Dear Friends,
I have a vivid memory of the first time I asked the woman who would become my wife where she was from. It’s a simple getting to know you question, right? Even people who have moved a fair bit typically have some general story about where their family’s roots are. Personally, that was always an easy question for me – I spent the majority of my early childhood living in the same house my mother grew up in. My grandmother, who I spent all my days with, lived a mile away in what had been her in-laws’ house. We had been entrenched in the same community for generations.
My wife, on the other hand, comes from a family of globe hoppers. Her dad grew up in a military family, in constant motion, and went on to marry someone with whom he’d live in countless places, living a life of public service. So when I asked my wife where she was from, the possibilities were endless. Did I want to know that the closest relatives in her extended family lived in Maine, that she was born in Virginia, that her parents lived in Guatemala? Did I want to know that she had entered college after two years at a boarding school in Vermont or that her first words were in Swahili since she spent her early years in Tanzania? There was no clear answer to what I thought was a simple question.
One thing we learn in Godly Play is about the well-worn paths that central Old Testament figures traveled. Our Desert Box figures move between Ur, Haran, Shechem, Bethel… back and forth and back. Eventually the view widens. We see more of the map. We go to Babylon, to Jerusalem, into Egypt. People travel to follow God’s call or because they are fleeing slavery or because they are forced to move. Displacement is a central theme. And this week, our lectionary brings us one of those stories.
Left At The Gates
This Sunday’s Old Testament reading is a reminder of just how heartbreaking these stories of displacement can be. Having escaped Egypt, having suffered in the desert, the Israelites art standing at the edge of the Promised Land. The fullness of God’s assurances lay in front of them. But Moses will never enter into this new beginning.
“I have let you see it with your eyes, but you shall not cross over there,” God says to Moses. God’s promises will be fulfilled, but not in Moses’s lifetime.
So let us begin there, right now. If, in this moment, you still don’t know what to say to your children about the violence in the Middle East, perhaps it is worth going back to the beginning.
Let us enter into the desert. We can follow Sarah and Abraham who leave everything they know behind and hear the promises of God in new places. We can dwell in Egypt with Moses and follow the newly freed Israelites across the Red Sea. And, perhaps most aptly, we can turn to the story of Exile and Return. It is a story weighted with violence and loss – but it is also a story that offers new beginnings. As things slowly change for the exiles after generations of violence and displacement, they are invited to make a new place home, and God is with them in all of it.
More To The Story
We always need to be careful about the connections we draw between the Old & New Testaments, but sometimes linking the two together is simple because the heart of the text is the same – even according to the most important scholars, and that is what we see this week. Asked by the Pharisees what commandment is the greatest, Jesus replies, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”
Hillel and Rabbit Akiva, two of the most revered Talmudic scholars, say the same: the heart of the Torah, the central commandment, is to love your neighbor as yourself.
Our Muslim siblings offer us yet another iteration of this mandate to love: "love for your brother what you love for yourself."
We are made to love (with a shoutout to the very complicated figure who is TobyMac, who has a song by the same name). This message repeats itself around the world, even when we cannot figure out how to love.
Truth, Love, & The Stories We Tell
‘Story’ can mean a lot of different things. It can describe fiction or personal experience, facts of fantasy. But as the Rev. Leyla King writes for Grow Christians, when it comes to the most serious things, it’s important that we stick to the facts, even as the way we share those facts varies by age. King is especially wise about the ways love and truth intersect (she’s previously written about telling the truth and the ways we avoid naming painful subjects, like death, through the use of various euphemisms). Ultimately, though, the facts matter and lead us toward right action.
Let us learn to be neighbors to those forced to make their homes in our communities, victims of violence, refugees.
Let us learn to be neighbors to people on the other side of the world.
Let us love our neighbor as ourselves or love for our brothers and sisters what we love for ourselves.
However we say it, we can learn to love our neighbors in new ways as we listen to their stories and learn their histories because, yes, Maybe I Can Love My Neighbor, Too. Maybe our love can change the world.
As Ruth said to Naomi, “Where you go I will go.” And so we may sing (and this is an easy one to teach), as we stand with those terrorized, occupied, staring at the terrifying possibility of displacement:
Moses never got to enter the Promised Land. Many great peacemakers have not lived to see the changes their lives made possible. With great fortune, with the work of solidarity and love and resistance, may we live to see a peaceful future. But even if we don’t, may we like Moses know that it is on the horizon.
Peace,
Bird