settlements from the other. Palestinian communities are separated from their farms, their clinics and their schools by a high dividing wall. Check-points block the roads; embargoes prevent the import of goods and relief; no-one can travel out to work in Israel. Can we see God in this contemporary wilderness?

In 1992 we travelled from Pakistan where we were living to visit Jonathan our son, who was working for an UN Aid Agency in the West Bank. Jonathan lived next door to the prison in Ramallah. Even then travelling to the West bank was extremely difficult and involved long waits at the border posts and watching Palestinians refused entry. We saw the poverty of the Palestinians and the new blocks built by Israeli settlers. That was before the building of the wall dividing Israel and Palestine. Life is much harder now and last night on the news we heard that the West Bank cannot use the aid it has been given as Israel refuses to allow building materials into Gaza. ‘We live in the biggest prison.’ It seemed a wilderness with little hope.

But there are signs of hope and here is one of them. Four years ago, from September to December 2005, Jan Pickard was an Ecumenical Accompanier working for the Quakers as part of a WCC programme: one of 600 EAs from 15 countries who have come in the last 6 years to the West Bank. Their role is to witness and record events as Palestinians try to use the 68 checkpoints dividing Israel and the West Bank. She accompanied farmers to the agricultural North and South gates near to the village of Jayyous.

Here are two poems, word pictures of what she saw.

Rite of Passage

She is twelve and a half,

Has become a woman

Is wearing the hijab

Demurely, with a cerise blouse

That looks new and rather special too,

For a day in the farmlands picking olives,

Along with a bounce of little brothers and sisters,

swinging their pails on a day off school.

She walks down the dusty road

wearing her new identity with grace.

But she does not have a permit.

Between child and woman she is caught out,

Stopped by the soldiers,

And stands still in the gateway

In her pink blouse and hijab,

While her father pleads

and her sisters and brothers run ahead

among the olive trees.

Then she has to turn

And walk slowly back home

Up the steep dusty track, stretching ahead:

At this turning point in her life

having no right to pass.

Quick

The sun is rising slowly,

Throwing into sharp focus

What happens at a check point:

A petty process-

Humiliation in the name of security-

Carried out deliberately,

slowly.

Then a young man

Who has submitted his ID,

Hid permit, submitted to scrutiny

From someone his own age,

But with a gun;

Has answered questions,

And had his donkey cart

Checked for explosives,

Is waved through at last,

slowly.

So he urges his donkey

Into a trot, along the military road

With the rising sun in his face;

Then

They break into a gallop

As though, in this moment,

They could break out

Of all these constraints,

Denial, oppression-

This slow death of the spirit-

Galloping into the sun

of a new day.

This year Jan returned to visit Jayyous to find if it had changed for better or worse. This is what she has written recently:

“As we walked down the muddy track to the North Gate, it looked much the same as it had done four years ago, and in my memory, and my advocacy, and my dreams even. But now the outer as well as the inner gate are often closed and locked, and the heavy metal barrier in between. The twelve-hour opening which I had seen four years ago has been whittled down to brief openings and long closed periods which waste many hours of daylight – and there are times in the farming year when every hour counts.

The North Gate is still in the same place, still a blot on the landscape. But the route of the Separation Barrier may change here, too. The route of the Separation Barrier when it was built cut off 75% of the farmlands of that community, and all the wells. An Israeli settlement, Zufin, is now well-established on the stolen land.

Meanwhile the South Gate has moved: because the Separation Barrier has also moved. West Bank land which the Israelis had earmarked for an industrial zone has been handed back to the people of Azzoun. The Barrier has been moved, but it is still there. I walked to the new South Gate. There was little happening there: no farmers waiting to cross and the gate closed. There was an army vehicle parked there, on the new military road and we watched an Israeli soldier climb out and put on a shawl and prepare in other ways for prayer, then follow his morning devotions, between the humvee and the barbed wire. The Barrier has only moved a little way. It is still there, confiscating land and separating lives.

Later that day the children in the village threw stones at one of the military vehicles guarding the contractors, and they retaliated with tear gas. I learned that there have been many more Israeli army incursions into Jayyous than there were four years ago. Some aspects of life have eased at the moment – there are fewer checkpoints, students and workers can travel to Nablus more easily – but all the time there is the sense that this is provisional; what will happen next? And meanwhile the Israeli settlements to the east of Jayyous – right across the West Bank between there and Yanoun – don’t stop growing, in both size and dominance over the neighbouring Palestinian communities.

A positive aspect of returning to Jayyous was meeting friends made four years ago. In the house next door to ours, two babies had been born since I left., I was moved to meet Abu and Umm Azzam, who can still go through the gate to their beautiful and fruitful farmlands but who also live just now with the distress of a son in detention without trial, and I spent time with Afaf Shatara and her brother, still sternly critical of the Occupation and still cheerfully keeping open house under their lemon tree.

Common humanity and friendship endure.”

Today

Today I saw a soldier in a prayer shawl,

with gun and phylactery and book,

bowing behind the humvee, beside the barbed wire

of the Separation Barrier: for him, maybe

as good – or bad – as any other place to pray,

today.

Today I travelled on a bus

Where every passenger (coming tired from work)

Greeted the driver and each other with

‘Peace be upon you – and upon you, peace’;

while the driver, who played dabka music all the way,

noticed the dove and cross on my vest

and wouldn’t let me pay –

today.

“And now I’m writing this in a small village on the West Bank. Yanoun is in a beautiful place – hence my thought that postcards might be a good way of communicating. From the front step of the house which our international team of four shares, we look out to a valley patterned with ploughing and greened with wheat beginning to shoot. There are olive groves, and terraces, where sheep graze, watched all the time by the shepherds. And all over the valley almond trees are just coming into delicate bloom. But the situation of its Palestinian people is far from idyllic.

On the surrounding hilltops are outposts of the Israeli settlement of Itamar: we can see watchtowers, water-towers, pylons, houses and caravans. There are also huge industrial buildings – barns for raising chickens. Here the chickens are definitely free-range and peck in the dust outside our door, while the roosters waken us every morning. Occasionally (often on the Sabbath) armed settlers will come down from the hilltops and stroll through the village: making it clear that they are claiming this land for their own. In the past they have attacked shepherds out in the fields, or families picking olives. In 2002 the villagers were so intimidated they all moved to the nearest town, abandoning homes, sheepfolds, and the land their families had farmed for generations. Israeli peace activists, and the international community, were so concerned at the symbolism of an entire community being cleared like this, that – after quick consultation – the villagers were offered a constant international presence in the village. For the most part, this is provided by EAPPI.

So now, for three months, I and my colleagues are offering a ‘protective presence’ – and also sharing the lives of the people of Yanoun (at least by drinking many cups of coffee and practising very limited Arabic). Each day we walk the streets of the village and further out, through the valley a couple of kilometres, down to Lower Yanoun and back – being visible to the watchers on the hilltops. I’m about to go and do just that. And then I shall come back, Here I’ll be tapping away at this laptop while sheep bleat in the shed next door. I’ll sit with the security of my British passport in my pocket, among people whose lives (through poverty, politics and particularly the presence of the settlers) are so very insecure. This is indeed a place of paradox.

Thank you for your thoughts and prayers. Thank you for wanting to know more.”

At the beginning of February this year the President and Vice-President of the Methodist Conference visited Jan in Yanoun and while there met the Deputy Mayor who said of the Ecumenical Advisors: “Your words and cameras are more powerful than guns. The levels of violence and intimidation of local Palestinians by settlers in Yanoun have significantly fallen since the Ecumenical advisors arrived.”

Jan’s is a voice and crying in the wilderness. It inspired the President and Vice-President to visit her, and it inspires us all. We must add our voices to hers and observe our world and speak out for all who are treated unjustly.