Sermon Archive

For the Peace of Jerusalem
 © by the Reverend Dr. Byron E. Shafer
(Rutgers, July 9, 2000;  14th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B; Holy Communion)

II Samuel 5:1–9 (OT, pp. 310–311);
Psalm 122 (OT, p. 633; from 1AdvA)

 

Pray for the peace of Jerusalem!

Jerusalem—the Holy City of the Holy Land.  The city sacred to three faiths—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.  The city of peace that throughout its history has ironically been faced by the nearly continuous threat of warfare and conquest.  The city that in these weeks just ahead, at Camp David, will doubtless pose the major stumbling block to achieving peace between Israel and the Palestinians.

As revealed by archaeology, the city of Jerusalem has existed for nearly 6,000 years, although the first reference to it in extant historical documents comes from a mere 4,500 years ago, in the Ebla archives that date to around 2500 b.c.  In the Bible, the indigenous people of the city are called “Jebusites.”

In this morning’s First Lesson, we learn that it was not until around the year 1000 b.c., or some 3,000 years after its founding, that the Jebusite city of Jerusalem was conquered by the troops of David, the newly crowned king of United Israel.

Israel’s first king, Saul, had been killed in battle, and the twelve  tribes of Israel had disagreed over who should succeed him.  The ten northern tribes recognized Saul’s son, Ishbaal.  But the two southern tribes recognized Saul’s rival, David.  So for the first seven and a half years after Saul’s death David had ruled, at Hebron, over only part of Israel.  But when Ishbaal was assassinated, the 10 northern tribes asked David to become their king also.

To help heal the tensions between Israel’s northern and southern tribes, David sought to establish his new capital in a neutral city, one associated with neither the north nor the south, a city that stood in the borderland between north and south yet had never been any part of the nation of Israel;  and there was just one place that fit that description—namely, the Jebusite city of Jerusalem.

So Jerusalem, whose name has traditionally been understood to mean, in translation, “foundation of peace”—Jerusalem first became part of Israel by being conquered.

After capturing the Jebusite city of Jerusalem, David and his son and successor Solomon greatly expanded it.  David also brought there the ark of the covenant—the sacred chest that symbolized for Israel the presence of God.  Later Solomon built there a glorious temple for God.  So for Israel Jerusalem quickly took on an indelible aura of sacredness.  Israel came to see Jerusalem as the place of God’s most intense earthly presence.

Psalm 122, this morning’s 2nd Lesson, reflects that understanding.  It is a song that was sung by Israelite pilgrims as they converged on Jerusalem and on the temple that Solomon had built there.  At various times of festival, the people came to the temple to worship God, and as they came, they sang Psalm 122, which expressed so well their feeling that Jerusalem was earth’s most sacred space.  The pilgrims’ aching muscles and gritty feet were forgotten amidst the joy and ecstasy of their encounter with God at this, the earthly center of God’s justice and peace.  And so they joined together to call out, in an expression marked by great alliteration, “Sha’alu shelom Yerushalaim!” “Pray for the peace of Jerusalem! …  May peace be within your walls, and security within your towers.”

Such pilgrimage festivals continued among the Jewish people for almost 1,000 years—for the first 350 of them at the magnificent temple built by Solomon, and then, after its destruction at the hands of an enemy, for another 585 years at the much less grand Second Temple.  This modest structure was, however, greatly expanded and beautified beginning shortly before Jesus’s birth—by Herod the Great, the tyrannical king imposed on the Jews by the Roman Emperor Augustus.  This temple of Herod stood until the year 70 a.d., when the Romans, in quelling a Jewish revolt, destroyed it.  But it was Herod’s temple to which Jesus traveled as a pilgrim, doubtless reciting Psalm 122.  And it was in this same temple that Jesus went on to worship and teach.

Jesus’s association with Jerusalem and its temple is the reason that we Christians consider Jerusalem holy.  Most particularly, we consider Jerusalem holy because it was there that Jesus died and was raised from the dead.

In the 4th century a.d., immediately after Christianity had become, under Constantine, the dominant religion in the Roman Empire, Christians began to build in the Holy Land sacred shrines to commemorate the important places where Jesus had been.  And the most hallowed of all these Christian shrines was the church that was erected in Jerusalem over the traditional site of Jesus’s death and burial—the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which was consecrated in the year 335 a.d.

Some three hundred years after that, in the year 638 a.d., a Muslim emperor, Omar, led his armies from the east and wrested control of Jerusalem from the Byzantine Christians.  In Islam Jerusalem is considered the 3rd holiest site on earth, just behind the Arabian cities of Mecca and Medina.  Jerusalem is holy to Muslims both because of its association with God’s earlier prophets to the Jews, including Jesus, and because of its association with God’s final prophet, Muhammad.

You see, according to the Qur‘an and Muslim tradition, Muhammad was carried one night on a mystical night journey from Mecca to Jerusalem.  There Muhammad spoke with some former prophets of Israel, and there also, from a rock on the site where the Jewish temple had stood, Muhammad was lifted to heaven’s highest level for a time of speaking with God.

So it was that at the end of the 7th Century a.d. a Muslim ruler, in order to commemorate Muhammad’s night journey to Jerusalem, built in that city a mosque and a shrine on what, during the Byzantine era, had been the abandoned and garbage-strewn site of the first and second Jewish temples.  The two Islamic structures built then on the site of the Jewish temple are still standing today—the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock.  This latter is the gold-domed shrine framed in many modern photographs of Jerusalem, and it was completed in the year 691 a.d.,more than 1300 years ago.  It was built to hallow the rock from which Muhammad had ascended into heaven.  The magnificent calligraphy found on its walls offers inscriptions of all the verses in the Qur‘an that speak of the prophet Jesus.

And so from all this recital of history we come to the present and to the peace talks that will begin at Camp David just 2 days from now—the talks between Israel, most of whose citizens are Jewish, and the Palestinians, a majority of whom are Muslim and a minority of whom are Christian.  Jews, Muslims, and Christians in dialogue over Jerusalem.

Through these coming weeks, it is important for us to be in prayer.  “Sha’alu shelom Yerushalaim!” “Pray for the peace of Jerusalem!”  Pray that peace may come within its walls, and security within its towers.  For if peace can be established in Jerusalem, it can be established anywhere on earth.

Between the years 1948 and 1967, Jerusalem was a city divided into west and east, between Israel and Jordan, the latter ruling over the Palestinians.  After the war of 1967, Israel took control of all of Jerusalem, annexing East Jerusalem, the part that was Palestinian and incorporating it into Israel proper.  Since 1967, Israel has greatly enlarged the boundaries of Jerusalem, expanding the city to almost ten times the area it covered prior to 1967, and, in doing so, Israel has annexed more and more Palestinian land.  Most of today’s city of Jerusalem, as defined by Israel, had never been part of Jerusalem prior to 1967.

Now Israel is insisting that after peace is made all of this “expanded Jerusalem” must remain united under Israeli sovereignty.  But the Palestinians are insisting that the parts of Jerusalem where Palestinians lived before 1967 must, in order to have peace, be placed under Palestinian sovereignty.  And the passion that lies behind these competing claims is a passion fueled by the religious attachment that all parties feel toward Jerusalem’s holy sites.  And what makes the matter of these holy sites so hard to resolve is that all of them—Jewish, Christian, and Muslim alike—all of them lie within East Jerusalem, the portion of the city that before 1967 was Palestinian.

At Camp David, some formula will have to be found that mediates between these competing demands of Israelis and Palestinians.

Friends in Christ, these next few weeks are an absolutely critical period for the Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations.  If peace does not come now, I foresee much violence ahead.  But of course if any peace agreement attained now is to endure both sides must believe that its accords are just.  Hard bargaining lies ahead.  Will Israel and the Palestinians find their way to peace with justice, or will they not?

Friends, the peace process needs help, and there is something that we can and must do.  Throughout these next several weeks, please “sha’alu shelom Yerushalaim!”  “Pray for the peace of Jerusalem!”  Pray that at last peace may come within its walls, and security within its towers For if peace can be established in Jerusalem, it can be established anywhere on earth.

 

Let us pray:

O God, we do pray for the peace of Jerusalem, the city that You have proclaimed holy.  Over the next several weeks, be with the Israelis and the Palestinians gathered at Camp David.  Help them to grow beyond ancient hatreds to a newfound trust. Enable them to move beyond long-term conflict to an enduring peace, one that ushers in a new prospect for peace throughout the world.  Amen.