Across the Pastor’s Desk by Curtis Zieske

When I was a kid growing up in my hometown Lutheran church, I would occasionally hear of someone’s travel to the Holy Land. It was the holy grail of a Christian travel experience.

The tour would result in them showing their slide pictures of where they had traveled. It featured ancient ruins, stone buildings, panoramic views of Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives across the Kidron Valley and a group picture on steps leading up to the sun-bathed golden dome of the Dome of the Rock mosque in the background.

The truly sad part of their travel report is the omission of actually having met and talked with the people of the land to hear their stories. As one native of the Holy Land describes it, “They come to see the ancient stones and forget the living stones of this land.”

I have always believed that the travel experience itself is an education, if one takes the time to get to know the people of the land, their history and their culture. When I plan a visit to the Holy Land and take a group of folks with me, I don’t plan it as a tourism travelogue but as a pilgrimage and a spiritual awakening to today’s living stones of the land.

My very first experience of the Holy Land was way back in 1982 with wide-eyed culture shock. I must admit that I was not prepared for it. I was simply swallowed up by sensory overload with all the sights, sounds, smells and deep emotion at touching and experiencing these places that I had only read about in the Bible and seen in the pictures of others.

Since that first time I’ve become much more aware of what the Holy Land has to offer beyond the simple tourist experience. Real people live there. And they have stories — lots of stories. And most of those stories are not very pretty.

The Holy Land I visit today is the story of two peoples and three religious cultures all vying for the same space. The native people of the land are the Palestinians whose history goes back more than 4000 years. They have been identified as Canaanites, Palestinians or by various tribal names.

Then there are the newcomers, relatively speaking, on the scene — the Israelis. Their country was formed after World War II and the aftermath of the Holocaust under a banner that read, “A land without people for people without a land.”

The only problem was that there were people there — the Palestinians. The state of modern day Israel was created as a land in which Jewish people could relocate and settle and call home.

Not surprisingly, this has created confusion in the minds of some people who mistakenly identify modern day created Israel with the Israel of the Bible, simply because the two share the same name.

The three religious cultures mentioned above are Jewish (Israeli), Islam (Arab Muslims) and Arab Christian. Sadly and tragically, it is the Arab Christian people of the Holy Land that are the most overlooked, least noticed and most ignored. We hear a lot about terrorism in the Holy Land. We hear a lot about Israel’s right to exist and right to defend itself. What we do not hear about is the invisibility and shrinking numbers of Christians in the Holy Land.

The Christian population in all of the Holy Land (Israel and Palestine) is only 1.4 percent of the entire population. The vast majority of Christians in the Holy Land reside in the West Bank city of Bethlehem. Bethlehem used to be almost all Christian; today it is less than five percent.

In fact, going beyond the borders of Israel and Palestine, the whole Middle East is home to a Christian population. At roughly 18 million strong, Christians constitute five percent of the total Middle Eastern population, though no one is sure of the real number. Ten percent of Syrians and of Egyptians are Christian. Forty-one percent of Lebanese are Christian.

Americans are so used to thinking of the Middle East as Muslims surrounding an island of Jews that it rarely occurs to them that there might be some Christians in the birthplace of Christianity.

I grew up thinking that the martyrdom of Christians was consigned to a time past. Not so. ISIS terrorists paint the Arabic letter nun (N) for Nasrani (Nazarenes) on the front doors of Christian homes in Iraq, marking them out for extermination.

Grace Halsell, award-winning journalist and author, writes in the “Washington Report on Middle East Affairs” (May/June 1998) of the torture of dozens of young Palestinian men by Israeli police who had raided their homes in the middle of the night, dragged them from their beds and placed hoods over their heads. In jails they were kept in isolation; besieged with loud, incessant noise; hung upside down and sadistically mutilated.

Such stories are not reported in our United States media. Stories of the demolition of Palestinian homes, wanton mass arrests and torture of Palestinian civilians, land confiscation, Israeli military occupation of the land, confiscation of water rights, torture, travel restrictions and more are rarely, if ever, reported in American media, according to Halsell.

The dwindling Christian population of the Middle East and especially Bethlehem and the West Bank and throughout the Holy Land is deeply concerning. Indeed, will there be any Christians in the birthplace of Christianity in the future? Christians are leaving at a rapidly increasing rate because of the difficulty of living under a situation of persecution and neglect. Christians are leaving because they can, being better educated and, as a result, usually having the financial means to do so.

There are also those who are trying desperately to stay, in spite of the persecutions and neglect, because Palestine is their homeland, the place of their birth and ancestry, the place of their ministry and witness to their God and Savior.

These are the people — the living stones of the Holy Land — that I try to introduce to the people making a trip to the Holy Land. Of course, I know that people want to see the holy sites — the ancient stones. That, too, is a valuable experience. But a pilgrimage is much more than a tourist sightseeing venture. A pilgrimage, I am told, is intended to change a person spiritually.

I find the ancient stones to be interesting, even intriguing, but it is the living stones of the Holy Land that I find fascinating and getting to know them life-changing.

 

The Rev. Curtis Zieske is the pastor at Trinity Lutheran Church in Albert Lea.