… come anyway. Please …

We listened to Steve Bell a week ago Friday.  He’s been doing concerts all over the world for 30 years. Raised in Drumheller, Alberta, his father a pastor, his mother, a musician, and Steve coming out of their home with a strong sense of justice, kindness (he has an album by that name), a gift for story telling and a talent for making music. Most of the people in the audience had heard him before and they were back for more Steve Bell. 

What, it seemed to me, mesmerized the packed audience was not so much his guitar nor his voice, but the words he speaks in between … his theology maybe.  Withness,  (not witness) he said, is the entire Gospel message. We know God by loving. Love comes before knowing … . And my favorite maybe, a line out of a Bruce Cockburn song  (Lovers in a Dangerous Time)… got to kick the darkness till it bleeds daylight.  

At the very end of the concert he offered a prayer, something he apparently doesn’t often do at his concerts. But that evening, he did. Not a long prayer, but he lamented the pain in the world as we feel it these days. Really, it seemed a prayer spoken in anguish, a lament at the end of a lovely concert. Israel. Gaza. Ukraine. American politics. Social divisions. Wobbly economies. High levels of anxiety especially in young teens and young adults. Except, it’s Christmas. We are waiting the Christ child. It’s a season of joy, but Steve Bell prayed … maybe don’t come. It’s really a mess you’re coming into. And then he added, as he trailed off almost to a whisper … this … but come anyway. Please. 

I didn’t think this was Steve Bell performing.  This was a musician struggling with human pain and the ‘withness’ of God among us. It’s our human struggle and the black and white answers that are so attractive for a moment, never really do turn out so cleanly. The theories all have a place eventually where they meet the child with a name in a refugee camp, the soldier in a tunnel or in a trench, the frightened senior in an overloaded emergency ward with a 12-hour wait time, the young mother exhausted by the endlessness of being a parent, the terrified family with so much medical debt they can’t see their way out of it …

It’s a mess, but come, anyway. Soon. Please.

In 2016, Mark Labberton was President of Fuller Seminary. One of many guests, he spoke to about 200 or 300 of us attending Christ at the Checkpoints in Bethlehem.  It’s 4 or 5 day event, hosted every 2 years by Bethlehem Bible College, which means that mostly the audience is Christian Palestinian, with visitors like we were, from various other countries, and some Jewish people, and Muslims also.  Christ at the Checkpoints is the name because it’s the checkpoints where Palestinians are routinely humiliated, obstructed, ‘checked’ by Israeli soldiers. Checkpoints are a metaphor for so much of what happens in Palestine to Palestinians: 

Night raids where soldiers walk into a home, make a lot of noise, trash it, and arrest a young man or two who may be kept for up to 6 months without being charged. Administrative detentions, that can easily be extended. Another 6 months or more.  Home demolitions happen regularly, usually with little to no warning. Access to water: to dig a well a Palestinian must get a permit from the Israeli military. But there hasn’t been a permit issued since Israel took over Palestine 70 years ago.  So, most Palestinian homes have a black tank on top of their house. Israel controls access to all water so when it flows, they try to fill up their tanks. Everything is about survival, but surely … what happens to people when they live for two generations under such continuous stress?  

The Church of the Nativity, where Jesus was born is right there. Anyone, including tourists, can go there unless Israel decides, for whatever reason, to shut it down, as they do at times, seemingly just to show yet again, who is boss in Palestine. So the Christ at the Checkpoints seminar is about that Christ, born so nearby, somehow showing up at the checkpoints or the demolitions or when water has run out. But how indeed does Christ show up there?  

Remember, the West Bank is surrounded by a 700 km long, 12-meter high cement wall that zigs and zags always inside what was once allotted as Palestinian land.  Every few hundred meters there is a tower with far-seeing eyes that never sleep. No one ever gets out of this area, unless Israel allows it. A pregnant woman in labor? A dying child?  An impatient father desperately needing to get to work in Jerusalem? They just never know if they will make it anywhere. And inside the separation barrier, as it’s called officially, another 600 checkpoints, anywhere in the network of roads built to keep Palestinians and Jewish Settlers always separated, and Palestinians always reminded of who is in charge. So, especially, come anyway. Please. 

But how does Mark Labberton speak Christ the redeemer to that audience, all so very familiar with the daily despair that they live? A tragedy that hasn’t gotten better in 70 years?  We here, in our relative freedom and security are sometimes tempted to think of our lives as Christ having helped us to our significant privilege. But, Palestine? What happened there?

Labberton spoke out of Mark chapters 1-4. I took a lot of notes: the Gospel is about the restoration of our humanity. Jesus expects us to live our faith, not just profess it. Don’t be inspired by the message; go and love your enemies, he said.  We are meant to be cautious about our instincts.  We are called to vigorous living, which means, he said, that at the checkpoints there must not be any retaliation to the enemy. Pray for them, he said. And further, and here it begins to rub, our Christ calls us to ‘love those who annoy us, to love those not like us, to love those who don’t like us and indeed, to love our enemies. We are meant, he said, to give them our lives and this is not just academic talk when he says these things to people in the West Bank and Gaza.  

I admit I was a bit surprized by what Labberton said there, in that sad place. I thought he might find a way to help the listeners deal with their own desperation. Some ‘how to’ ideas, maybe, about how to sleep better at night or how to get past their anger.  But he didn’t. Not really. Jesus never did either, and I probably should not have been puzzled. Labberton was not outlining any theological peace-building-workshop ideas. Not really. He was speaking to people who every day, multiple times, must choose whether to give in to their own despair and anger, or to try, yet again, to follow a way that was shown them, and us all, when a refugee baby was quietly born in a barn … just up the hill a bit.  

Today, 2023, that baby would perhaps be born in the ruins of a bombed out home in Gaza or Ukraine, or in the makeshift tent of a homeless person in Calgary.  And Labberton, maybe a bit like Steve Bell, was simply saying to all of us … it’s a mess, but come anyway.  Please.