St Andrew’s Day sermon, November 30 2015
Isaiah 55, Psalm 9.7-11, John 12.20-36
St Andrew’s Scots Memorial Church, Jerusalem
Barbara Trapido’s first novel, published in 1982, was called Brother of the More Famous Jack, a book that redefined the coming-of-age novel.[1] My next St Andrew’s Day sermon will be called Brother of the More Famous Peter.
The truth is, we don’t know a lot about St Andrew. He is mentioned a mere eleven times in our gospels, and two of those are in lists of the twelve, chosen to symbolize the twelve tribes of Israel.
Nor did St Andrew, in any legend that I know of, bring the gospel to Scotland. That honour belongs to Ninian of Whithorn and Columba of Donegal.
So I thought that I would turn my sermon this evening on its head, and talk not about Andrew, but about the Church of Scotland and its engagement with the land of Andrew’s birth: this land.
If I have a text for my sermon, it is perhaps the last four lines of the hymn of St Andrew we’ve just sung:
So may we who prize his memory
honour Christ in our own day,
bearing witness to our neighbours,
living what we sing and pray. (CH4 339)
Why are we here?
The late Alan Plater, in the Beiderbecke trilogy he wrote for British television, also in the 1980s, famously answered this question by saying, “Everyone’s got to be somewhere.”[2] But that is scarcely a sufficient answer to the question, “Why is the Church of Scotland in the Holy Land?”
Who are we, in this strange tormented country that is just as troubled today as it was in the days of our Lord’s flesh? What are we trying to do here? And who are we trying to do it with?
The first Scottish Presbyterians who came here in 1838 were incapable of giving realistic answers to these questions.[3] Alexander Black, Alexander Bonar, Alexander Keith, and Robert Murray McCheyne were sent out by my Church to explore the possibilities of Christian mission to the Jews – not something we do a lot of these days.
Caught up in a religious fantasy about the return of the Jews to Israel, the conversion of the Jews to Christ, and the imminent return of Christ to Jerusalem, they were incapable of seeing the inhabitants of this land, the land itself – or, for that matter, themselves – as they really were. They looked at 19th-century Palestine, and what they saw was the land as described in the scriptures of the Old and New Testaments. It’s long been my belief that every copy of the Bible should have inscribed on its cover in large, friendly letters the words, “This book can damage your mental health.”[4]
Their visit bore no fruit until almost half a century later, when David Torrance established a hospital in Tiberias on the Sea of Galilee.
Three main strategies were adopted by Christian missionaries in the 19th century. The first was to confront people directly with the truth of the gospel and beat them into submission. This didn’t work very well. The other two were to set up hospitals or schools, in the hope that providing people with services they needed would open them up to hearing the claims of Christ, or at any rate the claims the missionaries made on his behalf.
In the Tiberias hospital, this didn’t work very well either. Dr Torrance and his colleagues provided a much-appreciated service – the hospital, in fact, closed down only in 1959, when an expanding Israeli health service made it redundant. But they converted almost no-one: Jew, Arab or Druze. One exception to this rule was Leon Levison, who moved to Scotland, and two of whose sons – David and Fred – became distinguished ministers in our Church.
The hospital is still there. After four decades as a low-cost hostel for pilgrims and tourists, it is now the Scots Hotel, offering high-class accommodation at the other end of the cost spectrum. Around the corner is our other church, St Andrew’s, Galilee, where my colleague Kate McDonald Reynolds is the new minister; we’re happy to have with us this evening her immediate predecessor, Rev Colin Johnston.
The second leg of the Church of Scotland’s engagement in this land happened almost by accident. In 1863, Jane Walker-Arnott created a school in the seaport of Jaffa, to begin with, for the girls of the town. On her death, she left the school to our Church. As we were recovering from our surprise, the Great War broke out, which at least gave us a breathing space. But we took it on and have run it with some success ever since.
The third leg is where we find ourselves tonight. St Andrew’s Scots Memorial was the brainchild of Ninian Hill, an energetic Scottish businessman and an elder in Murrayfield parish church in Edinburgh.
Two days after General Allenby walked through the Jaffa Gate on December 11 1917, Hill rose in the Presbytery of Edinburgh to propose that the Church of Scotland should celebrate the fall of Jerusalem by erecting in this city a Scots Kirk of St Andrew. A persuasive man, he convinced both the Presbytery and our General Assembly to back the scheme. The church was duly built and opened in 1930. Its purpose was in part to remember those Scots who had died here in the Palestine campaign.
We still do that. But if you look carefully at the memorial plaques on our walls, you will see that we also remember the soldiers and policemen who died here during the British mandate, from 1920 to 1948, and two Scots who died elsewhere in this region during the Second World War.
As I recount this history, it sounds very much like a chapter of accidents. But we Christians tend to believe that even accidents happen on God’s purpose, if only we could figure out what that purpose is.
So I return to my question. What is the point and purpose of the Church of Scotland’s presence here? We are three institutions in three places, with a tiny Church of Scotland staff. Unlike our Anglican and Lutheran sisters and brothers, we didn’t set up an indigenous church – something for which the historic churches of the Holy Land are no doubt grateful.
What, then, are we for?
I’ve been here just over a year, and I expect that we shall still be asking that question long after I am gone. But let me contribute to the discussion my own tuppence worth.
The first penny comes in the form of a familiar quote from the prophet Micah: “What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love compassion, and to walk humbly with your God?” (Micah 6.8)
Let me start at the end of that. We need, as the Church of Scotland, to walk humbly in this land. We are newcomers, Johnnies-come-lately; we are even, in a sense, intruders. And the worth of our being here is measured in no small part by the degree to which we can be of service to the Christians of Palestine.
We still struggle with that. But it was, I think, my predecessor Colin Morton, who came here in 1988, who first saw it clearly. Arriving a year after the outbreak of the first intifada, he recognized that we needed to build much closer relationships with the local churches and the Palestinian community.
His wife Carol started Craftaid on the premises of St Andrew’s to help Palestinian self-help groups market their products. This continues today in the form of Sunbula, still on our premises, as well as online and in east Jerusalem, and of Hadeel, next door to our church offices in Edinburgh.
This was also the period when the Church of Scotland began to see more clearly that the value of our being here turned also on our commitment to doing justice in an unjust land. That is still our firm conviction, but I don’t propose this evening to beat you over the head with problems that are depressingly familiar.
To say a little more about loving compassion, let me offer you my second penny. This is the prayer of a Palestinian Christian that I encountered 23 years ago, when I first visited Jerusalem. It appears today on the homepage of our website. More of an instruction than a prayer, it says:
Pray not for Arab or Jew, for Palestinian or Israeli, but pray rather for yourselves, that you might not divide them in your prayers but keep them both together in your hearts.
I posted this instruction not because it is easy but because it is hard. The longer I stay here, the harder it seems to me to fulfil.
Christians say our God is a biased God with a decided preference for the poor and downtrodden, the homeless, the displaced and the dispossessed, the exiles and the refugees.
Christians also say our God is an unbiased God who cares for all of us without discrimination; Christ died for us while we were yet sinners; we love, however imperfectly, because God first loves us.
If we are commanded to love compassion, it is this reckless, indiscriminate divine compassion we are called to love; and yet we are in the same divine breath commanded to do justice.
Holding together these first two of Micah’s requirements, while walking humbly in a land in which we are guests if not intruders, is, it seems to me, why we are here.
St Andrew’s Scots Memorial is on Facebook: You can visit us and “like” us. Or not, of course.
Notes
[1] Or so Bloomsbury Press claims on its website, and who am I to disagree with the publishers of the Harry Potter series?
[2] Alan Plater’s The Beiderbecke Trilogy is available both on DVD and in novel form. Recommended!
[3] For more on the history, see Walter T Dunlop, Faith Rewarded: The Story of St Andrew’s Scots Memorial, Jerusalem (Peterborough: Fastprint, 2014), Isobel Godwin, May You Live to be 120! The Story of Tabeetha School, Jaffa, 1863-1983 (Edinburgh: St Andrew Press, 2000), WP Livingstone, Galilee Doctor: Being a Sketch of the Career of Dr DW Torrance of Tiberias (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1923?), Michael Marten, Attempting to Bring the Gospel Home: Scottish Missions to Palestine, 1839-1917. International Library of Colonial History (London: Tauris Academic Studies, 2006).
[4] If you spotted the allusion to Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, give yourself an extra point.