[This is a sermon I preached at Salem Friends Meeting, Liberty, IN, in April, 2008.]

In 1992 the world reverberated with the simple words of Rodney King, "People, I just want to say, you know, can we all get along?" We continue to scratch our heads and wonder, "Why can't we all get along?" I think the simple answer is not everyone wants to get along. There are people who become committed to a very rigid view of how people are to live, believe that it's the only right way, and then insist on everyone conforming to their way. These are people we call extremists or fundamentalists.

They come in many varieties. The extreme can be on either end of the spectrum, whether that continuum is about politics, economics, or religion. We talk about them as being on the right or on the left. No matter which side of the aisle they are on, they do not have an aisle seat. They sit way over on one side or the other. Their extremism is the only thing they have in common. Everyone else on the spectrum are their opponents: The further away others are on the spectrum the greater the animosity, anger, and even hatred toward them.

In our current political climate, we most often hear the word extremist in conjunction with Muslims. The term "terrorist" has almost become synonymous with Muslim extremist. There do exist Islamic factions around the world that see Islam as the final and ultimate revelation of God to humanity. They believe God didn't get it quite right the first time with Judaism; God made some progress with Christianity; but God finally got it right when he divulged his secrets to Muhammad. The ensuing compilations of Islamic law, therefore, contain the ultimate pattern for community and national life. For many of these extremists, their way is the only way and all others must conform. We see this throughout the Arab world from the east in Indonesia to the western Maghreb of North Africa. We talk about Al Qaeda, Taliban, Hezbollah, and Hamas. Besides the more militant factions, there are Islamic fundamentalists who are working to bring Arab cultures back to what they see as the original intentions of the Islamic "founding fathers," to borrow a phrase.

They certainly are not the only kind of religious extremists terrorizing the world today. Remember back to 1994 when Yitzhak Rabin (then Prime Minister of Israel), Shimon Peres, and Yassar Arafat were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for their work to bring peace to the Middle East through the Oslo Accords. On November 4, 1995, a right-wing Orthodox Jew, Yigal Amir, fatally shot Rabin because he disagreed with Rabin's moderate policies. Currently, the prime minister of Israel is Ehud Olmert, who represents Kadima, a more centrist party founded by Ariel Sharon. But there are other groups, like the Likud party, that take a more extreme view about maintaining Israel as a Jewish state. Zionists want to see the modern state of Israel continue to gain more land and more power. For them the military is a means to achieve their ends. What stands between them and their Zionist vision are the Arab people that surround them from the north, the east, and the south; the Lebanese, the Syrians, and the Palestinians.

There's a third group we could talk about, and that's Christian fundamentalists. For the Islamic extremists, the Qur'an must be read, analyzed, and even memorized. Reciting its words is a holy act. For orthodox Jews, the Hebrew Bible, the Tanak—a term representing the three parts of the Hebrew Bible (Torah, Neviim, Kethuvim; the law, the prophets, and the writings)—is the word of God. It is to be reverenced; it is to be studied, memorized, and recited. The scrolls themselves are sacred and treated as such. Christian fundamentalists reverence the Bible in the same way. They cherish the leather-bound, gold-gilded pages of the book and consider it sacred. Its words are to be read as coming directly from the mouth of God. The whole thing is equally inspired and every aspect of it is to be believed as if one's eternal destiny depended on it. Whatever it is deemed to say about any aspect of life must be held to be literally true no matter how inconceivable it might seem. Christian fundamentalists in the US see their country as a Christian nation and strive to get everyone else to recognize the original intentions of the "founding fathers" to build a Christian nation "under God." They want their view of science and sexual morality to be taught in the schools. They want civic society to uphold their standards of decency. They want US foreign policy to be guided by their Zionist views, which they think will fulfill the prophecies of the Bible. The scariest part of Christian fundamentalism is, although they do not tend to be militant themselves, they consider the US military to be their tool to bring the Christian empire to the world.

In all of these areas of the world, moderate voices are working at the task of getting along. At times that can seem like anti-religious groups are working to shape society. Those are times that the balance begins to shift to the opposite extreme. In the middle are the moderates, both religious and secular, who are trying to find ways for well-meaning people to build societies based on peace and justice for all people.

It is not easy to be a moderate centrist. It can seem like people are middle-of-the-road because they can't make up their minds which side they are on. It's like they don't believe in anything or have any commitments and just accept some loose set of principles. But that's not the case. It takes more work and intelligence to understand both sides of the issue and to refrain from becoming swept up by the extremes on either side. This extends to the basic decisions each of us makes about everyday moral choices.

It's rather easy to let someone else do your thinking for you. All you have to do is listen to what they say and then do it. Everything is black & white, right or wrong. Ethical choices for Christian fundamentalists could be as simple as asking, "What would Jesus do?" In fact, you don't really need to worry about any of that, as long as you've had a conversion experience. You don't need to be terribly concerned about the world because it and the devil are all going to burn soon anyway.

The trouble with being a moderate, however, is knowing where the boundaries are. If it's not a sin to drink alcohol, then what's to keep me from getting drunk regularly? If sex is permissible beyond procreation, then why shouldn't I live my life getting my jollies anyway I want? If I have freedom to interpret my faith and make personal choices, who's to tell me my beliefs and way of life are wrong?

We begin to figure that out for ourselves by coming to understand how human culture works. We then ask ourselves what are our values that transcend culture, those values humans have the most in common around the world. The more local the custom is--the more bound something is to our particular culture—the greater the tendency for it to be of less moral consequence. It may still be important to us and our community. But it is unlikely that it is something we should use to judge the character or value of others, try to impose on all people, or follow in some slavish way. Clothing styles, personal appearance, forms of music and art, manner of speech, etiquette, eating practices – these are all areas of life for which people in different cultures develop local customs. They may seem very important to people. In fact, extremists tend to make these things a priority and a test of allegiance to a particular religious worldview.

Our choices for how we think and act, first of all, should be based on how they affect the quality of our lives. Are we doing things that enhance our lives or are they potentially destructive? Do they give us immediate gratification but have long term detrimental consequences for what we want to achieve in life? Will the person we are ten to twenty years from now be grateful to the person we are now for the choices we make?

Secondly, our choices affect the people around us. We should be sensitive to whether our actions have a negative impact on others. We have a responsibility as members of the human race to live our lives in ways that at least do not hurt the people with whom we come into contact but also have a positive contribution to their quality of life and sense of well-being. At times that may mean voluntarily and temporarily giving up what might otherwise be something good for ourselves in order to do a greater good for someone else. In most cases, those expressions of love for others do not diminish ourselves but enhance and help develop the person we are becoming.

Thirdly, the way we choose to live life should have the least negative effect possible on the larger world of which we are a part and seek to have the greatest positive contribution possible to the welfare of people everywhere and also for life in general on our planet. All of this has to be in balance in our lives.

You could say that the best thing I could do to prevent harm to others and the planet is not to exist. But your human life has intrinsic value and has the potential to benefit the quality of life of others. We all should expect individual members of the human community to respect their own value to the whole, to do what's needed to pursue one's own aspirations, and to have the right to make use of a reasonable share of the world's resources.

The flourishing human life is characterized by freedom, on the one hand, and personal commitments on the other. We serve others but do so voluntarily. We suffer for others, but we do so in ways that benefit rather than diminish us. In all these choices, we hold up to ourselves for imitation the best of human ideals. For many cultures this is an expression of the divine life, a godlike existence, a participation in the holy presence of God.

The human family can get along in the world but not by falling into the trap of cultural ideologies and religious fanaticism, fundamentalism, and extremism. The way to make the world better is not by trying to convince everyone in the world to adopt the faith and practice of your group, movement, or religion. It doesn't work to say, "The world would be at peace if everyone would just be like me." We have to realize what we have in common as humans is the destructive tendency to think local histories, customs, and traditions are values that everyone must share. Or that what we think is the standard for all others. By that way of thinking, therefore, it becomes legitimate to use coercion, force, and even violence in order to superimpose those values on others. Wherever these extremist views happen, they should be suppressed by more moderate voices. The vocal minority should not have the last word in how the world is run. A broad education and cultural awareness is the only way to help people progress to see how their lives interact with others.

When we read about Jesus, the Apostle Paul, and others in the New Testament, we can see the ways in which early Christianity sought to include marginalized people, to break down cultural and ethnic barriers, and to make a qualitative difference in the lives of men and women. In this way Christianity was focused on bringing people together into God's kingdom. The message about Jesus was meant to be good news to all people everywhere. It was a ministry of redemption and reconciliation. It was a message about peace and the justice of God. The vast majority of people want these things in their lives and in the world. But there are some who don't want that. They want their way and only their way for all—or else. In the course of marginalizing those people we must not trample on the rights and freedoms of others. It takes all of us working together to achieve this task of getting along. We can't just sit around waiting for God to do it for us. God expects humans in all parts of the world to discern God's voice, to make good choices, and be on our best behavior for the benefit of all.

[This is a message I gave at Salem Friends Meeting, Liberty, IN, April, 2008.]

On Friday my wife, Suann, and I drove our daughter back to Indianapolis for her last week of the school year. We've made numerous trips into Indy over the past year and each time presented its own challenges of navigation. Because of the construction going on until the end of 2007 we tried to avoid going straight into Indy on 70 and then from the south attempt to find our way north to the Butler University campus. Instead, we first tried to go from Post Rd. with an east-west approach on 38^th Street. That was complicated by the State Fair traffic, the myriad of intersections, and crazy drivers weaving in and out of traffic. We then decided just to go around Indy on 465 to the north and come at the city from the north taking exit five on route 5, which is Meridian, and that takes us right near Butler. Obviously, that's going the long way around. It's easy to do, but it makes a long trip even longer. If we go that far, we might as well just keep going to West Lafayette [inside joke about Purdue University]. We tried numerous times to find ways to attack or retreat from Indy on a southerly route. On one trip in I turned the wrong direction—I went south instead of north —after getting off 65 and it wasn't until we hit countryside and saw planes landing nearby that we realized we were in the wrong place. Other times we tried to leave Butler going to the south only to discover we were in a scary part of town and construction prevented us from getting on 70. I finally made progress when I figured out how to get from the Butler campus to 38^th Street, to Martin Luther King Drive, on to 65 south, and then 70 east. After several attempts to make the reverse trip, I finally accomplished it and knew where I was going. I commented to Suann, "It's taken us a whole year, but we've finally figured out how to get to and from Butler."

For many of us growing up in small towns or in the country, the big city can be a challenging world. Remember the first time you, who grew up here in Liberty, Indiana, visited the big city of Connersville, Oxford, Ohio, or even Richmond. During elementary school years, you probably went with your family or on a school trip to see Cincinnati, Dayton, or Indianapolis. When you got older, you had your first trip to Chicago. Maybe you visited other major cities, perhaps even going to Washington, DC or New York City. That progression may have continued to the point of having your passport stamped in cities around the world. From some small neighborhood your perspective developed over time as you grew up to include a greater area and a larger concept of what and whom your world includes.

You learned about the world in school, but you didn't really broaden your mind until you experienced places and people different than you and your own. Maybe you stared the first time you saw someone with a different color skin than what you were used to. The first time you saw people dressed differently and speaking a different language you might have thought they were strange or perhaps even dangerous. You began to become accustomed to the fact that, although you share the world with people who look and live differently than you, people are basically the same wherever you go. They are no better and no worse than people like you. In fact, you might even have come to the conclusion that the values and customs of people from somewhere else are even better than your own.

As a teenager you thought the whole world revolved around you. As a young adult, you focused your energy on how to make your life better and to make a good life for your family. Somewhere during that time you will have realized that the world is much bigger than you, and there are more important issues than whether you own a nice home in a good neighborhood, drive a new car, and have the best entertainment center or home theater system in your family room.

That doesn't happen for everyone. Many adults are still children in the way they view the world. Their town is the best. They identify closely with their own political or geographical region and their local sports teams. Everyone ought to speak the same language they do, belong to the same religion and denomination they do, and hold to the same moral values. Perhaps they even want their own ethnic group to do better than others and to be in power. They want their own country to be the superpower and dominate the world. Since God has come to them in a particular way, that must mean it's the only right way, and only people who accept that way have real value and deserve to receive God's blessings and benefits. If others can't agree with their idea of how the world should be, they must be forced to comply even if it takes imperialistic policies, aggressive actions, or the violence of "shock and awe" indiscriminate bombings.

How do you see yourself? What is your primary self-identification? I'm speaking from within the context of a church, so you might expect I want you to say Christian. We're in a Friend's meetinghouse, so you might guess the most important identification is Quaker. Most of your are sitting with family members, so maybe family is the most important. We're a few months away from July 4^th; you're all good, patriotic Americans. Some people put their flag outside their home everyday or wear a flag as a lapel pin. There are churches in which people get tears in their eyes when they hear the words of the song "I'm proud to be an American."

How would it change our way of thinking to say my primary way of thinking about myself is that I belong to the human species? I am related to every human being in the world irrespective of how that other human's ancestors evolved in other places in the world and the ways they developed to think, believe, and act. Or perhaps to even go one step further, we humans share this planet within an interdependent ecosystem and do not have the right to destroy the rest of the planet for our own benefits. In religious language, we are part of God's creation. It's debatable whether we are really the pinnacle of the ascent of evolution or if we are in fact the malignancy that will eventually destroy our own home. You might recall the word's of Agent Smith in the movie "Matrix."

I’d like to share a revelation that I’ve had, during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species and I realized that you aren’t actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with its surrounding environment, but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply, and multiply until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You are a plague, and we... are the cure.

Christians like us have come to read the Bible in a very selective way to reinforce our own provincialism and chauvinism. Even when we talk about the Bible's own history of transmission and translation, we think of it as beginning with Hebrew and Greek in the Middle East, becoming readily available in the language of the people in German during the reformation, and eventually culminating with English translations in Britain and in the U.S. From the United States, then, the Bible gets translated to the other languages of the world—from us goes forth the gospel. Where did we get such an idea? How chauvinistic! We are neither the terminus to which the gospel was destined nor the terminus from which God's message goes forth to the world to gather the world's sheep into our fold.

The stories of the Old Testament point again and again to the way in which humans should not turn their attention to themselves and their own but realize they are part of a much larger world. Adam and Eve were forced to leave their gated-community called Eden. When people started going in a wrong direction, one man and his family were preserved while God treated all the rest of the human family as one. The story of the Tower of Babel relates how, when one group decided they were the best and only divinity remained to be conquered by erecting a pyramid to the sky, God caused humans to have a variety of cultures and languages and to spread throughout the world. Our Bible traces one ethnic group's belief that God uniquely called their ancestor to come from northern Mesopotamia, from modern-day Iraq, to be given a corridor of land on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea. Abraham, whom Genesis calls "the father of many nations," recognized the rights of others to live together and share ownership of the land. According to Gen 23, when Abraham wants to have a burial place, he insists on buying the property from "the people of the land" living there rather than taking it by force. When his descendants find themselves living as slaves in Egypt, it is an adopted, Egyptian-raised child of the Pharaoh who leads the Hebrew people from the foreign land. Although this monotheistic Semitic group with its own particular cultural values seeks to remove their idol-worshipping cousins from some of their cities in the Land of Canaan, to a large extent they find ways to live together with them. Even their national constitution demands they respect the alien living among them. Hear what the Torah says, "When an alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien. The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the LORD your God" (Lev 19:33-34).

The Israelite and Judean kings often marry foreign wives and adopt the ways of others, beginning with David and Solomon. The philosophy and literature of other groups become assimilated into theirs. Their prophets often speak about their need to be a light to the other nations of people. They tell the story of the prophet Jonah, whom God actually tells to go to Iraq—what was then the Assyrian city of Nineveh—to call them to repent of their misdeeds because God cares for them. God tells the pouting Jonah, when God does not destroy them with "shock and awe" like Jonah wants God to, "And should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also many animals?" (Jonah 4:11).

Progressive Jews of the centuries before Christ sought to become a part of the world scene instead of being isolated with their own language, culture, and religious texts and ceremonies. Jesus comes out of that tradition as someone who moves outside of his own village and territory. He cares for people from all walks of life: the rich and poor; men, women, and children; Jews, Samaritans, Greeks, and Romans; rural people as well as urban elites; farmers, fishmongers, trades people, merchants, tax-collectors, religious authorities; people suffering from diseases, injuries, blindness, deafness, mental illnesses. Jesus talked about God's kingdom not the kingdom of Israel (and certainly not the kingdom of the United States of America). When the church is born at Pentecost, the gospel message was not proclaimed in one language. Everyone there heard God's message in their own native language. Hear what Acts says.

Amazed and astonished, they asked, "Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs-- in our own languages we hear them speaking about God's deeds of power (Acts 2:7-11)

Many people have the view that the earliest Christianity was a Jewish Christianity that became suppressed and was eventually lost. Some people have tried to recreate a kind of Jewish Christianity with Jewish customs and claim that Christians should all adopt this kind of Christian Judaism. But that's not how it happened. The Christianity that took root and spread was a Hellenistic Jewish form of Christianity. The lingua franca of the day was Greek. It was the language of commerce and travel. It was the language that was the most common to people within the Roman empire. The good news about God's kingdom was for all people--for all people equally, for all people regardless of their particular geographical location, language, and culture.

Christianity quickly became the tool of empires, whether that was the Holy Roman empire, the British empire, or the empire the United States seeks to develop. Those Christians who identify their place in the world as centered in their own group of people and their own nation are allowing themselves to be used in this way in many subtle and not so subtle ways.

How big is your world? Do you spend most of your time thinking about yourself, your own needs, your own condition, your own future, and those near and dear? Or do you see your world as a much larger place, filled with people who look, think, and act differently than you but are essentially the same? Do you give some part of your day to read the newspaper and watch the evening news, not as a voyeur into the sensationalistic and sentimental, but to be informed about the lives of people around the world because you care for all the people of the world? Do you find ways to educate yourself about how the rest of the world lives—how they speak, how they practice their faith, how they express themselves in art and literature, how they feel about their own opportunities for health, safety, and freedom? Do you give some of your money and time to help those who are strangers and foreigners, even those some might call enemies?

The measure of our world is the measure of own souls. Our devotion to God is only as deep as our world is wide. We cannot afford to live our lives any longer in isolation, in selfishness, narcissism, or even well-intentioned patriotism. We are extremely privileged people upon whom is placed a huge burden of responsibility to the rest of the world. Each of us owes it to ourselves and to the world to broaden our horizons, to live responsibly in the world, and in this way to serve God the creator and sustainer of all.

[This is a message I gave at my church, Salem Friends Meeting]

A few years ago, my wife, Suann, and I became homeowners. I’ve not been convinced that it was a wise decision for us. Sure, the house has served us well. It has kept us warm – at least warmer than the out-of-doors. It has kept us dry – except for the leak in the roof and the puddles in the basement. There is the security we have – the security of knowing no sensible thief would try to rob a house like ours. We primarily bought the house because of its location. It is located on the southwest side of the city where the high school is and it’s across the street from where I work at Earlham School of Religion. We thought the advantage of its location outweighed any of the other problems the house might have. However, the children hardly ever walk to school and I’m still always at least ten minutes late for work.

Along with the house comes a nice piece of property. It’s my property. I own it. I’ve looked online and have seen the official boundary of my property. When we first moved in there was a playground set in the back yard. I drove into the driveway one day and saw a little boy in my backyard. I went down there and told him he couldn’t be on my property. I defended my land and prevented an incursion from occurring on my land.

My land has given me many fruitful harvests for which I continually curse mother nature. If only there would be less rain and less sun, perhaps the grass would not grow so quickly and the weeds wouldn’t force themselves through every nook and cranny of my property. Besides the occasional patch of mushrooms that appear in my front yard and some kind of wild strawberry that showed up where it didn’t belong, there hasn’t been much produce from the dirt that hides below the surface of my ill-manicured lawn.

There are other families for whom land has greater significance. My parents have a plot of land they bought as a retirement home. My father has put a great deal of sweat and probably some blood – I know it’s taken a fair amount of money – into his handful of acres. But he’s only lived there for maybe a dozen years or so. He’s tended a large garden most years and that’s helped them with the cost of food. But it’s not been his livelihood.

I can imagine that farm families have a greater attachment to their land. For some farm families their land has been in the family for generations. Until recent years farm families could expect the land to provide a livelihood for a next generation of their family. They could tell you about what the land has meant to them over the years. Not only have the farmers had an intimate connection with the land by their blood, sweat, and tears, there may well be ancestors buried in the dirt on their land.

Nowadays it seems farmers are a different breed. In order to do well on a farm, they need to have a knowledge of business management and understand the market. They are biologists and soil scientists. I suspect the modern day farmers see their land more as their field of business than the dirt which gave birth to their families and which holds their ancestors in trust until resurrection day.

In the olden days, as in antiquity, people had a greater spiritual connection to their land. The stories of how their tribes of people came to settle the land are passed down through generations. For them, it was God or the gods who gave them their land and provided life to them through it. God blessed their land with the heat and life-giving force of the sun. God showered them and sent streams of water to quench the thirst of their land. The cycles of life were the seasons of planting and harvest; God gave life from the ground and to the ground people returned. To you and your people the land was a God-given trust; not just property to own or an asset of your business but a part of the earth God gave to you and your people.

I can explain what that means to some people, but I obviously can’t really understand it. I think there are many people like me who don’t have a real connection to the ground they live upon. I don’t know if that’s good or bad, but that’s the reality we live with.

The fact is, here in the United States of America, we live on land that only a few hundred years ago belonged to another group of people. We think of our ancestors as people who fled religious persecution and were led to this new world as a promised land flowing with milk and honey. It was okay for us to displace the people living here. After all, they hadn’t made anything of the land. The natives lived like animals. They had no technology, no industry, no literature, no philosophy, and no God – or at least not ours. We have now successfully removed the aboriginal people and confined them to small reservations where they can leave in freedom. We’re sorry about that, but it’s okay because we were following God’s leading, fleeing religious persecution, and we were establishing a great country founded on religious principles.

I’ve been thinking about this because of my plans to live in Palestine for a few months. That has caused me to begin thinking more about the Middle East crisis. How does one look at this conflict fairly? What is our perspective as US citizens? What is our perspective as Christians? How is that different for us as Quakers?

We cherish Holy Scripture and consider ourselves as part of the religious and spiritual heirs of its stories and teachings. The Jewish people are our religious and spiritual ancestors. Their God is our God; their Bible is our Bible. We read their Scripture in which God tells them God will give them a land and God will bless them there. God makes a covenant with Israel to be their God. That same Bible prophecies of a future blessing of God when Israel is returned to their land and when everything God gave them in the past is restored. The more literal of our brothers and sisters in the faith take that to mean the future of God’s work in the world is directly connected to the future of the modern state of Israel.

The recent history of our world saw a terrible event happen to those whose Bible we share. European Jews were persecuted: tormented, tortured, and executed by the train-loads. We ignored their plight in the beginning and refused them protection in the end. Through a series of politically and economically motivated decisions, a place was secured for them to go. There was a problem however. Author Ghada Karmi titles her book on the dilemma of modern Israel with an allusion to a famous message. When rabbis visited the land of Palestine in the 19th century looking to return to their former homeland, they sent back word: "The bride is beautiful, but she is married to another man." There’s no other way to see it than that we have been complicit in the taking of that bride from her husband and giving her to another. But what can we do? Say that a religious people has no right to claim land from an indigenous people, virtually wipe them out as savages, and then declare themselves God’s people and their country as blessed of God?

Jimmy Carter, in his recent book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, describes making this connection in 1973, when he visited the Holy Land ahead of his plan to run for the presidency. Carter understood this comparison having been a farmer himself.

I have to admit that, at the time, I equated the ejection of Palestinians from their previous homes within the State of Israel to the forcing of Lower Creek Indians from the Georgia land where our family farm was now located; they had been moved west to Oklahoma on the “Trail of Tears” to make room for our white ancestors. In this most recent case, although equally harsh, the taking of land had been ordained by the international community through an official decision of the United Nations. The Palestinians had to comply and, after all, they could return or be compensated in the future, and they were guaranteed undisputed ownership of East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza.

I’m trying to understand what it means for Palestinians to have their land taken from them. What it means to be removed from their homes and forced to live in refugee camps. What it means to have their homes and their orchards taken over by others or simply to have them bulldozed. What does it mean to soak the dirt with their tears and their blood, the dirt that contains the life of their people from thousands of years. How do I really understand what that means and what do I do about it?

My Christian theology has little room for the value of dirt. For us, heaven is our home and in this world we are only resident aliens. Our life is in the spirit, not in flesh, bone, and dirt. We save the soul, not the body and the land on which it resides. Our heritage comes from the merging of middle eastern culture and the western culture of Greece and Rome. Our values are not in the maintenance of property and wealth. Palestinian author Ghassan Kanafini, in his novella Men in the Sun, has Abul Khaizuran tell Marwan, “The first thing you will learn is: money comes first, and then morals.” Our ethical system says the opposite. But then we judge that from a place of privilege. Easy for us to say. “Why are you fighting over worldly goods: land, wealth, oil? Be like us and live in the spirit – now that we have our land of prosperity and security.”

Our Christian theology may not have much to say about valuing land and dirt, but it does have a great deal to say about justice, fairness, and peace. It is our responsibility to think about what this means. Just because we made a mistake in the past and have learned to live it, doesn’t mean we should be willing to be partners in doing it again to another group of people.

As I prepare myself to live in Palestine in the fall, I have a satellite image on my computer screen that shows me the city of Ramallah. It will be home from Sept. through December. It’s not much to look at, really. There is little vegetation to be seen, mostly sandy and rocky soil. But it’s their dirt and it’s their home, at least for a little while longer.