Reconfiguring Family
Covenant Presbyterian Church, Lubbock, Texas

Genesis 21:9-21
Matthew 10:24-39

Family of Origin
When Palestinian children call for their fathers, they say, “Baba.”  When we heard this, we initially assumed that this was because “Baba” was Arabic for “Daddy”.  We then noticed that when Palestinian fathers call for their children, they, too, say, “Baba.”  “Baba” isn’t the name of the father.  It isn’t the name of the child, either.  “Baba” is the name of the relationship between the two.  That is true of all family names: “Mama,” “Grandma,” “Auntie.”  The relationships themselves get named, an indication of their value.

The culture to which Christ came in our New Testament story was not all that different from that of our little Palestinian Christian village, particularly when it comes to families.  Families were, and are, all-encompassing – relationships, identity, geography all center in family in ways the modern world has forgotten or left behind.  In our adopted home of Zababdeh, extended families live together.  Your second name is your father’s name, and your third name is your grandfather’s name.  If you are the oldest son, your first son’s name will be that of your father’s.  As a term of respect, parents are called by their oldest son’s name – Ramzi’s father is known around town as “Abu Ramzi,” that is, father of Ramzi, while Ramzi’s mother is known as “Im Ramzi.”  And your spouse will often be from your extended family, through an arranged marriage.

If this sounds claustrophobic to you, imagine the current context of living that life out on the West Bank.  As a Palestinian, your Israeli ID has your village’s name on it.  Your movement even within the West Bank is tightly controlled, and sometimes limited to what is written on that ID.  Building a home or expanding one to accommodate a new generation isn’t an option in many places where homes are razed to the ground for lack of impossible-to-acquire permits.  Replace the Israeli army with the Roman army, and you have the context in which Jesus preached a new understanding of family.

Sometimes physical separation isn’t an option when seeking a sense of identity.  Sometimes the search for value in relationships must come while living with your parents and married to your second cousin.  Sometimes physical separation doesn’t solve the problem, anyway.  Even Ishmael, in his exile, remained a child of Abraham.  But whatever the context, seeking that value in our relationships is what we are each called to do.  Christ urges us to see ourselves first as children of God, as loved by that God, our “Baba,” the one who cares for us in our wilderness.  We must embrace this relationship that is to be valued above all others.  It is from this first relationship that all others grow, transcending blood and tribe and village, drawing a family tree that encompasses our brothers and sisters in Christ.

Despite politicians’ protestations to the contrary, we are in the clash of civilizations.  The Western (largely assumed to be Christian) society has been pitted against the Arab (largely assumed to be Muslim) culture.  The amount of misunderstanding and mistrust between these two monoliths grows daily.  And somewhere in the middle stands the Arab Christian, both fully Christian and fully Arab, an incarnation of both the tension and reconciliation of these two identities.  The world has much to learn from them as we seek a future of co-existence rather than one of destruction.

In Zababdeh, there is no interaction with Judaism – interactions with Jews are limited to those with soldiers.  Many villagers used to work in Israel, but are no longer allowed because of security concerns.  Many of the nascent reconciliation efforts between Palestinians and Jews which had grown in the past few decades have now been abandoned by both sides, and those that continue to function are far from the isolated backwater of the Northern West Bank.  Islam is another story. In the overwhelmingly Muslim Northern West Bank, Zababdeh is the largest Christian population, with two-thirds of its 3000 people belonging to one of the four church communities.  In that context, Christians and Muslims have found their unsteady, but fertile, common ground.  They know each other, they know what they have in common, and they know how to live together.

Firas is a student of ours who lives on this common ground.  His father is a Palestinian Muslim, his mother is a Russian Christian. At school, they study Islam in their religion classes – in Palestinian society, the child follows the faith of the father.  But at home, he and his brother learn and celebrate both faiths. He is well-versed in the Bible and the Qur’an.  He wears two necklaces: one the Muslim creed, one the cross.  There may come a day when he chooses one and rejects the other.  He is living the tension – or, perhaps, the reconciliation – of Abraham’s household.  He, and his family, have found a way to honor the promises of God without banishing one to the wilderness.

Christianity is not Islam.  Nor should it be.  Islam holds Jesus in high regard.  His birth to the Virgin Mary was miraculous.  His teaching was unparalleled.  He is the Messiah, the Christ, and he will return to judge the world.  Muslims will name their children Jesus and Mary.  But Islam rejects the incarnation, that God became flesh in Christ; it rejects the crucifixion, that Christ died on the cross; and it rejects resurrection, that Christ rose from the dead.  These three doctrines are central to Christianity.  Through them we receive grace, mercy, forgiveness, reconciliation.  We should not deny these fundamental truths.  But nor should we not deny the image of God in those who do.  We are all of us, regardless of our confessional loyalties, created with the divine spark, God’s imprint.  Together, as brothers and sisters, we can stand on that unsteady, yet fertile, ground.

The family which takes the strongest hold on people is that of nation.  In Israel and Palestine, national allegiances are hardening to the point that they take precedence over all else.  Recent polls have shown that a majority of Israelis support a policy of ethnic-cleansing of the Palestinians.  And a significant number of Palestinians support brutal suicide bombings against Israeli citizens.  Each side continues its policy of violence and militarism, the whole claiming that such action is the only thing “the other side understands.”  It sounds like the American tourist trying to speak to the French store clerk in English. “He understands me,” he says, as his volume – rather than his language – changes.  Such is the approach to communication in the Middle East.

We need to be clear about our allegiances.  Ours is a faith which follows Christ, seeking not to build earthly kingdoms, but the kingdom of heaven and the reign of God.  Ours is not a citizenship bound by geographic boundaries, but that which joins us as fellow citizens with the saints and apostles in the household of God.  Let us be careful, though.  It is not a question of setting one allegiance in opposition to the other.  Rather, we must set one above the other.  Nationalism is a dangerous phenomenon, and seeing it rampant among Israelis and Palestinians, even in their places of worship, is deeply troubling.  But the Middle East is not unique.  We see the same confusion on our own soil.  In Israel, in Palestine, in the United States, all over the world, the allegiances of faith and nation have become entangled, and at times are indistinguishable.

The Palestinian struggle for self-determination is one such example of entanglement and confusion.  It is, at its core, a desire to seek justice and freedom from oppression.  But its growing use of violence, particularly the use of suicide bombings, has undercut what should be a just cause.  In contrast to that are those voices who say that such a struggle should go on, but it should shun violence.  There have been and continue to be Muslim voices, Christian voices, and Jewish voices joining in a lovely Pentecostal chorus calling for justice as the key to liberate of the Palestinian and Israeli people from the specter of bloodshed.

While there are those voices who argue for a strategy of non-violence because of its effectiveness, others – Christian, Jewish, and Muslim – do so because of its faithfulness.  Violence is an offense to the kingdom of God.  For us, violence in the service of liberation is an offense to the redemption of the cross. Their allegiance to God overrides their allegiance to nation.  Mitri Raheb, a Palestinian Lutheran pastor, is one such voice.  He sent out a letter not long after being used by Israeli soldiers as a human shield in his Bethlehem neighborhood.  In it, he issued the challenge to make “neighbors of our enemies, not enemies of our neighbors.”  This is the challenge that lies before us, in the family of humanity, that we ought to see across national boundaries and geographic dividing lines to see that which binds us together as neighbors, as brothers and sisters.