Where is the land to which you belong and that belongs to you?

“Where is the land to which you belong and that belongs to you?”

One way I can answer that question is by pulling out my passport.  Here, I am a citizen of the United States.  This is the land to which I belong, and that belongs to me. I’ve had a passport for as long as I can remember.  I’m so old that in my first one, I was included in my mother’s passport.  I was extremely proud when I was finally allowed to get my own first own passport.  Because it gave me proof, it gave me proof that there was somewhere that I belonged, a land where I belonged and that belonged to me.  Where all people had rights and where all would be protected….at least so I thought as a child.

It was my parents who inculcated my love of American citizenship.  My mother, because she became a citizen by choice.  She became a naturalized citizen because she chose to marry an American and chose to immigrate to this country because, having grown up in Nazi Germany, where fascism and violence ruled, she recognized the beauty and power and importance of democracy.  For my mother, her blue passport with gold letters stamping the United States of America meant that she was a protected citizen of these United States, and she returned that protection with gratitude and civic engagement. After a decade of suffering under the Nazis, the US was the land where she belonged and that, as a democracy, belonged to her.  And my father, because he fought for democracy in World War II, enlisting as soon as the US Army would take him at age 18.

“Where is the land to which you belong and that belongs to you?” is the core question for this morning (2nd Sunday in Lent Year C), including at the heart of our first reading from Genesis 15.  In Genesis 15 we have a dialogue between God and Abraham in which God restates an earlier promise or covenant that God made to Abraham.  Already in Genesis 12, God instructs Abraham to leave his homeland and together with his wife Sarah, his household, and his nephew Lot, to wander westward to the land of Canaan, the territory that today comprises Palestine, Israel and in some versions also Syria. Once Abraham gets to Canaan, he builds several altars to God, a kind of territorial flag planting, “conquering” the land of Canaan in the name of Adonai.  But Abraham leaves Canaan and goes to Egypt in an effort to survive a famine that has taken over the land.  Abraham returns to Canaan a second time.  And it is then that we have the dialogue in Genesis 15 with God repeating his promise to Abraham.  For a second time, God promises Abraham a new homeland, the Land of Canaan, to inhabit as Adonai’s people and where God will make Abraham’s descendants prosper. But there are some problems with God’s promise of giving Canaan over to Abraham and Abraham’s descendants.  Because there are people already living in Canaan, the indigenous inhabitants of the land.  But God doesn’t sweat the details.  Adonai isn’t concerned about the identity and rights of the indigenous people of the land—the Kenites, the Kenizzites, the Kadmonites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Rephaim,  the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Girgashites, and the Jebusites.  Adonai becomes a colonialist God, declaring that Abraham and his descendants can have authority over the land and the people.  If Abraham had bothered to ask the indigenous people of Canaan: “where is the land to which you belong and that belongs to you?,” the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Rephaim and the Canaanites would no doubt have answered this land….this land of milk and honey.  Only Adonai and Abraham didn’t ask. They conquered.

The challenge with this covenant and eternal promise of Canaan to Abraham and his descendants is that it has become one of the main justifications for not only the establishment of Israel (which, as a Lutheran Christian, I strongly support) but the ongoing displacement and removal of Arab residents in Palestine (which I, as a Christian, do not).  Should this divine promise of land in the Middle East be read as an eternal land lease to a particular religious people? Biblical scholarship suggests we must be wary. Because the passages about the Abrahamic Covenant are not original texts.  They weren’t written down during the time of Abraham, ca. 1800 BCE.  (There weren’t written records in that era.) The Book of Genesis, including these passages promising Canaan, was likely written down and edited around 500 BCE, during what is called the Second Temple Period when the Jewish leaders were released from captivity in Babylon, returned to Jerusalem under the protection of the Persian emperor Cyrus and were intent on establishing the legitimacy of the returned Jewish monarchy in Jerusalem.  The passages about God’s covenant with Abraham, giving the promised Land to the Israelites in perpetuity, can be read as part of a religio-political strategy to assert Jewish claims on the volatile territory.

Fast forward now to 1948 and the establishment of the State of Israel as part of the British mandate of the territory after the Brits conquered the Ottoman Empire at the close of World War 1.  The claim of a perpetual Jewish land lease based on God’s covenant with Abraham had massive implications for the majority-Muslim indigenous peoples who had been living in Palestine for 1400 years when Israel was established in 1948.  Imagine asking the Arab peoples living in Palestine in 1948 this question: “Where is the land to which you belong and that belongs to you?”  What would they have answered?  “We belong to this land and it belongs to us.”  But like the Hittites and Periszzites and the Amorites, the Palestinians were made to leave swaths of lands and be displaced.  And so in our Genesis 15 reading, we have the roots of the Israeli-Palestinian problem that continues today in the Israeli-Gaza war.  Because the question for the Palestinians remains unsettled: “Where is the land to which you belong and which belongs to you?”

“Where is the land to which you and I belong, and that belongs to you and me?”  Paul tells us in his letter to the Philippians, Chapter 3: our citizenship[j] is in heaven, and it is from there that we are expecting a Savior.  As people of faith, we are dual citizens; we are passport-carrying citizens of an earthly land.  But we are not bound by that passport alone.  We are not bound solely by the laws and policies of that earthly land.  We are citizens of the land of God, the land of that God envisions, we are citizens of the true Promised Land that is not tied to just one place or piece of land.  

The true Promised Land is not the land of Canaan, or even that democracy that my mother chose to flee to in 1958 believing---as many who come to this country from elsewhere—that the US is a promised land of liberty and justice. The true Promised Land is a land that has not yet been fully realized, although people and nations may try.  The Promised Land is there where the vulnerable are restored, the weak are protected, and the violent power is scattered.  We catch a glimpse of the true Promised Land in Jesus’ short lament and proclamation in our Gospel reading today.   The Pharisees tell Jesus that the violent, oppressive King Herod who had John the Baptist arrested and beheaded is after Jesus too. But Jesus doesn’t blink. Instead, Jesus counters Herod’s threats with his commitment to continue healing and casting out demons, and offering a powerful image of defense.  Jesus, using one of the few female images to communicate God’s actions, explains that he has come to protect the people of Jerusalem—to protect you and me who are longing to be faithful people of God. Like a mother hen protects her brood, Jesus offers to protect the people of Jerusalem from the violence of the Empire, and proclaims his vision of how a land should be: an empire of restoration and healing.  Jesus gives voice and image to the true Promised Land.  But Jesus also laments that so many in Jerusalem fail to recognize what he is offering.  Jesus challenges us to recognize this truth, this gift: that the land to which you and I belong and that belongs to you and me is the promised land of Jesus, the promised land of love and healing and beloved community.

One of the most powerful contemporary witnesses to the promised land was the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who, in his final speech on the night before he died, closed his speech with this testimony: “I just want to do God’s will.  And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain.  And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you.  But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land.”  Dr. King is speaking here, especially on behalf of African Americans seeking to live in a land of equality and inclusion, free of racism, but the insight resonates for all of us. 

We all must ask ourselves: What is the land we belong to and what land belongs to us? We can answer, of course, with the name of the country stamped in gold on our passports.  But the true answer, the life-giving answer, is that we belong to the Promised Land. Not the promised land in Palestine that the politically repurposed covenant between God and Abraham purports to establish on earth in perpetuity without regard for indigenous inhabitants of the land.  No, we belong to the promised land of Jesus, that Jesus calls into being with his command to love, that the Church is called to steward.  With the life and teachings of Jesus, we too, like Dr. King, have seen the promised land.   Whether we get there or not remains an open question.  We will, we will, if we continue to be the church of healing and restoration and protection against violence and harm. The church, like Jesus, the mother hen, defending her brood…for life in the Promised Land.  Amen.