Livestreamed service

1 Corinthians 12:12-31a

        Good morning.

        It’s a blessing to be with you all this morning. In times such as these, where we see the powers at be looking to sow division, being here in community feels almost as if it’s an act of resistance.

        I work for an organization called Churches for Middle East Peace. As I’m sure you can imagine, the past fifteen months have been some of the most difficult of my life. And the challenges we’ve faced don’t even begin to encapsulate the kind of pain that those in the region have endured. The devastation of the war is far reaching. On my most recent trip to the Holy Land just a few months ago, I was struck by how empty it was. Our group– who traveled both as pilgrims and as witnesses– stood alone atop the Mount of Olives, and read passages from the Gospels at the birthplace of Jesus. Each of these places that are so holy, and meant to be full of worshippers, felt almost abandoned. The stories we heard from people were not dissimilar. Both Israelis and Palestinians we met were united by the blanket of grief and loss that seems to have overtaken the Holy Land. Perhaps the most striking place we visited was the church at Dominus Flevit– the place where, in the Gospel of Luke, Jesus weeps over Jerusalem, and says “If you, even you, had only known on this day what would bring you peace—but now it is hidden from your eyes.” (Luke 19:41-42) Standing at this site, I knew in my heart that Jesus continues to weep over Jerusalem today. And I also knew that someday there will be peace.

        Because of this, the pain is not all encompassing– something I am reminded of over and over again when talking with my friends on the ground in the Land who continue to make music, and laugh, and break bread even in the wake of such difficult times. With the pain, there are also stories of resilience (or, to use the Arabic word, sumud), togetherness, and even joy.

        This week, at Churches for Middle East Peace we hosted a worship series for the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. Led by ethicist Andrew DeCort, for the past eight days our community has prayed through the beatitudes and heard reflections from incredible Christian leaders from Palestine, Jordan, South Africa, and Syria. In the midst of a week of high emotions– from a fragile ceasefire in Gaza and Israel, to the juxtaposition of the Inauguration and Martin Luther King Day, to the fires in Southern California and freezes in the American South– it has been a gift to walk through it all in prayerful community centered around both Jesus’ Beatitudinal Way from his sermon on the mount (Matthew 5:3-10), and on the spirit of Christian Unity heard in our scripture from 1 Corinthians this morning.

        One of the themes that came out of each of these sessions was the idea that we can see the face of God in the faces of our community. Here, “the community” or “the body” (to go back to our text) is both a metaphor– representing the people in all corners of the globe, each sacred, and very literal, calling us to be in genuine connection with our neighbors. How often, over the past few years, have each of us looked past someone. How often have we excluded those we disagree with? For me, with the kinds of polarization at work it has become so easy to surround myself with those who are like me. Who have my views, look like me, come from a similar place and perspective. But praying for unity cannot mean only unity for those who are like us. It’s deeper than that– instead, unity becomes a celebration of difference. This passage implores us to both see and uplift the inherent worth of every life. To both believe in and work for the principle that all people deserve to live with basic human rights and dignity.

        So, then, how might we go about answering this call? I believe this scriptures leaves us with two lessons for how to live with and love one another.

        The first is that unity is not the same as homogeneity or sameness, and, in fact, our greatest strength comes from our diversity. What a radical idea to see those who look differently than us, live differently than us, and worship differently than us as part of the same body. This is a divine call for us to love not only those in whom we can see

        ourselves, but also those a world away. Even those who we see as Other or different. And even those who we, because of our imperfect eyes, have come to see as our enemies. This scripture is a reminder especially to love those people. The ones who are harder for us to love.

        In one of our sessions for the week of prayer, the general secretary of the South African Council of Churches, Rev. Molo, reflected that “In South Africa, we know… the power to overcome evil is when we hold hands across valleys, across seas, and witness together that in the world there is a God and that God is a God of Justice… then the world can become different.” And yet, all the time I spend in the Holy Land, there is one refrain that repeats over and over again when I talk to our Palestinian Christian siblings– they want to know “where is the church?” They want to know whether Americans hear their cries. They feel abandoned. And the truth is, for many churches, and for many Christians –– the fear of saying something wrong has stopped us from saying anything at all. But even so, we mustn’t fall into despair. As advocates remind us often, despair is a luxury of the privileged. And this moment is still so urgent. This passage from 1 Corinthians is also a call to action.

        This is our second lesson from this text. When Paul writes these letters in 1 Corinthians, he is giving divine instruction for how the Church, and us, as its members, ought to live. Chapter 12, with this beautiful passage about unity and diversity in the body of Christ, comes in the midst of instruction about spiritual gifts, which, according to verse 7 in the chapter, “are each given the manifestation of the spirit for the common good”. For the common good. In this context, we understand the metaphor of the body as one that calls us to recognize the place, purpose, and value of all people, and also that we each are called to do the work. For the common good. It reminds us that each one of us, no matter what our unique gifts might be, are not only important, but indispensable (22) to this body–– or to this blessed community. A community that is expansive, and inclusive, and beautiful because of the ways that each part is different.

        In our world today, there is so much pressure to force ourselves into false binaries and reductive categories that quell the expansiveness of what it means to be human. In my work on the Middle East, I see more division than ever along these lines. But, drawing inspiration from Romans 12:14-15, which reads “Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse. Rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn” our call as Christians is to lament every one of the 47,000+ lives taken in Gaza over the past 15 months, just as it is our call to weep for the 1,200+ Israelis killed on October 7th and the families of those taken hostage. It is our call to work against the legitimate threat of Antisemitism in our communities. It is our call to bear witness to the violence of occupation suffered by Palestinians in the West Bank, including the life of two-year-old Layla al-Khatib, who was killed yesterday by Israeli military fire near Jenin Refugee Camp. As followers of Jesus is our call to be on the side of the oppressed, the marginalized, and the endangered. This passage reminds us both of what we have in common– as blessed children of a merciful God– and that the places where we differ can be invitations for growth, new understanding of one another, and more expansive visions of the kin-dom of God. If Jesus walked the earth today, I believe he would be in the midst of the most broken places. This passage reminds us of this. “If one part suffers, all suffer together with it; if one part is honored, all rejoice together with it.” With so much pain in the world, this can be difficult to imagine. But grief, when held in community, becomes lighter. And joy, when held in community, turns into hope.

        I don’t know about all of you, but this week, I could use a bit of hope. And so I’ll leave you this morning with a few words that give me the kind of hope that encourages steadfastness in this difficult work of peace and justice. These words come from Lamma Mansour, a Palestinian scholar, and researcher at Oxford University, who spoke about hope during her 2024 talk at the Christ at the Checkpoint conference in Bethlehem. “Hope,” she says, “is not naivete, nor is it mere optimism.” Most importantly, hope is not passive. Instead, she says, “hope is a living force compelling us to act in our neighborhoods, our streets, and our world,” bringing hope from a place of stagnation to one of creativity and imagination. In Mansour’s remarks, imagination becomes a driving force for change which is grounded in spirit-inspired action to bring about the Kingdom

        of God. In embodying this active hope, says Mansour, “we are stepping onto Holy ground, encountering God in the least of these… [in these acts] we bear witness to God’s love, to God’s mercy, and to God’s justice.”

        So, my dear friends, let us go forward inspired by this call. This is my prayer: Creator God, help us to see your sacred images in the faces of our expansive human community. Open our hearts to be guided by the spirit to work towards the common good. Give us the courage to love better, and especially to remember the humanity of those who we may see as our others or enemies. Lead us to know our gifts, and how best to use them in service of a just world at peace. And above all, let our hearts remain softened to both the suffering and the hope of this broken world. Amen.