Turning our face toward Israel

In less than a week, I will be heading to Israel and I am very excited and eager to get going. My travelling companion will be Pastor Phil Leo from Calvin Church in Oak Lawn. Travelling the same day (but on a different airline) and meeting up with us in Israel is Pastor David Adams of Grand Rapids and a Lutheran pastor friend of his. We will be joined by four other CRC representative in a spiritually and personally exciting conference and spiritual pilgrimage through Bethlehem Bible College.

While we adjust to the time change, we hope to do a little sightseeing, visiting the Herodian and the Church of the Nativity. We will also tour a business run by a local Christian family. If you see news about Israel this week, think of us, too, and ask God to guard us and encourage us through this time of learning and reflection. Our schedules are full but I hope to keep up with the blog; feel free to check in and respond. Thanks.

The shrine of the book

We spent part of a day gonig to the Israel Museum. One of the highlights at the museum is the shrine built in honor of the finding of the Dead Sea scrolls. The exhibit begins down underground; like entering a cave where the scrolls were found just over 60 years ago. You see tools and writing instruments and coins from the Essene community at Qumran, the community which copied and preserved these ancient manuscripts of the Bible. As you work your way deeper into the cave, you finally enter the shrine of the book - a room that is designed to look like the inside of one of the clay pots that held the scrolls for nearly 2000 years. The outside of the shrine can be seen in the picture at the right; doesn't teh white domed roof look like the lid to a pottery jar to you? In a way, we are people of the book; we listen to the Bible as God's word to us, a book filled with words of life.

The Garden Tomb

One of the most moving parts of being in Israel comes with realizing that the events I have heard about since a child happened right here, leaving footprints somewhere here, near my feet.

Like the resurrection of Jesus. We know that he was crucified outside the city gates, outside the wall surrounding Jerusalem; we have a pretty good idea where the old city walls ran. But the exact address, we don't know.

One contender for the site of Jesus' resurrection is the garden tomb. As the garden tomb tour guide said, the resurrection might have happened here or it might have happened 100 meters away from here. Though no one can be certain of a more exact location, what really matters is that Jesus rose from the grave. Glancing over the hill at the garden tomb and seeing the old city wall just a few blocks away, stirred my heart to say: Jesus is alive. It happened here, outside this city. ,With these thoughts in my mind, our tour guide's voice broke into my thoughts: "He is risen!" "Hallelujah," we replied. He is risen indeed!

Sephoris

We are back in Jerusalem after four days in Galilee. One of our many highlights is a visit to the town of Sephoris. Sephoris is just a few miles from Nazareth, maybe a thirty minute walk. The Romans built Sephoris as their new capital in Galilee during the early life of Jesus. It is not difficult to imagine Joseph and his young son Jesus walking over the hills to find work in this new city. There would be plenty for a tradesman to do. Sephoris is filled with beautiful mosaic floors. The Romans loved big banquets and in the floor of one of the sumptuous banquet halls is this mosaic, nicknames the Mona Lisa of Galilee. What these artisans could do with a little colored stone is astounding. It is so exquisite in detail and marvelously shaded, I wondered who could have designed such beauty?

Safety Concerns

When we left for Israel, many people assured us that they would pray for our safety. I took it that they were concerned about conflict between Palestinians and Israelis and that we might get caught in the cross fire. I am very grateful for those prayers. There is some danger in this place. Most of the danger comes from the places we are visiting! We are hanging over cliffs, climbing into dark cisterns, hiking up paths with danger of falling rocks, walking along staricases suspended hundreds of feet in the air, winding down narrow mountain roads in our bus, and encountering drivers who are more aggressive than any we see in Chicago.

Walking up the Kidron Valley, below the area of Silwan, we walked below power poles with severe warnings about climbing the tower. In Hebrew, Arabic, and English, the sign said: "Warning! Danger of Death!" Another sign warned against walking too quickly down a flight of marble steps; a stick figure is seen with one leg out at a 90 degree angle, his upper body in the opposite angle, and arms flailing helplessly over his head. Below is one of our favorite warnings: don't stand too close to the edge of the cliff or ... this could be you!

Tears of God

On the Mount of Olives, a little chapel rests on a traditional site where Jesus may have stopped to weep over the city of Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. At this site, Jesus could have looked across the Kidron valley and seen the entire temple complex and the city rising behind it; the view is strikingly beautiful;. I can imagine Jesus seeing that entire week in one glimpse, his sorrows, his trial, his death - and the people who were rejecting his sacrifice of love.

I also love the chapel, Dominus Flevit. It is shaped like tear drops falling on the hillside. Inside, there are mosaics and reliefs that commemorate Jesus sorrow over Jerusalem. The chapels concave ceiling is lined with strips of gold leaf 'trickling' down the roof, punctuated by a small, central opening in the ceiling that lets in light. To me, the church suggests the tears of God, streaming down from heaven, over people who refuse his compassion, his sacrifice, his love for them. Tears of heaven.

I was so moved by the thought that it overwhelmed me; God's tears for us, as Origen wrote. God's tears over our hurts, our brokenness. Gpd's tears of compassion and love for us.

Our Class

We have 45 students in our class as we study and travel throughout Israel. Our instructor is Dr. Carl Rasmussen. Dr. Rasmussen is Professor of Biblical Studies at Bethel College in Minnesota, has a Ph.D. in Ancient Near Eastern Studies, and also Th.M., B.D., and B.A. degrees. He is the author of the Zondervan NIV Atlas of the Bible and the history, archaeology, and geography editor for the revised Halley's Bible Handbook. Here is a link to his website, jammed with photos: http://www.holylandphotos.org/ Needless to say, he can speak in depth about what we are studying. What a gem of a resource!

the students in our class include a dozen people from Columbia Bible College in British Columbia, 5 students from other colleges - like our son Nick, 6 seminary students, 7 pastors, 4 college professors, and a good number of folks who simply want to learn more about the Bible. It is a great group of people; we are enjoying our time together!

Here is a picture of Carl Rasmussen, in one of our "on the field" class sessions.

He made a spring in the desert

Near the shore of the Dead Sea, the terrain is barren and the air is hot. We hiked up the wadi En Gedi, past ibex combing the rock face for food, and thornbushes clinging to the pathway. As we climbed, there was water in the bottom of the wadi; within a fifteen minute climb were waterfalls and pools, grasses and trees. What simple joy to wade in to the cool water at the spring. It was like grace, pouring down on us from on high., soothing and calming our troubled hearts, filling us with joy. Here our class is enjoying the cooling spring.

Into the desert

We just got back from three days in the desert. At first the desert is quite intimidating: temperatures in the 90's, bright hot sun, rocks and sand. But it actually has its own beauty and is full of life. Even people fill the desert. Abraham spent a fair amount of his life around Beer Sheva.

Water is a scarce and precious commodity in the desert. In Beer Sheva, we walked into a massive water system that held waer diverted from the wadi. The wadi's drain a large area and the water runs off the surface quickly, collecting in a torrent at the bottom of the wadi. In an ingenious way, the ancient people diverted water from the water into their system, and they could use it for months to come. We were able to walk into the water system, walking down the well by taking four long flights of stairs. You may be able to see one of the flights of stairs on the right of the picture. I began to appreciate how water gives life. And how the bible calls the spirit of God "life giving water."

Yad Vashem - Israeli Holocaust Museum

We were free on Monday afternoon so we took a taxi to Yad Vashem. The memorial sits on a 60+ acre campus, beautifully wooded and landscaped. Surrounding the outside of the memorial is a walk of memory, honoring gentiles who helped save lives of Jews during WWII. The rooms of the memorial contained photographs, written accounts, and visual displays including interviews with holocaust survivors. The memorial was organized as a history of the holocaust, showing events that led up to the war, the rise of hitler and the Nazi party in Germany, and the development of laws that took away rights of Jewish citizens in Germany and the countries it occupied. As a Dutch woman said, it was like the Nazi's threw the people a loop of rope around the Jews and it gradually became tighter and tighter until a whole people was being murdered. It was deeply moving and troubling, leaving us in tears at some of the stories.

We saw a name we knew in the walk of the righteous, and I was moved by remembering the sacrifice this person made to save the life of a young Jewish boy in Rotterdam. Trudy left a stone on the traintrack of an exhibit of a boxcar used to transport Jews to the prison camps (leaving a stone on a grave is like leaving flowers in our culture) and we walked away in tears at the enormity of what had happened less than a century ago.

A land of contrasts

On Friday, we travelled from the mountain region around Jerusalem and Bethlehem, down through the Sorek Valley toward Gezer in the lowlands, which guards teh way to Jerusalem from the coastal plain. In less than an hour's drive, we changed altitude from 3000 feet to just above sea level, and changed from brilliant green mountain valleys to the recently harvested flatlands. Here is a glimpse of the Sorek Valley, a little west of Bethlehem.

I can imagine David walking along the ridge of this canyon, on his way to bring meals to his brothers who are locked in fear because of the intimidating threats and size of Goliath from Gath, a Philistine city on the coastal plain. God trained him in courage, wandering through the hills, caring for his father's sheep, protecting them from bears and lions. Courage - it would take a lot of it just to walk through a valley like this.