So I've mentioned a few times that Brooks and I went to Israel for a two week pilgrimage back in our seminary days. 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 sneak away or crack up in the back row. We’re not disruptive, we’re just differently attentive. But we are attentive. And, with God’s help, we try to stay open.
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 West frontier and Midwestern understatement. Their land was frozen, and so were their emotions.
Their priest, Fr. Ken, took us seminarians under his wing, and we spent a good deal of time trying to get him to cut loose. We surprised him one night by sneaking him, some 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 ladder and using a plastic garbage can as an altar. I believe this was the first Anglican service ever done in that ancient place.
But as a whole that group was pretty buttoned up and modern American tourists. 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 where Jesus was tempted with control of worldly things. But mostly, what we’d see 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, they only seemed to see a sort of quaint curiosity wherever they went and they seemed a little bit afraid to actually relax and soak it all in.
But one day things changed. 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 topped with concertina wire separated us from, well, it was hard to tell what, exactly. Looked like more yellow dust. 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 would 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. Then another, 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! Mines!
It was only in recent years that the location had been reopened to the public, and 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, silty water, and a ramp led down to stadium seats at the lip of the bank. Clean and crisp and safe. Surrounded by buried ready-to-explode nightmares, you could sit comfortably in the desert sun with your wide-brimmed hat pulled low over neck and an imported bottle of water dripping condensation through your fingers.
Above you, up on the viewing platform, a pair of young Israeli soldiers in full fatigues kept a lookout, but mostly they just looked bored. Across the water, maybe as close as I am to you folks in the back row, 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 outdoor platform we stood on, that’s the place where Jesus was baptized.
To our left, another bus’s group from Equatorial Guinea wore brightly colored clothing, sang hymns and dancing – not walking -- from one place to another. Those closest to the water kicked off their sandals and danced on in. We watched, all of us quiet and hot and unnerved by the land mines or maybe the unashamed display of faith, I’m not sure which.
Ahead, between us and the soldiers across the way, a bevy of Russian 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, loving priest, rambunctious 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 alone.
Because we were surrounded by those sodden babushkas, that charismatic, dancing Afrian 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 those 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, though not because of some awkward tourist vs. pilgrim juxtaposition; no, we were 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. We do this in the face of whatever the world arms itself with, we do this where there is boredom, where there is hatred, where there is cheapened faith or sanitized history.
In that place, within that deadly fence, churches sit empty, riddled with old wounds, and the soil itself occasionally leaps and explodes with angry ordnance. It’s a far cry from the comfort of our pews here, thank God. But even so, we are brought back to the Jordan, each of us because of our baptisms. Baptism that means so much more than we usually think. Death to the ways of this world, new birth into life committed to Christ come what may, marked as Christ’s own in a world that doesn’t always welcome Christ’s own. There, in the muddy waters outside Jericho, there, those acts are no quaint curiosities or cheapened anachronisms.
As you might imagine, it took awhile for the silence to break. 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. Changed people.
We laughed, reminded of the weight lifted from us. 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 Midwestern Frontier types, we even talked about what it felt like to make those promises to God. I believe, and I will with God’s help. Because in this world, that’s where we’re meant to be.