The following post is a sermon/message I wrote and gave at East Union Presbyterian on August, 14 2022. The scriptures I discussed are John 1.43-49 and Luke 10.25-37. If you're interested in watching the live message, you can view that here: https://fb.watch/eXw3HIYxT8/. Otherwise, what follows is the transcript and corresponding photos from my trips.
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This week, as I mused over the three different experiences I am here to talk about today - traveling to Northern Ireland to understand the Troubles, exploring the Holy Land, and my future year in Albuquerque, NM - I wondered how on earth was I going to thread all of these stories together, and not just make them make sense but also connect them to scripture. So, all of that to say, we are going on a bit of a journey together this morning, and I invite you to join me.
I picked these two scriptures for today, because I think they get at the heart of all I have learned over my past four years at Queens. One of them is quite well known - the Parable of the Good Samaritan and the other perhaps less so - Nathanael’s questioning of Jesus’ origin. Out of the two, I’d have to say the latter is my favorite, not just because of what it means but because of how I learned it. See this was a scripture I had never heard of until it was quoted to me by a Muslim in Nazareth. Our guide throughout the Holy Land, a Palestinian man named Iyad, told our Christian group about this scripture that most of us did not know because he wanted to convey the significance of Jesus claiming Nazareth as his home. Nazareth was an agricultural community, nestled in the verdant hills surrounding the Sea of Galilee. If you were one of the approximately 400 people who lived there, you were probably either a farmer or a fisherman, and every town within a few days walk would be exactly the same or even smaller. In the grand scale of the Roman Empire, Nazareth was a poor, tiny, and insignificant village not even worth marking on a map.
So when Nathanael asks, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?,” the implied answer is ‘no.’ Surely, the Messiah would come from Jerusalem, from somewhere amongst those holy halls and ancient temples. Surely, the Messiah would not be a fisherman, a laborer, from a village most of the world would never have heard of. Surely, the Messiah would not have been a poor man from a family no one knew. And yet, today we have Jesus of Nazareth, and the question, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?,” seems preposterous. Of course something good can - the Savior did.
I think this story pairs well with the Parable of the Good Samaritan, because this time it is Jesus himself telling us to second guess what we may first think about others. He puts the question back to the lawyer who wanted a definition of a neighbor, “Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?” The lawyer of course responds with, “The one who showed him mercy.” A Samaritan man, who was neither a Jew nor a Gentile, and who would often have felt the hatred of this society for his foreignness. It was this outsider, not the priest, not the Levite, men who were supposedly of the same ethnic group and status as the robbed man, but the outsider who showed mercy. I think we can also put Nathanael’s question here: “Can anything good come out of Samaria?” Chances are, the lawyer would have previously answered “No.” And yet, Jesus teaches us that this stranger is actually a neighbor, and his act of mercy is good.
In the spring of 2020, I took a class on Peace and Reconciliation in Northern Ireland. In this class, we learned about the Troubles, an approximately 30 year civil war that took over Belfast and surrounding cities from the late 1960s to 1998. It was all over before I was born, but I’ve been told that in those years, Northern Ireland was not some place you talked about vacationing for fear of beatings, shootings, and bombs. Upon telling people I would be traveling there with my class at the end of February, I almost always received a comment about the impossibility of traveling there merely 20 years ago. It became clear to me that even in America, people still thought of Northern Ireland with some apprehension. Perhaps underneath this concern and memory of violence is a familiar question: Can anything good come out of Northern Ireland?
Perhaps y’all are starting to get where I’m going with this.
For some important background information, the Troubles is a conflict that is often attributed to differences in religion, namely Protestantism and Catholicism. However, when you really get into it, the reasons and motives behind the different parties are more complex than just theological differences. Catholics were also often people who considered themselves Irish and thought that Northern Ireland rightfully belonged to the Republic of Ireland to their south and not the United Kingdom. Protestants were also often people who considered themselves British and resisted the idea of Northern Irish independence. Over the centuries of conflict between these two stances, the people’s religious identities became synonymous with their political hopes for their country. Their neighborhoods, lined up right next to each other, had to be divided by thirty-foot high walls so that they could not throw bombs onto each other’s roofs. It would have been a common question in those days to ask: Can anything good come from Protestants? Can anything good come from Catholics?
The answer is yes. Two men - Reverend Roy Magee and Father Alec Reid - were influential in securing a ceasefire and promoting peace between the different paramilitary factions. They both realized that people in their communities were hurting each other and that peace could not be found individually, only in community.
When my group traveled to Belfast, we had the wonderful opportunity to attend Monday Mass at Clonard, the Catholic Monastery where Father Reid worked throughout the Troubles. The neighborhoods around its spires were now quiet and quaint. Among memorial gardens, murals, and “peace” walls - scars of the past violence - birdsong hung in the air and locals slowly trickled into worship. As I focused my camera on the great glass window at the front of the chapel, an elderly man spotted and walked up to me. The man who approached me that day did not give me his name nor any information about himself. He just saw me with my camera, aimed at the front of the church, and must have understood at once that I was one of the students with the group from America that had come to sit in Mass with them. He offered me a tour of the church before worship, and so I agreed and followed him down the center aisle as he clacked along with his cane. He talked a bit about the construction of the church, the fresco of Mary and Jesus, whose crowns were made from the family rings and necklaces of local women back when coal mining was the biggest industry and such things were even more precious. Then, he stopped in front of a large stone altar, rested his hands on the handle of this cane and nodded towards it.
“That is the entrance to the crypt,” he said, “where, during World War II over a hundred people from the surrounding communities hid together during the Belfast Blitz. Both Protestants and Catholics hid there. They survived together, in this church, a Catholic church. There was no killing each other then. They weren’t always fighting. I want you to remember that and share this story with your group. There was a time when they got along.”
Can anything good come out of Northern Ireland? My response to that would be that the people’s resilience, desire for peace, and commitment to healing is good. I hope to continue learning from it and sharing the stories of peacemakers with others for the rest of my life.
This past May, I was given the opportunity of a lifetime. I was invited to travel to the Holy Land with Covenant Presbyterian Church from Charlotte, NC. If you thought my condensed background on Northern Ireland was a lot, then I would need an hour to even begin to approach talking about the history of the Holy Land, so I won’t. But in all seriousness, both conflicts and histories are fascinating and complex, and I highly suggest taking the time to learn about it if you are so inclined. I would also love to talk with anyone further about my experiences.
The Holy Land, or what is today known as Israel/Palestine, is one of those places in the world that we hear about a lot on the news but perhaps raises a lot of questions for us. Again, I have found that when I told people I was going to Israel/Palestine, I got an interesting reaction. Most people worried about the Palestine bit. Like Northern Ireland, perhaps there is an underlying question here: Can anything good come out of Palestine?
Well, it's hard to take a trip to the Holy Land and not spend at least some time in Palestine. That’s where Bethlehem is, and I was very fortunate not to only spend two nights there but to meet five Palestinian Christians and get to explore Bethlehem with them. It was perhaps the part of the trip I was most nervous and excited for. How would we communicate? What similarities would we have? Well, as any 20-year old college students, we discussed majors and jobs, career goals and current struggles. Sometimes, we had to use Google Translate, and sometimes hand gestures were enough. Everyone was nervous; everyone was excited. Their energy and enthusiasm sparked as they showed us around their hometown, telling us the history of different buildings, the names of different churches. Their pride and love for their city, their people, was infectious. We walked on to find a kebab shop and sat down to dinner. Upon discovering that a couple of our new friends were singers, the other students from Queens and I asked them to sing for us - so waiting for our food, they jumped into various Arabic songs, switching from one to another to a third, clapping and laughing. People on the street stopped to watch and smiled at their energy, and then someone started Bad Romance by Lady Gaga, and we were all swept up into it. I was struck by the magic of the moment. I was in Bethlehem, in Palestine, laughing with amazing people I had just met. Yes, we came from different countries, lives, cultures, and experiences, but somehow, we had found space for joy together. That is good.
And if I haven’t sold you by now, I would also lift up another story. During one of our days, we went to the Mount of Olives and walked the path that Jesus is said to have entered Jerusalem on right before his death. We stopped at the Church of All Nations and the Garden of Gethsemane. There, our guide, Iyad - the Palestinian and Muslim man who taught me the scripture from John - was able to talk with the locals who maintained the garden that they have preserved and open it up for us. There, in a grove surrounded by olive trees much like the grove Jesus would have been in when he told the disciples of his upcoming death, we observed communion with the bread and juice obtained by a Muslim man. And as we prayed, the 4:00 call to prayer echoed from mosques all around us, voices in Arabic lifting to the heavens our own prayers for our shared God.
There are times where I find myself thinking that nothing good can come from a specific place, or group, or person. However, if I have learned anything from my time and experiences from the past couple years, if I have learned anything from scripture, it is that there is always something good. We just have to decide to look for it and have faith in it.
This is what I keep in mind as I go into this new time and year with the Young Adult Volunteer (YAV) program. I have never been to New Mexico, nor Albuquerque. I do not know how to speak Spanish, but I am trying to learn. I have never worked with refugees before, and I am worried I will not know what to do or say to ease someone's pain. And sometimes, I ask myself if anything good can possibly come from it.
We have our answer in Jesus, and he said to the lawyer who answered about the neighbor, “Go, and do likewise.” So, I’ll look for the good and have faith it exists.
Amen.
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Thank you for reading! If you're interested in following along with my YAV journey, make sure to subscribe to the mailing list located at the bottom of the home page for notifications on new posts. If you're interested in donating to financially support my year, you can click the following link and select my name from the drop-down menu: https://www.abqyav.com/donate.html. I am currently a little over a quarter of the way to my goal of $4,000! Any little bit helps.
Wishing you time to breathe and sit outside,
Allison
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