Opening
Good morning. Thank you for welcoming me into your community today, here on the unceded lands of the Coast Salish peoples.

In today’s Gospel, a lawyer comes to Jesus with a question. Matthew tells us plainly that it was a test. It was not asked to learn something, but to trap Jesus. And he answers with the heart of everything: love God with all your heart, soul, and mind, and love your neighbour as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.

We often hear this as a beautiful saying. But in the life of Jesus, love was never only a word. He touched those others would not touch. He ate with those others excluded. He healed on the Sabbath when it cost him. He overturned tables. And in the end, he paid the ultimate price for his love, on a cross, at the hands of an empire.

Love, in the Gospels, is something you do. And sometimes it is something that costs you everything.
Today I want to share with you what this commandment means for Palestinian Christians, a people living under apartheid, and how our churches have tried to respond with what we call the logic of love. I will begin with my own story.

Part 1: My story
One People, Divided by Design
Before I tell you about myself, I need to give you a map, because there is no single Palestinian experience. Let us orient ourselves to the geography. On the right, I have the Middle East regional map. On the left is a closer view of what is better known as Israel and Palestine. As you can see, Palestine is not on the map. The two dotted-lined areas, known as West Bank and Gaza are what would have constituted a Palestinian state based on the Oslo Peace Process, which never got there. Instead, we have an occupied West Bank and a siege and genocide in Gaza. These are the lands. Now let us talk about the Palestinians who live there.

Again, there is no single Palestinian experience. There are Palestinians who are citizens of Israel, like the community I grew up in. There are Palestinians in East Jerusalem, who hold residency but not citizenship in the city of their birth. There are Palestinians in the West Bank, who live under military occupation and have been experiencing accelerating settler violence. There are Palestinians in Gaza, who have lived under siege for nearly 20 years and are now living through a genocide. And there are millions of Palestinian refugees and their descendants around the world, who are not allowed to return. Some of them are your neighbours here in Vancouver.

Each group carries a different ID card, lives under different laws, and has different rights. Where you may travel, where you may live, whom you may marry and live with: all of this depends on which category you were born into. We are one people, fragmented by Israeli design.

This is what apartheid means: a system where your rights depend on your lineage. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem have all reached this conclusion. Palestinian Christians have been saying it for a long time.
And in every one of these groups, there are Palestinian Christians. We are a small community, but we are not newcomers to the faith. The church did not come to us from somewhere else. It began among us.

Growing up in Nazareth
I was born and raised in Nazareth, the town where Jesus grew up.

This is a map of my own lineage. I am a Palestinian Christian with Israeli citizenship. Within Israeli society, there are Jews, Palestinians and others. Officially, the state calls us “Israeli Arabs,” a label many of us refuse because it tries to separate us from our heritage. We constitute about 21 percent of the Israeli population. Among Palestinians, Christians are a minority within a Muslim majority, about 1.5 percent of the total Israeli population. A small community. And within the Christian community, there are many denominations. My paternal ancestry is Coptic: Egyptians who, according to tradition, received Christianity through the mission of the apostle Mark in the first century. My maternal ancestry is Greek Orthodox, a church that traces its roots to the first Christians in the land. However, by the time I was born, both my parents were practising Baptists, the fruit of the Southern Baptist Missions in the early twentieth century.

Church missions at the time wanted a foothold in the Holy Land, so many of them established schools and hospitals. During the Nakba, many children were orphaned as a result of the chaos of war, and the Baptist mission started an orphanage. My mother lost her mother during childbirth, and the Baptists mission took her in. She was one of nineteen children, each with their own story of displacement and loss. My father was enrolled in the newly established Baptist school in Nazareth.

At some point in their lives, both my parents chose to become Baptists. Now that I am a member of a United Church of Canada, you could say I am on the other end of the denominational spectrum. This is partly because of the Southern Baptists’ adherence to Christian Zionism, which pushed me on a spiritual journey to where I am today. I could not be a part of a denomination that sees the suffering and displacement of my people as part of a divine plan for God’s chosen people to live in our homes and on our lands without us. This theology is not good news to the Palestinian people, and one thing I learnt working in reconciliation is that if my theology is harming my siblings, then something is terribly wrong with that theology.

The first time I realized that I was living in a system that treated me as a second-class citizen, and saw me as a demographic threat in what was then my only homeland, was when I was about twelve or thirteen years old. I was at the beach with my relative playing Frisbee. My cousin threw the Frisbee my way, and somehow it landed on a young Jewish teenage couple. The young man stood up, very angry. He demanded, “who threw this?” At that time, I knew that if I approached him and spoke in my broken Hebrew, he would realize that I was Palestinian and I worried he would hurt me in some way. So, I did what I knew to do: I pretended to speak Hebrew with an American accent and apologized. The couple immediately forgave us and were curious where we were from. At the time, the only location that came to mind was from the TV show Beverly Hills, 90210, so I said Beverly Hills. They welcomed me to Israel, and gave us back the Frisbee.

As a Palestinian citizen of Israel, I could speak Arabic and Hebrew, and I could also navigate both cultures. Today’s scripture was a foundational reason why I chose to work in peacebuilding, because I felt called to be a bridge between Palestinians and Israelis; to show that we can live together, and that we have a lot more in common, if only we had the chance. My peacebuilding work began around 2000, during the Second Intifada, and continued until the 2014 War on Gaza, when more than 2,200 Palestinians were killed. That summer, I directed a children’s camp in the midst of a war, where we had to seek cover from rockets coming from Gaza. I will never forget the trust parents placed in me, handing me their children in the middle of a war. The children and their teen counsellors were so brave and handled the sirens and shelters very well. I was anxious and afraid the whole week, praying for safety and that no one would be hurt, while also aware that the children in Gaza had no sirens or shelters to give them time to find protection. I still remember standing there and realizing the irony of the moment. Here I was, running a camp for Palestinian and Israeli children in the midst of a war, asking myself: how is peace possible? I was living in an oasis that felt further and further from reality.

That moment led me to a point of disillusionment. Not disillusionment that peace is impossible, but that the dominant powers are not interested in peace. They do not want us there. They covet our lands without us. The past ten years that followed saw more violence, more shrinking of the humanitarian space, and outlawing nonviolent resistance to the injustices.
So, when October 2023 came, for many of us the violence was anticipated. What shocked us was the magnitude and force being used. To watch my people being killed on a screen here in Vancouver was a new experience for me: the constant phone calls home, watching endless news coverage, the guilt of being safe, the silence or misunderstanding around me, the fear for my family and friends there.

In our reading from Deuteronomy, Moses stands on Mount Nebo and sees the whole land laid out before him, and he cannot enter it. I have felt like that. I could see everything. I could not reach anyone, and I could not save anyone.

Part 2: The logic of Love

Whose Son is the Messiah?
Let us return to the Gospel. After Jesus answers their test, he asks a question of his own: whose son is the Messiah? They give the expected answer: the son of David. In other words, a king from the right bloodline, who will restore a kingdom by power and drive out its enemies.

Jesus will not accept that answer. God’s anointed is not defined by bloodline, by throne, or by conquest. Within a few days, the one Jesus is speaking of will be enthroned not in a palace but on a cross.

Apartheid runs on the logic of lineage: who your ancestors are determines what you are owed. Jesus answers with a different logic. The neighbour is owed love, not because of their bloodline or their ID card, but simply because they are a neighbour, made in the image of God.

I want to be clear: this is a critique of a system, and of a theology that blesses domination. It is not a critique of Jewish people or of Judaism. Many Jewish people stand with us in this struggle.

Kairos Palestine: Love as Resistance
In 2009, Palestinian Christians from every church tradition gathered in Bethlehem and wrote a document called Kairos Palestine: A Moment of Truth, inspired by the South African Kairos Document. “Kairos” means a decisive moment, a time when God calls us to choose.

This document says that resisting injustice is both a right and a duty for Christians. But it insists on how we resist: it is “resistance with love as its logic.”

We refuse passivity: accepting oppression as God’s will. And we refuse hatred, becoming the mirror image of what oppresses us. Love sees the image of God even in the soldier at the checkpoint, and precisely because it sees that image, it resists the evil that is degrading both of us.

Last year, in the midst of genocide, Palestinian Christians issued a second Kairos document, A Moment of Truth: Faith in a Time of Genocide, released from Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and my own city of Nazareth. It calls on churches around the world to act: to end arms transfers, to use boycotts and sanctions, to support legal accountability, and to practise creative, nonviolent resistance. It dreams of a land where every person has equal rights.

And it says something every church should hear: “True solidarity is costly.”
This is the commandment of Matthew 22 lived out. Love that costs something. Love that acts.

What this looks like
I see this logic of love all around my people.

I see it in the churches of Gaza, the Orthodox Church of St Porphyrius and the Holy Family Catholic
Church, which opened their doors to Christian and Muslim families alike, and which were struck while sheltering them. Just three weeks ago, a mother and her daughter, Maysa Abu Daoud and Mary Najjar, were killed when a strike hit their apartment building in Gaza City. They had been serving displaced families at a shelter of the Holy Family Church.

I see it at the Tent of Nations, a Christian family farm near Bethlehem facing confiscation of its land, where a stone at the entrance reads: “We refuse to be enemies.”

I see it in sumud, our word for steadfastness: staying, planting, rebuilding, and refusing to disappear.

Part 3: Two Homelands
I know that many of you have also come here from somewhere else. Many of you are newcomers to Canada, and many of you carry another homeland in your heart.
So I want to ask some questions that I ask myself.

How do we belong here while our hearts are also somewhere else? When there is turmoil in the place we come from, what do we do with this double position? Some of us are here because of violence or hardship there. Some of us came for opportunity, and still carry the worries of family back home. Either way, we live between two places.

And this land, Canada, has its own story. It was taken from Indigenous peoples who still live here and still resist. Canada also once decided rights by lineage. Through the Indian Act, Canada decided who counted as “Indian” by descent. For generations, a First Nations woman who married a man without status lost her own status, and so did her children. And so a question we cannot avoid: if we know the pain of dispossession, what does it mean to build our lives on land where others were dispossessed?
So, when we arrive here, we arrive into a story of dispossession that is not finished, and we bring our own stories with us. That is not a weakness. It is a gift. You understand, in a way many others do not, what it means to love a place you cannot fully reach.

Loving our neighbour means we do not have to choose between our homelands. We can love both. We can learn from the Indigenous peoples of this land, remember the places we came from and stand with others whose homelands are burning. Our double belonging can become a double solidarity.

Breaking the silence: Actions
The Gospel ends with a strange sentence: after Jesus’ question, no one dared to ask him anything more.

Silence can be the end of a conversation. But it can also be the place where complicity hides. For too long, the church’s response to Palestinian suffering has been silence. The logic of love asks us to keep asking the questions no one else dares to ask.

Palestinian justice is a journey. You do not need to do everything. Start where you are.
I want to go back to the Frisbee story. I do not know what made me pretend to be someone else that day. Perhaps I had already learnt that, as a Palestinian, I would always be asked to reassure others of their safety, and that no one would ask about mine. I was twelve then. Many of us are still pretending, still reassuring, still waiting for someone to ask whether we are safe.

Three years into this genocide, many of us are asking hard questions: where is God? Why is the world unable to stop Israel? Are 74,389 deaths not enough? Why does it feel like no one cares about us? What have we done to deserve so much suffering?

We are doing all we can to extend and show love to our people. Loving Palestinians is part of our witness. If we say we love God and do not act in love of our neighbour, we need to be asking ourselves hard questions.

Under apartheid, love is not soft. It is not only a feeling or a word. It is the hardest, most costly, and most faithful logic we have.

May we love God with all our heart, soul, and mind, and our neighbour as ourselves, here and in every homeland we carry.
Amen