What’s Your Story?

The passage we read from Psalm 78 is one that Mennonites have lived by. The Psalmist says that he will tell “the glorious deeds of the Lord and the wonders that he has done”. He tells the story of “God’s mighty saving acts” (to use the phrase coined by George Ernest Wright) so that the next generation will know what God has done and will place their trust in God.

 

Wright called this recital “salvation history” – the story of God’s mighty saving acts which created Israel’s identity. If their descendants forget this story, they will become rebellious and lose God’s favour and blessings. If they remember what God has done, they can choose to be God’s people fully and receive God’s blessings here and hereafter.

 

We have also told the story of how God preserved our people through danger, especially as Mennonites were restricted and persecuted in the former Soviet Union. The way that different families were able to escape in the 1940s inspires us to trust God and follow God faithfully. I have been blessed hearing these stories, and they continue to shape us and give us hope today.

 

That’s what stories do. They shape our identity and give us a way to live in the world today. You know the story of Dirk Willems, the Dutch Mennonite who turned back on an ice-covered river to save his pursuer. He saved the man’s life and lost his own, expressing his commitment to love and peace. His story nourishes our own commitment to peace, even at great personal cost.

 

The Story of Canada 

Many of you studied the history of Canada in school. I didn’t, but I know enough about the way history is told to know that a lot depends on who is telling the story. I learned about the second world war when I was a schoolboy in Zimbabwe. My English teachers told me that the English won the war with the help of the Americans and others. Then we moved to Pennsylvania, and I heard the same story, but this time from an American perspective. I learned that the Americans won the war, with the help of the English and others. It matters who is telling the story!

 

The history of Canada as taught in our schools today seeks to include an indigenous perspective, but I suspect most of us learned the story from an immigrant perspective. We learned how immigrants from Europe found a new place to live and carved out homes in the wilderness. The beginning of Steinbach is part of that larger story. We know the story of Steinbach: 18 families from Russia carved their homes out of the empty lands on the east edge of the prairie.

 

Of course, people did live here before it was Steinbach. There were Assiniboine and Cree nations. When they moved on, Anishinaabe took their place. When the first Mennonite settlers came, the Metis nation lived in the general area. That is why we sometimes recognize that the church is located on the traditional lands of the Anishinaabe, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota, and Dene peoples, and on the homeland of the Métis Nation. The point of this recognition is not to make anyone feel guilty. It simply notes that there is more than one perspective in our history. When we learn our story, we should also learn the story of the people around us. This may make us uncomfortable, but that’s okay.

 

This is part of what is happening this weekend, as a group from SMC joins the Metis community in Manigotagan at their annual family camp. When we no longer could send a youth team there, representatives from SMC started going up and visiting with the community. We have listened to their stories and told them some of our stories. This process means that the community in Manigotagan and our community are becoming partners in life.

 

Israel and Palestine 

But what happens when two people are in critical conflict with each other? What happens when their stories are so radically different that they cannot agree on what happened? This is the situation we see in Israel-Palestine. In the June issue of Anabaptist World, Lisa Schirch has an article in which she compares the story that Israelis tell with the story that Palestinians tell. She sets these competing narratives out in a useful table (see link) that helps us see how they work.

 

You see the Palestinian story: From their historic tie to the land to the nakba in which 700,000 Palestinians lost their homes to European Jews fleeing European persecution. From the military occupation of Palestine by Jews backed by Europe to the continued occupation of Palestinian land and the daily humiliation of Palestinians who remain in their home. From the military might of Israel supported by the West to the destruction of Gaza by Israeli troops. The only possible solution is for Israel to stop their aggression and withdraw from all Palestinian territory.

 

It’s a compelling story. Three of my college friends were Palestinian Christians. C’s family lost their home in the nakba. J and D have dedicated their lives to serving Palestinians in Israel through their occupations as a lawyer and a journalist. J married a woman from the church I pastored in Pennsylvania, and I remember the visit of his family to our church when they held the wedding feast in his bride’s home. I hear this story and my heart aches for my friends. Their story resonates in my heart and in my soul.

 

But hear the Israeli story. From their historic tie to the land to the holocaust in which six million Jews died to the dispossession of 700,000 Jews who lived in Arab lands. From the reality that half of all Jews were “brown, Arab Jews” and half were Ashkenazi European Jews to the way that Arabs and Palestinians have worked to destroy them – even colluding with the Nazis to the reality that there is only one small Jewish state where they can live in safety compared to the 50 or so Muslim states who support Palestine. From the experience of constant attacks from Palestinian extremists to the horrific invasion of Israel last October.

It’s a compelling story, if we have the ability to hear it. I have taken several groups from Providence to visit the mosque on Waverley Avenue in Winnipeg for Friday prayers and to Sha’arey Zedek across from the legislature for the Sabbath service. I have been there often enough that Bill Weissman, our guide when I take a class, has told me that they will have to make me a member.

 

One Sabbath, the synagogue service was what they call a Yizkor – a remembrance. The rabbi said, “Now we remember those whose mothers have died”, and he called us to stand. I stood with the others whose mothers had died while he prayed, “Remember, God, the soul of my mother, my teacher, who went to her world, because I will give charity for her. Let her soul be bound up in the bond of life, with the soul of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Sarah, Rivkah, Rachel and Leah, and with the other righteous men and women in the Garden of Eden. And let us say, Amen.”

 

We said prayers for those whose fathers had died and prayers for those whose children had died. Each group stood in turn while we prayed, and you could hear quite weeping in one family or another as they remembered their loved ones – a lot like our Eternity Sunday. Then finally the rabbi said, “Now we remember the six million”, and everyone stood. I realized with a start who they meant. Six million Jews killed in the Holocaust. Twenty percent of all Jews worldwide died in that terrible time, only 80 years ago.

 

This is our problem: The Israeli story is a deeply compelling and tragic story, and the Palestinian story is a deeply compelling and tragic story. How do we come together when the stories that we want to tell, as the Psalmist reminds us to do – what do we do when those stories are in such bitter conflict?

 

Towards a Resolution 

I don’t have the wisdom to answer this question, but I can point us towards an answer. The steps we have taken with the community at Manigotagan are part of the answer. Start by hearing the others’ story and telling our own. Start by embracing the full humanness of the other and by baring our own souls in return. Our stories shape us and make our identities: We share ourselves when we share our stories.

 

Paul gives us a clue about a further step we can take. As Christians, we have a new and deeper story. You see it in 1 Corinthians 15, one of the earliest Christian confessions. It is the story of the cross: “Christ died ... Christ was buried ... Christ was raised ... Christ appeared to us ...” It is the story of God’s grace given to people whose rebellion has cut them off from God. It is the story of God’s response to the ugliness and hatred and violence that permeate all of our human stories. It is the story of God’s redeeming love.

 

When we come together at the foot of the cross, our own personal stories are transformed. Our story as immigrant settlers from Europe comes together with the indigenous story of those who helped us make a new home in the East Reserve, when we come together in the presence of the crucified and risen Jesus. Our mistakes and failures don’t disappear, but they lose their power, and we can embrace our sisters and brothers at Manigotagan. This has already happened, as their elder, Norman Meade, has opened the word of life to us on several occasions here.

 

Israel and Palestine present a much harder case, but the way to new life in the Middle East still passes through the cross. I cannot see how Israelis and Palestinians can walk that road, but I know that it runs through the cross. The Friday prayer in the Anglican church says it well: “Almighty God, whose most dear Son went not up to joy but first he suffered pain, and entered not into glory before he was crucified: Mercifully grant that we, walking in the way of the cross, may find it none other than the way of life and peace; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord. Amen.”

 

It would be arrogant of us to try to tell Jews and Palestinians how to walk this path. Our part is to listen to both sides, to seek to hear their stories, and to act as carefully and prayerfully for peace. What that means is for discussion in our Sunday School time. A couple from the Mennonite Church who have significant experience in Israel-Palestine will join us in November, and we can talk more about it then.

 

Until then, embrace God’s story. Embrace the “mighty saving acts of God”. The story of the cross embraces all our stories and transforms them into “the way of life and peace.” Join me in a closing prayer: “Lord Jesus Christ, you stretched out your arms of love on the hard wood of the cross that everyone might come within the reach of your saving embrace: So clothe us in your Spirit that we, reaching forth our hands in love, may bring those who do not know you to the knowledge and love of you; for the honour of your Name. Amen.”

 

 

8 September 2024, Manigotagan Sunday 

Steinbach Mennonite Church

Texts: Psalm 78:1-8; 1 Corinthians 15:1-11

 

Focus Statement: Our lives can be told as a story. We all have different stories, and so do our families. Our individual and communal stories are sometimes in conflict with each other, but they all come together in the story of the cross (heilsgeschichte – salvation history).

 

Going Deeper Questions: What can we do with the different stories of Palestinians and Israelis in the Middle East? What about Canada's indigenous people and our own Mennonite ancestors? How can we come together as one people when our histories are in conflict?

Indigenous Relations: The Land

A Biblical Perspective on Land

Scriptural perspectives on the land usually have to do with the Land of Promise, Canaan, given to the Children of Israel (Exodus-Deuteronomy; Joshua). The prophets used reminders of the promise of the land as part of their call to faithfulness on the part of God’s People: Jeremiah, for example, makes it clear that the people have used God’s promises in an illegitimate way to allow unfaithfulness and idolatry to flourish. Consider Jeremiah 22, in which the prophet equates the people with the land, while warning them that they will lose the land.

The passage we read from Deuteronomy 26 contains the profound statement: “My father was a wandering Aramean.” The “father” referred to was Jacob, renamed Israel, who went to Egypt during a famine as a small family (Israel and his twelve sons and their families) and came out of Egypt in the Exodus “a great nation, numerous and powerful”. Deeper than their identity as the “people of the land” was their identity as “God’s people”.

This fact helps us to understand the way that the New Testament refers to God’s people, using the idea that we have a Sabbath Rest (Promised Land) beyond the bounds of this world (for example, Hebrews 3 and 4). A post-biblical writer put the basic idea of our citizenship in Heaven eloquently in the Letter to Diognetus (written by Mathetes – “a disciple” – sometime in the second century):

Christians are indistinguishable from other men either by nationality, language or customs. … And yet there is something extraordinary about their lives. They live in their own countries as though they were only passing through. They play their full role as citizens, but labor under all the disabilities of aliens. Any country can be their homeland, but for them their homeland, wherever it may be, is a foreign country. … They live in the flesh, but they are not governed by the desires of the flesh. They pass their days upon earth, but they are citizens of heaven. Obedient to the laws, they yet live on a level that transcends the law. …

The people’s relationship to the Promised Land is seen clearly in the Jubilee Laws of Leviticus 25. You remember the basic idea of the Jubilee Year: Every 50 years, all land returns to its original owners and all Jewish slaves are set free and return to their families. We can think of it like this using the founding of Steinbach as a model. In 1874 eighteen families laid out their plots to form what is now the city of Steinbach. Their properties were laid out in narrow strips crossing the creek that ran parallel to what is now Main Street. If Steinbachers had practised the Jubilee, in 1924 all properties would have been restored to the original 18 families. The same restoration would have taken place in 1974, and we would be expecting the next Jubilee in 2024.

The Jubilee year, then, teaches us the principle of radical restoration. Wealthy people gave up their excess wealth, and those who had become poor had their lands and their dignity restored. The simple movement of property in the Jubilee may be impractical (we have many more people in Steinbach today than the original 18 families), but the principle of radical restoration remains.

Concealed beneath this clear truth lies another equally powerful truth. Hear verses 23 and 24: “The land must not be sold permanently, because the land is mine and you reside in my land as foreigners and strangers. Throughout the land that you hold as a possession, you must provide for the redemption of the land.”

One reason for the Jubilee Year was that the land (which they appeared to own) was God’s, not theirs. So in verses 14-16 we read: “If you sell land to any of your own people or buy land from them, do not take advantage of each other. You are to buy from your own people on the basis of the number of years since the Jubilee. And they are to sell to you on the basis of the number of years left for harvesting crops. When the years are many, you are to increase the price, and when the years are few, you are to decrease the price, because what is really being sold to you is the number of crops.”

This understanding is basic to a scriptural understanding of the land. Genesis 1 and 2 makes the human pair God created stewards or caretakers of God’s creation. Creation itself still belongs to God, but we care for it. Psalm 24 rings out clearly: “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof; the world and they that dwell therein.” Jesus tells parables about masters who go away and leave their belongings in trust with stewards or caretakers. When the master returns, he demands an accounting for what he has left in trust. When Jesus will return at the end of time, he will also call us to account for what we hold in trust –not just for our deeds, but for the earth itself.

Mennonites and Land

Two weeks ago, Gerald Gerbrandt reminded us of our history. We are a people who have moved many times – in the case of Russian Mennonites, from Holland to Prussia to Russia to Canada and several countries in the Americas. In many of these places we established colonies, implying our ownership of the land around us. Certainly, here in the East Reserve we have taken possession of our homes and farms and fields; we live here and we are at home here.

At the same time, we retain an awareness that we are citizens of Heaven before we are citizens of Canada. Our membership in Mennonite World Conference reminds us that we belong to a great host of people, so that Mathetes (in the Letter to Diognetus) might say of us:

[Mennonites] are indistinguishable from other men either by nationality, language or customs … yet … [t]hey live in their own countries as though they were only passing through. They play their full role as citizens, but labor under all the disabilities of aliens. Any country can be their homeland, but for them their homeland, wherever it may be, is a foreign country.

If we take this insight seriously, we do not own the land to which we hold title. It belongs to God. We are stewards, and the title we hold is the title to care for our home and our lands as servants of God.

Indigenous Realities

At this point, we face a problem. You know that our government (and therefore we ourselves) made treaties with the indigenous peoples of Canada (which we have failed to honour). One of the basic aspects of those treaties is the possession of the land.

This piece of land where we worship this morning was a part of Anishinabe territory. On August 3, 1871, the Anishinabe people signed Treaty 1, giving the settlers encroaching on their lands permission to live here. I do not know enough to describe in depth how the Anishinabe understood the treaty, or how the government understood the treaty, but I can see the basic outline of what happened.

Within three years the first Mennonite settlers came to Steinbach and laid out the village according to the line pattern they brought with them from Russia. Others can explain the history that followed with more authority than I can. Rather, I make two basic points.

·         One: The indigenous understanding of the land closely parallels the biblical understanding we noted earlier. They knew that the Creator God owns the land. They knew that they had permission to use the land, but that it was not their possession.

·         Two: We can conclude readily that the indigenous peoples of Canada did not intend to give ownership of the land to the settlers who were moving in, if only because they did not see such ownership as theirs to give. As stewards of the land, they could give visitors permission to use the land – but that is a far cry from simply giving the land itself.

I suspect that the Mennonite land-owners understood little of this indigenous perspective. Once we have title to land, we assume the land is ours. Lois and I have paid properly for our house and property; we see it as our property. Yet, properly understood, God owns our house and the land, and we live here because the Anishinabe people welcomed us and shared the land with us.

What Should We Do?

What should we do with these realities? It does not mean that those of us who come from outside North America should simply leave. Arthur Manuel writes in Unsettling Canada:

When we speak about reclaiming a measure of control over our lands, we obviously do not mean throwing Canadians off it and sending them back to the countries they came from—that is the kind of reduction ad absurdum that some of those who refuse to acknowledge our title try to use against us. We know that for centuries Canadians have been here building their society, which, despite its failings, has become the envy of many in the world. All Canadians have acquired a basic right to be here. … At present, we are asking for the right to protect our Aboriginal title land, to have a say on any development on our lands, and when we find the land can be safely and sustainably developed, to be compensated for the wealth it generates. [End of chapter one.]

Finding a way forward means that we find a path that embraces the rights of Canada’s First Peoples, as well as of those of us who have come to Canada over the last several hundred years. We are here together, and we must live together. I suggest a few basic thoughts as we do so.

1. The earth – Canada – belongs first to God. We do not own anything, even when we hold title to it. “The earth is the Lord’s”, and we are trustees who care for the earth until Jesus returns.

2. Just as God gave the land in the OT to the Children of Israel, God gives a place for all people to live. God gave the land first to the First Nations of Canada. When our Anabaptist ancestors came to Canada, both First Nations and the Canadian government gave them – and therefore also us – a place to live.

3. This means also that we give up what is sometimes called “the doctrine of discovery”. This doctrine is the legal basis that the government of Canada has used to claim sovereignty over the land of Canada. It suggests that much of the land around us was essentially empty when the first Europeans came to Canada, and they simply occupied the land that they found. This is the old idea of “finders keepers, losers weepers”. The fact that we live on Treaty One land is sufficient indication that someone was here, and that the land belonged to them as much as any human beings could be said to own it.

4. In some sense, all of us are settlers – God has given us a place to settle down and live on this earth. Therefore, in an ultimate sense God owns the land on which we live. First Nations in Canada got here first and received land from God. We followed. Therefore, we must live in justice and peace with each other as stewards of the piece of land God gives us.

5. As long as the first inhabitants of this land are dispossessed and struggling, we cannot live at peace in God’s land. When our Indigenous friends tell us of the hardships of life on the reserves, we know that their pain is our pain and their loss is our loss. Our lives are bound together, and we must find a way forward together.

Conclusion

I come back to the Scriptures. In Deuteronomy 26, it is clear that God has given the people all that they need to live well. They were wandering nomads, with no place of their own, and God gave them what they needed. God does the same for us and for Canada’s Indigenous People, and God wants us to participate in bringing into reality the fullness of life God has for all of us.

In Hebrews, it is clear that a Sabbath Rest remains – something beyond this world. We are still wandering nomads, never fully at home here, whether as Mennonites or as Indigenous People. The truth is that we are all Indigenous people – but our true home is in Heaven, and we are all Settlers – in the places here on earth that God has given us. I have no answers as to how we live justly with each other; I can only say here that we do so in relationship with each other.

The promise of the New Jerusalem is not a reason to ignore the struggle for justice here – as though it will all be alright in Heaven, so we can ignore injustice on earth. Rather, the promise of the New Jerusalem lights the fire for us to work for and with each other, because we know that God will prevail, no matter how deep and painful our failures are on earth. We are going to Heaven together, First Nations and later arrivals alike, and we belong together there and here.

Steinbach Mennonite Church, 28 October 2018

Deuteronomy 26: 1 to 11; Hebrews 4: 1 to 11