Back in our seminary days, my buddy Brooks and I went to Israel for a two week pilgrimage. Now, Brooks and I, well, most of y’all have seen us. You know we’re gonna make our way as faithfully as we can, but we’ll also steal away and cut up in the back row. We’re not disruptive. And we actually are attentive. And, with God’s help, we try to stay open to what's happening around us.
Now, our pilgrimage was populated mostly by a group from an Episcopal church in Idaho. I’d never really met anyone from Idaho, so this was my first exposure to that weird blend of Old Western frontier and Midwestern understatement. Truth be told, they were mostly lovely people, and their priest, Fr. Bob, took us seminarians under his wing. We actually surprised him one night by sneaking pita bread and an airplane bottle of Maneschewitz into the Church of the Holy Sepulchre so he could celebrate Eucharist there, squirreled away in a dark corner of the most sacred site in Christendom under a forgotten, rickety ladder and surrounded by fifteen hundred year-old graffiti from ancient pilgrims just like us. As far as we could tell, we held the first Anglican Eucharist in that place in centuries.
Now, the group was, on the whole, pretty liberal and highly educated, but there was a small contingent that was way out on the fringe. As in, one day, we lost track of one of the representatives from Idaho, only for him to show back up at dinner and regale us with stories of his afternoon spent with leaders of the Palestinian Liberation Front. But he was an exception.
Mostly, when we poured out of our tour bus at various holy sites, Brooks and I’d gape at whatever sacred thing stood in front of us and laugh at the juxtaposition of tourist trap camel rides rented out on the very spot Moses held his tablets and railed against idols. But mostly, what we’d see, and often what Brooks would see first and then help me understand, was that these were the places our story began. This was holy, and it never took long for a tear to come or a heart to lift. But the frozen Idahoans, lovely as they mostly were, poured out of the very same bus, and where Brooks saw and helped me see something of God, they seemed to see a sort of quaint curiosity.
But there was one particularly notable exception to the group’s detached interest. We were driving into the uninhabited desert with Jericho at our backs and nothing but yellowed dust ahead. Not too terribly long into our trip, we turned off the main road and began down a bumpy, narrow stretch of new pavement. Closing in tight on either side of the bus, a high fence made out of carpenter wire separated us from, well, it was hard to tell what, exactly. More yellow dust, it seemed to me.
Once in a while, there was a free standing building, typically a small chapel of some sort, with an understated onion dome or a bare cross atop a single, modest steeple. I’d learn later that these holy sites had been abandoned some years before and still bore the bullet holes of past conflicts. The first of the small, orange signs hanging on the fence whizzed by as the bus made good time. Another clipped by in short order, and another soon after that. There couldn’t’ve been thirty feet between each identical sign, but it wasn’t until the bus slowed that I could actually read them. In English, Hebrew, and Arabic, the same sobering message: “Danger !Land Mines!”
It’s the only official sign I’ve ever seen with an exclamation point. And it was only in recent years that the location had been reopened to the public, and Christian pilgrims rushed in. Unexploded mines littered the area, but great efforts had gone into clearing a path and securing a little plot of land at the water’s edge.
You see, at the end of that treacherous thoroughfare, was a little welcome center, one that would’ve felt right at home in Yellowstone or up in the Adirondacks. It was clean and tidy. There were bathrooms and pamphlets and someone sitting behind a desk ready to answer questions in a million languages. A viewing platform overlooked a little ribbon of slow moving brown water, and a ramp led down to stadium seats at the lip of the bank. Clean and crisp and safe.
Surrounded by buried nightmares, you could sit comfortably in the desert sun with your wide-brimmed hat pulled low over your neck and an imported bottle of water dripping condensation through your fingers. Above you, up on the viewing platform, a pair of Israeli soldiers in full fatigues kept a lookout, but mostly they just looked bored. Across the water, a pair of Jordanian soldiers mirrored them, standing on the end of a dock smoking a shared cigarette and making jokes about something. That odd spot, not even a wide pool in that narrow ribbon of water, that was the River Jordan. And the little bend it took right between the Jordanian dock and the Israeli stadium seating, that’s the place where Jesus was baptized.
To our left, another bus’s group from Equatorial Guinea wore brightly colored clothing, sang hymns loud enough to echo off the pearly gates, and didn’t walk so much as danced from one place to another. There was some fiery preaching going on on the banks of the Jordan, and those folks were moved. Those closest to the water kicked off their sandals and waded in. We watched, all of us quiet and hot and unnerved by the land mines or the unashamed display of faith, I’m not sure which. Ahead, between us and the soldiers across the way, a bevy of babushkas stood waist deep in the muddy waters surrounding their bearded priest. He welcomed them one at a time and pushed them under, entering into this great Body of Christ at the very same place Christ began his journey with John. I wondered what it must be like to be a priest baptizing in that place. And still we watched, quiet and hot and unnerved.
And then that Idaho priest stood. He held the branch of an olive tree he’d snagged earlier in the day and dipped it down in that same water. He passed around some papers, and we read back and forth those vows we made at baptism, that covenant that unites us, a loving priest, judgey seminarians, faithful semi-frozen flock all as one. With each response, he flicked the olive branch towards us, and little droplets of that sacred stream splashed our hot faces. I believe. I believe. I believe. We repeated those simple words as little sacred splashes accompanied beads of sweat.
I will, with God’s help, we promised, knowing we’d fail if left on our own, but of course, we weren’t on our own. We had those sodden babushkas, we had that charismatic, dancing choir, and God love ‘em, we had those Idahoans. And more than all that still, we had the promise of Christ. I will, with God’s help. And little sacred splashes and little beads of sweat mixed now with drops of tears. The sacred waters of the promised land living and salted and bringing us all together in the midst of so much worldly contradiction.
We were still quiet, but the hush now was less about exhaustion and more about reverence for unexpected grace. We were still hot, the sun hadn’t relented, but now there was a touch of conviction burning us on. And we were certainly still unnerved, unnerved because of a realization. There, sitting on land claimed by two states, covered in water disputed by a third, with a field of landmines behind us and more on the opposite bank, right there, that’s where we Christians are meant to be. We’re meant to occupy the spaces in-between. We’re meant to be peacemakers. We’re meant to be present and to witness. We’re meant to speak our prayers and to rely on God, even in those places God seems to have been abandoned.
Back on the bus, orange signs warning of the dangers buried below flew past and then became a memory. Signs for Jericho ahead replaced them, and as the waters of the promised land dried, finally, we began to speak. I so wish those voices had come down on the banks of the Jordan. I wish those babushkas and the dancers had heard our chorus then. We shared our hearts with each other, open to God’s grace and the person sitting nearby. We even, and I know this might sound crazy for those frozen Western Frontier types, we even talked about what it felt like to make those promises to God. I will with God’s help. And I believe.