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Lord, have mercy, Lord, have mercy.
Christ, have mercy, Christ have mercy.
Lord, have mercy, Lord, have mercy. 1
The Lord said: “You shall be holy as I am holy.”

May the words of my mouth and the mediation of my heart be ever acceptable to
you, oh God. In the name of the Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer, amen.

Since news broke about Palestine and Israel on October 7^th, my mind has been fixed on the Palestinian civilizations and Israeli citizens. Since then, 7028 Palestinian lives, most of them women and children, and 1400 Israeli lives have been decimated by the violence in the Holy Land. And now, Israel has blacked out Gaza and, out of their justified fear they are carrying out an unjustifiable response.
We are witnessing a traumatized Israeli government brutally defend their existence against a defenseless people. We must be clear about where and with whom power lies in this dynamic, and we must remember how easy it can be to slip into anti-Semitic rhetoric in pro-Palestinian protests.

We must be mindful and not be silent as Christians formed in the Gospel, publicly witness matters. So, we must be ceaseless in advocating for an immediate ceasefire, praying for peace to be made between two vulnerable, terrified bodies of people who believe in the holiness of their homelands. Most importantly, we must commit to the painstaking practice of loving everyone, even our enemy. We are reminded today that to love is the greatest commandment. It is also the greatest risk because to love makes us vulnerable. Can we pray like we believe we are bound to each other’s humanity as neighbors?

The world has been on fire before, and it is on fire again. As Christ-followers, how do we live as it burns and the Holy Land blacks out? The Holy Land is a site of contested homelands. Today’s Gospel is about the identity of Christ and how we, when shaped in the ways of Christ through the Holy Spirit, become holy ones. We are called to be holy, set apart, as God is holy. But set apart by whom and for what purposes?

We cannot understand holiness until we recognize the one who calls us
towards it. Who then is this Messiah and how can we bear witness to him in times of crisis? In today’s Gospel we see Jesus, a Palestinian Jew, son of David, arriving in Jerusalem where He bears ultimate witness to sacrificial love in a context of structural oppression on the Cross. The Pharisees ask: Who are you, Jesus? They
ask: who are you stand here among us and speak good news? How are we to respond to your presence? The Pharisees grappled with these questions, and so should we because how we answer them with our lips has consequences for our lives.

What is the greatest commandment? What does faith most essentially require of us and what does it offer as a response to scenes of subjugation and horror? Such questions are as relevant to us as Christians now as they were in antiquity. How are we to live as Christian witnesses especially in a time of religious and political
unrest, gun violence, and untenable massacre in the Middle East? Can we live together in holiness in global crisis? Jesus invites us into a distinctive way of practicing the faith we have inherited through the Cross. Our faith requires us to love sacrificially and not only to love those we perceive as friends those we see as enemies.

We are entrusted with the Gospel, so what do we believe it says and compels us to do is love God and love one another as our neighbor. Our allies and our enemies are our neighbors. And we love them by praying for them: intercession is a form of social witness in severe oppression and structural violence. We must pray, as Paul does for the Thessalonians, for “courage

To proclaim the Gospel of God despite great opposition. The courage to bear with the good news in public when it feels safer to remain silent. Living the Gospel out loud is risky, but we must do it with God’s help and with one another. From Christ, we learn that love is the greatest witness to justice.

What sets us apart, what makes us Holy as God is Holy, is our call to love everyone: everyone, friend, ally, stranger, other, kin. Everyone is our neighbor. We cannot be separated even from those we most wish to hate. We are called to love everyone, including our enemies. No exceptions. So, how do we demonstrate our love towards those we hate? We pray. We confess our hatred and commit to communion. We pray that our hearts remain soft and our spines upright in justice.

To pray for a ceasefire in Israel in Gaza is to witness to God’s love and to commit our rage against unjust political authorities into God’s hands. To pray for those who are against us is an act of neighborliness. Neighborliness is difficult to practice but it is what sets us apart. We are set apart in the breaking of the bread with friend and enemy with lover and betrayer. Christ asks us to remember this and to pray like He has taught to do at supper with his friends.

There are no holy sides in this war. And yet, we are called to be holy, and God is holy? What does this mean? How can we practice holiness, being “set apart” for God’s purposes as Hebrews renders the command in the TORAH? Holiness is about sacrifice, offering our bodies as sacrifices for justice, mercy, and peace-making. The scriptures declare in the mouths of apostles and prophets in Isaiah and Daniel, in Luke, and Matthew that the spirit of God has come upon them through the Spirit upon us too to proclaim good news to the poor:  Bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberation to the captives, and the opening of the prisons to them that are bound. (Isaiah 61:1)

No one is bound, or bombed, or blacked out in the kingdom.
How do we bring the Gospel good news in extremist war and dehumanizing violence? As Christ’s followers, we are called to humanize the ones we most want to hate. It is so tempting to cast an enemy outside the reach of our prayers. It is okay to hate evil, but we must pray for everyone and be discerning in our determinations of good and evil.

Wars force our loyalties into false and harmful binaries. As Christians formed in the Gospel, our loyalty is to Love first. It is to the
God of Love and Justice to whom we should address our prayers for shalom in the Holy Land.

The terrors and the embers in the Holy Land are on my mind, and I am glad. I do not wish to cast my vision elsewhere. No one is bound, or bombed, or blacked out in the kingdom. When one body member suffers, all suffer. To be attentive to the body as one is what it means to belong to this communion of Christ. We have a moral obligation as Christians to pray for our enemies, trusting in the political power of prayer to shape bodies, lands, and spirits because our enemies are a part of communion.

When we pray, we pray for our loved ones and enemies differently.
For our kin, perhaps we pray first for courage, comfort, and wisdom. And for those we contend with as enemies, perhaps we pray for repentance, discernment, and a re-orientation of their spirit towards righteousness as justice. But we must pray for friends and enemies and love boldly and sincerely. Knowing our enemies as enemies is discerning, but we cannot go so far as to dehumanize them.

More than 7000 Palestinian lives and 1400 Israeli lives have been stolen by the violence of the Israeli-Palestine atrocities to date. We must pray that peace is made in the Holy Land. Justice is the antecedent to peace.

So, beloveds, can we oppose terrorist and paramilitary extremists, praying fervently for the mutual recognition of Jewish and Arab homelands? Can we pray for Israeli hostages and for Palestinian liberation from a form of apartheid? Can we rage and weep and advocate as we pray? We must not remain silent.

I’m drawing strength from radical Christian socialist Vida Dutton-Scudder, whose feast day we commemorated on October 10th in the Anglican communion. She describes the power of prayer for social witness in her article, “Social Problems Facing Church in 1934”:

The responsibility for social intercession
is not satisfied by vague aspiration,
“Thy Kingdom Come.” That petition, to
be sure, covers all our desires, but if we
pray specifically for the recovery to health 

of a beloved friend, for example, we
should be equally specific in our prayers
for the health of the body politic.

Prayer is a powerful response to total crisis because it requires, we cast our full attention to the other and reorient of minds, bodies, and souls toward reconciliation in Christ’s body. So, we must pray for justice and be specific as we intercede for peace in all places and for all people.

As people marked by the covenant of Christ’s passion, cross, and resurrection, may the Spirit give us the courage to offer our bodies as living sacrifices as we pray for our allies and enemies. May we find the strength not to dehumanize lives in these texts of terror and the wakefulness to read statistics as lives, not numbers to scroll
by; and names as lives as though people have died because they have. May the spirit give us boldness to make peace and sow love where there is hatred in bombed lands. May we carry the bones and memories of the dead and the ashes of desecrated places in our bodies and go out and seed the kingdom with the remnant. Christ shows us in his life, ministry, and dying breath that prayer is a powerful social witness to God’s love, justice, and mercy. We can and must pray when violence seeks to engulf hope. We are not hopeless people, so we must continue to pray for courage to keep loving one another, even those whom we perceive to be other, even those whom we perceive as enemies.

We are a community of practice committed to faithfully living out the good news of the Gospel as social witness in our time in our places, so let us begin with prayer to the God of Hope and Justice, who is with us and within us through the power of the Holy Spirit.
Audre Lorde, said:

We must be very strong and love each other to go on living.

Oh God, give us the courage to love and go on living. You have not forsaken us.
Let us not forsake each other in our fear or in our fight for justice for those whom
you have already liberated. Oh Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy. Lord, have
mercy upon us. God of Justice and Mercy, hear us. Amen