Jerusalem, Jerusalem
July 05, 2009
July 5, 2009
Rev. Susan Gilbert Zencka
Frame Memorial Presbyterian Church
Texts: 2 Samuel 5:1-10; Matthew 5:1-16
As most of you know, I was on a two-week pilgrimage to Israel and returned Thursday. This pilgrimage was funded by a grant from the Cousins Foundation in Atlanta, who sends many groups of pastors to Israel each year. Our group included 20 pastors, and 2 seminary professors from Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary. The pastors were a diverse group – half men, half women; about half European-American, and a quarter each Asian-American and African-American; half were PCUSA, the others including United Methodist, UCC, Lutheran, AME, Baptist, and Associated Reformed Presbyterian. Our group was about half from the Louisville area, and the rest from all over: Seattle, California, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Indiana, West Virginia, New York, Iowa, and of course, Wisconsin. We spent a week in Galilee, the northern region of Israel, and a week in Jerusalem. We took day trips to the Golan Heights (on the eastern shore of the Sea of Galilee, bordering Syria), the West Bank (where Bethlehem is) and to the Negev (the desert wilderness which includes the Dead Sea, Masada and the Qumran caves where the Dead Sea scrolls were found).
We saw traditional holy sites, geographical landmarks, visited Christian, Jewish, and Muslim worship places, heard guest lecturers (some of whom are internationally renowned scholars) about Muslim, Palestinian and Christian issues, saw Druze and Bedouin people, worshiped in an Orthodox Jewish synagogue, at several orthodox Christian services in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, prayed at the Western Wall, and opened and closed each day with our own prayer services, centered on the psalms.
We splashed in the Jordan River, swam in the Sea of Galilee, waded in the Mediterranean, and floated in the Dead Sea.
We walked, and walked, and walked – mostly uphill it seemed, and I was really glad that I had prepared by walking 75 and biking 133 miles since the end of March as well as losing 10 pounds, a beginning to my own fitness pilgrimage that will continue. And we rode the bus, and even had a boat ride on the Sea of Galilee.
While the trip was a spiritual pilgrimage, we did become more aware of some of the political realities of the region. We also did take time for shopping. And we ate – St. Peter's fish from the Sea of Galilee, and traditional Middle Eastern food, including falafel, hummus, baba ganoush, beets, corn salad, halvah, lentils, Turkish coffee and more.
It was a profound trip for all of us – none of us will ever read Scripture the same way, nor will we ever be the same as we were before the trip. Among the gifts of the trip was the gift of the community that we formed together – we met in May for a retreat to get to know one another, and we will see each other in September for a final retreat. We feel very connected to one another and I am very mindful this morning of my brothers and sisters who are also climbing into the pulpit to share with the congregations they serve and love about our pilgrimage experiences.
And yet, how to begin to share such a profound and complex journey? I planned this worship service before I left, intentionally leaving it fairly open-ended. And, amazingly, our Old Testament text was the lectionary text for today! I will have some adult education times in the fall when I share more concretely about the trip, for those who are interested – and I have been posting photo albums on facebook, for those who want to see the photos. And there will be a couple of other times I preach from the trip, and this pilgrimage will inform my preaching from now on. It's still early in my reflecting on our pilgrimage, so today's sermon will be some impressions, loosely organized around these two scriptures.
The first Scripture is about the founding of Jerusalem by King David. Jerusalem was, even then, a complex place, and has become more complicated after centuries of Jewish, then Assyrian and Persian, then Jewish again, then Roman rule – which initially suppressed Christianity and later permitted, and still later mandated Christianity. The Byzantine era followed the fall of the Roman Empire, and later the city became Muslim, and then came the Crusaders. It was not part of 1948 Israel, but since the Six Day War in 1967, it has been part of Israel. It is, indeed a complex city, and one that has gotten thoroughly under my skin – which I didn’t expect. No wonder Jesus said to Jerusalem, shortly before his death there, “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing! See, your house is left to you, desolate. For I tell you, you will not see me again until you say, ‘Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.’”
One of the gates of Jerusalem, the Golden Gate remains sealed, for as our guide Ghassan told us, “The three traditions all agree that someone is coming, or coming back.” This gate will open in the Messianic age, an age that is supposed to be one of peace. As Psalm 122 reminds us, “Pray for the peace of Jerusalem, ‘May they prosper who love you.’”
Last Sunday, by 10 a.m., I had already worshiped at an Ethiopian Orthodox, service, a Coptic Christian service, a Greek Orthodox service, in a Syriac Orthodox chapel in a cave, and with the Armenian Orthodox Christians on the third floor of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. The Church of the Holy Sepulcher is an amazing place – it is shared by six denominations: the five I have mentioned, as well as Roman Catholic. It is an uneasy sharing – turf issues abound. While one group is worshiping, the bishop for another group processes through the periphery of the same space, with their entourage pounding walking sticks in a cadence on the stone floor.
There were so many disputes over the building through the centuries that generations ago the keys to the building were entrusted to a Muslim family – someone with no stake in these issues – and a member of this family unlocks and locks the door to this day. The cave where the Syriac Christians worship is in contested ownership with the Armenian orthodox Christians, and so neither group can decorate the space, or do any maintenance on it. The Armenians have an exquisitely beautiful chapel with mosaics so nuanced that I thought they were frescoes at first – nonetheless, they are not going to cede ownership of the cave chapel to the Syriacs. A while ago, the light bulb wore out – neither group could permit the other to change the bulb, because to do maintenance on the space could be precedent-setting in terms of ownership rights. So they agreed to call in an Israeli electrician to check the fixture. The electrician gained access after hours through the Muslim gatekeeper, and later reported back to both sides that the fixture appeared to be working just fine.
If you look closely at photographs of the front of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, you can see a ladder on a ledge outside a second story window. Apparently, the ladder has been there for over 100 years. It is a wooden ladder, and subject to wear from age and rain, so occasionally the ladder is replaced, but it remains there – the window and ladder apparently belong to the Armenians, but the Greek Orthodox own the ledge. Because of all the turf issues, eventually the Turks (who had control of the city at one point) established what's known as the status quo – that is, everything stays as it was in that moment...including the ladder on the ledge, and there will be no changes. Unfortunately, no one wrote down the status quo agreement, but later a British officer kept careful records of all he observed about how the Church functioned and that has become the de facto status quo arrangement.
We tend to think of groups in Israel being neatly divided: Arabs, Jews, Palestinians – but what of our guide in Galilee who was a Catholic woman married to a Jewish man who then lives in a kibbutz? What about the Arab and Palestinian Christians? Not all Arabs and Palestinians are Muslim. Although the old city of Jerusalem is divided into quarters – the Jewish quarter, Christian quarter, Muslim quarter, and Armenian quarter – life is not separated out that neatly. The Western Wall of the old Jewish temple, the sacred place for prayer also known as the Wailing Wall, is in the shadow of the Dome of the Rock – the third holiest place for Muslims to pray, after Mecca and Medina. The Dome of the Rock is the gleaming gold dome that is part of the Muslim mosque built on the same site as the original location of the Jewish Second Temple that was destroyed in 70 CE, as the Jewish rebellion against Rome was being crushed. Christians never built on this site because they remembered Jesus saying that not a stone of the temple would be left standing. As if this weren't complicated enough, it is the same site from where the prophet Muhammad is said to have flown to heaven. And it is also thought to be Mount Moriah, where Abraham prepared to sacrifice his son Isaac...or Ishmael in the Muslim version of the same story. And this story belongs to all three traditions. As our guest lecturer told us, “Holy places tend to stay holy.”
The lecturer who took us to worship last week at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher is a woman named Hana Bendcowsky, a religious Jew who has a master's degree in comparative religions from Hebrew University. She works for the interfaith Jerusalem Center for Jewish-Christian Relations. Hana said of Jerusalem, “Beauty and complexity, layer upon layer, this is religion [and life] in Jerusalem.”
That was certainly our impression – it's all very complicated – and in the midst of these holy places, and the struggles over the holy places, life goes on. When we were at the Pools of Bethesda - Roman ruins that remain from the place marked in the 5th chapter of John where Jesus heals a man, we could see the apartments that were right next to these ruins – apartments with satellite dishes where an Arab woman was hanging out her wash as we learned about the holy place below.
That, perhaps, was the clearest lesson, one which kept coming up again and again in my heart during our pilgrimage – the holy places are, and were, right in the middle of where life is being lived.
In Galilee, when we visited Capernaum, the city where Jesus did most of his ministry, I was so struck by how small a town it was – I stood on the shore of the Sea of Galilee and was less than 100 yards from the synagogue. In between the synagogue and the lakeshore was the home of Peter. The ministry of Jesus was very local. It took place, mostly, in a town much smaller than Stevens Point's downtown business district. And it took place where people lived, worked, prayed and played. It's important for us to remember that the parables with which Jesus taught were describing ordinary life situations with which his hearers would all be familiar. His ministry was woven right through the lives of the people he was in ministry with – and so should ours be, too. His teachings were not removed from the lives of the people he taught. And what he taught is intended for our real lives, too.
Two weeks ago, we worshiped at the Mount of the Beatitudes – no one knows whether Jesus really gave the Sermon on the Mount on a mountain. But the hillside where the Mount of the Beatitudes is, would have been a likely place for Jesus to teach. It was a gently sloping hillside leading to the shore of the Sea of Galilee, around which his ministry was centered. And the acoustics would have been good there – as scholars and pilgrims have tried to discern where such a talk might have taken place, it seems like a likely place. It no longer looks like it did – there is a beautiful chapel there, and formal gardens. It is not the undeveloped hillside it was. While we were there, we read the entire Sermon on the Mount together, chapters five through seven of Matthew's Gospel. This morning, our second reading is the first sixteen verses of this sermon – some Christians have often thought of this sermon as abstract idealism, but it seems very clear to me from reading it in its context and seeing how Jesus lived it out, and from seeing how it meshes with other teachings in scripture, that this is not intended as ideal or abstract teaching at all, but very practical teaching to be lived out in our real lives. After visiting Israel, I now know that Jerusalem is on a hill – traditionally people speak of “going up to” Jerusalem. Knowing that gives the closing verses of this section special meaning – let's listen for the word of God. [Read the Gospel reading: Matthew 5:1-16] The word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.
This is, indeed, the Word of the Lord – a Word to inform and shape our living.
One of the members of our pilgrimage is a Lutheran minister named Ken Boehm. Ken has a unique ministry in that he is the Chaplain for Churchill Downs race track. He ministers to the roughly 2,000 people who live and work at the track, as well as to those who visit on race day. Ken, in the usual course of his ministry walks through the stables, visiting with his congregants where they work and live. His ministry is connected to their real lives. The rest of us clergy on the pilgrimage have more conventional ministries – we meet our people in church on Sundays. Over the past 500 or so years, particularly because of the Protestant and Industrial Revolutions, faith has become sequestered in churches on Sunday mornings – and so the living of our faith has become, often, separate from the living of our lives.
The pilgrimage to Israel reminded me of something I have always known, and that is that faith is how we live our real lives. Our faith is shown in our living – in our work, our play, our relationships. When our faith is disconnected from our living, it can no longer provide the abundance in life that Jesus came to give to us.
Yet, even in Biblical times, people protested that the Word of God was difficult to live out. Moses responded to this concern in Deuteronomy 30:11-14, saying, “For this commandment which I command you this day is not too hard for you, neither is it far off. It is not in heaven, that you should say, 'Who will go up for us to heaven, and bring it to us, that we may hear it and do it?' Neither is it beyond the sea, that you should say, 'Who will go over the sea for us, and bring it to us, that we may hear it and do it?' But the word is very near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart, so that you can do it.”
Our faith is profoundly incarnational – it is meant for the nitty-gritty flesh and sweat of daily living. While the experiences of the Holy Land may seem far away from our own, the challenge for us is, today as always, to ask and answer the question, “How then shall we live?” In light of God, and God's Word to us, and the real challenges of our real lives, how then shall we live?
And Moses reminds us that the word is, indeed, very near us so that we can indeed live it. And when we do, our churches and jobs and homes become holy places, and where we live – Stevens Point, Plover, Mosinee, Iola, Rosholt, wherever we live, wherever we go – become holy land, and our lives - our ordinary and holy lives – become pilgrimage.
Pray for the peace of Jerusalem, and for you all and me also, I pray Shalom, Salaam, Peace. Amen.
Rev. Susan Gilbert Zencka
Frame Memorial Presbyterian Church
Texts: 2 Samuel 5:1-10; Matthew 5:1-16
As most of you know, I was on a two-week pilgrimage to Israel and returned Thursday. This pilgrimage was funded by a grant from the Cousins Foundation in Atlanta, who sends many groups of pastors to Israel each year. Our group included 20 pastors, and 2 seminary professors from Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary. The pastors were a diverse group – half men, half women; about half European-American, and a quarter each Asian-American and African-American; half were PCUSA, the others including United Methodist, UCC, Lutheran, AME, Baptist, and Associated Reformed Presbyterian. Our group was about half from the Louisville area, and the rest from all over: Seattle, California, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Indiana, West Virginia, New York, Iowa, and of course, Wisconsin. We spent a week in Galilee, the northern region of Israel, and a week in Jerusalem. We took day trips to the Golan Heights (on the eastern shore of the Sea of Galilee, bordering Syria), the West Bank (where Bethlehem is) and to the Negev (the desert wilderness which includes the Dead Sea, Masada and the Qumran caves where the Dead Sea scrolls were found).
We saw traditional holy sites, geographical landmarks, visited Christian, Jewish, and Muslim worship places, heard guest lecturers (some of whom are internationally renowned scholars) about Muslim, Palestinian and Christian issues, saw Druze and Bedouin people, worshiped in an Orthodox Jewish synagogue, at several orthodox Christian services in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, prayed at the Western Wall, and opened and closed each day with our own prayer services, centered on the psalms.
We splashed in the Jordan River, swam in the Sea of Galilee, waded in the Mediterranean, and floated in the Dead Sea.
We walked, and walked, and walked – mostly uphill it seemed, and I was really glad that I had prepared by walking 75 and biking 133 miles since the end of March as well as losing 10 pounds, a beginning to my own fitness pilgrimage that will continue. And we rode the bus, and even had a boat ride on the Sea of Galilee.
While the trip was a spiritual pilgrimage, we did become more aware of some of the political realities of the region. We also did take time for shopping. And we ate – St. Peter's fish from the Sea of Galilee, and traditional Middle Eastern food, including falafel, hummus, baba ganoush, beets, corn salad, halvah, lentils, Turkish coffee and more.
It was a profound trip for all of us – none of us will ever read Scripture the same way, nor will we ever be the same as we were before the trip. Among the gifts of the trip was the gift of the community that we formed together – we met in May for a retreat to get to know one another, and we will see each other in September for a final retreat. We feel very connected to one another and I am very mindful this morning of my brothers and sisters who are also climbing into the pulpit to share with the congregations they serve and love about our pilgrimage experiences.
And yet, how to begin to share such a profound and complex journey? I planned this worship service before I left, intentionally leaving it fairly open-ended. And, amazingly, our Old Testament text was the lectionary text for today! I will have some adult education times in the fall when I share more concretely about the trip, for those who are interested – and I have been posting photo albums on facebook, for those who want to see the photos. And there will be a couple of other times I preach from the trip, and this pilgrimage will inform my preaching from now on. It's still early in my reflecting on our pilgrimage, so today's sermon will be some impressions, loosely organized around these two scriptures.
The first Scripture is about the founding of Jerusalem by King David. Jerusalem was, even then, a complex place, and has become more complicated after centuries of Jewish, then Assyrian and Persian, then Jewish again, then Roman rule – which initially suppressed Christianity and later permitted, and still later mandated Christianity. The Byzantine era followed the fall of the Roman Empire, and later the city became Muslim, and then came the Crusaders. It was not part of 1948 Israel, but since the Six Day War in 1967, it has been part of Israel. It is, indeed a complex city, and one that has gotten thoroughly under my skin – which I didn’t expect. No wonder Jesus said to Jerusalem, shortly before his death there, “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing! See, your house is left to you, desolate. For I tell you, you will not see me again until you say, ‘Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.’”
One of the gates of Jerusalem, the Golden Gate remains sealed, for as our guide Ghassan told us, “The three traditions all agree that someone is coming, or coming back.” This gate will open in the Messianic age, an age that is supposed to be one of peace. As Psalm 122 reminds us, “Pray for the peace of Jerusalem, ‘May they prosper who love you.’”
Last Sunday, by 10 a.m., I had already worshiped at an Ethiopian Orthodox, service, a Coptic Christian service, a Greek Orthodox service, in a Syriac Orthodox chapel in a cave, and with the Armenian Orthodox Christians on the third floor of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. The Church of the Holy Sepulcher is an amazing place – it is shared by six denominations: the five I have mentioned, as well as Roman Catholic. It is an uneasy sharing – turf issues abound. While one group is worshiping, the bishop for another group processes through the periphery of the same space, with their entourage pounding walking sticks in a cadence on the stone floor.
There were so many disputes over the building through the centuries that generations ago the keys to the building were entrusted to a Muslim family – someone with no stake in these issues – and a member of this family unlocks and locks the door to this day. The cave where the Syriac Christians worship is in contested ownership with the Armenian orthodox Christians, and so neither group can decorate the space, or do any maintenance on it. The Armenians have an exquisitely beautiful chapel with mosaics so nuanced that I thought they were frescoes at first – nonetheless, they are not going to cede ownership of the cave chapel to the Syriacs. A while ago, the light bulb wore out – neither group could permit the other to change the bulb, because to do maintenance on the space could be precedent-setting in terms of ownership rights. So they agreed to call in an Israeli electrician to check the fixture. The electrician gained access after hours through the Muslim gatekeeper, and later reported back to both sides that the fixture appeared to be working just fine.
If you look closely at photographs of the front of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, you can see a ladder on a ledge outside a second story window. Apparently, the ladder has been there for over 100 years. It is a wooden ladder, and subject to wear from age and rain, so occasionally the ladder is replaced, but it remains there – the window and ladder apparently belong to the Armenians, but the Greek Orthodox own the ledge. Because of all the turf issues, eventually the Turks (who had control of the city at one point) established what's known as the status quo – that is, everything stays as it was in that moment...including the ladder on the ledge, and there will be no changes. Unfortunately, no one wrote down the status quo agreement, but later a British officer kept careful records of all he observed about how the Church functioned and that has become the de facto status quo arrangement.
We tend to think of groups in Israel being neatly divided: Arabs, Jews, Palestinians – but what of our guide in Galilee who was a Catholic woman married to a Jewish man who then lives in a kibbutz? What about the Arab and Palestinian Christians? Not all Arabs and Palestinians are Muslim. Although the old city of Jerusalem is divided into quarters – the Jewish quarter, Christian quarter, Muslim quarter, and Armenian quarter – life is not separated out that neatly. The Western Wall of the old Jewish temple, the sacred place for prayer also known as the Wailing Wall, is in the shadow of the Dome of the Rock – the third holiest place for Muslims to pray, after Mecca and Medina. The Dome of the Rock is the gleaming gold dome that is part of the Muslim mosque built on the same site as the original location of the Jewish Second Temple that was destroyed in 70 CE, as the Jewish rebellion against Rome was being crushed. Christians never built on this site because they remembered Jesus saying that not a stone of the temple would be left standing. As if this weren't complicated enough, it is the same site from where the prophet Muhammad is said to have flown to heaven. And it is also thought to be Mount Moriah, where Abraham prepared to sacrifice his son Isaac...or Ishmael in the Muslim version of the same story. And this story belongs to all three traditions. As our guest lecturer told us, “Holy places tend to stay holy.”
The lecturer who took us to worship last week at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher is a woman named Hana Bendcowsky, a religious Jew who has a master's degree in comparative religions from Hebrew University. She works for the interfaith Jerusalem Center for Jewish-Christian Relations. Hana said of Jerusalem, “Beauty and complexity, layer upon layer, this is religion [and life] in Jerusalem.”
That was certainly our impression – it's all very complicated – and in the midst of these holy places, and the struggles over the holy places, life goes on. When we were at the Pools of Bethesda - Roman ruins that remain from the place marked in the 5th chapter of John where Jesus heals a man, we could see the apartments that were right next to these ruins – apartments with satellite dishes where an Arab woman was hanging out her wash as we learned about the holy place below.
That, perhaps, was the clearest lesson, one which kept coming up again and again in my heart during our pilgrimage – the holy places are, and were, right in the middle of where life is being lived.
In Galilee, when we visited Capernaum, the city where Jesus did most of his ministry, I was so struck by how small a town it was – I stood on the shore of the Sea of Galilee and was less than 100 yards from the synagogue. In between the synagogue and the lakeshore was the home of Peter. The ministry of Jesus was very local. It took place, mostly, in a town much smaller than Stevens Point's downtown business district. And it took place where people lived, worked, prayed and played. It's important for us to remember that the parables with which Jesus taught were describing ordinary life situations with which his hearers would all be familiar. His ministry was woven right through the lives of the people he was in ministry with – and so should ours be, too. His teachings were not removed from the lives of the people he taught. And what he taught is intended for our real lives, too.
Two weeks ago, we worshiped at the Mount of the Beatitudes – no one knows whether Jesus really gave the Sermon on the Mount on a mountain. But the hillside where the Mount of the Beatitudes is, would have been a likely place for Jesus to teach. It was a gently sloping hillside leading to the shore of the Sea of Galilee, around which his ministry was centered. And the acoustics would have been good there – as scholars and pilgrims have tried to discern where such a talk might have taken place, it seems like a likely place. It no longer looks like it did – there is a beautiful chapel there, and formal gardens. It is not the undeveloped hillside it was. While we were there, we read the entire Sermon on the Mount together, chapters five through seven of Matthew's Gospel. This morning, our second reading is the first sixteen verses of this sermon – some Christians have often thought of this sermon as abstract idealism, but it seems very clear to me from reading it in its context and seeing how Jesus lived it out, and from seeing how it meshes with other teachings in scripture, that this is not intended as ideal or abstract teaching at all, but very practical teaching to be lived out in our real lives. After visiting Israel, I now know that Jerusalem is on a hill – traditionally people speak of “going up to” Jerusalem. Knowing that gives the closing verses of this section special meaning – let's listen for the word of God. [Read the Gospel reading: Matthew 5:1-16] The word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.
This is, indeed, the Word of the Lord – a Word to inform and shape our living.
One of the members of our pilgrimage is a Lutheran minister named Ken Boehm. Ken has a unique ministry in that he is the Chaplain for Churchill Downs race track. He ministers to the roughly 2,000 people who live and work at the track, as well as to those who visit on race day. Ken, in the usual course of his ministry walks through the stables, visiting with his congregants where they work and live. His ministry is connected to their real lives. The rest of us clergy on the pilgrimage have more conventional ministries – we meet our people in church on Sundays. Over the past 500 or so years, particularly because of the Protestant and Industrial Revolutions, faith has become sequestered in churches on Sunday mornings – and so the living of our faith has become, often, separate from the living of our lives.
The pilgrimage to Israel reminded me of something I have always known, and that is that faith is how we live our real lives. Our faith is shown in our living – in our work, our play, our relationships. When our faith is disconnected from our living, it can no longer provide the abundance in life that Jesus came to give to us.
Yet, even in Biblical times, people protested that the Word of God was difficult to live out. Moses responded to this concern in Deuteronomy 30:11-14, saying, “For this commandment which I command you this day is not too hard for you, neither is it far off. It is not in heaven, that you should say, 'Who will go up for us to heaven, and bring it to us, that we may hear it and do it?' Neither is it beyond the sea, that you should say, 'Who will go over the sea for us, and bring it to us, that we may hear it and do it?' But the word is very near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart, so that you can do it.”
Our faith is profoundly incarnational – it is meant for the nitty-gritty flesh and sweat of daily living. While the experiences of the Holy Land may seem far away from our own, the challenge for us is, today as always, to ask and answer the question, “How then shall we live?” In light of God, and God's Word to us, and the real challenges of our real lives, how then shall we live?
And Moses reminds us that the word is, indeed, very near us so that we can indeed live it. And when we do, our churches and jobs and homes become holy places, and where we live – Stevens Point, Plover, Mosinee, Iola, Rosholt, wherever we live, wherever we go – become holy land, and our lives - our ordinary and holy lives – become pilgrimage.
Pray for the peace of Jerusalem, and for you all and me also, I pray Shalom, Salaam, Peace. Amen.