(For the next several months this blog will contain
memories, reports, journals of
international tours I have led or workshops I have conducted. They will include
The Holy Land, China, Finland et
al. Each blog will contain a portion of the original reports.)
It had been very difficult to convince our tour company, NAWAS to include Bethlehem on our tour. There were issues: security, no four star hotel in Bethlehem, the Nawas family is Lebanese and
Lebanon/Israel
relations are strained. Yet, I insisted we go to Bethlehem or we don’t do this
tour.
Bethlehem was
included.
My work with
Wheat Ridge Ministries called upon me to assist in supporting Lutheran work in
Bethlehem.
Wheat Ridge funded the Wellness center there. Wheat Ridge friends helped build
the
school. Wheat
Ridge helped establish a Parish Nurse program and sponsored short mission trips
for doctors,
audiologists, nurses who donate their time for brief periods of time there.
So we visited.
We listened to Pastor Mitre who tries to keep hope alive in a place where hope
is a rare
commodity. And we worshipped on Sunday at Christmas Lutheran Church.
We had agreed
(or more accurately, I had decided) to have our group sing a special
number during
the service. I decided it should be Stan’s version of The Lord’s Prayer. We
rehearsed it
(especially on the bus). I loved it and so did others. However, others with
better
musical ears
than mine came to me and said, “Mel, this is not working. Listening to our
botched
up harmony
does not make it easy to feel like a prayer. We must go to Plan B.” Plan B was
to
sing
“Alleluia”. Great song. I didn’t think it fit. I felt it kind of went on
without an ending. I
made an
executive decision. We will sing that old Lutheran favorite “Beautiful Savior.”
Problem: We
didn’t have the music for that with us. Through Barbara I e-mailed Jane to fax
it to
both our
hotels in Jerusalem and in Bethlehem. She tried. Both hotels had their faxes
turned off.
But we got
just the right arrangement when we visited Bethlehem ministries on Saturday, 33
copies clearly
copied.
Sunday morning
found us at church 30 minutes ahead of time (a minor miracle for folks
from Calvary)
but in time with that specific request from Pr. Mitre. As we entered the
beautiful
chapel with
its exquisite stained glass windows we were met by a large group of white
people,
certainly not
the Arab members of the congregation. It turned out to be a big brass band from
Germany. They
had come to support the Lutheran ministry in Bethlehem, had a benefit concert,
taught
children in the Lutheran school there how to play some band instruments and
donated instruments. They were led by a gentle, tall Lutheran pastor. Now we
needed to negotiate how their playing and our singing would work together to
enrich the worship. Surprisingly, my German was better than the director’s
English. Beautiful Savior is well known in Germany by its German name,
“Schoenster Herr Jesu”. The band director thought we wanted her to accompany
our group. Not a good idea. When I mentioned our hymn choice to Pr. Mitre he
said, “Wonderful. This is a favorite hymn of
my
congregation. Why don’t you folks sing the first 3 verses and the congregation
and the organ
will join in
on verse 4.” We did that. It was stirring: “Beautiful Savior, Lord of the
Nations.”
I was also
glad that we had dropped singing “The Lord’s Prayer “ when Pr. Mitre said,
“We do the
same thing every Sunday. When we pray “The Lord’s Prayer” during the service I
ask each
person to pray it in the language of their choice. It was powerful, Arabic,
German,
Swedish,
Norwegian, English. (I chose Cantonese.) God sorted it all out.
Another
decision had to be made. Pr. Mitre had asked for someone from our group to
read the
Epistle lesson for the day. Of course, many wanted to do that. Several
volunteered. I
chose to
offend them all and made the decision that I would read the lesson. And what a
lesson it
was to hear
God’s call for justice, peace and consideration for the poor. Once again, the
right
word of God
for exactly that time and place.
Two
disappointments: The sermon was, of course, in Arabic. Pr. Mitre chose to not
give
a brief
summary in English. I learned later that Pr. Mitre struggles on Sunday in
finding a
balance
between being the pastor for the members of his flock, and also paying adequate
attention to
the needs of guests.
The second
disappointment: The church was built by German Lutherans more than 100
years ago. The
stained glass windows all depict the life and ministry of Jesus in and near
Bethlehem.
Stunningly beautiful! My disappointment: The Bible verse accompanying each
window was
there in German. I wish it had been in an Arab language. To compensate, upon
the
100th
anniversary of the church, the congregation had the words of the Gloria in
Excelsis done in
beautiful
Arabic script around the dome.
The
conversations after the service were an important part of the experience. Once
again
the tour
members were wonderful as all of us met the Arab members, some ELCA youth
volunteers
from America and guests from Norway and Germany. My conversation with one of
the members
was sobering. He explained the great difficulty he has getting around the
“security
walls” to land
which has been in his family for generations. He said to me, “I must get there.
I
must continue
to plant olive trees there. If I fail to go, if I fail to plant, my family’s
ancestral
lands will
immediately be ‘appropriated’. So I go. I plant with my bare hands. I have
planted 400
olive trees.”
“Mitre, how do
you feel about the future?” “Not hopeful”, he said. “I see almost no signs
of us moving
toward a peaceful solution.” “Yet”, he said, “we must keep hope alive.” As
Martin
Luther said,
“Even if I knew I would die tomorrow, today I must still plant an olive tree.”
(Luther, of
course, had said, “plant my apple tree” but in Bethlehem the apple tree became
an
olive tree.) I
heard that and tried to keep my teardrops from becoming too obvious.
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