IN WHICH: Joel reflects on a Presbytery meeting and we reflect on a September tragedy

As a new Presbyterian pastor, I have the great pleasure of getting to attend Presbytery meetings.  Now, for folks out there who are playing the "home version," Presbytery is a big meeting of pastors and elders from the various Presbyterian churches in a particular area where they get together and someone says "all in favor, say aye" a bunch of times and occasionally people get very particular about some fellow named Robert and all the rules he made up for when people have meetings.  People spend the better part of a day saying "aye" and making motions and resolutions, then decide that they've said "aye" enough times for the day, and then get back in their cars and go home for a month so they can get ready to come back next month.

Ok... so there's obviously more to a Presbytery meeting than that.  They work very hard to be both a resource and a guide to church sessions and pastors, and make some tough decisions.  For example, our Presbytery yesterday spent a lot of time in heart-felt conversation about how we best serve and love a church that might want to leave the Presbyterian denomination entirely.  And from the emotions coming out in the very discussion of that possibility, I could tell that this is a Presbytery that genuinely cares about every church that it comprises.

But there was something else that happened at Presbytery yesterday that made an even greater impression on me than all the "ayes," "nays," and motions flying about.  There is a woman in our Presbytery who is from Syria.  During the meeting, she was asked to give a prayer and she shared the 23rd Psalm in Arabic.  But she also shared some things that truly affected me and still have me thinking, even today... actually, especially today.  Of all days.

She talked about her family, who lives in Syria, and the fact that when they write to her, she sees them literally embodying the 23rd Psalm.  They dwell in the valley of the shadow of death, and they still fear no evil because they know that God is with them.  And then she talked about the conflict itself.  She talked about the conditions that her family lives in, the things that they have to deal with every day.  And then she talked about the refugees and the deplorable situation that they must face because they have no other choice.  She talked about the smallpox, the lack of clothing and adequate housing, the hunger and the squalor that refugees accept as their normal situation now.

She told us about the reality of the situation in Syria - not about the complexities of the political structure there, the use of chemical weapons, or the "rules of war" that our nations have somewhat arbitrarily fashioned and now work to enforce on other countries.  She talked about the fact that in America, we're only seeing what the media wants us to see, which is the bald-faced lies of war-mongers and profiteers.  She shared that what used to be various different groups of rebels are not "rebels" anymore, as we're told and as our country has tried to support in the past; they're now organized, taken over by Al Qaeda and populated by more people who are outside of Syria than those who are citizens of the country.  She shared her experience of watching a news interview in which they interviewed a Syrian person and asked them: What should Americans do?  How can we help?  The Syrian person answered that they didn't want anything from America but humanitarian aid, but the translator translated them to say "we want weapons and arms."  She said the journalists only show the "rebels" fighting off what is made to appear as an oppressive national military regime, but that we never see those same rebels taking over an entire town, forcing people out of their homes and taking their livelihoods (and even lives) away from them.

She asked us, gathered in that dining hall at the camp, to pray with her for peace in Syria.  She shared her hope that America could come to understand the reality of the situation and to see the best way to help - that if we are to do anything in Syria, it needs to be to help those who are most affected by the war by giving aid.  In her own words: "We don't need America to throw bombs at us.  We need America to throw medicine at us, vaccines, better housing for refugees."

But most of all, she talked to us like we had the ability to do something.  She asked us to help.  To do something about the situation - because we can.  This isn't just an issue for politicians to sit in ivory towers and ruminate over, passing resolutions and finding more reasons to say "aye" or "nay" to just one more motion on the docket.  This isn't just a matter of upholding one particular "standard" while turning around and ignoring the others that we should be holding even higher.  It's a matter of human lives.  It's a matter of human dignity.  It's a matter of loving not just our neighbors, but our enemies as well.  Because that's what we're supposed to do.  It's about remembering that violence can only beget more violence, that "those who take the sword perish by the sword" (Matthew 26:52 ESV).

That encounter left an impression on me - enough so that I finally decided to start a blog, because I realized putting a huge post on Facebook would just not do and 144 Twitter characters doesn't even begin to cover it.  The people of Syria are weighing so heavily on my heart that the words just need to pour out somewhere.

And especially today, they need to pour out.  Those of you who have known me for a while know that I don't get overly emotional about 9/11.  I remember the day.  I remember where I was.  I've had the same conversation time and time again with people my age that people who lived through JFK's assassination still have, almost a full 50 years later now.  It's an event that has shaped an entire generation of people - so much so that, twelve years later, we as a people are still held captive to it.  We turn on our televisions and are surrounded by the images, the re-broadcasts of the news coverage, the minute by minute re-living each year of those horrible events.  And we're told again and again of the terrorists who were behind the attack.  Of the thousands of people killed.  Of the horrific images that broadcast live to our living rooms, that caused my grandfather to have flashbacks of his experiences in World War II and gave us the barest hint of the kinds of things he must have seen that he took with him to the grave.  We log onto Facebook and make obligatory posts about the event, sharing pictures of American flags, of first responders sifting through the destruction and looking for survivors, of bald eagles superimposed over twin towers that still stand tall in our minds.  I see the enthusiastic displays of patriotism and fervor from people whom I know had no more connection to those horrific events than I did, who didn't lose loved ones in the towers, who didn't even know anybody in New York at all.  And yet they glue themselves to their screens each year and re-live the entire day each year like it's their solemn patriotic duty to do so, like they'll be arrested or considered un-American if they don't.  Like they did have family or friends in those towers.  And many of these same people were the first ones I heard expressing the desire to "turn Afghanistan into a parking lot," to "bomb them back to the Stone Age," to exact a fierce and complete vengeance.  They're the same people who have been talking the last few weeks about the necessity of attacking Syria.

And I can't help but ask: what didn't we learn from our own experiences of having a foreign people launch attacks against us?  How can we be so callous as to never even think that the missiles we launch today could bring about the same kind of tragedy that we ourselves have gone through?  That our "enforcement" of the "rules of war" could very well be Syria's 9/11?  I hear the words of the New Yorker in this video and have no better way of expressing it:

Couldn't we offer a hand that helps, instead of a command that kills?  Couldn't we at least show peace, even if we can't broker it?  Doesn't it make us a better people in the end to be the ones that plant and build, rather than the ones who burn and destroy?  After all we have been through as a nation, shouldn't we be the first to say that we will not be throwing bombs at other people, but throwing aid to them, instead?  I pray today that we can.