[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.