December 17, 2004

A voice was heard in Ramah,
Wailing and loud lamentation,
Rachel weeping for her children;
She refused to be consoled,
Because they are no more.
Jeremiah 31:15

Grace and peace to you from the Holy Land! We are well into the season of Advent, the season of waiting and watching, listening for the wilderness voices crying to prepare the way and make straight the roads of the Lord.

To make straight the roads—a poignant cry in a land whose roads are blocked in hundreds of places by checkpoints, barriers, fences and the Wall! The only roads that are straight, the hundreds of miles of bypass roads, are primarily forbidden to Palestinians. For them, there is no straight road. (See www.btselem.org, “Forbidden Roads,” August 2004 report.)

In this season when our eyes turn towards Bethlehem, we can see what is tragically taking place across the whole of the West Bank. If Mary and Joseph were to arrive in Bethlehem today, not only would they need permits to pass the checkpoints, but they would have to take a detour to get into the town. The main historic street into Bethlehem is being completely cut off by a wall, ostensibly because of Rachel and her tomb, located on that road. This place has had religious meaning not only to Jewish women, but historically was a gathering point for Christian and Muslim women as well, as they prayed for the gift of a child. The tomb area was also the main burial ground for Muslims in the city, but is no longer available to them. Now, Rachel’s tomb has become a fortress, an Israeli military outpost at the entrance to the city. Only Israeli Jewish and foreign women and men are allowed access today. As part of the Wall project, the area is being cut off from Bethlehem, making way for a new Jewish settlement, displacing more Palestinian families and separating others from their olive groves or businesses.

See (http://www.poica.org/casestudies/Bethlehem%2026-01-04/index.htm)

If one manages to get close enough to the tomb, though, past the razor wire and around the 20-inch-thick concrete walls, one can almost hear Rachel, still weeping for her children. She weeps for Iman al-Hamas, a 13-year-old Palestinian girl riddled with machinegun bullets by an Israeli army officer on her way to school in Rafah, as she weeps for the 652 Palestinian children who have been killed in the past four years alone. She weeps for Yuval Abadeh, age 4, and Dorit Aniso, age 2, recent Jewish immigrants from Ethiopia, killed in Sderot by rockets fired by Palestinian militants in the Gaza strip, as she weeps for the 117 Israeli children who have been killed. See www.rememberthesechildren.org.

She weeps for the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi and Sudanese children, and the over two million children who have lost their lives in armed conflicts in the last decade alone. She weeps for children left without parents, without food and water, without housing and education, who are victims of the world’s obsession with violence, a world so bent on destruction and war that it spends billions on bullets, bombs, and brutality, responding to symptoms of conflict rather than proactively investing in solutions to the causes.

In the United States alone, we have poured over $150 billion into the war on Iraq. With that same amount we could have done any one of the following: immunized every child in the world for almost 50 years; provided health insurance for almost 90,000,000 children in the United States; put over 19,000,000 kids in Head Start or over 2,000,000 more public school teachers in place for a year; built 1,300,000 new homes for those struggling to make ends meet; given over 7,000,000 students four-year scholarships to public universities; or fully funded global anti-hunger programs for six years or global AIDS programs for 14 years. If we add the amounts spent by nations worldwide on arms and conflict, what we could have done for children around the world is almost unimaginable. See www.costofwar.com.

Living and working in this land called “holy,” we cry with Rachel for all of the children—Palestinian, Israeli, Christian, Muslim, and Jew. We weep for children everywhere who pay the price for the arrogance and greed of adults the world over. We long for the crooked places to be made straight, so that the most vulnerable among us might know life before death!

Yet Advent reminds us that, in the midst of weeping, there is another cry. It is the sound of hope and truth that somehow the darkness and weeping cannot and will not overcome. It is the sound of a newborn child crying, bearing new life, hope, and light into a broken world. This stable-born savior was born to change the world by transforming our love of power into the power of love; a love that blesses the poor, embraces the unworthy, forgives the guilty, and liberates the oppressed. This child will lead people to a holy mountain where the wolf will live with the lamb and the leopard will lie down with the kid. During this sacred season, we wait with faith and longing, even in the midst of tears and fears, for the fullness of God’s reign on earth. We reflect on our lives and our choices, and we watch every day for signs of the Child. We center our lives on the gift of Love that came to us in a child and we seek renewed conviction to give ourselves to the work of justice and peace.

This Advent, we go to Bethlehem, where Love is born, to see if there is any room in our busy, important lives for the Child. We go as the scared and surprised shepherds, to watch for angels and listen for Glorias! We go as Mary, pondering and treasuring in our hearts what this Child means for us all. And, yes, we go as Rachel, to wonder at how each of us can reach out to change our priorities for the well-being of children everywhere.

Please pray for us in this little town of Bethlehem—and all over this Holy Land—for the good news of steps toward a just peace, towards healing and reconciliation. Pray that we may all live so that Rachel’s weeping is transformed into joy as children the world over discover the opportunity for life.

May the peace of the Christ Child be born in you again this Christmas, and carry you with joy and blessing into the New Year.

Sincerely,

Rev. Alex and Mrs. Brenda Awad
Mission Personnel - United Methodist Church
General Board of Global Ministries

Douglas Dicks
Regional Liaison for Israel, Palestine and Jordan
Presbyterian Church (USA)

Nancy Dinsmore
Development Officer
Episcopal Diocese of Jerusalem

Rev. Paul Lillie, deacon
St. George’s Cathedral, Jerusalem

Sri Mayasandra
Mennonite Central Committee

Catherine Nichols
Global Ministries Personnel
Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) & United Church of Christ

Rev. Sandra Olewine
United Methodist Church Liaison - Jerusalem
General Board of Global Ministries

Rev. Julie Rowe
Communications for the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Jordan and Jerusalem

Tim and Chris Seidel
Mennonite Central Committee

Rev. Russell O. Siler, pastor
English-speaking congregation
Lutheran Church of the Redeemer, Jerusalem

The 2005 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 170