Hook Or Crook

These paragraphs are being written just a few hours after my return from the Holy Land, where I enjoyed a week of intensive travel to the various sites of Galilee and ancient Judea, now Israel and Palestine.  There are more observations to be made than I can make in these sentences, but I will try to focus a bit on the future as it relates to tradition – or heritage.  The ruins of Megiddo, or Qumran, or Masada almost scream at the historically perceptive person — scream about the inhumanity of man to man; about the aspirations of common men and women through the centuries; about the thoughts and actions of good persons like Jesus, several disciples who left signs of their lives in the rubble, of scores of saints like St. Catherine, so brutally murdered.  Thought lines that we might take for discussion seem endless. Just one, the beautiful statement of hope and death, made by the leader of the 970 Jews on Masada, and read the night before the population took their lives rather than submit to the slavery and rape of Roman soldiers.  All lingers in my mind. It is a statement that rings with the love of God and family and freedom that etched itself into my being.

But I must leave that part of the trip to focus on the future as it is impacted by the past.  Israel and their neighbors are expecting as many as ten million visitors to the Holy Land in the year 2,000. In Israel and the Middle East one commonly sees the designation C.E. rather than A.D. for the marking of the years.  At first the suggestion was that instead of: the year of our Lord (A.D.) the period would be designated as the Christian Era (C.E.), and that seemed to catch on.  Somewhere along the way another change occurred that has been adopted without much discussion.  Christian Era has now been lost for some to Current Era, which is also C.E. – so to permit the individual to choose preference for identifying 2000 years of time.  The references are generally taken as acceptable, and will likely remain.  There seems little problem on the part of anyone, of whatever religious persuasion, to talk about Jesus and his place in the history of the land, as long as one does not make him Lord and Savior in any serious sense.  Certainly there are missionaries and other representatives of the Lord Jesus Christ in the land – one can’t get through the Garden Tomb (identified by General Gordon rather recently in history) without hearing the gospel from the representative of the private owners of the place. So many pilgrims visit the various sites that it seems clear that some of the places will be hard pressed to accommodate the increasing numbers of travelers. The focus, generally, is on business – tourism, unrelated to spiritual renewal.  However – our purpose of the pilgrimage was met.

In my education, the history of the church, and the world has been important to me, but I missed something that I was able to understand and absorb on this trip, and that is, how greatly the crusaders affected the area so many centuries ago.  They were sufficiently successful that they left a lasting impact in their architecture and influence on the life of the area, and the desire of Christians to get back even to the land of their religious roots.  The sense of heritage is stronger with me as a result of this and other observations, than it has ever been before.  The trip offered a feeling elevated above the current tensions of Israel/Islam.

Jody Lee McElrath, my younger daughter, and her husband, David, a minister in Coronado, California, were the leaders of the group and organized the project.  In conversation one day while on the Sea of Galilee, Jody told me about a sermon that her husband had recently preached, entitled, By Hook or Crook.  The emphasis, as I understand it, is that Jesus used fishing and shepherding as analogies to the call for ministry.  The fisherman used a hook on the end of the line to catch fish, and the shepherd used a crook to rescue the lamb caught in the rocks, or to clear a grassy area of snakes.  This, it seems to me, is descriptive of our heritage.  Not many of us fish any more, and I saw no shepherd with a crook.  But it is something that I never felt more – the meaning of fishing for mankind and rescuing lost sheep than I felt at the close of our pilgrimage to the Holy Land.  Much that I saw was anachronistic to modern life, but so much of what I saw enlightens from the past the life I know from history – both physical and spiritual.  We are children of the world invited to be citizens of heaven.  No matter how secular Israel has become, the evidence of the interests of mankind with God is often taken from the life of what is called the Holy Land.