O Sabbath rest by Galilee

Dear Lord and Father of mankind, forgive our foolish ways;

Reclothe us in our rightful mind, in purer lives Thy service find,

In deeper reverence, praise.

When I visited Israel in 2008, I discovered that the various places I visited required different levels of using my imagination to connect with how that place was "back then." In some places, there a huge gap between how it is now and how it was then; the Church of the Holy Sepulchre presented one of the biggest challenges. (I hope to blog about my experience there soon.) In other places, the gap is smaller, because those places haven't changed much in the past 2000 years. The Sea of Galilee was one of my favorite places in Israel because it had the smallest gap of any place that we visited - so small that it melts away once you are out on the water, feeling the waves lapping at the side of the boat, feeling the wind and watching the gulls play on its drafts. The captain of our boat was a Jewish man who came to Sea of Galilee to work on a boat and ended up coming to believe that Jesus was the Messiah after, as he put it, sensing the spirit of Jesus on the water.

The hymns that mention the Sea of Galilee tend to speak of it in a very romanticized and idealized way. In preparation for our trip, we are reading an excellent book by NT Wright called "The Way of the Lord", which I would highly recommend to any Christian, whether they are preparing for a trip to the Holy Land, or whether they want to imaginatively walk where Jesus walked without leaving their armchair. In his chapter on Galilee, Bishop Wright warns against a quaint idealism about Galilee, favored by the Victorians, which casts Galilee as simply a quiet, lovely place with gently sloping hillsides and a tranquil lake for fishing. Galilee is beautiful, but it is a real place. As the Gospel shows us, living in a beautiful place does not exempt people from dealing with sickness and hunger and occupation by a foreign power.

O Sabbath rest by Galilee, O calm of hills above,
Where Jesus knelt to share with Thee the silence of eternity,
Interpreted by love!

The hymn Dear Lord and Father of Mankind speaks of the Sea of Galilee as a particularly peaceful place where Jesus sought rest in his Father's presence, but it also acknowledges our all too human tendency to forget our need for Sabbath rest. I love this hymn because it speaks so eloquently of how in the busyness of our lives we so easily err and stray from God's rest like lost sheep; how we follow too much the desires and devices of our own hearts, and will be restless until we find our rest in God.

Drop Thy still dews of quietness,
Till all our strivings cease;

Take from our souls the strain and stress,
And let our ordered lives confess
The beauty of Thy peace.

Breathe through the heats of our desire
Thy coolness and Thy balm;
Let sense be dumb, let flesh retire;
Speak through the earthquake, wind, and fire,
O still, small voice of calm.

Going to Israel to see the places of the Bible, it is easy to get into "go go go" mode out of a desire to see as much as we can before we have to head back to the airport. If we are used to a high level of strain and stress and striving in our daily lives, we will have to be intentional about entering into a different mode of being on our trip, in order for this to be a true pilgrimage and not just an exercise in tourism. The Bible speaks of coming into the promised land as "entering God's rest." May we enter into God's rest on this pilgrimage.

slideshow of my pictures from the Sea of Galilee
"Dear Lord and Father of Mankind" - sung by the Scottish Festival Singers

O God of peace, you have taught us

that in returning and rest we shall be saved,

in quietness and confidence shall be our strength:

By the might of your Spirit lift us, we pray, to your presence,

where we may be still and know that you are God.

Jerusalem if I forget you

I never intended to turn primarily to the hymnal as my source of inspiration for this blog, but it's been a really wonderful way to focus my reflections on the church seasons. With our church trip to Israel and Palestine just around the corner, I thought it would be fun to explore music that focuses on places that we will be visiting.

I'm going to start with a song about Jerusalem that is rather unusual and doesn't show up in any hymnal: Matisyahu's Jerusalem. Matisyahu is an Hasidic Jewish reggae rapper. As far as I know, no one has tried that particular combination of religious and musical influences, but it works for him.

(my point in posting this is more the song than the video - though the video does show some recreations of the temple that give you a sense of what it would have been like.)

In the chorus of this song, Matisyahu quotes from Psalm 137:

Jerusalem if I forget you
let my right hand forget what it's supposed to do

Psalm 137 is a psalm of exile; the people of Israel are desperate to remember Jerusalem and not to forget it because they have been cut off from it. They have been forcibly removed from their land and taken to Babylon. The loss of one's homeland would be enough reason to grieve, but the people of Israel have lost more than that.

Matisyahu speaks of Jerusalem being important to his people, not simply because of the land itself, but because it is the "dwelling place of his majesty." For the people of Israel sent into exile, leaving Jerusalem and its temple meant being cut off from God's presence, because the temple is God's throne seat; the place where God concentrated his presence among them; the axis between heaven and earth. Even before they leave Jerusalem, however, the temple is not what it was; in what I find one of the most painful passages of the Bible, Ezekiel depicts God's shekinah glory slowly leaving the temple in stages. God has been showing up to the people of Israel for centuries - in the burning bush, in the pillar of cloud and fire over the tabernacle, until he comes to rest in the temple that Solomon builds for him in Jerusalem, the crown of the city, and the throne of God. But the covenant God has made with his people is broken, and as a result God withdraws his presence from the temple. The people too are removed from their land, for their presence in the land was always inextricably linked to their covenant relationship with God. The exile was the apocalyptic event for the people of Israel - the event that signaled what for them was the end of their world. Their beloved city with its temple was razed; their homeland was mostly emptied of its inhabitants; and they were again slaves to a foreign master, as in Egypt. It appeared that all hope was lost. They suspected that God had washed his hands of them.

In that context, the message of the prophets like Ezekiel and Isaiah and Jeremiah is as shocking as it is hopeful. They announced that Psalm 30:5 is a true description of Israel's God:


For his anger lasts only a moment,
but his favor lasts a lifetime;
weeping may remain for a night,
but rejoicing comes in the morning.

God would not forget them; God would restore them to relationship with him, and that would result inevitably in being restored to the land of promise, including the holy city and its temple. There are so many prophecies that focus on Jerusalem being renewed and restored, but one of my favorites is from Micah 4:

It shall come to pass in the latter days
  that the mountain of the house of the LORD
  shall be established as the highest of the mountains,
  and it shall be lifted up above the hills;
and peoples shall flow to it,
  and many nations shall come, and say:
Come, let us go up to the mountain of the LORD,
  to the house of the God of Jacob,
  that he may teach us his ways
  and that we may walk in his paths.
For out of Zion shall go forth the law,
  and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem.
He shall judge between many peoples,
  and shall decide for strong nations far away;
  and they shall beat their swords into plowshares,
  and their spears into pruning hooks;
nation shall not lift up sword against nation,
  neither shall they learn war anymore;
  but they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree,
  and no one shall make them afraid,
  for the mouth of the LORD of hosts has spoken.


Jerusalem will become the place that draws not only the people of Israel but the peoples of all the nations, and they will come in order to encounter God and to learn his ways. This leads to the end of fear and war and ushers in a lasting peace, a time when Jerusalem will fulfill its destiny to be the place where God comes to live as our God, and we come to live with him as his people. Thanks be to God.

A model reconstruction of Jerusalem with its temple.