Hope Amid Struggles: A Pilgrimage to the Holy Land
Sep 07, 2024
May God’s grace and love uphold and energize you, dear siblings in Christ.
“The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something and tell what it saw in a plain way… To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion – all in one.” John Ruskin
This past June, I had the opportunity to take a pilgrimage to the Holy Land with several other bishops and members of the ELCA churchwide staff. Our very specific purpose was to listen to Palestinian Christians and see their experience of living in the Holy Land, especially in light of their ongoing struggles as a marginalized Indigenous population.
Our group outside the Church of the Holy Sepulcher
Friends, there is so much to tell and share! I would describe any visit to the Holy Land as an encounter with the holy, with God in God’s presence in many places and people. Whether it be the sense of awe, I felt in a past pilgrimage at the tomb of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher or the disturbance in my soul listening to one of the workers at the Lutheran guesthouse in Bait Jala share about their life being in danger from the military; one cannot go to the Holy Land without being deeply moved. All of us on this pilgrimage were aware that we were in Israel after the events of October 7, 2023. This date has echoes to me of September 11, 2001, with its tragic and malicious loss of life, both on that day and in its aftermath. As with both dates, there is no going back to “before.” The tragedy and potential of the Holy Land is that it is precious to all three of the world’s Abrahamic faiths: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Sadly, in our sinfulness, brokenness, and fear, we humans practice EXclusion rather than INclusion. (Can I get an “Amen?”) This begins in our lives as early as the age of two when we learn the word “Mine!”
Archbishop Hosam Naoum, the Anglican Bishop of the Archdiocese of Jerusalem and the only other indigenous Palestinian Bishop in the Holy Land along with Bishop Azar of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Jordan and the Holy Land
We witnessed this in so many personal and communal stories! The Christian population in the Holy Land is between 1-2%. This number continues to decline because of an increase in the non-Christian population and the movement of many Palestinian Christians out of the Holy Land to a place where they can live more safely. One of our visits was with members of the Rossing Center (rossingcenter.org), an interreligious, peacebuilding organization that documents attacks against Christians and Christian sites in Israel and Jerusalem. As you can see from almost any news source, these attacks – desecration of cemeteries and churches, abuse of clergy and lay people, and even murder of Palestinians – are on the rise. This news should disturb us and awaken us to action. I know it did me.
Christ in the Rubble, a Nativity display at Christmas Lutheran Church in Bethlehem
A word of caution: The overly and devastatingly simplistic answer is to once again retreat into “us vs. them” thinking. Let us not forget that a major motivation for the founding of the State of Israel was that the Jewish people needed a place to feel safe following the unimaginable destruction of the Holocaust. We, as Christians, who take it as an essential matter of faith to see all people as God’s beloved for whom Christ died, must not give in to us vs. them thinking, either here at home or in our interactions with the wider world. After all, it is our baptismal calling and commission to “work for justice and peace in all the earth.”
His Beatitude Theophilos II, Patriarch of Jerusalem
Reading the Beatitudes for the group on the Mount of Beatitudes
I must bring this article to a close. I hope you have caught a glimpse of what I have heard and seen. I would love to share more as opportunities permit. (Please reach out to my Executive Assistant, Deacon Gayle Ruege
[email protected]), if you would like me to visit, either in person or virtually, your diakonia class, adult forum or Bible study, council meeting, confirmation class, etc.) Please pray for peace in the Holy Land, learn more (
https://www.elca.org/crisis-holy-land?_ga=2.66910574.1916626243.1725368915-253396098.1723395268), reach out to your elected officials asking them to work for peace in the Holy Land and an immediate ceasefire and talk with neighbors, friends, family members and coworkers about what you have learned.
This, too, dearly beloved, is “living like Christ in our (world) community.”
Yours in the Incarnate Christ,
Bishop Egensteiner