Day 1: A most powerful message
It is our first day in the West Bank on our Sabeel Solidarity Pilgrimage in this time of genocide. We hear an absolutely inspiring address by Bishop Munib Younan of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Jordan and the Holy Land (ELCJHL). He lives four miles away from where we are staying, but travelled 35 miles to meet us, due to closed checkpoints. He thanked us all for being here. “You can’t understand what it means to us when you come to us in this hard time.”
Bishop Munib Younan of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Jordan and the Holy Land
The Western churches, Bishop Younan says, are “quiet”— that is, they don’t want to offend some of their own parishioners, who may have absorbed the Western mass media machine’s Zionist propaganda. Of all nations, only South Africa, with its own hard-earned understanding of apartheid, has spoken most boldly in favour of Palestinians. It’s not so much the leaders of churches and nations but mostly the grassroots who speak up and show up, here on the ground, in support.
The whole world is in turmoil, the bishop continues, not just Palestine. Western nations, who long ago helped bring forth the Charter of Rights at the United Nations, now do little to uphold it worldwide. “Though we do not know the future, we have hope, knowing by faith that a God of justice lives. It is the role of every Christian to speak prophetically. To say that all are created in God’s image and are loved, and that God is full of wrath when any of God’s children are abused.
A most powerful message to focus and challenge us as we start our Pilgrimage.
*About the author
Bill Butt is retired after writing for CBC Television, teaching at Western University in London, Ontario, and thirteen years as Overseas Personnel for the United Church of Canada, based primarily in Angola and Mozambique. He is a member of the CFOS Communications Committee. Along with a dozen other Canadians, he participated in a Solidarity Pilgrimage, November 11-21, 2024, hosted by Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center in Jerusalem. Each day of the pilgrimage, he wrote about his experience.