Sunday Sermon: The Good Samaritan

Sermon preached on July 14, 2013

Saint Clements by the Sea, San Clemente

By Shireen Baker

Text: Luke 10: 25-37 (The Good Samaritan)

Today’s Gospel starts in the same way as many other Gospel lessons, a leader in the community, stands up and ‘tests’ Jesus in some way.  This time it is a lawyer and he asks Jesus “what must I do to inherit eternal life?" Lawyers were teachers of Jewish law and were concerned with maintaining the law in its minutia. In this story he is testing to see how well Jesus knew and preached the laws of Moses.

Despite the antagonism of the questioner, Jesus takes the question seriously, and turning it around on the lawyer asks, “What is in the law?”  Amazingly the lawyer answers Jesus by reciting the two great commandments, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself." 

You see, the importance of loving God and your neighbor was by no means a new concept.  There is a story about an honored Jewish leader, a Pharisee and lawyer known as Hillel the Elder, who died when Jesus was about 10 years old.  In this story a Gentile approaches him and asks him to explain the Torah to him while he stands on one foot,  Hillel’s answers the Gentile saying, “What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow: this is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary; go and learn.” 

So the Lawyer already knows what he is meant to do, but he persists because he wants to ‘Justify himself.’  He wants to know the exact boundaries of the law, who exactly is he supposed to love, who can he leave out, how little can he do to be made righteous? 

It is in answer to this question that Jesus tells the story that we now know as “The Good Samaritan”.  These days the word Samaritan has come to mean ‘compassionate helper.’  And generally we think we understand the point of the tale  – ‘Don’t be like those bad compassionless priests and Levites, be nice like the Good Samaritan.”  But is that what the story is really telling us, or is Jesus challenging the lawyer, and us, to something much more difficult?

In the story that Jesus tells, the priest and the Levite, were respectable, good Jews.  They were the ordinary temple workers, not so high up in the temple hierarchy that they would have been unrelatable, but were still holy, clean and law abiding.  And their reaction to the man lying on the side of the road, was not done out of callousness, or cruelty.  Their jobs required that they maintain a high standard of purity.  They would no longer be able to work in the temple if they came in contact with a dead body and the very act of going over to check would have put their jobs at risk.  What’s more, the body could easily have been a trap, set there by robbers, they very easily could have become victims of a crime on that isolated stretch of highway, all in all the risks seemed to outweigh the rewards.  So they did not get involved, before they could even think about helping or not, they crossed over to the other side of the street, avoiding the problem entirely.

Jesus’ listeners would probably have been saddened by the actions of the priest and Levite, but those actions would still have seemed understandable.

The actions of the Samaritan, on the other hand, would have been alarming, nonsensical even. 

Now, of course, we know that a Samaritan is not necessarily someone who helps people in need, a Samaritan is part of a schismatic sect of Judaism that lived a very separate life from the rest of the Jewish population.  Instead of worshiping at the temple in Jerusalem, the Samaritans worshiped on mount Garizen, and they did not interact with those outside of their sect.  Samaritans were seen as unclean heretics, but what is equally important is that Samaritans saw the Jews as unclean heretics as well.  Generally Samaritans would have avoided contact with Jews at all cost.  So for this particular Samaritan to delay his own journey, risk his own well-being, spend a large sum of money and promise to return to check up on the injured man, was absolutely astonishing.  He went far above anything that would have been expected of anyone, much less a Samaritan.

And after all this, the Lawyer’s question “who is my neighbor?” is actually the wrong question entirely, so Jesus doesn’t even answer it, instead he rephrases it, asking the lawyer “who was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?”

The lawyer wants to know what his rights and responsibilities are under the law; he wants to know “who do we have to be neighbors to?”  But Jesus wants to know “how much of a neighbor are we capable of being?”  How far can we push the limits of our love for one another?  How much are we willing to risk, how much are we willing to sacrifice? 

Without question the man on the street, a fellow Jew, would have been considered neighbor to the priest and the Levite, but they had other laws to worry about, other responsibilities to hide behind.  Without question the man on the street would NOT have been considered a neighbor to the Samaritan, but he acted, not out of responsibility but out of love. 

Every day we are faced with similar challenges, and I know that I for one am constantly falling into the mindset of the Lawyer, asking myself questions, “how much do I have to give to the homeless man asking for change?”  “How much time do I have to spend helping this person find their lost dog?” “How long do I have to spend talking to this lonely person on the subway before I can go back to reading my book?”How far do I have to go?  How much do I have to sacrifice?  But most of the time I have stopped asking entirely, I have set the limits to what I can do and that is that.  Love does not really come into it at all.

But Jesus makes it pretty clear that there really is no limit to the love we should be showing to one another, and we know this, every Sunday we are faced with Christ’s teachings, over and over again we are told to ‘put on Christ,’ to take up the cross and follow, we know the challenge that is before us - we know what it really means to be a ‘Good Samaritan.’  But knowing is simply not good enough and Christ says in the end “Go and do likewise.”

But how can we, really?  The task seems so daunting, so beyond reason even.  Real loving compassion, the kind the Samaritan felt, that kind of compassion is so difficult to sustain.  It requires entering into other people’s suffering, into other people’s weakness and pain, It requires becoming vulnerable when what we really want to do is find a quick and easy cure or run away from the suffering entirely.  

It is most certainly not easy, but there are ways -

Thomas Merton once wrote “"Living is the constant adjustment of thought to life and life to thought in such a way that we are always growing, always experiencing new things in the old and old things in the new. Thus life is always new."

I think it is in this way that we can slowly but surely be formed as Christians, abandoning the question “what are my Christian responsibilities?” and asking instead “how much love can I show today?”  

Auschwitz I

Hey Folks -

This will be short because it is late and I have to be up in 6 hours.  One might think that going to a place like Auschwitz would bring greater understanding, a stronger depth of knowledge, insight - it doesn't.  A place like that only brings deeper confusion and cognitive dissonance.

We had a marvelous guide named Anna, as we went through Auschwitz I, she was very knowledgeable and explained things very well.

You do not need to go to Auschwitz to know that the Nazis were evil, but the sheer magnitude of what was done there is really hard to comprehend.  When you see an entire room filled with human hair and then a bolt of cloth made out of hair just like it...the corruption of the entire society starts to become tragically and unfathomably clear.  The hair was shipped to a company and weaved into fabric which was later used as fabric stiffener in clothing...There are no words to express...

The 1 yard by 1 yard cell where 4 POWs were forced to stand all night after working all day and the suffocation cell where POWs were locked in and slowly suffocated over a several days, these are not about efficiency they are about cruelty, a cruelty beyond measure.  

And yes, I walked through the gas chamber and the crematorium.  What can I say?  

The whole time I was there I had my guard up.  I don't think I could feel and when I went into the gas chamber it seemed unreal, my mind refuses to let it sink in.  A small dark rectangle shaped underground room with small windows in the ceiling through which the canisters of cyanide were dropped, so many people died in that space, on that very floor, but I couldn't feel anything, my brain could not process it, and as I walked out all I could think was that there was a time when nobody left that room on their own two feet...

And outside it was beautiful, verdant, with a blue sky and a well maintained red brick chimney coming out of the ground.  And there is this horrible cognitive dissonance because you want the landscape to match the horror, you want nature to reflect the sin within, but instead the ground fertilized with the ashes of thousands of people makes the place beautiful...

Who can possibly make sense of that?

Sermon June 9th

Luke 7:11-17

May the Words of my mouth and the meditation of our hearts be acceptable in your sight oh God our strength and our redeemer.

I feel that I would be remiss if I didn’t, before anything else, mention the events of yesterday.   Steve and I in the company of 9 others in this diocese, and many more around the country, were blessed with the privilege of devoting our lives to the service of God and to the Church.  The journey leading to the events of yesterday has been long and challenging, in so many ways, and I want to thank you all for the support and Love that this church has offered us, and continues to offer us as we take our ministry into the world.

“God Loves us just as we are.”  This is a statement that I hear people say quite a bit, it is meant to bring comfort and security in times of pain and doubt, and it is a true statement, God does Love us just as we are.  But I must admit that it is a statement that has always bothered me, I think, because it stops short of saying something truly substantive about God’s action in our lives.  Again I want to emphasize that the sentiment is not wrong, but As a statement of God’s Love, it is incomplete.

So what does it mean when we say that God Loves us?   On one hand, Divine Love defies definition, to try and define what God’s Love is like would be to try and define the unknowable, incomprehensible essence of God. 

Still, as Christians we believe that in Christ we encounter, and are able to comprehend, the true and living God, and by that God’s Love for us.  And today’s Gospel passage tells us something about what God’s Love actually looks like.

In today’s Gospel reading we are able to see what it means when God, in Christ, meets people where they are.  The widow of Nain, her dead son, even the gathered crowd, all of their lives are surprised, and brought up short by their encounter with Christ. 

When Christ meets this woman at the city gates, the scripture says that he has compassion for her, this compassion is not some passive feeling that Christ has inside, it is an active reaction to the suffering he sees in front of him.  And he acts, he does not pass by on the other side of the road, Christ meets this widow and her son where they are, in their darkest moments, in the midst of their pain, their despair, in the midst of death, Christ reaches out and with a mere touch brings the entire procession to a halt.  He restores to the widow the son which she thought she had lost. 

There is a freedom to this miracle; it does not require faith, or even understanding on the part of the widow or the crowd. None of the people in this story went looking for Christ’s help; none of them thought that their lives were going to be completely changed that day as they went to bury the poor widow’s son.

Christ does not give the widow back her living son and then burden them with loads of expectations, no, out of Love and compassion Christ gives freely to those he sees in need, regardless of their faith.

In many ways this story is a microcosm of the entirety of God’s work through Christ in the world.  We are not different from this funeral procession.  Just as Christ met this crowd as they walk towards the grave, so too Christ meets all of humanity in the midst of its descent into darkness, breaking the hold that death has over us, restoring our hope and illuminating the glory and wonder of God in our midst.  We are all the widow in need of hope and compassion, the son in need of new life, and the crowd in need of good news.  And in all of this, Christ does indeed Love us the way we are, but the amazing thing about that Love is it does not leave us unchanged. 

Christ Loves us - humanity - without any assurance that his Love will be returned, and it is a Love that will not be removed no matter how many times we may turn away from it or reject it. 

Still, this Love that is freely given and never removed is a Love that calls us as well.  It calls to something deep within us, covered over, perhaps even forgotten, but always there.  You see, through the incarnation God reveals to us both the perfect image of God and the perfect fulfillment of humanity, which itself bears upon it God’s image. 

There is a Russian Theologian named Vladimir Lossky, who wrote a book called The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, and if you want to better understand the breadth of theological thinking that has influenced the Anglican tradition, this book may be a good place to start.  In this book the imago dei is presented as a central component of theology.  According to Lossky the very nature of humanity is the image of God.  Through sin this image has been mutilated, cut up and misrepresented, but it is always there, part of all of us – all of us together. 

Love, Divine Love, calls to itself within us, urging us to respond by actively following Christ.  The image of God in us is that very Love that is given freely, Love that expects nothing, but changes everything. 

God Loves us as we are, a true enough statement, this is certain, but it cannot end there, because the Love of God does not leave us where we were found, Divine Love urges us out of the rut of life, the spiraling downward with our vision on things of this world: reputation, wealth, power. God’s Love finds us and will change us, if we let it.  When we choose to respond to Divine Love we allow the image of God within us to be restored and we are better able to see that image in others, because that image does not belong to us as individuals, but to all of us as humanity. According to the incomparable Eastern theologian and mystic Maximus the Confessor, “Love gathers together what has been separated, binding human beings to god and to one another.”

God does indeed Love us as we are, because we are, in our very essence made in God’s image, and are in our true nature truly lovable.  God sees this Love in us; we need only see it in ourselves, and each other.

Amen.

The Vulnerability of Redemption

Luke 13:1-9

“Except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish”

The theme of repentance seems to make this passage pretty perfect for the season of Lent, after all repentance is a key part of the Lenten journey.  We should all be taking stock and turning our lives back towards God. We are not new to the idea of being penitent, repentance is integrated into our liturgy, we are used to acknowledging that we are in fact sinful and need God’s forgiveness; this is nothing new to us. And yet when I first read this passage I cringed, I did not want to talk about repentance.  And the more I thought about the topic the more uncomfortable I got, and the more questions I had about it.  The more I realized I didn’t know, didn’t really know what it meant to repent.  So like a good Seminarian I started with the Greek. The Greek word used for repent implies a change of one’s mind for the better, and a turning away from sin.  This is all well and good, but still the definition seemed cold and the message, ‘repent or die’ seemed particularly severe.

 I couldn’t help but think: As Christians, surely our minds have already been changed, and God already knows our sins, what good can really come of exposing my weaknesses to God when he already knows what they are?  And besides we do the general confession every Sunday, surely that is enough.  Perhaps this Gospel reading just doesn’t apply to us, that can happen, right?  All of this went through my head and still this passage gnawed at me, obviously I wasn’t thinking about it the right way. 

As I turned the problem over and over in my head I started to think about the stories of repentance in the Gospel, and the one story that really stuck out to me was the story in Luke of the penitent woman who washed Jesus’ feet with her tears.  If you don’t remember the story, it goes something like this: while Jesus was eating at the house of a Pharisee, a woman, a known sinner rushes in and starts crying on Jesus’ feet and wiping them with her hair, and everyone judges her except for Jesus who praises her for her faith. There was something about that story that I felt had something to say about the nature of repentance, though I still couldn’t quite put my finger on exactly what that ‘something’ was.

I continued to struggle with this topic up until a couple of days ago when I got the opportunity to hear a woman by the name of Brene Brown speak.  Brene Brown is a research professor known for her work in studying shame and vulnerability.  In the course of her research she collected thousands of pieces of data and was able to make some interesting discoveries about how vulnerability works in our lives.  As I listened to her speak it started to occur to me that maybe somehow this was the missing piece to the repentance puzzle that I was looking for.  As it turns out vulnerability is exceedingly important to so many aspects of our lives.  Love, belonging, trust, creativity, joy: all the things that we want in our lives require of us the one thing that many of us won’t allow ourselves to do: be vulnerable. 

One of the things she said stood out to me in particular and that was, “In order for connection to happen we have to allow ourselves to be seen.”  And I wondered, ‘how often do I really let myself be seen by God, or by anyone for that matter?’  While I know that God sees everything and knows me better than I know myself, there is still a part of me that thinks I can hold something back.  Sins I don’t want to confess because I am not ready to stop doing them or I find them too shameful, fears and doubts that I know I shouldn’t have, imperfections that I don’t want anyone to see, not even God.  It occurred to me that there are whole swaths of my life that I still refuse to turn toward God because to do so would be to allow myself to be exposed.  In trying to protect myself am I denying myself a fuller relationship with God and with others as well?

It was then that I looked again at the penitent woman in Luke, in that moment when she washed Jesus’ feet with her tears and wiped them clean with her hair, she was utterly exposed and yet not at all ashamed.  She was filled with love because she fully knew that she was loved.  She allowed herself to be vulnerable and discovered God’s love for her in a way that many of us struggle with constantly.

Perhaps this is what Jesus wants when he tells the crowds to repent.  If Brene Brown is right, and I think she is, then we cannot even begin to truly be in relationship with God, much less be signs of God’s love in the world if we are not willing to have the courage to truly be who we are rather than what we think we should be.   

I don’t say all of this to take away the severity of what Jesus is saying in today’s Gospel.  The fact is that death is always out there waiting for us; eventually we will all have to face our Lord and maker and answer for our half lived lives.  And to be truly fruitful we need to surrender those things that we think protect us, but in actuality only serve to stunt our growth.

If the task of making yourself vulnerable seems too daunting, too insurmountable, then you are not alone, but there is hope and Jesus expresses that hope in the parable of the fig tree.  Just as the gardener does not give up on the tree, nor does God give up on us, but is constantly and patiently nurturing us in our journey so that when we do finally allow ourselves to be truly vulnerable we find that we are not, after all, weakened by the vulnerability of repentance, but are given a new chance to be truly fruitful both in the world and for the world.

Feast of the Transfiguration

Luke 9:28-43a

Exodus 34:29-35

2 Corinthians 3:12-4:2

Transfiguration

           

May the words of my mouth and the meditation of our hearts be acceptable in your sight oh Lord our strength and our redeemer.

They were not ready for what was going to happen that day when they followed Jesus up the mountain to pray.  I was recently given the opportunity to visit Mount Tabor where tradition tells us the transfiguration took place.  As my traveling companions and I stood at the bottom of the mountain waiting for the van to come and drive us up to the top, I remember wishing we had time walk up.  Even though the walk would have been long and steep, the day was beautiful and peaceful, a lovely day for a hike.  I can imagine that it wasn’t very different for the disciples on the day Jesus took them up the mountain.  They probably joked and chatted with each other as they walked, admiring their surroundings, and as they reached the top of the mountain, with its gorgeous view of the countryside, they dozed in the warm sun and cool breezes, lulled into a sense of comfort and complacency.  They were not ready for the startling revelation they were about to encounter.  They were not ready to have the veil pulled away before them, seeing Jesus in all his glory talking with the prophets of Old.  It didn’t matter that they had already seen Jesus perform some pretty amazing miracles, it didn’t matter that Peter had already proclaimed Jesus to be the Messiah of God, they just were not ready to be faced with God’s glory.

They were not ready to hear the voice of God speaking directly to them, telling them who Jesus is.  They were not ready and they could not cope.  Not many would be strong enough and brave enough to stand on a mountain top and respond when God speaks to them from the heavens.  Moses did it, Elijah did it, but Peter James and John were just not prepared to face that challenge.  So they said nothing, and would not speak of it again for some time. 

The reaction of the disciples was really perfectly normal. In today’s Old Testament reading The Israelites were not ready either.  Again and again in Exodus they see God’s glory descend and they are terrified by it, they could not even bare to see the glory of God reflected in Moses’ face.

And it is this same God that is incarnate in Jesus Christ, the same God whose glory terrified the Israelites, whose glory was describes as a consuming fire.

Every year we hear the story of the Transfiguration on this last Sunday before Lent and are reminded that we, like the Israelites and like the disciples, are not yet ready.

In his poem, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, William Blake wrote, “If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.” 

God understands that we are not ready.  And so we are given scripture, written in such a way that reveals God’s brilliance through ‘a glass darkly’, and we are given the sacraments through which we might each approach God’s glory at our own individual pace.  God is patient with our uneasiness and will meet us where we are, but continually encourages us to ‘wipe clean the doors of perception’, to peel back the thin veil between us and the infinite. We are constantly being urged to step out of our safe little caverns, and into the consuming fire of God’s glory.

But how do we really prepare for something like that?  Is it even possible?  It is easy to fool ourselves into thinking that if we are just able to understand theology well enough or have an organized enough life, or are penitent enough we can be prepared for anything God throws at us, but the truth is we will probably never be ready, not really.  We can’t really change ourselves enough that we would actually be able to cope with God’s glory, it is just too big.  Rather it is God’s glory that changes us, once we surrender to it.  And perhaps surrendering is enough of a task in its self.  If all of our prayer, Lenten discipline and study is done with the intention of trying to tame God’s mystery, rather than as a way of submitting to God’s work in us, than it is done for nothing. 

Because the truth is, the mystery that we think we have safely under our control, safely locked away in the tabernacle, cannot really be contained by the boundaries we have put around it.  So as Paul reminded the Corinthians, we too must act with great boldness and look to the incarnation of a fearsome and untamable God in the person of Jesus Christ, and we must look to his death on the cross and the glory of his resurrection and boldly face what that means for us, that we too have a stake in God’s infinite mystery if we would only surrender and be transformed. 

Jerusalem woohoo!

Hello folks.  I really should be posting something every night, but our days here are so long that by the time I get the opportunity to write I am so tired all I want to do is sleep.  I have not woken up past 6 a.m. since I have been here, and the days have been so completely packed with experiences that my mind feels like it can't possibly fit one more thing.  So this will be a short post.  My experiences here are so much more than just visiting Holy sites and archaeological digs.  While the course is called "The Palestine of Jesus" we are learning so much more than that.  We have had Jewish and Islamic lecturers come in from the surrounding Universities to talk about their respective religions and that has been really helpful in getting a better understanding of the people we are seeing when we are out in the city.  And we have met some interesting people.  This week is Christian Unity week which means that every evening a service is held in a different church around the city and all the Christian leaders show up and worship together.  A few of us have taken the opportunity to go to some of these services and it has been so amazing.  I got to meet the Abbot of the Dominicans who run the Church of the Dormition on Mt Zion.  He is from Northern Ireland and is just as awesome as can be.  Yesterday I sat in a Syrian Orthodox church and listened to a nun talk about all the miracles she has witnessed in that place.  Yesterday a group of us stood in a shop for an hour drinking tea and looking at expensive and one of a kind jewelry, while we joked with the shop owner and he worked very hard trying to sell us stuff. 

This place has been truly amazing in so many ways, and I wish I could spill out all of my experiences on to this page, but I must go to sleep, tomorrow we go to Jericho and Bethany, and we are renewing our Baptismal vows at the Jordan river.

I'm not saying all my experiences have been wonderful, because they haven't, and actually I have been surprised by my reaction to some things, but even the bad experiences have given me something to think about.

Sorry there are no pictures, the wireless Internet here is spotty at best, and without wifi I can't get the pictures off of my phone.

I'm going to bed, for reasons that I don't want to disclose yet, tomorrow is going to be my longest day yet.

Greetings from Jerusalem!

Hello all!  I have been in Jerusalem for two days now, and have finally found a chance to sit down and write a little something.

I need to apologize about the few and unimpressive quality of the photos in this post.  I brought the wrong USB chord and am unable to plug my camera in to retrieve any of the pictures on it.

It is pretty amazing being here, and I already feel overwhelmed with how much I have seen and experienced.  I don't really know where to begin because I haven't really sorted it all out yet, and I know that whatever I write will be tied into what I do the rest of my trip.

I flew in Monday afternoon around 3 pm but didn't get to Saint George's College until close to 9 pm   It only takes about an hour to travel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, but it took me over three hours to get out of the airport.

My trip started off in a very exciting way with me being detained by Israeli security.  Now I expected that something like this would probably happen because I was born in Iran.  For those who are reading this but don't know: Yes I am an American citizen and always have been.  My parents are not Iranian, and we lived there before the big regime change that brought the Islamic government into power.  We left before the trouble started.

These and other questions were what I had to answer several times, to several different people.  Actually the first two people I talked to were rather nice.  The first guy suggested that I should see Argo because it shows what people had to go through when leaving the country at that time.  He also said that I would like it because Ben Affleck is in it.  The second guy who talked to me asked a lot of the same questions, what is your Father's name, where was he born, why were you there, when did you leave, etc.  He then said that I had to talk to yet another person, but that I shouldn't be nervous, it was just procedure.  He then asked me if I knew what my name was (which I do, it means sweet) and sent me out to wait for yet another interrogator.
Anyway, I spent a lot of time waiting, then being asked more questions then waiting again. Finally just when I was starting to get really worried, this guy comes out and rather unceremoniously shoves my passport and entrance visa in my hand.  All in all it only took three hours.

So that was an interesting and somewhat annoying ordeal.  I was lucky that other students had waited for me, apparently there was a moment when everyone was going to wait, but the mass of people and bags was getting out of control, so 4 kind souls stayed behind to escort me to the school.

The school is lovely, especially the food.  The food here is very yummy.  And the people here are so kind and informative.  There is so much more information than I can even begin to process.

Yesterday we went and took a look at the old city from a distance, just to get a sense of the geography.  Today we traveled to Machpelah, the Tomb of the patriarchs.  It was both beautiful and sad.  You see because of a shooting spree that took place on that site in 1994, leaving 29 Muslims dead, and resulting in a riot that left over 30 more dead, the site has been divided in two.

Sarah's 'cenotaph' Muslim side

On one side is a mosque and the bodies of both Isaac and Rebecca are kept there.  No Jews are allowed on that side of the Tomb.  It was very quiet there, people were kneeling saying personal devotions, and it was so open and colorful.  Also on that side I got to touch a foot print that supposedly belonged to Adam.  Neat.

The other side is the Jewish side, and Joseph (disputed) Jacob and Leah are found there. No Muslims are allowed on that side.  I was amazed at the difference between the Muslim and the Jewish sections.  While the Muslim side was quiet and prayerful, the Jewish side was loud and crowded.  There were men praying on this side, but in little booths set up that we had to squeeze past, and further in there were classes being taught and so many people milling around it was hard to move at points.  Apparently we came on the day when the Brit Milah, or The Covenant of Circumcision was being celebrated and that is why it was especially crowded on the Jewish side.

Class being taught on the Jewish side

Dividing the two sections are the tombs of Abraham and Sarah, which are visible from both sides.  When we  were looking at Sarah's tomb on the Muslim side we heard what sounded like a woman wailing.  At first we thought it was someone crying over the patriarchs, but when we found out about the circumcision celebration, we realized that it was probably an adolescent boy getting circumcised (apparently that is not terribly uncommon).

The whole experience was really amazing, the sad bit is that the tomb that was meant to bring together this family has been divided in two and the only people who can visit all of it are the Christians.

I think I will stop there, even though there was so much more going on.  We saw the ruins of the Constantine church at Mamre, which houses an ancient well known as Abraham's well (one of them, anyway).  It was just stuck there in the middle of a city block, surrounded by a broken down chain-link fence.  Unfortunately we couldn't go into the ruins because of a dispute over who has oversight.  I think this happens a lot out here.   Okay, now I am going to stop, I swear.

The ruins of Mamre and the Abraham's Well

Tomorrow we leave for 4 days and go to Galilee.  I will try to write again when we return. 

This is us milling about at Mamre