University Presbyterian Church - Chapel Hill, NC

Video | Download Video
Audio Player Below | Download Audio

Mark Braverman

I Samuel 12:19-24

Revelation 22:12-14, 16-17, 20-21

Thank you Bob, for inviting me to preach, and thank you all for welcoming me into your midst.

You know, as a Jew who grew up in the synagogue, preaching from a prescribed set of scripture reading is very familiar territory.  Every Sabbath we read a section from the Five Books of Moses – it’s a one-year cycle, we divided it into 52 portions – and a selection from the prophets.  But when I discovered the lectionary I was so delighted – what an embarrassment of riches for the preacher!  There is the Old Testament — with a psalm as a bonus, and Gospels, and Epistles. And for me, especially – this you need to understand –  growing up I was not supposed to read the New Testament, and talk about Jesus was out of bounds. In fact walking into a church was out of the question – it was actually considered a dangerous place – such was the legacy of Europe. And so to bring the scriptures together into a whole is a reestablishment of wholeness, a wholeness and coming together in faith, I submit, that is a matter of the utmost urgency to us today.

Today I want to talk about kings.

We are, of course, in the season of Easter -- still. And the connection with kings is clear – in the Christian narrative, Easter is concerned with the King of Kings.  But the story of that King takes place before the backdrop of other kings, other kingdoms.  We enter Easter after Lent -- a time of introspection, of self-inventory – as individuals, communities, societies. It’s a journey. One does not enter Holy Week until one passes through this process to overcome the blindness -- the distraction -- of self-absorption, attachment to the idols of ego, possessions, temporal power.  So that when Good Friday comes around, we are prepared to turn from looking inward to a contemplation of the world, to turn outward, to look out and see human suffering, contemplate the effect of human action on the world.  And then the journey continues, to Easter, the ultimate seeing, the ultimate opening to the possibility, the reality, of a new world. 

It’s a journey.  You don’t get to see all at once, it doesn’t come to you all at once.

This morning, continuing this Easter theme of seeing, we read about how the eyes of the Israelites were suddenly opened, when they realized their mistake in demanding a king “so that we may be like the other nations.” This story of Israel and its kings continues the drama of the Bible narrative – the story of God coming to humankind, and, on the stage set by the Bible, a drama of a land, of kings, temple, priests and prophets, the ongoing story of how we, as humankind, learn to live with one another and how to honor this planet we inhabit.  God knew, as did Samuel, what would happen with kings. And he knew that this was what would have to happen in order for the people to learn about His Kingdom. The people would have to learn from one bad experience after another – and with the help of the prophets, and ultimately a Galilean mystic in the great tradition of those prophets, Jesus of Nazareth, that they had to keep their eyes and hearts focused clearly on God’s kingship, not that of kings of flesh and blood, and not on the myth that violence can ever be redemptive.

This is the learning that we must learn over and over again, in every generation. It’s a lesson that I have learned on my own journey.

I was born in the United States in 1948 – the year of the declaration of the State of Israel. Zionism was mother’s milk to me, an inseparable part of the traditional Judaism in which I was raised.  I was taught that a miracle – born of heroism and bravery – had blessed my generation. The State of Israel was not a mere historical event – it was redemption from millennia of persecution.

I grew up immersed in the Jewish narrative of the birth and meaning of the new Jewish homeland. The legacy of Europe – of survival in the face of millennia of marginalization and suffering -- was a sense of specialness, of separateness, and a kind of brittle sense of superiority and entitlement.  And the ideology and romance of the birth and survival of the State of Israel partakes of this legacy and this identity.  I embraced it.

Until I saw the occupation.

I travelled to the occupied West Bank in 2006. When I saw the dispossession oppression being perpetrated in my name, it broke my heart and what is more important it challenged my assumptions and beliefs. I saw the wall, the theft of land, the everyday, devastating impact on the lives of the Palestinian people.  I saw the soul killing impact on my Jewish cousins manning the checkpoints.  I learned the other narrative, the Nakba, in Arabic the catastrophe – of  1948. I learned about the destruction of towns, villages, farms, the attempted negation of an entire culture that took place to make way for the Jewish state, and I understood that this too was an essential part of my own story as a Jew.  I met the Palestinian people, I recognized them -- claimed them -- as my brothers and sisters. And, after considerable soul searching, I realized that my Jewishness required me to work for justice in Palestine. 

The experience of seeing the occupation knocked me down – showed me a whole new way of seeing. I realized that if my own people were going to survive, we had to transcend our sense of specialness, a sense incubated for 2000 years and that had now taken the form of a political ideology that granted to us the land as our special inheritance and right. I realized that we had to understand the land not in the literal sense of the Old Testament promise but in the context of what God requires of us as belonging to all humankind. The earth is the Lord’s. I realized that the meaning of the Holocaust was not that we had to retreat behind walls of protection, but that it must bring us to a recognition of the universality of human suffering and our obligation to relieve it. For the Palestinian story is also our story, it is – must be seen as – our narrative, our urgent narrative.  It is our journey, today – like the journey of the Jews during the time of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Hosea and Amos – and of Jesus of Nazareth. Because Jesus, like the Jewish prophets before him, confronted the evil of power, spoke of the evil of kings.

Theologian Walter Wink talks about Jesus’ statement, My Kingdom is not of this world.  He says that in the gospel of John the Greek word for “world” is kosmos – which translates as order or system.  This world, Jesus is saying, this system of empire, this empire which seeks only to increase its own power and reach at the expense of communities, families, human health and dignity – this world order will give over to the Kingdom of God – something completely different. Christian Bible scholars and theologians are now beginning to understand the gospels as the record of a movement of social transformation and nonviolent resistance to the evil of empire. In a tragic and compelling parallel, this is what we see being played out today, in the Palestine of 2000 years later.  What we see today happening in the Holy Land is an indigenous population subjugated by a colonizing power.  What we see today is an occupied people fighting for dignity, human rights, and justice. 

I find myself saying to Christians who seek a devotional pilgrimage to the Holy Land:  Yes!  Go!  Walk where Jesus walked!  For, if you do go and indeed see what is to be seen, you will not only walk where he walked but you will see what he saw. 

You will see the attempt to destroy community and family through the taking of farms and the fragmentation of village life.  You will see the dismantling of an agrarian and merchant economy by the imposition of illegal laws and the tread of soldiers’ boots. 

But you will also see nonviolent resistance, in the refusal of farmers to abandon their land in the face of walls, fences and harassment.  You will see it in the parents of Israeli and Palestinian children lost to the violence of the conflict meeting together and declaring, “We refuse to enemies.” You will see it in US churches at local and denominational levels proposing phased divestment from companies profiting from the occupation. You will see it in the declarations of Palestinian religious leaders who, following Jesus’ exhortation to love your enemies, reach out – in love -- to their Israeli occupiers to demand that the land be shared, that they be seen as equals, as children of God.

And then, you will return to your Bibles and understand the origin of Christianity as a movement of nonviolent resistance to the forces that would remove women and men from the source of their strength and from knowledge of God’s love.

So the church is at home here.  This is the social justice agenda that permeates the global church – it’s not a hard call!  Except for the interfaith issue.  That makes it difficult.  I know.  I know what charges you open yourselves to when you dare to question the actions of the State of Israel.  I know that it threatens relationships built up over years, especially on institutional levels. But I say to you: do not let yourselves be held captive to our struggle. Do what your faith directs you to do, even if many of your Jewish brothers and sisters refuse, for the time being, to accompany you on this ministry. Have compassion for us, honor the painful process that we must go through as we begin to look in the mirror and confront the awful consequences of our nationalist project. But do not wait for us. Do not confuse the work of reconciling with the Jewish people and atoning for millennia of anti-Jewish doctrine and acts with the urgent work that now calls. Fighting anti-Semitism is and continues to be important work – as is the opposition to all forms of racism – and Christianity has a lot to answer for in that regard.  But the urgent call today is the call to justice for Palestine– justice that will alone bring peace to both the Palestinian and the Israeli peoples. I say this to you today what I have said to many Christian groups, from the pulpit, in denominational assemblies considering proposals to divest from companies profiting from the occupation of Palestine – if you want to love and honor the Jewish people, then work, as faithful Christians, for justice in the Holy Land.

This is about seeing clearly – and answering the call to be faithful. And so today we also read from the Book of Revelation.

Some people have trouble with Revelation – all the talk of the beast and animals with many eyes, and Satan and hellfire. Yes, some of it is strange, can even sound like the ravings of a person whose religious fervor has caused him to become unhinged.  But let us call to mind the other name of the Book: Apocalypse.  Lifting the veil.  Seeing what is hidden, overcoming blindness.  Perhaps all these beasts with all these eyes is not so crazy.  When we let ourselves see, when we can look, maybe this is what it looks like.

And listen to the passion in this book:

2:9 I know your affliction and your poverty, even though you are rich!

2:19 I know your works – your love, faith service, and patient endurance.

Do you hear the call, the love, the appeal for endurance, for steadfastness, for faithfulness?  The imagery may be otherworldly but this is about this world, about what we are called to do as communities.

3:20 Listen!  I am standing at the door, knocking; Let anyone who has an ear listen to what the Spirit is saying to the churches.

Bear in mind -- this book is a letter. The author, like Paul, is writing to the far-flung churches, people he knows and feels passionately attached to. Remember -- this was a community movement, this was grassroots, this was small gatherings of faithful in the midst of a prosperous, urban, materialistic culture hostile and (appropriately) suspicious of such movements.

So listen to the cry of this man, this John, calling to the churches, reminding the faithful that it is the true King that they must follow: “I am the root and the descendant of David, the bright morning star.”  The House of David will not be built on a particular mountain, in a particular land – that is over.  The house of God is the house that we all build, as the hands of God on earth, in our faithful devotion to His will. We must remind ourselves continually. We forget at our peril.

We Jews are in danger of having forgotten this fundamental tenet of our faith. I see, as did the Jews in today’s scripture, that Israel has lost its way. We must learn to see again, to have our eyes opened. Every year, as the Christians celebrate Easter, we Jews at Passover and then at Pentecost remember the liberation from Egypt and receiving God’s law at Sinai. We brought to the world the teaching of a universal God, a God who seizes us by the arm, binds us to his covenant, demands justice – and we are now enacting the creed of a tribal God who commands conquest.  We have become “like the other nations.” We lay claim to our tradition of social justice and the requirement to relieve suffering, but we have left the Palestinians out of it – it is only about our suffering. We live behind a wall of our own construction. That wall exists not only in the hills of the West Bank and in the sands of Gaza but in the hearts of Israelis who do not know their Palestinian brothers and sisters. We say on Passover, “next year in Jerusalem!”  But what Jerusalem are we building? A capital we selfishly, dishonorably and disastrously claim for ourselves, or a city in which we live harmoniously with all the children of God?

But change is coming.

Yesterday was Nakba Day. I was privileged to celebrate it last night here in the Triangle in the company of 600 local Palestinians and their supporters. Rabbi Brant Rosen from Evanston IL wrote in his blog last spring on Israel Independence Day – which occurs, of course, at the same time of year, that he could not celebrate. Rather, he wrote, he could no longer separate the reality of the Nakba from the founding of the State of Israel. The anniversary of Israel’s birth, he wrote, had to be a day for soul searching for Jews – to acknowledge the Palestinian Nakba as our story as well as it is theirs. 

The Bible is the story of humankind’s journey toward a kingdom – God’s kingdom -- built on universal love, on compassion, on justice.  Today, here, we continue on this journey.  Each of us, when we open our eyes, is Jesus entering the Temple and, in horror, realizing that it has become a den of thieves. It’s Jeremiah standing on the Mount of Olives, as Jesus did 8 centuries later, weeping for the city, for the destruction he knew it was calling down on itself.  It is the person of faith – Christian, Jew, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, confronting the question of what to do when confronted with evil in his or her time, confronted with the House of God turned into a machine to dispossess the powerless, rob the poor, despoil nature. 

The church is called here. Just as it was called – and it answered – in the struggle against Jim Crow in America and against Apartheid in South Africa. Let us remember the words of MLK Jr., who in response to his fellow clergy who urged him to be patient in his call for nonviolent action, wrote the following from the Birmingham jail:

The judgment of God is upon the church as never before. If today’s church does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century.

In closing, I would like to turn to another passage in Revelation, near the very end of the book, where the writer draws even closer to the vision of the Old Testament prophets and to that of Jesus, who calls on all of us to open our eyes, to bring about the Kingdom of God here on earth.

I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more.

And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.

And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying,
“See, the home of God is among mortals.
He will dwell with them as their God;
they will be his peoples,
and God himself will be with them;
And the one who was seated on the throne said, “See, I am making all things new.”

Teach us to see.  Teach us all, Christians, Jews, Muslims, people of all faiths, to see and to follow that light. To know that we face the choice, every day, to see or not to see, to choose, every day, to answer the call to the new or to turn away. Teach us, in this Easter season, to know that resurrection is happening every day.

Amen