The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight– yes, Bethlehem.
They are strange words to sing in the globalizing 21-st century. We live in a flat world, with the ability to know so much about what happens everywhere all the time. And mostly we are numbed by it all.
Hopes and fears of all the years? And such a small little place, Bethlehem?
I can never sing that song without remembering a meal I had in a home on the hills above Bethlehem, looking back on Jerusalem a few miles behind and down upon the city of David a few miles below. But it is not so pastoral now, and is instead more a war zone with soldiers, barbed wire and blockades—and people full of longings and loves that are a zero-sum game, politically.
I thought of this again in a conversation with my neighbor and friend Todd Deatherage the Wednesday morning after the bombing began between the Israelis and the Palestinians—again. With another neighbor and friend, Mark Rodgers, we meet at the local Caribou Coffee once a week, talking through, thinking through, praying through our vocations—the big, complex word that that is, covering the waterfront of our relationships and responsibilities.
We talked about Jim Hoagland’s essay in the Washington Post (“Advice to President Obama for a second term”) which included this succinct sentence, “Palestinians and Israelis are rediscovering anew, as they do at least once a decade, the bloody dead end they create by refusing to talk of peace.” There are few in the city, and in any city, whose vision of contemporary geo-politics comes close to the wisdom of Hoagland, the distinguished watcher of the world that he has been for decades—and I listen to him, carefully.
With the heartache of war again, this time with rockets blasting into the air and onto the peoples of Tel Aviv and the Gaza Strip, I wondered what Todd thought, given his commitments and experience.
After years of life in the Senate, he became the chief of staff for the internal State Department think tank under Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. He began visiting Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and Bethlehem regularly, and in the years since that has only increased with his leadership of the Telos Group, along with his friend, Greg Khalil, who happens to have relatives by the dozens in Bethlehem.
Th other day, there was a fascinating interview with Todd at The Daily Beast (“What Evangelicals Get Wrong About Israel and the Palestinians”), which made me glad and proud, even in my unsettled heart, full of yearning for Bethlehem and beyond as it is. He has taken on a heroic responsibility, one that almost no one in the church or the world believes in. Simply said, he believes that any long-term solution to the “hopes and fears of all the years” is in taking seriously both the Israelis and the Palestinians. He refuses to choose, knowing too much history and too many people on both sides. (The article is not perfect, the writer has her own perspective, but she does allow Todd to offer a more complete story than is typically told.
In this very now-but-not-yet world in which we live, there is no other future than one marked by a proximate justice, a proximate peace—taking seriously the hopes and fears of both peoples. That is the telos of Todd’s work, and the heart of his vocation.
If we have ears, we will hear.
(Full Disclosure: I am not only Todd’s long friend, but I serve on the board of the Telos Group.)
Image by Jim Forest. Used with permission. Sourced via Flickr.
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