The story of Jesus’ encounter with the Syrophoenician woman in Mark 7:24–30 is often read as a story of outsider faith that foreshadows the inclusion of the Gentiles. In that reading, Jesus tests the faith of one beyond the bounds of Israel, and her successful reply becomes a sign that Christ’s mission will move beyond Israel. While such conclusions may be consistent with the Church’s broader understanding of God and the scope of Christ’s mission, they too quickly pass over the violence of Jesus’ language, the asymmetry between Jesus, the unnamed woman, and her suffering daughter, and the contested naming of the woman herself within the passage.

On closer reading, this scene cannot be reduced to a simple miracle story or a neat lesson in inclusion. The daughter’s healing is bound to a verbal struggle in which speech, identity, and social order are brought into crisis by the urgency of life. What is at stake in Mark 7:24–30 is not simply the faith of an outsider, but the exposure of a distorted social order through a struggle for life, as the Syrophoenician woman’s speech becomes the hinge through which healing occurs without erasing the asymmetries that structure the encounter.

Translation, Place, and Asymmetry

Among the few ways the text names the unnamed woman, her ethnicity and social location are most prominent, a fact reflected in the translational choice to render her as either “gentile” or “Greek.” That choice materially alters how the woman is framed. To identify this petitioner as “Greek” can suggest a higher social status than that of the poor Jews in rural areas whom Jesus might represent, while to identify her simply as “gentile” can risk flattening the story into a later Jew/Gentile dichotomy. The instability of her naming suggests that the woman is not simply an outsider to be incorporated, but a figure whose identity resists reduction to a single theological function.

Tyre is not incidental to this encounter. Jesus has crossed into Gentile territory, and the scene unfolds in a place already marked by contested belonging, inherited hostility, and unequal proximity to power. The passage is therefore not simply about a needy woman approaching a healer, but about a meeting that takes place in a socially charged border world, even the border between the colonized lands of Tyre and Galilee. In Mark’s larger narrative, this location stands between Jesus’ dispute over purity and the later feeding in Gentile territory, making Tyre a hinge rather than a backdrop.

The asymmetry of the encounter is not created only by Jesus’ response. It is already present in the way the woman and her daughter appear in the narrative. The woman is introduced not by name but through a cluster of identifiers, while her daughter is introduced through affliction, as one with an “unclean spirit.” Before either of them acts meaningfully within the scene, they are already rendered socially legible through categories of ethnicity, gender, geography, and impurity. The exchange therefore does not begin on equal ground. It unfolds within a world in which Jesus can invoke the order of the scene, while the unnamed woman must answer from within terms already arranged against her.

The Woman’s Reply and the Order It Exposes

The saying about the children and the dogs is not merely a statement about timing or sequence. It does not simply mean that Israel must be fed first and others later. The image also names an order of worth. The children belong at the table; the dogs do not. Whatever softening one draws from the diminutive form, the logic of the saying still depends upon a distinction between those who properly receive and those who receive, if at all, only indirectly and beneath them. The insult is therefore not accidental to the passage but integral to its pressure. Jesus’ words do not only defer the woman’s request; they render exclusion rhetorically intelligible before her reply exposes the inadequacy of that order.

The image of dogs in this passage does more than mark a secondary place at the table. It participates in a logic of degradation by which exclusion is made to appear fitting, even natural. To name the woman and her daughter through an animal figure is not simply to defer their claim, but to lower it. Even if the diminutive introduces a note of endearment, Jesus’ refusal still places the woman and her daughter within a degraded order of access. The woman’s response matters all the more because she does not deny the violence of the image. She answers from within it and bends it toward life. The diminutive, then, does not make the saying gentle. It sharpens the woman’s tactical brilliance, since her reply seizes the small opening embedded in Jesus’ own words without pretending that the humiliation is not real.

An aspect of this exchange that is often overlooked is that Christ’s action is narratively bound to the woman’s reply. Jesus does not heal the daughter through touch, visible command, or unsolicited compassion, but in response to what the woman says. Her word is clever, pointed, and effective. Jesus responds not simply to persistence in the abstract but specifically to “this word,” acknowledging the force of her answer. Healing in this scene is therefore elicited not simply by maternal desperation, but by speech that works within the image Jesus has given and turns it toward life.

The woman’s speech does not reject Jesus’ image from a safe distance. She does not deny the logic of the table, the children, or even the dogs. Instead, she seizes the small opening already present within Jesus’ own words and presses it toward life. The woman answers by taking up Jesus’ terms and exposing their insufficiency from within. Her reply therefore does more than secure an exception for her daughter. By accepting the image and yet refusing its finality, she exposes the inadequacy of the order invoked against her and reveals how quickly its logic begins to fail when pressed by a suffering life.

Healing Under Asymmetry

The encounter does result in healing, but it does not do so by dissolving the asymmetries that structure it. The woman remains unnamed, Jesus’ language remains harsh, and the terms of the exchange are still shaped by gender, ethnicity, and exclusion. The scene’s breakthrough must not be confused with the erasure of the violence that structures it. The scene does not move from hostility to innocence. It moves through struggle, and healing occurs without erasing the unequal order through which it has had to pass.

The story’s breakthrough, then, does not cancel the unequal terms on which it takes place. The woman is permitted speech, but only within a scene that still confines her to domestic and familial concerns and marks her as ethnically subordinate. She advocates not for public transformation, but for her daughter, and she secures healing only by accepting the figure of the “dogs” rather than contesting the hierarchy it names. In that sense, the passage does not simply overcome sexism and ethnocentrism; it reveals how deeply they structure the exchange even as the exchange is bent toward life. The healing is real, but it is not total: it does not arrive on innocent terms, nor does it undo the prejudicial order through which it comes. To read the story faithfully is therefore to affirm the healing without sanitizing the struggle through which it is given.

Constructive Christology

What this passage discloses Christologically cannot be resolved by saying either that Jesus is merely testing the woman or by treating the harshness of the exchange as though it could finally subordinate the divinity of Christ to the distortions of the world he enters. Both moves are too easy. The first protects Christ by denying the force of his words; the second protects us from the harder possibility that the one in whom Christians confess the fullness of God enters history under its pressures rather than above them.

What this constructive turn suggests is that Christ’s perfection is not best understood as historical untouchability. Rather, this passage presses toward a Christology in which divine faithfulness is disclosed within history as freedom from final captivity to its distortions. If this exchange ended with the reaffirmation of Gentiles as dogs beneath the table, it would culminate in the ratification of prejudice. But it does not end there. What proves decisive is that Jesus is not finally bound to inherited place. He does not allow the distorted order voiced in the exchange to stand unchallenged. He lets healing overrule it.

In that sense, sinlessness here is not distance from history, but freedom from remaining captive to its distortions. Christ is revealed not as one untouched by the world’s disorder, but as one who, within that disorder, refuses to let it have the final word.

Conclusion

This passage cannot finally be reduced to a story of outsider faith or even to a story of inclusion. What it exposes is the way denied life presses against the categories that misname it and the order that would keep it in its place. The woman’s reply matters not simply because it displays humility, persistence, or cleverness, but because it reveals the inadequacy of the world invoked against her. The healing of her daughter is therefore not an ornamental miracle appended to a theological lesson. It is the moment in which a distorted order is forced, however incompletely, to yield before the claim of life.

The woman’s speech does not erase difference, and the scene does not resolve the tensions it unveils. Neither suffering nor marginality is sanctified here. They are not goods to be preserved, but wounds that expose the violence of the world that produces them. Mark 7:24–30 reveals that distorted order is most clearly judged where healing breaks through. The final word is not who belongs beneath the table, but that healing overrules the order that put them there.

A note on sources: This reflection was shaped by readings of Mark 7:24–30 from Jin Young Choi, David Rhoads, Tat-siong Benny Liew, Stephen D. Moore, Dong Hyeon Jeong, and The Women’s Bible Commentary.

The doctrine of Christianity among the religions must begin with repentance. Christian speech about Palestine cannot pretend that the church has spoken innocently about Jews. The history of Christian anti-Judaism is real, violent, and enduring. Christians must reject supersessionism and refuse to treat religious others as alien others rather than neighbors. That claim is necessary. But it is not sufficient. Rejecting supersessionism does not require blessing the dispossession of Palestinians. Christian repentance for antisemitism becomes morally incoherent when it is used to silence Palestinian suffering.

Jewish suffering must never be used to justify the suffering of another people. That is not a rejection of Jewish safety. It is a refusal to let Jewish safety be imagined through Palestinian removal, humiliation, or permanent subordination. A Christian theology of Palestine must therefore refuse both antisemitism and anti-Palestinian racism. It must not collapse Jews into the State of Israel, Muslims into threat, or Palestinian Christians into a sentimental footnote.

Palestinian Muslims must be named as full neighbors and fellow sufferers, not merely as background figures in a Christian-Jewish conversation. The command to love the neighbor does not depend on shared doctrine. Land belongs to God and is given to be shared, not possessed as private or imperial property. That claim cuts against every religious nationalism that turns land into an idol. Muslims, Jews, and Christians do not have identical theological claims, and Christian theology should not pretend that they do. But difference does not excuse domination. Interreligious solidarity cannot be built by flattening Judaism, Christianity, and Islam into the same thing. It must be built through truthful difference ordered toward justice.

Palestinian Christians sharpen this entire question. A Western Christian reading of Scripture that treats Palestinians as invisible occupants of someone else’s sacred story must be refused. The hermeneutical key for Christian reading is Jesus Christ; any interpretation of Scripture that contradicts the life and teaching of Jesus is invalid for the church. That claim places Palestinian Christian theology directly inside Christian doctrine, not outside it as a political supplement. The question is not whether Western Christians should “care about” Palestinian Christians as an additional category. The question is whether Western Christians can recognize the crucified body of Christ when that body speaks Arabic, lives under occupation, worships in ancient churches, and shares land, grief, and hope with Muslim neighbors.

This is where eschatology becomes necessary. Christian hope cannot be reduced to optimism about history or escape from the earth. The life to come is not the cancellation of creation but God’s promised future for it. Resurrection means that what Christians do in the present in pursuit of justice, beauty, and peace is not wasted. Hope is therefore not an alibi for passivity. It is a judgment against the claim that empire is permanent.

An eschatological theology of Palestine says that occupation, apartheid, exile, and militarized borders are not ultimate. They may be politically powerful, but they are not finally real. The resurrection of Jesus is God’s refusal of the world’s verdict. That does not make Christian hope abstract. It makes it dangerous. If God’s future is a renewed creation, then Christian faith cannot bless systems that make life unlivable for the occupied, the displaced, or the besieged. If the risen Christ bears wounds, then the church cannot pursue reconciliation by asking the wounded to disappear.

Christian hope becomes vague when it speaks of peace without justice. God takes the side of the oppressed in order to empower them to regain their rights. This is not a claim that God hates the oppressor. It is a claim that God’s justice is restorative, truthful, and concrete. The oppressor is also liberated from the lie of domination, but not by bypassing confession, restitution, and repair. There is no Christian reconciliation without justice. There is no Christian hope that leaves Palestinians permanently occupied so that Western Christians can feel theologically balanced.

The doctrine of the church brings these claims home. Because the church is a company “to whom God is faithful,” it cannot secure its identity by controlling the boundaries of whose suffering counts. The church receives its life from God’s faithfulness and therefore remains answerable to the wounded members it would rather ignore. It is always under judgment. It is not faithful because it has correct symbols, ancient liturgies, progressive commitments, or public statements. The church is faithful when it receives God’s faithfulness and becomes a visible witness to it in the world.

Western Christianity has often failed that test in Palestine. It has prayed for the peace of Jerusalem while ignoring Palestinians in Jerusalem, visited holy sites while avoiding the living communities around them, and spoken about Jews and Muslims while forgetting that Palestinian Christians exist at all. This is not just a representational failure; it is a failure of catholicity. Palestinian Christians do not replace Jews in the story of God or make Muslim Palestinians less central to the struggle for justice. They expose the inadequacy of Western Christian imagination. If Western Christians see Palestine as a problem between Judaism and Islam, they have forgotten the church. If they see the land through biblical memory but not through the living bodies of Palestinians, they have confused pilgrimage with possession.

Palestinian Christianity reaches back to the earliest Christian communities of the land and refuses the assumption that Christianity belongs to the West while Palestine belongs only to someone else’s religious or political story. The point is not a modern nationalist claim projected backward. The point is that Christianity did not begin in Europe, America, or the imagination of Western empire. Palestinian Christianity is not peripheral to the church’s story. It is one of the church’s oldest living witnesses. To erase Palestinian Christians is to misremember the body of Christ.

The church’s task, then, is not to baptize a political program. It is to bear witness to the reign of God against empire through truth-telling, peacemaking, justice, and reconciliation without hatred. That witness requires interreligious honesty, eschatological hope, and ecclesial repentance. It requires Christians to reject antisemitism without making Palestinian liberation unspeakable. It requires Christians to honor Muslim neighbors without treating them as generic victims or religious threats. It requires Christians to recognize Palestinian Christians as kin whose suffering indicts the whole body.

A coherent Christian position on Palestine must therefore be anti-imperial, interreligious, and ecclesial. It must say that the land belongs to God, not to empire. It must say that Jewish safety, Muslim dignity, and Palestinian freedom are not enemies. It must say that the church’s hope is not escape from history but participation in God’s promised renewal of creation. And it must say that the body of Christ includes those whom empire has taught Western Christians not to see, including Palestinian Christians.

When Christians turn Jesus into an ideological mascot, they misplace power and belonging, committing a subtle form of idolatry. Such idolatry violates the command forbidding any created thing from occupying the place of ultimacy before God (Ex 20:3). The danger is not that Christ is denied, but that he is conscripted. Fear-driven control replaces participation in the crucified Lord. Therefore, the Church must recover a faithful understanding of power through the doctrine of God, a cruciform Christology, and a rightly ordered ecclesiology that catechizes its people into participation rather than control.

Christopher Morse, in his text Not Every Spirit: A Dogmatics of Christian Disbelief, describes God’s being as “a-being-One-with-Another-in-a-unity-of-Spirit that is the domination of love,”[1] locating divine dominion not in isolated will but in relational communion. Morse’s hyphenation here is not merely aesthetic; it signals that divine dominion is not first the imposition of control but the fullness of shared life. If dominion names communion, then coercive preservation cannot be its extension.

In securing Christ for their own ends, Christians reveal a failure to trust that God’s dominion is sufficient. As Morse claims, Christian faith refuses to believe that God’s way of being is either the effect of something else or untouched by anything else.[2] If God’s way of being is not the product of creaturely forces, then divine dominion does not depend upon creaturely reinforcement (Ps 103:19). As Catherine Mowry LaCugna insists, theological claims about God must be rooted in what is revealed in the economy of salvation, they become projections of human values onto the divine being.[3] To secure Christ defensively is to attribute fragility to God.

Morse further clarifies that responsibility toward creation “centers not in any human dominance […] but in God’s providential concursus in which human agency is conjoined with God’s purpose.”[4] Divine and human action are not competitive but participatory, for in him we live and move and have our being (Acts 17:28); attempts to secure Christ through coercion invert this order. One might object that such an account risks rendering divine dominion so sufficient that human resistance becomes unnecessary. Yet participatory agency is not passivity; it is action ordered toward communion rather than domination.

Ideological defense therefore reveals a doctrinal confusion about divine power. As Catherine Mowry LaCugna insists, the doctrine of the Trinity must be tied “to the actual economy of salvation” and guarded against “ungrounded speculation about God’s ‘inner life.’”[5] When Christians defend Jesus through coercive means, they do not derive their understanding of divine power from God’s saving self-revelation but from anxious projections of control. In doing so, they confess a different god than the one revealed in Christ.

Yet the surrender embodied in Gethsemane is not mere resignation. As Morse insists, “Cross and Resurrection […] cannot be separated in the signifying of the gospel.” Cruciform surrender is therefore not the abandonment of power but its proper revelation. The cross itself must be understood not as abstract suffering but as a political execution. As Dorothee Sölle observes, the cross is rightly grasped only when one recognizes its “objective function as an instrument of power politics in the service of the rule over, and oppression of, subject peoples.”[6] Yet the political character of the cross does not exhaust its meaning; it reveals the depth of divine self-giving precisely within such structures. If divine dominion is communion rather than coercion, then the cross does not contradict God’s power—it discloses its form.

The disciples act not from faithful conformity to the way of Jesus, but from fear shaped by a vision of dominion that cannot imagine authority without control. Their defense is not faithfulness misapplied but faithfulness misformed by a conception of power in which dominion must be obtained and preserved through coercion.

The object of the disciples’ violence is not the architect of injustice but a servant—one already caught within a system not of his own making (Lk 22:50).[7] Fear-driven defense rarely reaches the centers of power; it strikes those nearest at hand. In healing the wounded servant, Jesus not only rebukes violence but redefines dominion (Lk 22:52). Authority is revealed not in the capacity to wound but in the freedom to restore.

In healing the servant and refusing coercive defense, Jesus exercises authority. Resurrection confirms that this authority cannot be extinguished by violence. As Sölle puts it, “They simply could not succeed in destroying him. That is resurrection.”[8] The indestructibility of obedient love, not the reassertion of force, reveals divine dominion. What appears as weakness is the enactment of divine authority.

If Christ’s authority is exercised in cruciform mercy, then the Church’s formation cannot be shaped by fear of loss. The disciples’ grasping discloses how fear of loss—real or perceived—when unformed by trust in the sufficiency of Christ’s lordship, relocates belonging into projects of control. In such moments, ultimacy is quietly relocated from the crucified Lord to created structures that must resist crucifixion to maintain their trustworthiness. Rieger and Kwok describe this fusion of church and host culture as a “Christendom” mentality—the “creation and maintenance of a Christian nation by forging a strong and close relationship between the Christian church and its host culture.”[9]

Participation in Christ’s lordship may entail visible loss—not as transaction but as relinquishment of false security, a loss that wounds but does not determine identity. Sölle notes, “Really living like Christ will not mean reward […] but difficulties, discrimination, solitude, anxiety.”[10] If the church proclaims the inbreaking reign of God, it “must provide the environment for […] a foretaste of it.”[11] Yet such foretaste cannot be engineered but arise from conformity to the crucified Lord.

This distinction between preservation and participation flows from the nature of revelation itself. As Morse argues, “what happens concerning Jesus is believed to be the taking place of God’s own acts of creation, judgment, and salvation.” The media through which this revelation is known cannot make it occur; God’s Spirit alone confirms it.[12] The Church testifies to divine dominion; influence cannot be equated with faithfulness. Without attending to embedded power differentials, ecclesial reform risks becoming “another novel idea that will ultimately benefit those who already reap plenty from the status quo.”[13]

The decisive ecclesiological question, then, is whether Christians are being formed in trust of divine dominion or in habits of fear-driven preservation. Christian malformation produces coercive preservation; cruciform formation produces participatory witness. The Church becomes what it trusts.

When Christians turn Jesus into an ideological mascot, the problem is not merely political misjudgment but theological confusion about the nature of divine dominion. Divine dominion is love; Christ’s lordship is revealed not in coercive preservation but in cruciform mercy. In the face of loss, the disciples grasp while Jesus exercises authority through surrender and mercy. Freed from anxious defense, the Church is shaped by the crucified and risen Lord instead of the need to preserve its own power.

[1] Christopher Morse, Not Every Spirit: A Dogmatics of Christian Disbelief (New York: Continuum, 2009), 115.

[2] Morse, Not Every Spirit, 120.

[3] Catherine Mowry LaCugna, Freeing Theology: The Essentials of Theology in Feminist

Perspective. Edited by Catherine Mowry LaCugna. New York: HarperOne, 1993, 91.

[4] Morse, Not Ever Spirit, 224.

[5] LaCugna, Freeing Theology, 92.

[6]Dorothee Sölle, Thinking About God: An Introduction to Theology. London: SCM Press, 1990, 124.

[7] This emphasis was sharpened through reflection on a Lenten pastoral letter by Bishop Chris Green, “Lenten Letter,” Diocese of St. Anthony, February 17, 2026, https://us15.campaign-archive.com/?e=7d5967c7ac&u=6a9843db6605d3e38781fb5d9&id=940bb60696

[8] Sölle, Thinking About God, 132.

[9] Joerg Rieger and Kwok Pui-lan, Occupy Religion: Theology of the Multitude, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Pub., 2012, 123.

[10] Sölle, Thinking About God, 133.

[11] Rieger and Pui-lan, Occupy Religion, 123.

[12] Morse, Not Ever Spirit, 109.

[13] Rieger and Pui-lan, Occupy Religion, 122.

It’s been two years and thirty-eight that you’ve tried to divide me—
to pit me against myself, to strip me at the seam
  your laugh, frustration;
  mine, bewildered horror.
With every pass of the blade 
I am enlivened to see
no other part of me.

I am no patchwork 
of stitch or lace,
nor hurried thread to stop the gape.
I am not an in-between,
though I see what is true
of you 
    and them
        and me.

You silence morality
and amplify it in me.
Thank you, and
how unfortunate to be, 
    to me, 
        for you.

While women and children die and plead,
and father’s return in fullness of loss, 
I am no threat to you,
though you demean me to be.
It is you who strips away dignity
while nations rise in streets, and 
Gaza crumbles to a lighthouse peak.

Woe to you presidents and kings,
market traders,
weapon creators,
and you, religious hypocrites
who forget the resurrection 
and deal out death
    after death
        after death.

You too shall inherit the Kingdom of God, where 
Lazarus fetches no water,
nor answers your call.
Not from spite,
but because he cannot hear you 
from the grace that raised him high
while you squirm with the worms 
that teach you to be dead.
  
Christ is in the rubble and the sky,
in suffering and its hope,
while you manufacture a savior of demise.
Christ is in Gaza, in the glimmer of night.
In hunger, it’s known the deserving of bread, 
in the terror of displacement, the safe warmth of a bed.
In an active kill zone, safety is real.
In Gaza’s suffering, humanity must kneel.

Return, O children of Israel,
to the promised land where 
God is in bitter hunger and thickness of honey’s sweet.
Destroy your weapons, your greed, your lust.
Embrace what your violence has buried beneath.
Only in Palestine, in the anguish and fear, can you hear it—
true hope lives here. 

At 14, just starting high school, being Palestinian was more a piece of trivia than an identity, something that only my last name gave away. That day forced me to reckon with the seeming fracture of my identity. Where does one go when terror is attributed to them, if not in word then in fear.

High school was just barely starting to feel routine. Fourteen is awkward enough without also living between worlds: church community on one side, public school on the other. At school, I was more bystander than peer.

Much has changed and continues to change as I learn more about myself and who I am. I’m really starting to get comfortable abiding in the chaos I can’t control—present to myself and others despite the fractures.

The poem that follows is what came out when I was writing my essay for admission into Garrett Evangelical Theological Seminary’s MTS in Theology and Ethics. It is quite the gamble to let poetry carry so much weight in an academic application, but it also felt like the truest expression I could offer.

I pray that God will change us, change me, into being more of who we truly are: a people who embrace difference, repent of the harm we cause, and offer the mercy we desperately need. We’re poisoned in the rage that damns us.

Lord, have mercy!

I am the ghost of stories that were never fully told—
a life shaped by half-sung melodies,
a longing to know, deep within my bones,
songs barely whispered.

I live in the in-between:
Euro-American. Palestinian. Cherokee.
The kid at the high school lunch table on 9/11,
clinging to Whiteness and pride,
raising a fist to the sky—
and damning himself in the very same breath.

I am the product of loss, of abuse, of shame, of neglect.
I am Moses raised by empire. No more and no less
the next iteration of culture and thought,
trained to be in awe of my captors
for saving me from my “savage” ways.

I am the recipient of God’s grace—
though draped in patriotic cloak.
The “terrorist” whose songs were never meant to be learned.
Whose language—to be heard,
but never spoken.

But I am not what was withheld from me.
I am the learning to live in the in-between.
I am the melody that vibrates in praise and lament,
even when I cannot sing the words.

And still, there is something I can do:
I can be the unsung song—
the chord that resonates to Fairuz.
The one who sits with you at the church potluck,
over fried chicken and overcooked pasta,
and invites you home for hummus and beitenjaan.

Not to pacify your hunger—
but to invite you into the ache.
The longing for more than the safest take
on your religion,
and freedom from hate.
Trained by an empire that believes
it can baptize the Jordan and
drape the Messiah in shades of conquest.
Yet victory is raised in the crucified.

Writing is a strange thing. Rereading my original work is even stranger. When writing, one is able to understand more deeply what they are thinking and experiencing, insights that otherwise might go completely unnoticed. Even now, I am answering a question I’ve been wrestling with: why do I reread my work so much? Am I trying to live in that moment again?

Maybe. But I also take much satisfaction from Natalie Goldberg’s reflection in Writing Down the Bones, that I am not the poem. The writing was tapping into reality for me then, and revisiting it does not in anyway capture the same awe and excitement of that first moment of revelation.

Still, I do think that revelation has continued as I edited this peace and prepared it for a writing competition. It was in the editing process that I realized how much meaning was present that I hadn’t noticed before.

I am not sure whether it would be helpful to name those moments, so I do invite your reflection as you sit with it.

I want to name and thank my friends who helped me in editing this piece: , a brilliant and thoughtful educator, and Aly Hawkins, a real bonafide Writer and Editor. They not only made the piece better, they helped me see this reality all the more clearly.

Tallasi, Not Tulsa

We are always moving toward something. Always searching. Always processing. Always discovering meaning. Connecting the dots—and not just the obvious ones, either. No moment exists without meaning and implication; rather, it is we who often exist without recognizing the moment. Sometimes meaning creeps up on you, revealing itself over time. Other times, purpose, meaning, and desire coalesce all at once—undeniable, rich with understanding, lingering long after the moment has passed.

It was in one of those moments, unplanned and ordinary, that I found my feet had set out while my mind lingered on my plans to promote a pilgrimage through Creek allotments, the living history of Black Wallstreet, and whether to use the name “Tallasi” on the graphics. Tallasi means “Old Town”. It’s a Creek word. I had to look that up, both the spelling and the meaning. I look for myself in everything. My first hope for anything Native I encounter is that it might help me understand my own Cherokee identity. But this word is not Cherokee; it’s Creek. 

Buying a home in this neighborhood is no small thing. It’s one of the oldest neighborhoods here, on land that belonged to the Creek, not the Cherokee, and that should be spelled Tallasi, not Tulsa. I want to know who lived here before me, and before them, and even before that. Was it the Creek people or the bison? Was it prairie or woodland? What happened between then and now to make my expensive fixer seem like a good idea? It probably isn't. 

I chose to walk down Carthage, the part that runs behind the QT.  I brought my camera, hoping to capture some images of lives lived differently than my own. It’s a film camera, so it announces my intent with each snap of the shutter. The photo might not even turn out, but that doesn’t change the reality of the moment. It’s easy to point my untrained eye toward those lying on the sidewalk or to their belongings left unattended. It’s much more difficult to point my camera at them—the people—to reveal myself, my intentions. My impulse is to capture their messiness and, in so doing, define the moment by their otherness and victimhood. A beautiful picture of the harshness of reality, of the neighbors we don’t think of as neighbors and so don’t treat as neighbors. 

It makes no difference if they’re awake or asleep, sprawled out, or neatly stacked like their things on the sidewalk. The result is the same. I shrink back, curl inward, and retreat into myself out of embarrassment.

I can't take the photo. 
What if the shutter’s click, the whine of the ‘90s-era auto-advance breaks the silence and I’m caught? 

I’ve been sharing my low-quality film photography on social media. Mostly buildings. Mostly structures. It’s low quality because I have no clue what makes a picture a photo. Or, maybe, it’s more that I don’t really know how to translate meaning through the viewfinder, let alone in the print. So, I stick to structures because I know I’m a hack. I’m sure the people I would point my camera at would know it, too.

My daughter and I took a walk to this same gas station just yesterday. Well, she rode her Power Wheel while I walked. We took the battery out so no one would steal it—this power wheel, broken and sun-bleached, that I picked up off a neighbor’s curb on trash day. She loves making this gas station the destination of our afternoon ritual even when she knows we won’t be stopping in for a treat. My wife wonders if it’s because she is curious about the people gathered on the sidewalks, about their belongings, about them not having a job to distract or motivate them, about having no houses to hide their messiness in. 
We host a group from our church on Sunday afternoons. 
We try so hard to hide our clutter and our mess.
We push it under beds or into closets.
Now we have a basement for that, too.
In our expensive fixer. 
I call it a fixer but it’s not, not really. 

We want to paint it and replace the leaking faucet. We want to preserve it and update it. We want it to look old, but more like it did when it was new. It’s been here for almost a hundred years. We love the original charm, but the floors need to be refinished. Well, leveled. The whole house probably needs to be lifted and straightened out. You know, like it was when it was new. We don’t mind some of the imperfections. They show the history—that the house has been lived in. Life happened here in different ways for a century, not to mention the way the land was used and lived on long before that. 
But we still want to touch up the really ugly parts.

Fender makes “reliced” guitars. They’re brand new, but you can still have something that looks old and used. An expert luthier beats the guitar with chains or hammers nails against the surface, leaving deep indentations behind. They chip and scrape the paint off just so. You can pick your level of “relic,” anywhere from a slightly scuffed finish to something that looks like it was run over by a train. They are still new though. Not like the Squier I bought at auction when I was 16 and chipped some of the finish off myself. It was black. I spray painted it purple.

I didn’t linger outside the gas station, but I don’t quite remember where I went next. My feet carried me, my body moving on instinct while my mind dragged behind, still caught in the last place, still dwelling in the last moment.

I didn’t really come back to myself until my eyes jolted my consciousness back to the present: a house set back from the road, a giant Palestinian flag affixed at each corner to its brick facade. 

I stopped to take a picture. I couldn’t help myself. Flags, like structures, won’t judge me. Judging is usually done by those who fly them—and those of us who judge them for doing so. It takes conviction to fly that flag—not just in this town, but in this country. I was overwhelmed with hope despite despair, hope for deeper belonging. 

This symbol begged me to stay present, to receive more than just a brief reminder that I wasn’t alone. Or maybe it was my desperation to feel less separate, less other. I noticed a thin cloud of smoke floating off the front porch. A chiminea, maybe? I have one buried behind moving boxes in my garage. I should put it on my porch where it belongs. With that zap of consciousness unifying my body and mind, my heart led me, body and spirit, down the driveway and toward the house. In stride, I noticed a Lebanese flag on the porch, too, or at least that’s what I thought it was. It was drooping down, waiting for the wind to make it proud. But it was there, so someone was proud of it. 

As I walked up the long driveway, I saw her seated, facing away from the street, and from me. She didn’t seem to notice me, and I didn’t want to startle her.
“Good morning!” I said.
It was almost noon.
I smelled cigarettes, not pinion wood.
“Hi,” she responded.

I told her that I saw the flag and just had to say hello. That I live two blocks over. I asked if the other flag was the Lebanese flag. I asked if she was Palestinian or Lebanese. Was this a home or a business? Did she own or did she rent? I told her about the pilgrimage. I told her it’s peaceful. I wondered why she didn’t seem excited like I was. Did she know about the Creek allotments?  
It was a Lebanese flag.
The owner put them up.
She’s not Palestinian or Lebanese.
It was cigarettes, not pinion.
She rents.
She was friendly, but not nearly as excited as I was
about these symbols and what they mean to me. 
They don’t mean the same thing to her.

It was a home, not a business.
They weren’t her flags. 
She was not the owner of the house or the flags. 
And yet she still lived there, in that house on Creek land, not Cherokee, which was not a business nor “owned” by her, but was nonetheless her home.
I told her about the pilgrimage and she went inside to get something to write on.
What could I have her write? 
I wasn’t prepared for her to have to write anything. 
I wasn’t prepared for her to not be Palestinian. 
I wasn’t prepared for her to rent and not own. 

I was longing for someone more like me. Palestinian, but Lebanese would work. Cherokee, but Creek would be great, too. I expected excitement and I received pleasant. I longed for kinship and I received… well, I was only received. 

When she returned from inside the house—her home—I wrote the address of where we’ll start the walk. I wrote the words “peaceful pilgrimage” and wondered if it was redundant. Aren’t all pilgrims peaceful? Oh.
The Creek might know something different.
The Cherokee too. 
I wrote down the web address. 
I wrote my phone number and my name. 

Writing this now I remember my Arabic name and what it communicates. Maybe the owner of the house will see it and wonder about kinship, like I am. Maybe they’ll be excited to know that a Palestinian born in Diaspora lives just next door. Well, actually a couple blocks over. Near the QT. My home is in a house that needs some paint. 

As I sat on my porch, writing this, Mel, who lives three houses down, stopped to introduce herself. She has twin boys, 16. She’s engaged. Her fiancé has a 15-year-old boy. She’s an interior designer. She sits out on her back porch with a chiminea and works like I’m doing on my front porch. 
My chiminea is in the garage. 
We’ve only just moved in. 
I really should dig that out. 

I tell her I love our front porch. In my mind, I know I’m also saying that I’m not as comfortable with the inside of my house. 

I notice her glasses. They make a statement. 

Maybe she can help us figure out the inside of our fixer. Make it less a house and more a home. Showcase the beauty of its history, but not the ugly parts. I wonder what she knows about that and
I don’t tell her about the pilgrimage.
I wonder instead about the name of the owner of the house with the Palestinian flag.
And I wonder if he’s Palestinian.

Elisheva knows rightly, as only a mother can, the child who has just entered the world. The crowd looks to him, expecting another Zakharyah, but Elisheva knows that is not who he is called to be. They look to her as a mouthpiece for the priest because the priest can no longer be heard, but when she declares his name the crowd is struck with disbelief.

His name is Yuḥanan. God is gracious.

They expect and desire another memory. Someone to hold the past in the memory of God. But instead, they are told that this child, from the one whose name means “Yahweh remembers,” and from the woman whose name means “God is an oath,” will be called “God is gracious.”

From the oath of God, we hear that God is gracious.
From the one who remembers, we receive the one who brings mercy.

“What then will this child become? For indeed, the hand of the Lord was with him.” (Luke 1:66)

The Surrender of Zakharyah

The only one of his parents who can speak his name and be heard is dismissed, despite her wisdom. Her authority is not respected, despite the unchanging authority from which it comes. The name she speaks is not neutral. It is true and made evident.

It is in Zakharyah’s writing, something that cannot be misheard or misconstrued, that the crowd must finally accept this reality. Not because authority has now first been spoken, but because the authority with status has bowed to the wisdom of the one long dismissed. This act, Zakharyah’s submission to Elisheva’s truth, is what restores his voice.

Zakharyah doesn’t break custom for the sake of rebellion. He simply affirms what has already been revealed. His silence has made space for something more powerful than memory: grace spoken by the overlooked. And in doing so, what is old and true is not abandoned—it is fulfilled.

The name Elisheva speaks carries memory, and vision, and power. It reveals something the surrounding society does not know how to hold: a God who can remember and be gracious—not as two separate acts, but one. A God whose mercy is not predictable or contained by the past, but whose grace emerges from it with unsettling clarity.

It is threatening. It is disorienting. And so, the crowd responds in fear.

We fear the empowerment of those who know the truth.
We fear a gracious response when we expect only preservation.
We fear the presence of a God who chooses to speak through the silenced.

But Elisheva names what the old order cannot imagine.
And Zakharyah’s voice returns not to override her, but to agree with her.
And it is in naming what is new that he is restored to what is old and true.

Grace That Disorients

In my imagination, in the way I’ve come to picture most of Jesus’ interactions, and the posture of those closest to him, I don’t sense panic. I don’t sense violence. I don’t sense despair.

Elisheva names her son with confidence.
If she understands the promise of God, then she will not be dismayed by a crowd that cannot hear or believe. Her knowing comes from somewhere else. While the crowd trembles in fear because the predictable has been broken, she remains steady. Confident even in the face of disbelief. A woman, someone from the margins, has spoken with clarity and authority, and she does not panic when others cannot recognize the voice of God. They have forgotten what God’s voice sounds like or even from where she speaks.

The crowd is disillusioned when Zakharyah, who is heard despite his silence, affirms the one who has been silenced. That is what disturbs them: not just that the expected name was not spoken, but that the one they thought could not speak the truth has been right all along.

Just as then, systems and crowds notice—even if they do not understand.
The Spirit is at work, naming what the status quo cannot imagine.

As Walter Brueggemann often reminds us, power has no imagination.
Those in power must rely on what has always worked in order to preserve their position. The new—the unexpected—is disruptive. It is threatening.

We fear that those we have oppressed, those who know firsthand how to scar and be scarred, how to diminish and be diminished, will flip the script, that they will gain what we can only imagine losing. We imagine that justice will look like punishment. That reckoning will mean reversal. And that the ones we’ve called inferior, lazy, or “third-world” will prove otherwise. Not in vengeance, but in wisdom.

But this is not the way of God.

Zakharyah remembers.
Elisheva knows.
And the child, Yuḥanan, is named Grace.

May we then, in the memory of Zakharyah, remember how to be silent,
how to affirm the authority of those we have learned to dismiss.
Remember Elisheva and the stable and unhurried promise of God,
and ask with awe:

“What then will this child become?
For the hand of the Lord is surely with them.”

This morning my phone reminded me that it’s Juneteenth. I talked about it briefly with the kids, but I found myself not knowing what to say. My ignorance and my privilege both amplified in the silence.

About halfway through Sinners, I realized I was watching a movie about cultural appropriation and colonization. I say halfway, but it was when the vampires showed up at the juke joint—drawn not just to blood, but to the identity and vitality of the Black community gathered there. They came to consume what was not theirs. The joy, the safety, the artistry. The life.

These vampires, unable to enter without invitation, offered a song of their own. One known so well its meaning was long lost. Performed, not lived. A hollow call to Sammie’s song, which tore through time and space, burning away pretense. His music was an offering. Honest, embodied, and rooted in something no vampire could ever touch.

The film is about cultural appropriation. About colonization. About the whitewashing of culture, history, and belonging in an effort to preserve control while pretending to reconnect with rhythm and meaning.

It confronts the impulse to define ourselves by what we are not, and then, when that proves hollow, to take from others what we could never cultivate within. Like vampires, we take the very thing that gives life, calling, and longing from a people in hope of making it our own. It is theft disguised as kinship.

This happens in the appropriation of Black culture in America. In Black fashion, music, language, to name a few. It’s done both on the consumer level and en masse. It’s done by people like me. And it often goes unrecognized by those who borrow without cost.

But those who do recognize it are often deeply held within their own historic cultures—ones that have resisted the lie of whiteness. Cultures that counter not only in form, but in substance. Their language, tone, and rhythm are marked by honesty. They use the medium rather than being used by it. They do not seek to replicate, only to testify to the stories held within a people.

This is why so many imitations fail. Why so much art that mimics Black form feels lifeless. The colonizer, like the vampire, cannot help but miss the mark. They can take the image, the story, even the melody, but they cannot touch the soul that birthed it.

What’s left is translation without meaning. Sanitization for the comfort of those who thrive on acceptance over truth. This is the story of the immigrant nationalist. Of the well-meaning thief. Of whiteness itself.

Colonizers are most compelled to destroy and then become those who are connected through divine calling. Those whose identity cannot be forged or faked. That’s why the vampire wanted Sammie. In an attempt to validate his own hollow life, he sought to consume the innocent who still had a soul.

But it doesn’t work. It never works.

There’s something important about the vampire needing invitation. Something about proximity. Something about needing permission to feel like they belong. Perhaps it’s this invitation, willing or coerced, that makes the theft feel legitimate. That soothes the ego and maintains the illusion of ethics.

There’s something about the lying Klansman too. About theft masked as transaction. Money taken in exchange for land never intended to be given.

There’s something about the preacher father, who loves his son but speaks with a bluntness shaped by survival: You need to change. You’re playing with fire.
And something about the turned brother, who promises to leave Sammie alone, but is now only a shell of who he once was.

I write this aware of my whiteness—and with the awareness that I still don’t see all the ways it lives in me. I live in a country, and am of a people, that has taken the offerings of the Black community and repackaged them as its own. This day, Juneteenth, is a remembrance of freedom delayed. Of emancipation resisted. And of culture, joy, and brilliance that not only survived, but transcended.

I watched Sinners last night. Today is Juneteenth. I am still learning what that means.

Words are powerful. And they always fall short.

Still, it got me thinking about the constant presenting that’s happening all around us. It’s easy to interpret the actions and desires of others as need, want, consumption. But that’s not quite it.

We’re all reaching. Longing to be seen.

We are constantly offering pieces of ourselves and hoping to be received, hoping to be known.

This poem is a gesture toward that.

Consuming, yet fleeting.
A five-course meal, an appetite as eager as expectation.

All of creation, speaking as breathing,
reaching, palms open.

We all long to be consumed.

I hope you see the beauty and truth of who you are in your own offering today.
I hope you notice someone or something else reaching too, and, as much as you’re able, receive what they are offering of themselves.

This wasn’t planned. I sat down with Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones and something rose up—a memory, a knowing, a grief that didn’t want to be analyzed, only spoken. This is not a polished essay. It’s a confession, a fracture, a small resurrection in the middle of a Wednesday.

It’s not secondary.

I am absorbing.
My mind is engaged.
I am becoming.
Not something new or something else—
but something more.

I am discovering me.

Goddamn, it’s scary.

I’ve spent years jamming myself into realities and fantasies where I don’t fit,
grasping for meaning and sense when it’s already in play.

A shovel is still a shovel, even if it’s being used to prop open the garden gate.
No wonder everyone who walks in trips.

I keep trying to begin again, like that’s even possible.

Oh, for Christ’s sake. Here we go again.

Everything with me returns to identity—
my identity—
and lately, it feels like a call to occupy the ache.

To live there, honestly.
To stop pretending the pain needs to be resolved before it can be inhabited.

To be an honest presence
asking deeper questions—
of myself,
of my church,
of the institutions I’ve inherited
and the ones I’ve internalized.

What does it mean to follow Jesus and champion the death penalty?
To bless genocide with a benediction?
To sanctify war with a flag-draped choir?

The ache lives in those contradictions.

Occupying it means refusing cute answers.

It means stillness.
It means defiance.
It means home.

It’s eating at the church potluck with you
and inviting you home for hummus and beitenjaan—

not to satisfy your hunger,
but to help you identify it.

Everything in me returns to death.

And to the One who entered it with me.

Christ has died.
Christ is risen.
Christ will come again.

“The mystery of the faith” doesn’t seem so mysterious to me lately—
Well… okay, it does.
But still—Christ.

Because Jesus died.
Really died.

As Bishop Chris often reminds us—
he didn’t fake it, didn’t float above it.
Christ entered death fully.

And I believe he never ceased to be dead.

He carries the stench with him—
the finality of death,
as much as death is ever final.

And yet he is risen.
Still dead,
but also resurrected.

The stench doesn’t disappear.
It settles into the soil.

Rotting matter becoming ground—
fertile, alive, fragrant in its own strange way.

What once reeked of ending
now perfumes the world with beginnings.

Death isn’t terminal.
It’s eternal.

And now resurrection lives to tell the truth—
not to erase death,
but to give it voice.

Not to skip the end,
but to carry it forward—
dead,
alive,
in communion with all creation.

I don’t live that reality.
Not fully. Not yet.

But I know something of what it means to die—

as a Palestinian.
As a Cherokee.
As a French colonizer.

And I know what it means to be raised by White Evangelicalism—
to be formed in reverence, in certainty, in song—
and to now hold all of it more openhandedly, with awe and trembling.

I can’t split off from these identities.

It would be dishonest—
to myself,
to my children,
to the ones I love.

As a Palestinian, I suffer.
And I suffer at the hands of my own tax dollars,
from pulpits I still long to stand in.

As a Cherokee, I hunger for tradition and culture I cannot even imagine—
because I took it from me.

As a colonizer, I suffer too.
I carry the emptiness that grows in anyone who learns to see others as less than human—
and then realizes they see themselves in those very people.

I am the bully who hates himself,
so he has to make someone else hate him more.

But this isn’t just my confession.

It’s a welcome.
A quiet seat at the table.
A place for those who’ve felt torn between too many truths to pick just one.

For those who’ve been told they had to choose—
American or Arab,
Christian or questioning,
soft or strong,
wolf or spaniel.

You don’t have to decide which part of yourself is worthy.
You don’t have to amputate your ache to belong.

You were never meant to be one thing.

Come in.
There’s food on the stove.
The ache can rest here, too.

Rethinking Eden, Shame, and the Goodness of Being Known

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Moses, who instructs all men
    with his celestial writings,
He, the master of the Hebrews, 
    has instructed us in his teaching—
the Law, which constitutes 
    a very treasure house of revelations,
wherein is revealed 
    the tale of the Garden—
described by things visible,
    but glorious for what lies hidden,
spoken of in few words, 
    yet wondrous with its many plants.

Response:     Praise to Your righteousness 
                       which exalts those who prove victorious.

St. Ephrem The Syran, Hymns on Paradise, Hymn I:1

St. Ephrem the Syrian has a vision of Eden unlike anything I’ve ever heard before. For him, Eden—or Paradise, as he calls it—is a mountain. Actually, it’s the tallest mountain. He writes:

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The summit of every mountain 
    is lower than its summit,
the crest of the Flood 
    reached only its foothills.

Notice the capitalization?

He’s talking about The Flood. The one that destroyed the earth. The one that covered the whole world in water—and yet, Paradise stood above it.

Perhaps, to St. Ephrem, this is the summit from which the dove returned, olive branch in beak. Paradise was never worthy of destruction. Not even judgment could drown it.

The Tree of Life – Untouched Invitation

In the garden, we’re offered three trees: the Tree of Life, the Tree of Knowledge, and the fig tree. One of these receives the most attention and holds the center of the Eden story. But what if all three are worth our attention? What did they offer our first parents—and what do they still offer us?

Of these, the most mysterious is the Tree of Life, which St. Ephrem places at the very summit of Paradise. For him, Eden is not a flat, gated meadow. It is a mountain—rounded, lush, surrounded by water, tiered with layers of creation. As you ascend, you pass through landscapes, lakes, and the animals of earth, until you reach the realm of the Sons of God—those redeemed and radiant in unity with their Maker.

And at the very top: the Tree of Life.

It is the tree most freely given, unlike the Tree of Knowledge, which came with condition. But there is a condition for this tree as well—unstated in Genesis, yet clear through Ephrem’s vision. Not a test of labor or suffering—Paradise is without toil—but of devotion. To reach the summit is not a matter of effort, but of faithfulness. Of singular desire. A heart trained not just to long for God, but to commune with Him.

And this tree—this Tree of Life—is not the one Adam and Eve eat from.

That doesn’t mean they weren’t in communion with God. They were. But they hadn’t yet reached the kind of intimacy that would place them in proximity to this tree. It wasn’t forbidden. It just wasn’t within reach. Not yet.

St. Ephrem puts it this way in his Hymns on Paradise, Hymn XII:

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For God would not grant him the crown 
    without some effort;
He placed two crowns for Adam,
    for which he was to strive,
two Trees to provide crowns 
    if he were victorious.
If only he had conquered 
    just for a moment,
he would have eaten the one and lived,
    eaten the other and gained knowledge;
his life would have been protected from harm
    and his wisdom would have been unshakable.

God’s desire was always for us to receive both—Life and Knowledge. But in the right order, and in the right way. One received in communion, the other only safe once communion was secure.

The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil – The Ache and the Autonomy

Can we listen for what’s not being said?

Many of us grew up assuming the fruit itself was evil. Even if it wasn’t outright stated, it was implied. As if God placed something toxic in the middle of paradise—something beautiful, desirable, and utterly destructive.

As if a loving Father would set a trap.

But that’s not what the story says.

The tree is not called the Tree of Evil. It’s the Tree of Knowledge—of Good and Evil. A tree that offers wisdom. A tree that, in time, could have been a crown, not a curse.

The harm doesn’t come from the knowledge itself. It comes from the taking. From grasping what we’re not yet fit to carry. Plucked too soon, like the fruit in the story—knowledge without purpose, power without communion.

It’s not a sin of curiosity, but of rupture. The breaking of relationship.

The Fig Tree – Performance Born of Panic

Here’s the quiet one. If the Tree of Life is barely mentioned, the fig tree is almost invisible. But it’s there—waiting. Familiar. Named by our first parents. Eaten from. Freely given. And after the rupture, it’s where they return.

Not to taste. But to hide.

This is not reverence. It’s reflex.

Social psychologist Jack Katz puts it plainly: the fig leaves are performance. A way to blend into nature. To strive for normalcy without naming the wound. They take what is good and right and natural, and twist it into something unfitting of who they were—and who they now believe themselves to be.

Their silence before God isn’t just shame—it’s the first rupture in relationship. With God. With each other.

The Garden Rewritten in Wood

The story of Eden is communal and personal. A mythos and a mirror. A pattern of ascent and descent, fracture and return.

So it’s no surprise that another Garden comes.

The Second Garden – The Ache Revisited

He did not hide.

In Gethsemane, Christ doesn’t retreat—He presses in. He doesn’t isolate—He brings His companions, even if they cannot bear the moment. He doesn’t mask the ache—He names it:

“Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me; yet, not my will but yours be done.”

And then He ascends the mount of Golgotha—and ascends the tree at its summit.
Not to cover shame, but to bear it.
Not to strip its leaves, but to become its fruit.

The Tree That Receives Him – All Three Trees Fulfilled

Christ, on the Cross, becomes the place where life is given. We eat of the Tree of Life only through Christ—the very Logos of God—and only by way of self-giving love.

This is not a bypass of suffering, but a pathway through it. Not an avoidance of ache, but its fulfillment.

In Golgotha’s tree, we see Knowledge revealed:
Goodness, in surrender.
Evil, in violence.
Humanity, in need.
And God, in mercy.

In this single tree, all three are answered:
Life is given.
Knowledge is revealed.
And fig-leaf shame is undone.

Even the fig tree is redeemed.

What was once stripped in panic now bears the fruit of peace. The tree that shaded our fear now shadows our healing. The leaves sewn in silence are answered by a body willingly broken.

When Jesus curses the fig tree in the Gospels, it’s not an act of cruelty—it’s a parable in motion. A mirror to our own instinct to perform instead of trust, to cover rather than confess. The fig tree, like us, could not bear what it was not ready to give. But on Golgotha, that symbol is transfigured.

The fig tree’s failure is undone—what once offered only cover, now offers Christ.

From Covering to Communion

This is where we return to Katz. He gives us language for something most of us feel but few of us name: performance isn’t vanity—it’s survival. The fig leaves weren’t rebellion. They were reflex.

Performance is not evil. But it’s not healing either.

Christ doesn’t scorn the instinct. He refuses it—and in doing so, He redeems it.

He meets our hiding with His own exposure.
Our silence with His Word.
Our panic with peace.

This is not a call to undress yourself on command.
It’s not a demand. It’s a mercy.

Christ’s redemption invites you
to stop pretending.
To give voice to the ache.
To bear your brokenness,
and be healed by His love.

Jesus returns to his hometown of Nazareth and enters the synagogue. He’s handed the scroll of Isaiah and begins to read:

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives,
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed go free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
(Luke 4:18–19)

And then—he stops.

Those familiar with the passage from Isaiah 61 would have expected him to continue. That’s not where the passage ends. It goes on to say:

“…to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor and the day of vengeance of our God.”

But Jesus does not speak those words.
He omits them.
And that omission is the entire point.

He read the scroll, and what he didn’t read—what he chose not to say—is his commentary.

He proclaims a jubilee vision: a vision of restoration, release, healing, and favor.
But he leaves out vengeance.

There is no judgment. No call to arms. No vindication by divine wrath.
In a land under Roman occupation, among a people long awaiting liberation, this silence speaks volumes.

What Did They Hear?

But was this what his hearers actually understood?
Based on their response… clearly not.

After Jesus declares, “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing,” it’s possible that his audience heard a rallying cry. The long-awaited moment when God would act decisively against their oppressors. After all, the passage begins with good news for the poor, liberation for the captives.

In their context—living under systemic, targeted violence—it’s not hard to imagine how they would have filled in the blanks. They may have assumed vengeance, even if it was left unsaid.

And their reaction reveals just how deeply they misunderstood.

“Is not this Joseph’s son?”

It’s a rhetorical question, brimming with hometown pride and excitement. Here is their unlikely hero—the local boy. The carpenter’s son. Jesus the Carpenter. Nazareth’s own.

There’s hope in their tone:
Maybe this is the one who will rise up on our behalf.
Maybe he’ll lead the revolution.
Maybe he will set us free.

But Jesus knows they don’t understand.
He sees the possessiveness in their excitement:

He is one of us—so surely he will act for us.
He will use his power on our behalf.

Cyril of Alexandria puts it plainly:

“They did not honor him as God, but looked upon him as a common man, no more than themselves… They expected him to do miracles among them, as in other cities, because they regarded themselves as especially entitled to them.”

“Physician, Heal Yourself”

Jesus speaks directly to their unspoken expectations:

“Doubtless you will quote to me this proverb, ‘Physician, heal yourself.’”

This isn’t a quote from Proverbs or any biblical text—it was likely a common saying, something like: “Take care of your own before helping others.” Not so different from our own “Put on your oxygen mask before assisting others.”

In a way, that’s exactly what the people are expecting:

You healed in Capernaum—heal here.
You spoke with power there—speak it for us now.
You liberated them—liberate us.

Their suffering is real. Their desire for healing is not wrong—but it is limited by a vision that cannot yet stretch beyond their own needs. Jesus will soon make clear: his mission is not only for Nazareth, not only for Israel, but for the whole world.

The Famine and the Gentile

Jesus then gives two examples from their own sacred story—examples that only inflame the tension.

First: Elijah, who during a three-and-a-half-year famine bypassed the widows of Israel and instead went to a Gentile widow in Zarephath.

This number matters.

And before you think I’m steering us into dispensationalism—let me stop you right there. Luke includes the three-and-a-half years intentionally. In biblical tradition, seven is the number of completion. So three and a half represents something incomplete, unfinished, or still unfolding.

Jesus is saying: the prophecy is being fulfilled—but not with an end to your suffering. It is fulfilled in the midst of oppression. And not for you alone, but for Gentiles, pagans, even Romans.

Then Jesus doubles down.

He references Elisha, who did not heal the lepers of Israel but instead cleansed Naaman the Syrian.
An outsider. An enemy.

Origen reflects on this moment:

“The Savior reproves them for their unbelief and hardness of heart, showing them that even in the days of the prophets, God’s healing was given not to the children of Israel, but to foreigners.”

This is Jesus confronting their misunderstanding head-on.
He is not here to bring vengeance on the Romans.
He is here to extend healing and liberation beyond their borders—to the outsider, the stranger, the enemy.

The Rage of Exclusion

No wonder the crowd turns.

Fleming Rutledge writes:

“There is something intolerable about a grace that reaches across boundaries we have erected for the sake of righteousness.”

It’s too much for the people of Nazareth.
And so, they rise up.

They drive him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built.
The foundation of their identity becomes the place of violent rejection.

Lynching the Prophet

In America, we had a name for this kind of justice: lynching.

James Cone, in The Cross and the Lynching Tree, reminds us that lynching was perceived by many in power as a form of justice—used to silence those who disrupted the social and racial order.

“Lynching was not regarded as an evil thing but a necessity—the only way a community could protect itself from bad people out of reach of the law.”

Cone isn’t just stating history—he’s condemning this distorted sense of justice.
And what happens in Nazareth bears a chilling resemblance:
The prophet threatens the religious and social order,
and the mob moves to silence him.

But Jesus Walks Through

And then—something extraordinary.

“He passed through the midst of them and went on his way.”
(Luke 4:30)

The Greek word used here is διέρχομαι (dierchomai)—to go through.
Not around. Not away. Not up in a cloud of glory.

Through.

I will not be destroyed by your rejection.
I will carry your rage with me.
And I will still go on my way.

Not Against Judaism, But From Within It

This passage has often been misused as a critique of Judaism—as if Jesus came to correct it or move beyond it.

That is not what’s happening here.

Rabbi Marc Ellis, the Jewish liberation theologian, reminds us:

“Jesus was a Jewish martyr and prophet of justice, rejected not because he opposed Judaism, but because he lived it radically.”

Jesus is not rebelling against Judaism.
He is standing firmly within it—calling his people back to their missional vocation:
To bless the nations.
To carry God’s justice beyond themselves.

The Test of Faith

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks puts it this way:

“The test of faith is whether I can make space for difference.
Can I recognize God’s image in someone who is not in my image, whose language, faith, and ideals are different from mine?”

The crowd in Nazareth fails that test.
And we often do too.

This Story Is About Us

This story is not just about ancient Nazareth.
It’s about us.

We, too, want a Jesus who serves our cause, affirms our side, and liberates our people—on our terms.
We, too, become enraged when the gospel stretches beyond what we are ready to accept.

We, too, stand on the brow of the hill—caught between the impulse to cast the prophet out, and the invitation to follow him into healing.

But Jesus passes through.

Not around.
Not above or below.
Through.

He walks through our blindness, our fear, our hunger for vengeance.
And he continues on his way.

Will we go with him?
Or will we stay on the hill—
clinging to a rage that can only condemn—
or will we step into the kind of healing that only comes by responding to the needs of others?

I wrote this one year ago and thought I’d share it here.

On this All Saint’s Day I am reminded of a saint that impacted my own family so greatly.

Lillian Trasher was born in Florida in 1887 to a Roman Catholic family. Through various encounters she discerned a call on her life to go to Africa - specifically to Egypt. She broke off her engagement 10 days prior to her wedding and went to Assiout where her ministry began. Shortly after arriving in Assiout she went to care for a dying mother, upon her arrival and finding that the woman had already passed, she was guided to the now orphaned daughter.

This infant child was severely malnourished and would have no hope for a future. The baby's grandmother could not care for the child and planned to throw the baby into the Nile River. Lillian offered instead to take the baby into her care and thus began the Lillian Trasher Orphanage. In her first 8 years in Egypt her ministry grew to 50 orphans and 8 widows. Later she would expand her mission to include a home for the blind.

In the course of her ministry she made room for one Marie Monsour Soubat Habibi and her toddler son, Yousef Habibi - my father. Fleeing for their lives in 1948 they found a place to live and grow. The orphanage was often under-resourced and able to provide less than the bare minimum, but it was a place for people who would otherwise have even less than that.

Mama Lillian, as she became affectionately known, was a force of her own and now, even after her passing in 1961, The Lillian Trasher Orphanage remains a place for the marginalized and some of Egypt's most desperate.

In honor of this Holy Day I would like to offer up this prayer to a saint I long to know and learn from.

Dearest Mama Lillian,

You followed the leading of the Spirit,
  even when you knew not His purpose. 
You provided the orphan a home,
  even when you had not a house .
You fed the starving,
  even when you had not food to eat.
You gave rest to the hopeless,
  even when you found none for yourself. 
You acted confidently in faith 
  for those who had no hope.
You did not leave the motherless an orphan, 
  but came to their aid. 
You honored the widow, 
  not leaving her alone and forgotten. 
You gave vision to the blind, 
  refusing to see them as a burden.
Teach us to to give 
  even when it seems we have nothing to offer .
To go where God leads 
  even when we know not why it is we go. 

Bless us to embody this love and care you gave to the motherless and forgotten of society. 
Pray for us as we discern our call to those who experience tragedy and injustice. 
May we have boldness to act and confidence to speak.
In the name of our redeemer, Jesus Christ.
Amen

There is no need to plot or maneuver; there is no rush. My elbows meet my sides as my wrists touch, my palms up to receive lead me forward. I am bound not by chains, but anticipation of redemption. I process forward in this liturgy of quiet anticipation, calm and steady, moving toward the host. Christ is present in this welcome invitation and will not abandon me to hunger or thirst. He will meet me here.

Is this what it means to be last: to know that God's invitation is open and that I am free to respond out of love rather than qualification? Is this Christ’s invitation, to know that God is for all and not a scarcity to be fought for or hoarded over? I am satisfied in Him in the longing and the receiving, in the waiting and the fulfillment. I am consumed now and when He reveals Himself all the more. The fullness of His revelation is present, even as I am yet to know Him.

It’s through lament that I make room for hope. The words below are not just catharsis; these questions and pleas are honest and direct. I am waiting for answers, even if they aren’t to the questions I am asking.

Lord, have mercy!
Save us!

My God, where are you?
We cry to you, and you do not answer us.
Are you so cruel a King
to turn away and let our suffering fester?
Why give light if it only reveals more darkness?
We know your way, yet we are powerless to follow it.  
Have we been abandoned to mourn and scream across your kingdom?

Is your heart too far to hear us?
Is our pain too small to be of concern?
Your Kingdom has been stolen,
are you asleep?
Have you not conquered the grave?
Wake up, God who is Love!
Set your kingdom right!
Lust for power consumes our rulers,
and our neighbors are chasing shadows.
We speak your truth, but only know its absence.
These leaders and rulers know nothing of mercy or love,
Yet they invoke your name!
They claim authority that is yours alone
and use it to crush us.

Must we cry until our tears return to the heavens?
Until there is not a drop of blood left to stain Gaza?
Our leaders feast on war
while our children die in ruins.
Will you not stop it?
Prince of Peace,
God of love,
where are you?

Are you who you have told us you are?
Then do not let the wicked carry your name!
Wake up and restore your creation.
For your name’s sake,
Remember your people.
Return to us, and do not delay!

Have you thought about rain?

Have you thought about rain?
The waters of the earth 
distributed in masses large,
or scattered sparse and small.

Through her daily presence,
The sun offers warmth and light.
Life that populates us,
transformed

We rise and join together
different there than here.
Bound together,
Sparse. 
Being. 
Whole.

I return.

From ocean or puddle.
From pond or cactus in desert sun.
Wisdom carried in our being.
From there, and now, here.

I return.

Elsewhere.
The same.
Now different.
Unchanged.

Wise and unlearned.
From water’s flow to vapor’s wisp,
to liquid once again;
of all I always am.

We return

I am no longer there,
Now, we are here
Containing there.

Ocean.
Vapor.
Puddle.
Vapor.
Ice cap.
Vapor.
Cactus at it's core.
Vapor.

I was,
then I was,
and still, I am.
We are.

Changed, 
and the same. 
Transformed, 
and returned.

Always the same, 
sometimes new.
I am the same,
becoming multitudes.

What Bessey went on to discuss was that healing doesn’t mean we don’t have scars. It doesn’t mean our routines don’t change. Essentially, healing is not a magic wand that makes everything perfect with no hint of the wrongs we’ve done or experienced. Then I encounter this passage today. It’s from John 19.

Meanwhile, standing near the cross of Jesus were his mother, and his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene. When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing beside her, he said to his mother, “Woman, here is your son.” Then he said to the disciple, “Here is your mother.” And from that hour the disciple took her into his own home.

I’m going to be honest, I was first thinking of this exchange happening after Jesus’ resurrection. This is Mary at the foot of the cross as her son is tortured to death. In my imagination she has not turned her gaze away from him. This in contrast to the very ill-informed idea that I held growing up that the Father turned his back to Jesus because he was so covered by the sins of the world that he was unbearable to His own Heavenly Father. Of course this can go so many ways; we could start talking about atonement theories. We could start talking about the Trinity. We could hash out how these ideas have been ill-informed or just plain wrong. However we go at it, we are using our imagination to make sense of Jesus, God incarnate, being tortured to death.

In this passage in which Jesus sees his mother and addresses her as “Woman”, well, my imagination went wild. I do not have the imagination to understand this address of Mary as “woman” rather than “mother” to be one in which Jesus severs his relationship with Mary, but I was drawn into what is happening in that word choice. In addition, I am wondering about Mary as a witness to the divinity and promise of Jesus from divine conception, through each miracle, and all peculiarities in which the divine must have been so odd in the confines of a world so oblivious to God, and then watching God die. If anyone was a believer it must have been Mary, but I wonder where her belief was in that moment.

It makes me think of the ways I have seen the divine in my life and how when confronted with unaccounted for truths or my own misunderstanding of God’s plan, even the things I’ve known to be truest are called into question. Somehow truths cannot become less true though. They either aren’t true at all and we were wrong in our belief or they aren’t true in the way in which I understood them.

Anyway, it is amazing how much can be contained in a few sentences that can be read as somewhat transactional unless you take a moment to dig in deeper. I hope you take a few moments today to imagine God in a way that is true.

As you gaze at him upon the cross, 
the last vision of your living son,
what is realized within you?

Are you swallowed up in sorrow?
Has it overtaken you,
the human suffering of your son?

Or is it the loss of humanity? 
A people so scarred by fear,
consumed in hubris.
overpowering with ungodly might.

A son so perfect in flesh and Divinity
can be so easily slain?
Has confusion consumed you?

You are his mother.
You enveloped him as all new life 
must be carried and grown. 
And so you must have carried and groaned.

He a most cherished guest,
no request too large to be denied.
Your body transformed, 
becomes a mother and her child.

A single you, now two. His innocent presence 
pressing against your physical limitations.
Carried for months within your being
to enter the world with needs no longer
just met, but demanded of your will and intellect.

As I imagine myself next to you,
hopelessness floods the void.
Casting doubt upon hard-held truths
understood only in a vacuum.

How do you endure, Dear Mother?
Gazing upon such misery.
Your Holy Son suffers to death,
betrayed even by his own divinity.

When your own son sees you 
in mourning and in loss,
He doesn’t call you as his mother,
it is your fullness on display.
You are offered yet another son,
To whom you’ll love and despair.

In Woman, a title not confined to mother,
You are seen for all you are.
A well of love and steadfastness.
Such Strength and Loving Care,

Mother Mary, 
Woman,
Woman,
Woman.

I have these things too, these monuments - certain memories. I have experienced unmistakable moves of God that I cannot understand in the least nor describe with full confidence. If you’ve been around the church long enough you are likely familiar with the concept of an Ebenezer Stone. We sing of it in the hymn Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing and in doing so call to mind specific ways in which God has been faithful to us, or we’ve experienced a miracle, or some moment in which our faith was strengthened.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

Here I raise my Ebenezer;
hither by thy help I’m come;
and I hope, by thy good pleasure,
safely to arrive at home.

For me, these moments have been no less frustrating as they have been tethering. When my doubt has been the greatest, these monuments, reminders of God’s presence, cannot be shaken. I cannot begin to express how frustrating this is to me, but I’m going to try! It might not be hard for some of us to imagine a relationship built on past intimacy without ever to experience that level of closeness again, or for those moments to be so few and far between that we wonder if they even mattered or were true. To a lesser extent, we can think about long term relationships that age well past the intoxicating infatuations of young love. Jameelah and I used to lavish each other in these big, gushy, overstated expressions of love. Gifts, and dates, and endless conversations, and curiosity. It was bliss. We were discovering each other as much as we were discovering ourselves. 15 years later, multiple moves, a couple kids, just as many dogs, soccer practices, school field trips, out of state family visits, and a couple of “real careers”, those grand gestures are fewer and further between.

We can be bound to the times in which we felt known and cared for by, love, or family, or God only to long for that once more and not find it. In that way we often leave our finger on the pulse of wherever we last felt God’s heartbeat, or felt known by God, or experienced some mystery of the faith. Maybe it’s kept us in the same church, or same expression of faith, or some community, but we haven’t felt God’s presence in a long while. To me, this is the harm that can come from this flawed understanding of the constant unchanging nature of God. To be clear I am not saying that God is not “the same yesterday, today, and forever”. I am saying that God is not stagnant. God is constantly at work and it is one of the few times where thinking of God as a person can be helpful. God is the same “person” working in and through all the different ways that God is and does move. God’s heart, God’s being, God’s Godness does not change.

This doesn’t lessen my frustration in my lack of understanding of why God has has been revealed to me as God has, or why I haven’t felt God move in some big grand ways like I have in the past. It means I don’t have to dwell there. I don’t have to compare the God I know now to the God I experienced on occasion back then. I can hold on to those times and feelings as a monument and know, in faith, that God is still present to me in that moment then and in whatever moment I find myself in now. Even if that season is one of feeling distant from God. God is present in that longing, desperation, and loneliness.

I want to tell you about the Gaza Ceasefire Pilgrimage through Tulsa and how we mapped our own cities suffering and unaccounted for sins onto our own hearts in a way that helped us more deeply understand our neighbors and this evil war on Palestinians. I want to tell you how “God showed up” for me and how all of us who journeyed together were overwhelmed by God’s presence in some big mysterious way. I can’t, so I won’t. Instead I’ll tell you that in the ways that we moved our created bodies through this city in honesty and prayer, God’s presence was known and made known to me, to my fellow pilgrims, and to this city.

I’m not sure I have the words to convey much more than that, and any attempt to do so would lessen how the pilgrimage impacted me, so to preserve the impact and continue to feel the pulse of God reverberating from my journey on Holy Saturday as long as I can, I will not force it here. Just know that God is where you last knew God to be, but you cannot rest there any longer than the Spirit is present there to you. Hold onto that monument for when you need the encouragement and faithfully continue longing for God’s heart. In the same way that you must find the profundity of love in the small and faithful ways of a steadfast partner, so you must let your prayers move you towards God and neighbor in those ways that are sincere and intentional. God is present there for you if you’ll only stop looking for God to do again what God has already done. Take notice, however small you might find God to be, that God is still present yet.

God of and in all,

Align my heart with yours.
May my posture be that of open and loving compassion.
Help me to know your voice, that I may dwell in you.
Soften my heart to rightly serve at your table, so your presence might be known to all.
May your grace move me, so that all might be moved to dwell in you.

To the glory of the one Holy Creator,
In the name of the same Holy God among Creation,
and by their Holy Transcendent Presence,

Amen.

Ordination into the role of a Deacon was a strange experience for me. A close friend asked me shortly after if I had experienced any change the days following the mass. This is often expected after ordination into any office within the church. I think for me, I was looking so hard for it that I was missing the forest for the trees. Once I settled into the fact that maybe I just wouldn’t experience anything like that, I began to feel an increased stirring of the Spirit in me. It felt ambiguous and disorienting and was completely something as opposed to the nothing I thought I had felt in the weeks after my ordination. I have always had an affection for my brother’s and sister’s in Palestine and our Diaspora, but I did not know that it would look like advocating and coordinating alongside peacemakers and protestors or addressing my entire dioceses, but that is where the Spirit has always been guiding me, even more so now.

Feeling a strong sense of the Spirit's leading towards a group of people and a part of the world deliberately hidden behind so much politicization is humbling and challenging, so I hope you can extend grace to me and hear the heart and challenge I’m laying forth both rightly and justly. My commitment to Palestine and Israel might be born from different circumstances than yours, but you should, as a Christian or any person of faith or moral commitment, not be impartial on the Palestinian issue and take this kind of work into all areas where people are oppressed. This includes the indigenous people of our own nations as well. I myself was born into citizenship in the Cherokee Nation, and despite my family's tribal ties, the only reason that I am considered a Cherokee Citizen by the US government and Cherokee Nation is because of my family's ability to trace our lineage back to some names on a piece of paper - the Dawes Roll.

The Dawes Roll is an interesting artifact of our own cultural history here in the States because it was a means for a still young government, established on land acquired through theft, murder, and forced labor, to dictate of all things who could claim membership in one of the "Five Civilized Tribes" and only then receive property from this same government that invaded and displaced these indigenous people from their own lands which they had cared for since time immemorial. Truly, I hadn’t thought much of my being Cherokee until visiting Israel and Palestine and seeing the colonization and blatant discrimination there first hand. Had I been raised in Oklahoma like my cousins, aunties, and uncles, I'm sure my Indigenous Cherokee heritage would have played a larger role in my earliest formation.

My dad’s Palestinian heritage, however, was a constant presence in our lives as I grew up and lived among the largest concentration of Arabic speaking people outside of the Arabic world in Dearborn, Michigan. If you know of Dearborn at all, it might be as the birthplace of the assembly line, or where most F-150’s are made, or where Henry Ford revolutionized transportation. To me, Dearborn, among many things, is the best place to get a Shawarma sandwich this side of the Atlantic. My father was born in Shefa-amr, Palestine in 1945. He was the only surviving child of his mother Mary Mansour Soubat when they fled for their lives during the Zionist invasion of Palestine in 1948. They together found sanctuary and home in the Lillian Trasher Orphanage in Assiout, Egypt.

Though my dad  found safety, these years from toddlerhood through High School and even Bible College were not without significant hardship. He experienced abuse, overwhelming and recurring food insecurity, and an orphanhood forced upon him despite his own mom surviving well into his high school years and living there on the same orphanage grounds as he. Like those of us in the States, my dad’s Christian framework was formed through a Western lens that views the nation state of Israel today as the same Israel mentioned throughout our Holy Scriptures, despite being formed in 1948 and after thousands of years of both Christian then Muslim majority in the land. This belief in a restoration of Israel by Jewish settlers whose families had been part of their own diaspora for centuries is part of a collective narrative that completely ignores the presence of a Palestinian Jewish community remaining throughout history and the violent displacement and oppression of the indigenous people living there prior to the establishment of Israel as a country. This conflation between Biblical Ancient Israel and the Modern Empire nestled among the The Levant comes with unprecedented blind support from not only Western Colonial countries, but unwavering support from the majority of Western Christians and Churches, completely dismissing our Christian Brothers and Sisters not only in Palestine, but all of the Arabic World.

We have bought into the propaganda that Palestinians, and Arabs in general, are less civilized, less intelligent, and far too irrational. We carry this discrimination through by harming all Arabic people irrespective of their differences, not only harming our Muslim brothers and sisters, but so grievously our own Christian Brethren who faithfully continue to witness the birth of our Savior, drink the water turned to wine at the wedding feast, and proclaim then and now Christ’s crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension. Shame on us! While you and I have our own opinions on the legitimacy of today’s Israel or complaints against the Palestinian governments, those opinions only matter to the extent that they influence our work towards peace and dignity for all to live into their God-breathed and sacred existence. We are all divinely created, our own Christian brethren throughout time and place, and of course all created people - be they Palestinian, Israeli, Muslim, or Jew.

It’s a fruitless game, although one often played, to argue that your perspective will, one day, in the future retelling of history be seen as right, while the other’s opinions and actions so obviously misguided and wrong. It is harmful and reckless to wait for hindsight to determine righteousness! When we do so we actively shrug off our responsibility to grapple with the issue at hand and reduce live’s lost, by death or displacement, loss of innocence or humanity, to a mere tally on the scorecard after the game. I’m not interested in keeping score or playing these kinds of games. What I am interested in is the People of God serving the poor, the marginalized, the hopeless, and the forgotten. This does not mean that hindsight is not useful, it is greatly useful, but only if it is used to help those suffering and in need now. We are sending bombs, tanks, snipers, and drones to do the work you and I have been Commissioned to do! We are commissioned to recognize and declare the image of God in all people. Destruction cannot bring about wholeness - only more brokenness.

Something particularly troubling is that when we haven’t fanned the flames of injustice or advocated in favor of absolute atrocities toward our fellow mankind, as we did in regards to the enslavement of black men, women, and children, or the displacement and genocide of American Indians, we have been divided as a body or even silent! This silence is a particular danger we need to be aware of in our own formation, especially in my context which is within the beauty of the Anglican Spiritual Tradition. 

There is surely something very right about holding the needs of Israelis and Palestinians in prayer. It is right to mourn the murder of the 1,139  Israelis on October 7th. It is right to understand the fear that grips a nation when terror finds a way to our family and friends dealing with the loss of loved ones, or when our brothers, sisters, sons, and daughters are called off to war perhaps never to return. Do they ever truly return? We know this because you and I have lived through these atrocities to one extent or another wherever it is you call home. We should not stop praying about these people and these very real horrors, be they in Palestine or Israel, or Congo, or Yemen, or Somalia, or here among our Black neighbors, our LGBTQ friends, coworkers, and family, or the indigenous people who are still suffering from the irreparable and ongoing harm of Manifest Destiny.

When you pray for peace in Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank, what is it you are actually praying for? Do your prayers end there? My concern is that we pray these things when the music swells and we do not unpack them after. It does our soul well to pray for those who experience oppression regardless of who they might be or the cause of their suffering. The Palestinians who were murdered by the Zionist militias of 1948, or fought and died to preserve their ancestral home in those same struggles are obviously the victims of violence. Those Jewish settlers coming from Europe to Palestine in increasing numbers culminating in the start of the Nakba to make a safe haven for themselves were coming after experiencing unimaginable loss, suffering, and terror at the hands of violence.

What my father and the millions of others who were forced to flee their homes and country experienced was also terror and violence. Living as less than full citizens by your sanctuary country and not being allowed to return to Palestine is a kind of violence. Having guns focused on you as you walk to school is violence. Being arrested or killed without reason other than your Palestinian ethnicity is violence. Being forced to flee your home in Gaza and then subjected to death or fear of death is violence! We have yet to hear how many Hamas fighters have been killed by Israel, but we know it is a fraction of the 28,775 Gazans who have been murdered and the undetermined number whose bodies lay under the rubble of their homes in this current wave of genocide.

Foreign Empires holding power over you to determine whether you have the right to exist and in what capacity is a kind of violence. What the Jewish people experienced under Nazi rule is horrific and violent to the mind, to the body, and to the soul. The fear that grips Israelis that one day Palestinians will take back what was stolen from them by overwhelming force is an ongoing kind of violence.

I will stop far short of telling you how or if you should vote or what the ultimate solution is for Palestine and Israel. I have no interest in continuing the harm that comes from the marriage of church and empire. So what can a person do? As a Christian I must encourage you to pray without ceasing. Even more so I insist that your prayers absolutely must take Spirit led action, and that you must not forsake the oppressed, the hungry, and the dying in Palestine. Do something! Talk about it. Engage with Palestinians and those who have real first hand experience or are related to those who do. Speak with friends and family. Call and write your government officials. Engage in creative non-violent resistance as Christians in Palestine have been doing faithfully and long before October 7th all while living at the blunt end of occupation and genocide. Our brothers and sisters have been pleading with us to listen and we have not been listening to them for far too long. Let us not be divided any longer. Let us not forsake them or our Christ, brother to all Christians and savior of all people!

I am worried that when we pray for peace in Israel and Palestine, or an end to war and suffering and then go no deeper. When we say things like “it is complicated'' and when we leave our prayers in the closet or whispered in the ear of Jesus, we are resigning to a type of saintly ego stroking or succumbing to fear of backlash. You cower from your commission to be the hands, feet, and mouth of Jesus to this world that desperately needs their savior. Of course as Christians we whisper or scream these things to our Savior. It is God who goes before us! It is God who is our advocate! We also know that the Word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart. 

So, with grace and peace I ask you - what are our intentions and how will you pray?

Where to begin?

It seems that we are more aware of beginnings then endings on most things. Our favorite TV shows that we binge entire seasons of in a week or two, or the ones we look forward to watching every week when the powers that be finally put them on your favorite streaming platform. That band that put out a really solid album a few years ago but you haven’t thought much about since. You might have even played that album on loop, but now can’t remember the last time you listened to it. Endings don’t usually get as much attention than beginnings do.

We are swept up in the new and exciting. Stories that grip us out of the gate, or hobbies that seem endlessly enjoyable. Once we get our bearings though, well, we lose some steam. The excitement wears off. If your brain is anything like mine, you are a dopamine fiend and can’t get enough of the stuff, I guess to an extent that is all of us. Once you start seeing behind the curtain and how things are working, or you grow tired of the rinse and repeat plot of that show you binged a season and a half of (looking at you The Walking Dead), things taper off.

Not all endings work out like that though. Some things end so well that it leaves you wanting more. Sometimes the ending isn’t all that noteworthy, but you love the thing so much that you go back to it again and again. The hiphop collaborative Tunnel Rats released an album in the mid-90’s called Experience. It’s a solid and grossly under appreciated album that I listen to start to finish several times a year. There was a tv show called Fringe that premiered in the late 2000’s that my wife and I enjoyed so much. It holds the place as one of our favorite shows and as such we’ve rewatched it in entirety in recent years and still couldn’t get enough.

For me, writing takes a similar trajectory. I started writing lyrics in 8th grade when I started playing bass guitar and making music with friends. I’ve never been much of a singer, but there was something about expressing emotion in music and word. In 10th grade my English teacher had us journal everyday. She would write a topic on the whiteboard and we had to either write about that or “free write”. I’m not sure how often I used her prompt, but it wasn’t very often. My friend jacob wrote all of his lyrics in one of those black and white composition notebooks, so that’s what I did too. My composition notebooks held lyrics, poetry, and other shortform writings.

So when did I stop? I’m not sure, but it was probably sometime in college. This substack is a return to that. I’m not sure how often I’ll post, but I know that I have been writing a lot and it doesn’t seem like these are pieces that should be kept in the cloud and forgotten. While they are sometimes in a sense journal entries, they are written to be shared.

I hope that these things will spark reflection as well as encouragement to recall the things that once captured your mind, heart, and attention. The things that have slipped to the wayside for one reason or another. Perhaps for you too, it might be time to bring a new beginning to those things that never had a proper ending. Perhaps the ending isn’t memorable because you were never intended to stop, only to pick it up again when you could offer more.

- John

This is a piece I’ve been writing and tweaking for the last week. It’s inspired by my thoughts as a Christian who feels deeply called to The Way of peace, but my lens is through that of a Diaspora Palestinian deeply dismayed by what is happening in and to Gazans and Palestine as a whole. I think there is something here for all of us though. Instead of telling you what to take away from it, I’d love to hear what comes to the surface for you.

Violence, Now Televised

I am a 
    pacifist,
I condemn all 
    violence.
Why so easy for me to claim?
Well, because 
    I am untested.
I live in a world where 
    I believe reason can sway;
    where a creative display can stir up 
        change. 
Or, 
    can it?
Perhaps the ways I have been met or dismissed 
or acknowledged or forgotten are 
    not at all that dire.
My friend asked me to consider the life of 
    M L K.


How could he have non-violently resisted and 
    made an unwilling public aware?
A mirror to injustice while 
    his black mothers and fathers,
    brothers and sisters, 
    daughters and sons
So disgustingly abused and dismissed, 
    overlooked and 
        beaten down.
Murdered and forgotten like 
    an adolescent achievement awarded as 
    encouragement of desired development
    observed rather than by merit of any accomplishment.
A glorified participation trophy for 
    showing up in the world in the way that
    your fathers and mothers want for you 
        to.
    The way they instilled and taught you to 
        do.
    You had no choice but to play the part
    convinced was a just and right part of you 
        too.
		
Identity wrapped to ideals so tightly
    blinded to the ways in which they are achieved
Images not aired or, 
    when they are,
    reasonable pleas for help, 
        muted or,
 	worse. 
Volume diminished so greatly that 
    beautiful language in poetic prose
        buried in the mix.
Lead vocals, 
    now just an ambient pad to add atmosphere.
New words take their place,
    still communicating a desperate feeling, but
    now every intended meaning, 
        lost.
        On purpose.

So what would I do if 
    my ideals of heroism were
    no longer confined to this dream of mine. 
Able to defend with words of caution against 
    a desperate thief who wants no more than 
    the toaster oven I 
        don’t use very often, 
or my tv if 
    he can lift it. 
        It’s awkward to carry. 
        Only 55 inches, 
        not even OLED.
This fiction in stark contrast to 
    the reality where 
peaceful walks with signs pleading to go home are met with 
    gunshots,
Where slings and stones thrown are met with 
    bullets 
    embedded in legs. 
        Target practice.
Sometimes they miss and 
    shoot you in the head.
        On purpose

My practical pacifism lives in the world of fantasy where 	
    we insist on talking it through
But in truth 
    we won’t listen to you.
Creative attempts to break through
    packed as a headline you’ll barely read
It could be called something succinct like,
    Common Problems of The Middle East
Could be a decent think-piece, 
    right?
Forcing people to convince us they are victimized, but
    only if coupled with disgusting tragedy carried out 
    in their name.
Forcing pleas for peace and dignity
    While dismissing injustice as 
        Common Problems of The Middle East
Creation,
    unseen.
Violence, 
    now televised.
But, 
	(are you listening?)


- John Habibi