In this season of Lent—Christians like us the world over—make the long journey with Jesus and his disciples to the city of Jerusalem. We are people on the move heading for the conclusion of the story as we have come to know it but open to the possibility that its retelling will shatter our preconceptions to reveal something entirely new.  Looking down from the hills surrounding Jerusalem, Jesus weeps, saying these words: ”Would that even today you know the things that make for peace.” I have always thought that in these tears it is as if Jesus is taking into himself all of the anguish of the world to that point and since—which of course is what we believe he did.

Just three weeks ago I was standing at such a spot on a hillside overlooking Jerusalem, the holy city that still makes us weep whether we are onlookers from afar reading the newspaper or up close as I was. We weep with anguish for its warring peoples and for us all because we’re still trying to learn the things that make for peace. But Jerusalem is also a place more vibrant and full of hope and possibility than any other. For me, even more than New York City, my home, Jerusalem is a place where I never sleep. When I am there it keeps me awake with excitement, with anxiety, but also with anticipation. How can one sleep when the hills of the city echo with the Muslim call to prayer interlaced with the bells of the Christian churches in the Old City and the chanting of the Jewish prayers echoing off the Western Wall or issuing from synagogues of all kinds.  More about both journeys to Jerusalem—the journey of Jesus and my own shortly.   

First a word about our text from Isaiah. The words of the prophet are such that if we really believed them they would change everything, here in the United States, as well is the Middle East. Isaiah believes that the people to whom he is speaking are more interested in the form of worship and religious observance -- in this case, they are more interested in fasting -- than in pursuing the actions of feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, bringing the homeless poor into your own homes, providing the shelter that people actually need. And in order to bring his point home, Isaiah attempts to redefine the word “fast.”  Is not this not the fast that I choose? To pursue justice!  To do what is right. To repair the world.  

“Then” he says, “if you pursue these things, Your light shall break forth like the dawn, your healing shall spring up speedily; then you shall call, and the Lord will answer; you shall cry, and he will say, Here I am.” The tantalizing connection that the prophet makes is that our engagement with the needs of our own flesh, to other human beings made in God’s image, is the key to our own healing. To know God is to do what is right and just for the other.

Like any good communicator the prophet rebounds then from another angle: “If you take away from you the pointing of the finger, presumably assigning blame over there, if you pour out yourself for the hungry and satisfy the desire of the afflicted, then your gloom will be as noonday, the Lord will guide you, satisfy you with good things, you shall be like a watered garden.  Your ancient ruins shall be rebuilt, you shall be called the repairer of the breach. The prophet believes that self-giving, not self-protection is the key to all these things.

How clear the message, how hard to live it.

A repairer of the breach? What does that quaint, poetic phrase actually mean? What comes to mind for me are the stories and people I met during my recent Lenten journey to Jerusalem, and to its neighbor, Bethlehem.

There is George Sa-adeh, a Palestinian Christian and principal of an Orthodox school we visited in Bethlehem. Intensely beautiful elementary age school children crowded around us as we entered the building; through the window in George’s office the most beautiful pink rose we had ever seen. He told us a story—how he and his wife and two daughters were driving to the nearby drugstore in Bethlehem on the morning of March 25, 2003. Israeli soldiers had set up an ambush for terrorists. They mistook George’s car for theirs and opened fire. Before George and his family realized what was happening, several hundred rounds of lethal bullets ripped into the family car, gravely wounding George and his wife, and killing beautiful Christina, his 12 year old daughter.  George was in such critical condition that he was not able to leave the hospital to attend his own daughter’s funeral. 

George told us this story without hysteria, recrimination or malice, saying simply that over time God has given them the power to forgive, if not forget.  One pivotal signpost along the way to forgiveness was the call he received shortly after Christina’s death, from a stranger, an Israeli Jewish mother, whose own child had been killed by a Palestinian suicide bomber. For a Palestinian to receive a call from an Israeli is unusual enough and she was reaching out to him in his grief. This mother was a member of a group to which George now belongs called the Bereaved Parents Circle, where those on both sides of the conflict, who have lost children, work together for peace.   

Repairers of the breach: Schlomo Brinn is an Orthodox rabbi, who leads a community of Jewish settlers. For the past three years he has been involved in a project called Kedem—Voices of Religious Reconciliation. It is a group of 14 rabbis, Muslim religious leaders and Christian priests who, have been meeting for dialogue and action for the past three years on the really difficult issues, most especially that many Muslims and many Jews think the land belongs exclusively to them. This was what Schlomo once believed as well. But he told us how his own perspective on this matter changed dramatically through wrestling with these new colleagues, so that now he believes that the land of Israel is there to be shared and that a two state solution must be found. For someone like him, this is a complete about face, a true conversion—a miraculous transformation. He told us that when the brother of one of the Muslim leaders in the group died, unexpectedly, the entire group of religious leaders, Muslims, Christians, and Jews went together to the Palestinian village where that man lived to pay a condolence call.  Such visits between real people living on opposite sides of the conflict could in the long run make a greater impact than volumes of words uttered by politicians.

Repairers of the Breach: One evening the group I was traveling with found ourselves in a restaurant in Jerusalem with some sixty Face to Face/Faith to Faith teenagers and parents. Face to Face is an international multifaith youth leadership program of Auburn Seminary now in its sixth year, which I co-direct. It is based on the hope that like the estranged brothers, Jacob and Esau, enemies from conflict areas around the world can eventually say to one another, “To see your Face is like seeing the Face of God.” I can tell you from personal experience that this is possible.

This particular night in Jerusalem held many wonderful moments but none more precious than the conversation between a Jewish mother and a Palestinian mother. They had not known each other before the evening; they did not share a common language; one spoke Hebrew; the other Arabic. But as they explained to us later, it turns out that  the Jewish mother was a gynecologist. Sitting there that night at the table she learned from the Palestinian mother how hard it is for the Muslim women in her village to receive proper medical care. As a result of their conversation that night they are working together, Israeli and Palestinian women, side by side, to develop a medical clinic to address these needs. We do not know how they communicated with each other, but evidently each understood the other despite the language barrier to build a bridge of peace.  Doing what is right and just, even when they could not speak the same language.

And finally, there were two business partners, one Israeli, one Palestinian. Jacob is a young  entrepreneur who has launched several successful businesses.  We stood with him in the shadow of abandoned buildings near Ramallah in what will be the Silicon Valley like tech zone that he and Sami, his Palestinian business partner are developing. The new businesses will be strategically located to employ Palestinians and Israelis. Their feeling is that after years of failed negotiations the one argument that cannot be resisted is economic. When it becomes evident that Israel and a new Palestinian state are economically interdependent the walls between them will come tumbling down.  

The thread that runs throughout these stories and so many more that I could have chosen is that these people, our flesh and blood, have not allowed themselves to get stuck in the rhetoric that we hear so often from both sides. On the Israeli side we often hear —we have no worthy Palestinian partner; therefore negotiation is not possible. From the Palestinian side we often hear that the root of all evil is the Israeli occupation.  To be sure there is a measure of truth to both perspectives but these simple sentences, that become a kind of code or mantra, can keep people from both sides paralyzed, frozen in place, for a long, long time.

What distinguishes these repairers of the breach? They have gone beyond the form of religious observance—fasting as Isaiah puts it—to pursue the fast that God chooses -- engagement with the other, experiencing the perspective of the other, forgiving what seems unforgivable, even the death of a child.      They have chosen not to endlessly debate the “facts” of history, or the finer points of a perfect justice or what’s fair,  but instead take the small, daily incremental steps to DO justice, that will transform rocky soil into the loamy rich seedbed fit for God’s peace.  Acting with the “fierce urgency of now,” as Martin Luther King Jr. put it. They are preparing the way where there seems to be no way.

What does it mean for us, Presbyterians here in the US to become repairers of the breach? The group that I traveled with was trying to answer this question in the wake of the Presbyterian General Assembly’s action almost two years ago to explore phased selective divestment from corporations doing business in Israel. The trip sponsored by Auburn Seminary and the American Jewish Committee included Presbyterian and Jewish clergy and lay leaders—our purpose was to expose us all to the multiple narratives on both sides, to the stories that each group may not normally hear. In this we were successful—for the complexity is greater than any facile solution, and the pain and suffering on all sides is acute. Humility should be our first response and the recognition that there is so much that we do not know. What should Americans who care about these things do: Be pro-Israeli, be Pro-Palestinian, be pro-peace. Find the way to invest in peace.

For us, as Christians sitting here today, the foolishness of the cross, as Paul deems it in 1 Corinthians, actually offers us a lens and a way to understand what it means to be repairers of the breach. Paul reminds us that what we think is wisdom, all of those things we are so sure of, may in fact, be folly. The foolishness of God is wiser than we; the weakness of God stronger than we are, he says.

We believe that Jesus poured himself out in his death on the cross for us, for the sin of the world; we also believe that he took into himself the other, in forgiving even those who put him to death, including his friends who ended up betraying him. “Father, forgive them, they know not what they are doing.” “In Christ, God made space for others, even godless others, and opened arms to invite them in.” (Miroslav Vulf)

Our role as repairers of the breach should surely have something to do with this capacity of Jesus for making a space in his own heart for the other.  As theologian M. Vulf explains it, “The faith in Jesus Christ, who made our cause his cause, frees us from pursuing our interest only, and creates in us the space for the interests of others.” P. 215. It is this quality of capaciousness, of being able to take into themselves the story of the other, even the enemy, that so many people we met exhibited.

One of our speakers Yehuda Bauer, a vigorous and winsome octogenarian, is considered the foremost scholar in the world on the Holocaust and an expert in the area of genocide. He ended his time with us by saying: “I come from a people that gave the Ten Commandments to the world. Let us agree that we need the Ten Commandments now more than ever. We also need three more commandments; they are these: “Thou shalt not be a perpetrator; Thou shalt not be a victim, and Thou shalt never, but never be a bystander.”’

So in this season of Lent, as each of us decides anew how we’re going to spend our one precious little life, let us resolve never to be bystanders. Let us engage as players, who do not hide ourselves from our own flesh and blood. Let us keep the fast that God chooses by doing the work of justice; Let us be guided by the foolishness of the cross that sets the world’s wisdom on its head; let us join ourselves to all those the world over as repairers of the breach, until in the fullness of time, we shall all know God’s perfect peace. Amen.