Ephesians 2.1-10
“For you were dead….following the course of this world….”
Harsh words, you say—taken out of context, you protest. I imagine that the people of the early church heard these words in much the same way we hear them today—indictments of the way of the world, our own way of life.
“But God,….out of the great love with which he loved us…..raised us up.” Now that is more like it—we are not left for dead. Life and death—we are caught up somewhere in between these two, between the lives we live and the life God has created us to live.
We find ourselves suspended between birth and death, death and new life. But what if the life God has created for us is death? It was certainly so for Jesus. And for many who stand up, like Jesus, in protest against the “course of this world.”
This is how it was for Rachel Corrie, whose death was commemorated yesterday, March 16. Yesterday was the sixth anniversary of her death by bulldozer as she stood in front of it, trying to prevent yet another house from being demolished in Gaza in 2003.
Some excerpts from Rachel’s emails—two years ago, but still today the way of the world in Gaza and the West Bank.
February 2003--
…Now the Israeli army has actually dug up the road to Gaza, and both of the major checkpoints are closed. This means that Palestinians who want to go and register for their next quarter at university can't. People can't get to their jobs and those who are trapped on the other side can't get home; and internationals, who have a meeting tomorrow in the West Bank, won't make it. We could probably make it through if we made serious use of our international white person privilege, but that would also mean some risk of arrest and deportation, even though none of us has done anything illegal….
…I have been in Palestine for two weeks and one hour now, and I still have very few words to describe what I see. It is most difficult for me to think about what's going on here when I sit down to write back to the United States. Something about the virtual portal into luxury. I don't know if many of the children here have ever existed without tank-shell holes in their walls and the towers of an occupying army surveying them constantly from the near horizons. I think, although I'm not entirely sure, that even the smallest of these children understand that life is not like this everywhere. An eight-year-old was shot and killed by an Israeli tank two days before I got here, and many of the children murmur his name to me - Ali - or point at the posters of him on the walls….
… When that explosive detonated yesterday it broke all the windows in the family's house. I was in the process of being served tea and playing with the two small babies. I'm having a hard time right now. Just feel sick to my stomach a lot from being doted on all the time, very sweetly, by people who are facing doom. I know that from the United States, it all sounds like hyperbole. Honestly, a lot of the time the sheer kindness of the people here, coupled with the overwhelming evidence of the wilful destruction of their lives, makes it seem unreal to me. I really can't believe that something like this can happen in the world without a bigger outcry about it. It really hurts me, again, like it has hurt me in the past, to witness how awful we can allow the world to be…. Read more: http://www.rachelcorrie.org/
“For we are what God has made us, created in Christ Jesus for Good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life.” (Eph. 2.10).
O God of birth, death and resurrection, as we journey through these days of Lent, make us mindful of those whose daily lives are death. Help us follow in the way God has set out for us and to be messengers of resurrection along that way. Amen.
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