Lament

Review: The Other Side of the Wall

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Cover image of "The Other Side of the Wall" by Munther Isaac

The Other Side of the Wall: A Palestinian Christian Narrative of Lament and Hope, Munther Isaac. InterVarsity Press (ISBN: 9780830831999) 2020.

Summary: A Palestinian Christian narrative of lament and hope, describing the situation from his perspective and offering hope for a shared land.

The Hamas attack upon Israel in October 7 and the subsequent invasion of Israeli forces in Gaza has occupied our national discourse in the United States since that time. It has torn apart college campuses as support for Palestinians competes for support of Israel and charges of Palestinian genocide and anti-Semitism rival each other.

Reverend Doctor Munther Isaac is a unique voice within the clamor. He is a teacher at Bethlehem Bible College and pastor of Christmas Evangelical Lutheran Church. In Bethlehem, part of the West Bank Palestinian Territories. Isaac wrote this book prior to the current conflict. It is “a Palestinian Christian narrative of lament and hope.” He writes as one whose daily reality is defined by the twenty-five foot high wall around his city. To enter Israeli territories, permits and long waits at checkpoints are required. These are the same checkpoints through which Christian visitors to Bethlehem must pass. He writes:

“This book is my invitation to you to step into the other side of the wall and listen to our stories and perspective. It is my humble request to you to allow me to share how Palestinians experience God, read the Bible, and have been touched and liberated by Jesus—a fellow Bethlehemite who has challenged us to see others as neighbors and love them as ourselves. . . . This book paints a picture of our story of faith, lament, and hope. And I invite you to join and listen, on our side of the wall.”

The book is first of all a lament. He begins by describing what the 1948 creation of Israel meant to Palestinians living in this land. It was the Nakba or “catastrophe,” the seizure of 530 villages in which 750,000 Palestinians became refugees. He laments the dehumanizing of Palestinians while American Christians celebrated the Jewish occupation of the land as a supposed fulfillment of a promise of God. And he laments the continued silence as Israel continues to move boundaries and build settlements. This includes taking away the home and lands of Palestinians. Finally, he laments the marginalizing of Palestinian Christian voices by American faith leaders, not including them in deliberations. Sometimes this includes disinviting them (including the author) from Christian conferences.

Isaac characterizes Christian Zionism, which has supported Israel’s injustices and legitimized its use of power, as “imperial theology.” He addresses the “land theology” Christian Zionists use to justify unqualified support of Israel. He argues, not that Israel was “replaced” by the church but that Gentiles and Jews were incorporated into a new, transnational people in which the promise to Israel is expanded to blessing to the nations and extended to the whole earth.

At the same time, Isaac denounces antisemitism (including the antisemitism latent in Christian Zionism!). Instead, he wants Jews to be safe everywhere, not just in a homeland. Rather than eliminating one group or another, he advocates a solution of Jews and Palestinians sharing the land. He also speaks of love for the Muslim neighbor and the call of Christians to be peacemakers, which includes seeking justice. While deeply grieved by the evangelical support of Zionism, he laments in hope rooted in the reality that the Savior of the world was born in Bethlehem and also subject to terror and flight. He comes to those who face similar realities.

Munther Isaac represents voices many of us in the United States have not heard because they are on “the other side of the wall.” He challenges the complicity of American support of Zionism and the complicity of silence of the rest of the church. As a result, this is a challenging book. But will we listen to this fellow believer?

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher for review.

Review: Abraham’s Silence

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Abraham’s Silence, J. Richard Middleton. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2021.

Summary: Challenges the traditional reading of the binding of Isaac that valorizes Abraham’s silence as unquestioning obedience and faith, contending that God wanted more than silent obedience.

Abraham is held up as an exemplar of faith, who believed God and was reckoned righteous. Perhaps nowhere is this view of Abraham held up more than in the binding of Isaac in Genesis 22, known to Jewish readers as the Aqedah, from the Hebrew “to bind.” Abraham’s unquestioning obedience is upheld as a model of faith, that “God would provide the lamb,” that Abraham believed that he and Isaac would return to the servants. and the testimony of Hebrews 11:17-19 that Abraham believed “God could even raise the dead, and so in a manner of speaking he did receive Isaac back from death.”

Yet many thoughtful readers find this narrative disturbing. The idea that God would command such a sacrifice, even as a test, disturbs (although it must be noted that God prevents the act, subsequently forbidding all child sacrifice, in contrast to the gods of surrounding peoples.) Yet the images of the bound Isaac, and the raised knife shake us. What also disturbs J. Richard Middleton is the silence of Abraham. The narrative record does not record Abraham saying anything to God. He rises early the next morning (perhaps to avoid Sarah?), packs up the donkey with wood, and leaves with Isaac and two servants. No plea to spare his son for the sake of the promise. No plea to take him rather than the child of the promise. No nothing. Middleton proposes that part of the test is whether Abraham would talk back to God.

Middleton makes the case that there is a strong element running through scripture of “lament with an edge.” This is seen throughout the Psalms where God’s people cry out to God in pain and suffering that it doesn’t seem that God sees or hears, wondering how long he will permit this. Moses challenges God, convincing God to spare Israel despite their idolatry, pleading God’s reputation among the nations. He refuses to settle for less than God’s presence with him. And God accedes to all this and reveals himself as the God of steadfast love and faithfulness.

Much of the book, Part Two, is devoted to the exemplar par excellence of talking back to God–Job. He contends that Job’s vigorous protest is approved by God, in contrast to the counsel of his “comforters.” The fact that God speaks twice indicates he wants Job to speak back

Against this Old Testament backdrop, Middleton contends Abraham stands out in his silence. He acknowledges the scholarship of Walter Moberly and Jon Levenson that rules out criticisms of Abraham because these are external to the text. Middleton credits this precept but contends there are subtle textual cues to suggest that God wanted more than silent obedience. He notes the shift from YHWH to elohim, suggesting the test involved whether Abraham would perceive something different about the God of the covenant from the gods (elohim) of surrounding peoples. He notes the early departure, perhaps to avoid discussion with Sarah, and the three-day silent journey to a location that should have taken a day (Abraham doesn’t want to do this, but says nothing, just drags his feet), And there are the words to Isaac, “God will provide the lamb, my son.” Middleton says we assume the comma but what if this was not in Abraham’s mind? Middleton includes an amusing comic here to make the point.

Perhaps most striking is that afterward, Isaac parts from Abraham, returning only to bury Abraham. Sarah is also recorded as living apart from Abraham. Isaac’ life in many ways is a parenthesis between Abraham and Jacob. Middleton wonders how different this would have been if Abraham advocated for his son. For example in Jacob’s eyes, the God of Abraham is the fear of Isaac. Middleton wonders if the family dysfunctions of this family began at this time.

Middleton proposes that Abraham barely passes the test, maybe a “C”–he obeys–but that God wanted more. He wanted to see if Abraham would actively speak back, to advocate for the son and for the promise. Sadly, he did not, and also failed to see the richness of God’s mercy.

There is much to be said for this proposal. There is a pattern of Abraham’s willingness to put others at jeopardy–Sarah, Ishmael, and Hagar. In each instance God bales them out, as he does with Isaac. The exception seems to be Lot and Sodom, in Genesis 18, where Abraham pleads from fifty to ten righteous to save the city. Middleton notes that even here, he stops, though Lot and his family number less than ten. Fearing to anger God (although God showed no anger with his pleading), he fails discover how far God’s mercy would go. All he sees is the destruction of the cities, not knowing of Lot’s rescue…and he just moves on. Would Abraham go further in pleading for “his only son, the son he loved”? He doesn’t.

There is also the fallout of the binding in the fracturing of the family, and the likely trauma to Isaac. God works redemptively over the generations, but was this what God intended? Middleton raises profound questions that make us look afresh at this narrative.

Yet I find Middleton unconvincing on several counts. There are Abraham’s utterances to Isaac and the servants. Middleton treats these as brave but unbelieving when in fact they prove out. There is the specific approbation of the angel of the Lord and the restatement of the promise of blessing. Middleton notes subtleties in the language that in his mind qualify this approbation. I found them unconvincing.

I also looked for a discussion of Hebrews 11:17-19 in the text. Christians “valorize” (to use Middleton’s term) Abraham at least in part because of this text, taking our cue for how we read the story from the inspired writer of Hebrews. Middleton’s discussion was not to be found in the text but only in a footnote (59) on page 213-214. He writes:

“The New Testament also seems to validate Abraham’s attempt to sacrifice Isaac. In Heb. 11:17-19, Abraham is praised for his faith in the resurrection (he believed God could raise Isaac), which is the reason why he went ahead with the sacrifice of his son. Beyond noting that the explicit doctrine of the resurrection did not arise until after the exile. I would point to Heb. 11:32, which list none other than Jephthah as a hero of faith (in contrast to his portrayal as an unsavory character in Judg. 11). This is clearly based on extra-biblical tradition and not on the biblical text itself.“

Middleton’s argument is to find one questionable element (Jephthah) in the Hebrews 11 account to throw shade on the account of Abraham. This, to me is not an adequate argument for why Christians should not heed the testimony of Hebrews 11 concerning Abraham, and placing such an argument in a footnote reflects to me a reluctance to address evidence that contradicts his argument.

What Middleton does for me is make me look afresh at this challenging text. Along with him, I find myself wondering at Abraham’s silence toward God. I’m less certain than Middleton that Abraham barely passed the test but I do find myself wondering “what if?” I find myself wondering about the “cost” of this test to Abraham’s family. Yes, God did provide the sacrifice but Abraham, at least in a relational sense, lost a son (and, it seems, Sarah as well). What Middleton does is offer a challenge to address these costs for traditional views that valorize Abraham. He also offers the examples of vigorous prayers that take God seriously enough to lament and to contend with God. Whatever my questions about his reading of Abraham, this is a contribution I can wholeheartedly affirm.

Review: Hopeful Lament

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Hopeful Lament, Terra McDaniel. Downers Grove: IVP/Formatio, 2023.

Summary: Out of a string of experiences of loss, the writer, a spiritual director writes about grief, lament, and the hope inherent in biblical lament.

Terra McDaniel and her family went through a season of life where her friends began to liken her to Job. Their house burned to the ground, their daughter lost a child amid a life-threatening miscarriage, and her husband lost his pastoral position, resulting in their deparure from a church community they helped nurture from a home group.

As a spiritual director, and with the aid of others, she turned to the practice of lament to tend her grief. She writes because she believes we all need to recover the practice of lament. If nothing else, we’ve all lived through the experience of loss and grief in the pandemic, and the societal and environmental upheavals of recent years. And lament both heals and engenders hope in allowing us to express our griefs, all our emotions, questions and losses to God rather than being caught in a downward spiral.

Over ten chapters, she walks us through how this is so. Lament gives us permission to grieve and not suppress our grief but walk through it. Lament allows us to speak our sadness, with biblical lament offering us language to express our sorrows to God. Lament allows us to give our vulnerability, our “broken hallelujahs” to God and to discover that this is enough. She explores trauma and how it manifests physically and the practices that allow one to gently and safely lament trauma. She addresses how we lament when what we’ve lost is a toxic Christian community and the complicated work of both grieving and confessing our own complicity. Sometimes grief comes to whole families and she offers guidance of how we do that both individually and together, particularly with children who may grieve differently but need to grieve, whether it is the loss of a pet or a parent. Finally, she explores how we make our way through lament to life beginning anew.

Each of the chapters is accompanied with an exercise with suggestions both for adults and children. And this is one of the strengths of the work, its recognition that lament is important to children and shared experiences, whether making collages, using our bodies to express how we feel, or terra divina, identifying an object in nature and thinking about what God might say to us through the object.

McDaniel’s book gives permission to “feel all the feels” and express them to God, to take the time to tend and go through our grief, and offers ways to give voice both verbally and bodily, with all our being, to our laments. She shows sensitivity to safety, to what triggers, and to times when we need to get help. It’s a book born of real-life experience honestly shared. We and those we love will face loss. This book, along with caring friends, can be a trusted companion offering help and hope.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher.

Review: Sarah’s Laughter

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Sarah’s Laughter, Vinoth Ramachandra. Carlisle, Cumbria, UK: Langham Global Library, 2020.

Summary: An exploration of suffering, whether through illness or physical decline, human or natural evil, and the embrace of grief, lament, doubt, questioning and more, and what it means to hope amid our struggle.

I thought a long time after listening to an older, respected teacher began a talk with words something like this: “As one gets older it becomes clearer that there is much in life that is hard, and that hurts.” This new work by Vinoth Ramachandra carries a similar message and it comes as a stark challenge to a lamentless church that proclaims a form of Christian life that moves from victory to victory.

Ramachandra has seen the hardness of life first hand, witnessing the bloody civil war in his native Sri Lanka, and the complicity of global powers that profited from the arms sold that perpetuated the conflict. He observes the staggering consequences of climate change for the poor of the nations and the unique vulnerability of the poor in our present pandemic. And he has grieved the loss of a wife to cancer. So much suffering leads him to ask two questions of God. One is “Why, Lord?” The other is “How long, O Lord?” They are questions that do not beg a theoretical explanation and this book is not an attempt to offer one. Rather it invites the unvarnished expression of our pain and doubts and questions, even as do the “psalms of darkness” in scripture. We both wonder about the existence of God and rage at what seems the unfairness of it all to the God we doubt. His message comes as a special challenge to many Western churches (at least white churches) where lament is not a part of either the liturgy or the life of the church.

In subsequent chapters he explores the anguish of Job, an anguish that both questions and seeks God, and is not answered by friends who can only muster arguments of divine justice and retribution. He explores the testimony of scripture and theologians to the grief and pain of God, the tears of God, the suffering of God with us culminating in the “handing over” of his son who “dies both at our hands and with us.” He wrestles with the realities of natural evil from animal predation to natural disasters, from which he observes the poor dying in disproportionate numbers, while reminding us that human evil is far worse.

Ramachandra considers what it means for the church to live as a community that holds grief and hope together. He believes that this is a creative place, one of forgiveness, of making meaning, of pursuing justice, and of anticipating a new creation. It is also a place of waiting. Ramachandra calls us to a faith that “is about faithfulness in action rather than knowing all the ‘right doctrines.’ ” It is a life lived both with all our questions and griefs, and yet in faithful and hopeful actions that follow in Christ’s steps, both to the cross, and beyond.

This is a far cry from “happy, clappy Christianity.” Ramachandra writes a book that unflinchingly looks at the hardest realities, the hardest questions we may ask and the most painful cries of our heart. And yet he also explores the possibility of a life still lived toward God, by faith and faithfulness, where doubt and belief, lament and joy live together. This book is for those whose life is hard and hurts. Inevitably, that will be all of us.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

Review: Surprised by Paradox

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surprised by paradox

Surprised by Paradox, Jen Pollock Michel. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2019.

Summary: In a world where things are often defined in either-or terms and a quest for certainty, Michel proposes there are many things, beginning with basic biblical realities that are both-and, inviting our continuing curiosity.

Whether it is schism in the church, political divides, or just a good old marital conflict, the parties often have defined things sharply in either-or terms, one way or another. Jen Pollock Michel explains how she began to look for a third way, and to write this book. A family member had been lying to her, repeatedly. She described her dilemma to her counselor.

“…I needed light for groping my way out of this tunnel with two exits: should I suffer lying or sever the relationship?

‘What if there’s a third way?’ she asked gently. Her language sounded like a struck bell, especially because ‘third way’ language was something my spiritual director often used with me. It was as if here was yet another invitation to find a sure-footed way on some undiscovered path–to find and where I had previously imagined only either and or. Here was an invitation to ‘lean not on my own understanding’ and find wisdom in the way of paradox” (pp. 22-23).

She discovered that paradox ran through the pages of scripture, that Christian orthodoxy is full of and, beginning with the incarnation, this idea that the Son of God came to earth, fully God, and also fully human. If paradox is at the heart of the nature of the Lord we trust and follow, might we look for God in the and, rather than insisting on answers to either-or questions. This paradox also suggests that we find the spiritual in the material, the living God in the stuff of everyday life. It also suggests that to conform to God’s ideal for our lives, is to live fully the “one wild and precious life” that is ours, expressing in our own uniqueness, the image of God in our lives.

She goes on to explore three other paradoxes. There is the paradox of the kingdom, which is already here and not fully come, where the least are the greatest, where we both give lavishly and enjoy lavishly what we are given, and where strength takes the form of vulnerability whose crowning hour is the cross. Grace confronts us with other paradoxes. Treasured, yet not for any personal excellency. Finding favor when the wrath we deserved falls upon his favored Son. Michel writes, “We don’t get grace because we change our lives–but our lives are indelibly changed because we get grace. Finally there is lament, the raw, unvarnished plea to God of people in pain that God has not shielded them from, that is a paradoxical kind of faith. It takes God seriously enough to become angry, to speak with blunt honesty rather than pretty pieties when what has happened in one’s life doesn’t square with our understanding of who God is.

Michel is a compelling author, one who can relate the depths of theology to teaching her daughter to drive, and her need for grace. She weaves scripture, teaching of the theological “greats,” contemporary realities, images, and personal stories into a narrative that sings and helps us examine with fresh eyes what we thought we knew down pat, helping us by asking, “did you notice this and this?”

A friend once observed that when we try to get rid of the tensions in our faith, or our lives by getting rid of one side of the tension to focus on the other, we make life simpler, but also smaller and more confined. Jen Pollock Michel invites us to live with paradoxes, and to celebrate the ands of God. She proposes that this opens us up to mystery, to surprise, and to the depth of the riches of knowing our God and what it means to live in the and of his purposes, to experience how grace transforms our work, and how our laments in all their perplexity may be among the most robust acts of faith. What might this “third way” mean as Christians are present to a world mired in “either-or?”

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from the publisher. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

 

A Lament for a Divided Church

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Rembrandt_Harmensz._van_Rijn_-_Jeremia_treurend_over_de_verwoesting_van_Jeruzalem_-_Google_Art_Project

Rembrant, Jeremiah Lamenting the Destruction of Jerusalem

How long, O Lord?

How long will you endure a divided American church?

We were divided over slavery.

We were divided over suffrage.

We were divided over Civil Rights

We were divided over the Vietnam war.

We are divided today.

We travel the world on missions trips;

and fear the immigrants and refugees from those countries.

Pro-life Christians against Black Lives Matter Christians.

We complain about polarized politics and the death of civility;

And mirror those divides every Sunday while worshiping one God.

We pray “thy kingdom come” and pledge allegiance to various powers and parties.

We remember the broken body of Jesus, saying it was once for all;

And blithely continue to rend his body on earth.

We stand over the broken body giving thanks

For our freedom to worship.

How long, O Lord?