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Hi everyone. Welcome to another episode of Real Faith in the Real World, a ministry of Normal First United Methodist Church in Normal, Illinois. Let's listen to hear what Pastor Kent King Nobles has to say today.

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In you, all the families of the earth will be blessed. What does that mean? Do you feel that? Through you, God will use you to bless the families of the earth. You are blessed in order to be a blessing. Like some of you, I've been blessed to be in those lands, the town of Bethlehem. I believe I've been there four separate times in Bethlehem. In just a little bit, we're going to sing that famous Christmas carol, O Little Town of Bethlehem. And it's, you know, the famous song that Episcopal priest Phillips Brooks wrote. In 1865, he was able to get on horseback and ride from Jerusalem to Bethlehem, which is a short distance. He arrived there on Christmas Eve, and he experienced Bethlehem that Christmas. Then he came back to the United States and wrote about it. And then, you know, as pastors often do, he handed it to his music guy and said, Here, write a song on this. And so that's how we have that song, A Little Town of Bethlehem. The Bethlehem I've visited, though, is not that sleepy little town of Bethlehem from the song. It's a bustling modern city. Bethlehem, the center of our Christmas celebrations. As Chris mentioned, in Bethlehem, you can go to the church of the nativity, the traditional site of the birth. When you go there, to go in, you have to bow down the humility door. You have to bow down and enter in humility, the door of the church. And you can go to the sacred spot where the star marks the traditional place where they say this is the cave or the birthplace of Jesus. Sometime, if you ask me, I'll tell you the story about when Pastor Kathy and I took a one-year-old to that spot and kind of how that worked out. But that's a separate story. You can also go over to the shepherd's field, a short distance from there, and see caves where shepherds kept their flocks at night. There's a beautiful chapel right there reminding everyone of the announcement of the good news to the common people, to the shepherds. And you can visit the present-day craftsmen who support their families and much of the community by making religious crafts out of olive wood. And some of the people there working trace their roots all the way back to the time of Jesus Christ. They've been in Bethlehem that long. Some of them can say the Lord's Prayer in Aramaic. We heard that once when we were there, and you just think, wow, this is how the disciples heard Jesus speaking these words, the Aramaic, the primary language spoken by Jesus. Now I want you to stop for a second and picture a Palestinian in your mind. What does a Palestinian look like? Now, if you're like me, you grew up with this very prejudiced notion of what Palestinians and probably all Arabs were like. You know, crazy, the terrorist from the movie, violent, passionate. The people in Bethlehem are Palestinians. So what does a Palestinian look like? Well, here's one picture of some Palestinian Christians we met in Bethlehem, and that's Farras in the middle and his parents, and we had dinner with them when we were there. Here are some other Palestinian Christians from Bethlehem. And I know what you're thinking, two of those people do look kind of suspicious. But the two on the left were very peaceful, and uh and that's Kathy and Steve Gossard on the right, by the way. Here are two more Palestinians, friends of mine from college who have moved and now live in Jordan. Here's a Palestinian family on vacation. So what's happening to the Palestinians and the and especially the Christians in Bethlehem? As Chris mentioned, you know, um the numbers used to be a generation ago that 85 to 86 percent of the people living in Bethlehem were Christians. We're carrying on that Christian tradition. The best numbers we have today is like 11% there in Bethlehem are Christians and others, you know, so many you meet, their children have moved on, their their relatives have moved on just because life is so difficult there and it's so hard to see a future. Why? Why are Christians leaving those holy lands? Well, church leaders and journalists have reported a number of reasons. Number one, the economic collapse that started with COVID. So you remember when COVID hit, everybody stopped traveling, and so all of a sudden, this you know, all of these people who had built their lives around the economy of pilgrims had no income coming in. A second factor is the building of the wall separating Bethlehem from Jerusalem. I assume you've seen pictures of this wall. Um it it cuts right through and separates Bethlehem from Jerusalem. In the Bethlehem area, though the the bear is primarily a 26-foot high concrete wall, making it almost impossible for the people to go where they used to, to get to Jerusalem for jobs or health care or to worship at some of the holy places, to visit family, even outside. The wall might also make it less likely that pilgrims and truerists will come and enter Bethlehem and spend the night in hotels. And the wall separates some farmers from their land. You know, that when the wall was put up, there was no consideration that a farmer had land right next to his house, and the wall was just put right through. So now some of the farmers can't get to the land that their families have farmed for generations. A third factor, of course, is the war and the attack by Hamas on October 2023. We all watched in horror those terrible images of slaughter. And then we watched in horror as the Israeli Defense Forces began bombing building after building, and we saw innocent people being killed. And violence spread into the West Bank, and then we saw settler violence. And now very few pilgrims go into Bethlehem. You know, we we'll have to think about whether our church is going to go back next year. Um, it is a wonderful experience to be there, and the Bible does come alive, but but when you watch the news, are are we willing to go at this time? Um so many people are not willing and not going. Many local Christians say that younger generations can increasingly see no future for themselves in Bethlehem, so they're leaving, moving on, and and who can blame them? When Jesus was born, Bethlehem was a small Jewish village. For centuries, it has become one of the most important centers of Christian life in the world. And think about all the generations that now have left Bethlehem. Today only 10% of the population left there is Christian. So, how are we supposed to think about what's happening in in uh Palestine, in Israel? Um, how do you understand this from a Christian point of view? That's really kind of what I want to get at this morning. Um, I think there are a couple of different ways to to look at this issue. Um, and I think one of them can can be called Christian Zionism. Christian Zionism, pretty, pretty popular way of thinking about what's going on there. In Christian Zionism, the idea is that God has given this section of land to the Jewish people, and the Jewish people have a right to it. It belongs to them, and and others should should either accommodate that or or move out of the way. Some Christians believe that it's important for Jews to control all the land so that biblical prophecy will be fulfilled and Jesus Christ will come again. And you hear that in a lot of evangelical churches. They think about Israelis coming up from slavery in Egypt and being empowered by God to defeat and kill the current inhabitants and take the land as the promised land. So God promised this land to the Jewish people. Now, I'm sure there are United Methodists who would take this view, but this is not a uh, this is not really in line with United Methodist teaching, with our doctrine. Christian Zionism is not. So, what's another point of view? Other Christians believe that the land promised in Scripture must be interpreted like everything else through the lens of Jesus, through the teaching and example of Jesus. They note that Abraham was blessed so that all nations could be blessed, and that the New Testament shifts the focus from controlling land and territory to being part of God's universal kingdom. For these Christians, no people have a God-given right to dominate or expel others. The land, the promise, and the blessings are to be shared. When we think of Bethlehem, we might think of Christmas pageants and nativity scenes, but we often forget that real-life people live there. Christians are living there, they worship there, they raise families there, they pray there. And many wonder whether they'll be able to stay and their children will be able to stay. You know, when I think of Palestinians and Jews, I sometimes think of Samaritans and Jews. In the first century, you know, the Samaritans were the enemies. The Jews and the Samaritans were the ones who were enemies with each other. And yet Jesus did what? He stopped and spoke with a Samaritan woman at the well. He made a Samaritan the hero of one of his most famous parables, the good Samaritan. He healed Samaritans. He refused to condemn a Samaritan village when his disciples asked him to condemn the village because they didn't do what they wanted them to. Jesus did not advocate removing Samaritans from the land. Instead, he expanded the circle of who neighbor is. Jesus taught people to live together and to share God's blessings. Jesus continually crossed boundaries. Jew and Samaritan, Jew and Gentile, male, female, clean, unclean, rich and poor, the movement of Jesus is always toward inclusion and blessing rather than exclusion and curse. How are we to see the conflict? Now, if you just want my personal opinion, which I'd be happy to give to you in more length at some time, I believe that many of the current policies of the state of Israel, the governor of Israel, are not in keeping with God's will. And I believe that the actions of some Palestinians are also wrong and just making things worse. I feel strongly that the conflict should not be taking out on our brothers and sisters over here, also. You know, if if we made the short drive over to uh to the temple to talk to our Jewish brothers and sisters there and to talk to the rabbi, they would tell us that hate crimes are higher than ever against Jewish people in our nation. That the F, since the FBI has been tracking that, that there are more hate crimes now than there ever been. They would tell you that they don't feel safe worshiping, that they have to have locked doors and guards, that they don't feel safe going around town with their religious articles on, identifying themselves as Jewish. That is wrong. If we made a drive just a little bit farther and went to the mosque on the other side of town, the people coming out of worship there would tell us the same thing. That they feel like they're ostracized and that they feel like their hate crimes against Muslims. It continues to rise. That is not right. Followers of Jesus are surely called to a different path. We refuse to dehumanize Jews or Muslims, Palestinians, Christians. We refuse to treat entire people as our enemies. We remember that every person is created in the image of God. I remember a Palestinian Christian in Jerusalem talking to our group one time, and we were asking, you know, about the political situation and asking about a lot of things. And at one point he kind of stopped us and said, Now please don't come over here and take sides. So we have plenty of that already. We don't need anybody else taking sides. What we need is peacemakers. How can you help us work toward peace? I remember being in a home in a Jewish family some years back, and they were talking about their lives and how they go through their lives. Their children were there, the mother and father, and they said, you know, part of our Jewish life is seven times a day we pray for peace. Seven times each day. Pray for peace. I believe that the question for us as Christians is not who gets to claim the land, it's God's land. The question is how followers of Jesus are called to treat the people who are called to share the land. How can we help people share the land and the resources? How can we help people overcome all the bad history of violence and abuse? If God blessed Abraham so that all nations might be blessed, then any interpretation of God's promise that denies the dignity of another people has missed the purpose of God's promise. God did not bless Abraham and Sarah merely to make them great. I'll make you great. You'll be famous, you'll be a big star. No, God blessed Abraham and Sarah so that through them and through their descendants the whole world could be blessed. In Jesus, the promise to Abraham reaches its fulfillment. The blessing is no longer confined to one nation, one tribe, one people, one piece of territory. The blessing is for all people. So as Christians, we may disagree about politics. We may disagree about borders, we may disagree about governments. But surely we cannot disagree about this. Every Israeli child and every Palestinian child is created in the image of God and loved by God. Every human being deserves dignity. Every follower of Jesus Christ is called to be a peacemaker in our world. May we work to make sure that every child is blessed. May others be blessed through you. Amen.

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