18 August 2024
Rev. Dr. Munther Isaac,
We write to express our gratitude for your visit, fellowship, and preaching in the City of Chicago and extend our prayers to you as our brother as you conclude your sojourn in America.
Our Friend Isaac Pennington in the 17th century said that “[t]he sum and substance of true religion doth not stand in getting a notion of Christ’s righteousness, but in feeling the power of endless life, receiving the power, and being changed by the power. And where Christ is, there is his righteousness.”
Your land of Palestine is the land of Jesus Christ, called the Prince of Peace. But today, as in his time, it is subjected by empire. Since October, the State of Israel has waged an exceptionally bloody war that has decimated the Gaza Strip and killed many tens of thousands of civilians. This appears to be a genocidal war on the Palestinian people themselves. Even when there is no open war, Palestinians live in conditions of Israeli apartheid (separation) and settler-colonization (dispossession and removal) across the historic Holy Land.
It is a land where many peoples have sought God and loved God. Our Meeting would be inclined to view the Christian, Jewish, and Muslim peoples in Palestine (as in all lands) as our spiritual family. As Friend William Penn said, “[t]he humble, meek, merciful, just, pious, and devout souls are everywhere of one religion; and when death has taken off the mask they will know one another.”
Yet here in the United States, many people who would also claim to be religious, or even Christian, support the oppressive practices and distorted ideology of the State of Israel, under a number of guises, including “Christian Zionism.”
In your work speaking against Christian Zionism and articulating a theology of the land of Palestine and of Palestinian and human liberation, we recognize your faithful love of mercy and justice and your seeking after God. Undoing the man-made constructs that allow God’s people to be turned against each other in relations of domination is a ministry to the imminent reign of Spirit.
For as it is said, “the hour is coming and is now here when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such as these to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” John 4:23-24. A fully spiritual relationship with God resists all attempts to turn words or ideas about God to the service of human domination, as the Society of Friends has born witness to in our confrontations with Caesar when he would press us into military service, involve us in slavery or environmental destruction, or otherwise compromise the integrity we treasure as the vouchsafed word of God.
Brother Munther, in your ministry during your trip, you spoke at Missio Dei and led services at Peace Memorial Church, where Friends in attendance received the blessing of your spoken ministry, and we are all blessed by your ongoing witness and writings. We have heard you say Christ is under the rubble in Gaza. We are joyed to accept your call back to the work of seeking God among those who are cast out, kept down, or otherwise excluded from the circles some misguidedly draw when asked “who is my neighbor?” As another sojourner who found the consolation of the Spirit of Christ after a long night of darkness enjoined us, as he helped gather us into a people and called us to our vital mission:
So the ministers of the Spirit must minister to the Spirit that is transgressed and in prison, which hath been in captivity in every one; whereby with the same Spirit people must be led out of captivity up to God, the Father of spirits, and do service to him and have unity with him, with the Scriptures and with one another. And this is the word of the Lord God to you all, and a charge to you all in the presence of the living God: be patterns, be examples in all countries, places, islands, nations, wherever you come, that your carriage and life may preach among all sorts of people, and to them; then you will come to walk cheerfully over the world, answering that of God in every one.
George Fox, Letter from Lancaster Gaol, 1656
We pray for your safe travels and fruitful sojourn in Jesus Christ. We pray for your safe return, and the safety of the parishioners in your care in Bethlehem. We pray for peace in the Holy Land and the liberation of Palestinians from genocidal war, occupation, and apartheid.