Meeting Bishop George Saliba, Syriac Orthodox Archbishop, Mt. Lebanon Church, Sabtiyyeh

On Saturday October 23, our NEST class with Dean George Sabra on 'Contemporary Eastern Churches' traveled by bus to a neighborhood in Sabtiyyeh on Mount Lebanon just outside Beirut to meet with Bishop George Saliba of the Syriac Orthodox Church. This was meeting none of us will soon forget, especially the U.S. citizens among us!


Bishop Saliba arrived by car just as our bus parked outside one of the Syriac Orthodox churches on Mt. Lebanon. His warm smile, joyful spirit, wonderful sense of humor, and ever present cell phone were immediately endearing. He conducted us inside just as a Lebanese Scout unit of young teens, boys and girls, was assembling on the church grounds.


We were led into a cool room with AC surrounded by pictures of Syriac Orthodox monasteries in  Turkey, Iraq, & other Middle Eastern countries. The walls were lined with bookcases containing many volumes. A Syriac Orthodox Deacon attended the Bishop and other members of the Bishop's staff served us hot tea with sugar, pistachio cookies from Damascus, and Arabic coffee with more sugar. Each of us was given a copy of 'The Lord's Prayer in Syriac-Aramaic: The Spoken Language of Our Lord Jesus Christ,' a copy of the ancient & modern Syriac-Aramaic Alphabet, & 2 beautiful brochures on the recently constructed & sanctified 'Beth Suryoye - Mor Gabriel Church' in Kesrwan, Mount Lebanon.


The Syriac Orthodox Church was presented in my textbooks in college and seminary as 'monophysite,' i.e., the eastern Church that accepted the Nicene Creed (325 CE) & the decrees of the fourth century church councils at Constantinople & Ephesus, but that did not accept the Creed of Chalcedon of 451 CE. In early Christendom among Latin & Greek-speaking Churches, the Syriac Orthodox Church was referred to as the 'Jacobites' or 'monophysites,' those who teach that 'God became man in Christ, united in one nature' (related to the Alexandrian-inspired christology emphasizing the union of two natures in Christ). They teach that Jesus Christ is one Person of two natures (divine & human). They refer to Mary primarily as theotokos (God-bearer in Greek) but also as 'the mother of God.' 


By contrast Pope Leo and the Latin & Greek 'fathers' at the Council of Chalcedon in 451 declared Christ was one Person in two natures (divine & human), the two natures remaining distinct after the union. The Latin & Greek-speaking Church of the old Eastern Roman empire persecuted the Syriac Orthodox Christians as heretics for rejecting the Creed of Chalcedon. Differences in language, culture, & political loyalties turned these subtle metaphysical & theological distinctions into slogans that divided Christians along religious-political lines in an age where there was no separation between religion and ruling regimes. 


The persecution of the Syriac Orthodox Christians (who continued to worship in the Syriac-Aramaic language common to Mary, Jesus & the early Jewish-Christian movement of disciples that founded a center for the Church & mission in Antioch) was so severe that when the rising Islamic empire conquered the eastern region of Christianity in the seventh century, the Syriac Orthodox Christians welcomed the new regime. 


Over the centuries Syriac Orthodox Christians evangelized India where their church continues to have relatively large concentrations of members, and they were most numerous in the region of modern Turkey & Iraq. Due to persecutions of their churches by Muslims & Kurds that began in the late Ottoman empire and around WWI and in the 1930s, Syriac Orthodox churches moved to Lebanon, Syria, and outside the Middle East. 


Bishop Saliba emphasized to us that in more recent times in Iraq under Saddam Hussein, the Syriac Orthodox Church had lived in peace. He said that Saddam Hussein was like a 'father' to their Church & other Christian minorities in Iraq. That all changed with the U.S. invasion of 2003. Since the U.S. toppled the prior Iraqi government, and allowed a new regime to form dominated by Shia Muslims (along with Sunni Muslims in the government), the Syriac Orthodox Christians were brutally treated and have left Iraq by the thousands. Neither the new regime in Baghdad nor the U.S. forces have prevented the violent persecution of thousands of Syriac Orthodox Christians. The Bishop said that western powers followed a similar pattern in the 1990s in Kosovo in former Yugoslavia which was once a center for eastern Orthodox Christians, but is now dominated by Muslims and western Christians.


The Bishop also expressed his frustration with U.S. foreign policy regarding the State of Israel and the Palestinians (thousands of whom still live in 12 refugee camps scattered around Lebanon). He said bluntly that U.S. foreign policy is a "slave of Zionism" when it comes to dealing with Israeli political leaders over negotiations on a future Palestinian State. Neither in former President Bill Clinton nor in current President Barack Obama did he find the toughness necessary to bring the Israelis to a viable peace settlement with the Palestinians.


At the same time he said that the two Palestinian factions, Fatah & Hamas, need to reconcile if they are to negotiate effectively with the Israelis and the American mediators.


Although the Bishop's words were blunt & might have offended some of us who are American citizens who support a two-state solution in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, his personality and hospitality connected with everyone in our class. He said he was speaking about our leadership, not the American people as a people. He also had blunt words to say about western European powers & their involvement with the Ottoman empire in its closing days and in former Yugoslavia.


He also connected with our class made up of Christians from different nations due to his identification with persecuted Syriac Orthodox Christians in Turkey (along with Armenian Christians), in Iraq today, & other Christian minorities who suffer from second or third class citizenship in other contexts in this region.


One of my observations on preparation for ministry is that an individual may have an excellent education but lack the personality to connect with others effectively to communicate the Christian message. Bishop Saliba connected with us through his joyful and generous personality in such a way that we could hear his blunt words about U.S. foreign policy, about the current regime in Baghdad, and learn from his identification with suffering Christians in the Middle East. 


           

Worshipping with the Assyrian Church of the East, Sabtiyyeh, Mt. Lebanon

Today (Sunday / The Lord's Day, October 17) Dean George Sabra's "Contemporary Eastern Churches" class traveled by bus from Hamra (NEST's neighborhood) through Beirut and up part of Mount Lebanon to Sabtiyyeh, a suburb of the city where we visited with Fr. Akhikar Wardeh's congregation in the tradition of The Assyrian Church of the East. 

The Assyrian Church is one of the oldest expressions of Christianity dating its origins to 431 CE. They worship in both Aramaic (the language spoken by many first century Jews & Gentiles in Palestine & the eastern regions of the Roman empire & it is the language of their Bible & liturgy), & in the modern Syriac language which is related to but also different from Aramaic & Arabic. Their Church faced massive persecution from 1914 - 1933 under the Ottoman empire; 500,000 Assyrian Christians were massacred or died on a 1,000 km trek from southern Russia (where the Orthodox Russian authorities had protected them until Russia withdrew from WWI) to northern Iraq fleeing persecution by the Ottomans. At one time there were 750,000 Assyrian Christians in northern Iraq around Mosul (Nineveh) and in the Kurdish regions. Ongoing conflict between the Kurds and Assyrian Christians has reduced their numbers in recent years from 60 - 70,000 to only 20,000 remaining in Iraq today. Now their patriarch and their Church is based in Chicago where many Assyrian Christians immigrated in the 20th century. 

Fr. Wardeh is a young, relatively new priest from Iraq who received his theological education in Rome since there are no Assyrian monasteries or schools of higher learning remaining in the Middle East. There are 3 Assyrian Church congregations in Lebanon, including the village of Sarah (phonetic spelling) in the Bekah valley south of Beirut established by Assyrian church refugees from S. Russia in 1914. The church we visited was built in 1953 and was well attended. 

The Lord's Day service (that was in progress when we arrived) lasted at least 90 minutes and consisted almost entirely in the chanting of their liturgy in modern Syriac by a choir of young, single women (heads covered by a kind of red beret with red choir robes) and three priests who were joined by the congregation in some of the chants. There was much incense that was used, among other things, to cleanse one's hands before received the bread and wine of the Eucharist. Children were communicated with the bread, and women covered their heads with scarves to receive the elements. The Gospel reading for the day was Matthew 20:1-16 (The Laborers in the Vineyard) with a seven minute sermon on 'So the last will be first, and the first will be last.'

In our NEST group some of the Protestants who were less familiar with E. Orthodox liturgics were quite taken when a red curtain emblazoned with a gold cross was drawn to hide from us the consecration of the elements by Fr. Wardeh. Although our group was made up of Presbyterians (Lebanese & N. American), Lutherans (Europe & N. America), Anglicans (England & Scotland), & Armenian Evangelicals from Syria, we were all welcomed at the Lord's Table. 

The Assyrian Church of the East has a distinctive understanding of the Person of Christ that is  close to the Gospel of Mark, Colossians 1:15-20, early Jewish Christianity (before the 'parting of the ways' between Gentile Christians and rabbinic Judaism), and the school of Antioch's theology where Jesus' humanity becomes the subject of the incarnation of God's divinity from the moment of Jesus' conception. For them, Mary the mother of Jesus is not theotokos ('God-bearer') but christotokos (mother of the Messiah). They confess the faith using the Nicene Creed in its original version of 325 CE (where the Holy Spirit proceeds from God the Father, but not from both the Father and the Son) and they add to the Creed Colossians 1:15b, that Christ is 'the firstborn of all creation.' (This same text was used by Arius, the presbyter of Alexandria, who taught that Jesus is Savior of the world but not divine in the same way as God the Father. The Assyrian Church, however, does not have an Arian christology, as interpreted by Fr. Wardeh.)

In the celebration of the Eucharist, the breaking of the bread symbolizes for Assyrian Christians how Jesus' humanity and divinity was broken in the crucifixion, but then reunited in the resurrection and ascension to eternal glory.

Since Fr. Wardeh did his theological training in Rome, I wanted to ask him if the emphasis on the historical Jesus in Catholic theology since the 1940s and esp. since Vatican Council II in the 1960s has opened doors of dialogue with Assyrian Christians who have never forgotten that Jesus, Mary and the disciples spoke Aramaic. 

Given centuries of protected religious minority status under a series of Muslim empires, Assyrian Christians had a significant impact on Islamic scholarship that brought the philosophy of Aristotle & Greek medicine to western Europe through Arabic translations of the Greek texts. But the massacres and persecutions under the Ottoman empire and contemporary conflicts with the Kurds in N. Iraq marks the Assyrian Christians as a Church of the Cross. It is interesting to note that all the crosses in the congregation we visited were not crucifixes (they did not display the broken body of Jesus on the cross) but empty crosses proclaiming the resurrection from the dead of the crucified messiah.          

How to Stay Informed about Lebanon & Beirut

By now you probably know from news media that the President of Iran, Mahmoud Admadinejad, is visiting Lebanon this week (October 13-15). Yesterday (Wed.) he met with leaders of the Lebanese government in Beirut. Today (Thurs.) he is meeting with members of the 'Party of God' (Hizbullah) in southern Lebanon near the border with Israel. A good way to keep up on the local news from Lebanon is to paste this address into your browser & go to this English & Arabic language website:


http://web.naharnet.com


Naharnet posts updates hour to hour and provides both local (Lebanon) and regional news (Middle East).

Learning in The NEST in Beirut at a Crossroads of the Middle East & the West

This fall semester at NEST I am responsible for two courses: Theology of the Reformation: Luther & Calvin in Comparative Perspective, and Doctrine of Christ. Let me tell you first about my students.


In Luther & Calvin I have two: Kladys is a Presbyterian from a village in northern Lebanon working on her M.A. in Christian Education, and Saleem is an Anglican Palestinian from Nablus working on his M.Div. At the end of this post I will include with Kladys' permission a poetic meditation that she shared at the beginning of one of our classes last week, and a meditation that Saleem prepared for this week, also with his permission.


In Doctrine of Christ I have six: Kristina is Korean-American, already has her M.A. from Fuller Seminary in Cross-Cultural Studies & has lived in both Istanbul & Beirut; Rana is a Greek Catholic lay woman from Lebanon who studied architecture at the American Univ.-Beirut (AUB); Hagop (cf. Jacob) is an Armenian Evangelical from Lebanon who has studied biochemistry & psychology and is pursuing the M.Div.; Sevan is from Kurdistan in Iraq & a member of the Armenian Orthodox Church; Talar is from Aleppo, Syria working on her Bachelors in Christian Education; & Kladys is also taking this course.


These students are members of a community of 30 students at NEST this fall: 18 from the Middle East (Lebanon, Syria, Armenia, Iraq, the Occupied Palestinian Territories) and 12 from Europe (Germany, Switzerland, Denmark, Scotland) & N. America. Here at NEST many of us live in the same vertical campus, dine together 2 - 3 meals a day, wash, iron & dry our clothes, drink Arabic coffee on the veranda, play volleyball, & worship in chapel 5 X per week. Imagine a kind of Protestant theological monastery in a busy, mixed Christian & Muslim neighborhood near the American Univ.-Beirut, and you have something like NEST.


In Luther & Calvin we are working our way through Kittelson's biography of Luther and watching the 2003 Luther film. Later in the course we will take up Luther & Calvin's views on Judaism & Islam. One thing we noted early on in the course was the tremendous anxiety about 'the Turks' in Rome and western Europe as Luther's reform began.


In Doctrine of Christ we are focusing on atonement and different understandings of Jesus' execution in Scripture & the history of Christian thought concluding with the contemporary debate about abuses of the cross. Over the weekend we were to re-read the Passion Narratives in the four New Testament gospels. We had four presenters on each Passion Narrative today. As Hagop interpreted John 18:16, he taught me a new word in Arabic: wasta <phonetic spelling> which means 'mediation,' something that happens when the 'other' or 'beloved disciple' who has followed Jesus into the courtyard of the high priest gets Peter brought in.


Teaching at NEST is a joy. The institution has high standards of admission and all my students are well prepared for class, well read in biblical studies, theology, & education, on task when we meet, and take their studies very seriously. Many of them come from cities and villages where Christianity has been around much longer than in Europe and N. America, yet their churches have been minority communities in this region for many centuries. 


And now here is the poetic meditation "Walking in the Desert" by Kladys Abboud of Lebanon shared with one of our classes:

Walking in the desert .. walking Alone…
Searching for a friend, searching for a home…

Asking Who am I? Asking what to do? In a world of loneliness, from where do I start?
It seems like they will never end, these long days of hopeless nights,

I scream, I cry, I shout, I feel like I will die, I always ask why…. but .. no reply ..
What shall I do to find a meaning for a life that I didn’t ask for..
From where do I grasp the power to continue.. to be stronger than before ??
I kept walking, searching for the answers here and there ..
Searching for the meaning that saves me from the despair..
While I was in this journey of struggle, I passed through a fountain of water, I looked around..
I saw the trees, the flowers, the little plants, the fishes.
The whole nature .. it was happier than me..

Suddenly I saw a man who was drinking from the fountain..
 He looked at me directly in my eyes,
He noticed me, he noticed that I am there..
He noticed the sadness, he noticed the fear..
He asked with a smile on his face, what are you searching for? Why are you here?

I answered with hesitation; I am searching for “the meaning”
Did you find it? Or are we together in this journey?
We are together my dear, he said..

Let’s sit and talk, let’s stop the walk ..
For just one moment ..
Looking to the creation .. 

Trying to find consolation .

I felt happy to find this friend..
It was a glorious moment for me after all this strife ..
It was the most meaningful moment that I spend in my life ..
Every word I heard from him, touched my soul
he was sincere, he talked directly to my whole ..
I asked who are you?   I want to know
Your presence changed my mood, helps me to go …
beyond the struggle and the sadness ..
you filled my heart with gladness
He answered saying, I am the meaning your searching for ..
 I am your friend, I am your lord..

I want to be always with you, let me shine in your heart .. l
et your light be so bright .
let the whole world know that you are loved by your God ..
Life is a struggle I agree with you .. but our friendship will give you the power to continue ...


Here is Saleem's meditation, entitled, "He Collects Your Tears."


"You keep track of all my sorrows. You have collected all my tears in Your bottle. You have recorded each one in Your book (Psalm 56:8).


Do you know how important you are to God? He cares so much about every detail of your life. He cares about your thoughts, feelings, and emotions. In fact, what you are going through is so important to Him that He records every sorrow and collects every tear you've shed. Why would God record  your sorrows and collect your tears? It's because He loves you so much. He's your Vindicator. He's keeping account of every wrong that's ever been done to you so that He can make up for every single one of them. He wants to restore everything that has ever been stolen. He wants to heal every single hurt and pain. He sees the longings and desires of your heart, and you can rest assured that behind the scenes He is working things out for your good!


I want to remind you today that God is with you. He is on your side. He has your best interest at heart, and He is working to bring restoration and peace to every area of your life. Keep standing, keep believing, and keep doing the right thing because the One who collects your tears will restore every broken place in your life!


Let us pray: Heavenly Father, thank You for loving me and setting me free. Thank you for being my Vindicator. I choose to release every hurt, pain and sorrow, knowing that You will make all things new. In Jesus' Name. Amen."

I look forward to learning more about the Christians, churches & cities of the Middle East in the weeks ahead from my students and colleagues in the faculty & staff at NEST.   

A Walk with President Mary Mikhael in Downtown Beirut

Friday evening (Oct. 1), I was invited for a walk downtown led by NEST President Mary Mikhael with a visiting committee from the World Council of Churches. The committee included ecumenical leaders from many global regions with Conrad Reisner, their distinguished chair.


As we walked the narrow and traffic-congested streets of Beirut in the tropical heat & humidity, President Mikhael would stop and point out public landmarks. We were moving from the Hamra district where NEST is located to city-center. Beirut is a relatively small city in square miles but densely populated and crammed with historic sites, both ancient and modern.


As we approached the parliament building which dates back to the Ottoman era of the 19th century, Mikhael showed us how both Christian and Jewish centers of worship were built around this building, for both Jews and Christians were protected peoples under Ottoman rule. The result is that the must public areas of downtown Beirut host some of the most beautiful churches and mosques I have seen in any global city.


What also makes these sacred sites significant is that several of the churches (including the very first Presbyterian church built in Lebanon) were destroyed, in whole or in part, during the Lebanese civil war of the late 20th century. Some of the churches which are built over much older churches dating back many centuries, were actually battle sites between different militias fighting inside the church buildings. All of them that were destroyed or damaged were re-built with funds from their own traditions, not with public funds. In the case of one church, beautiful icons from the 1700s were removed from the sanctuary and hidden in a hospital before gunfire broke out in the sanctuary. This beautiful church has been restored but those who re-built left the bullet marks on one wall to remind the public that a battle once scarred this holy place.


We also saw from different angles the reconstruction of Beirut's central synagogue as an historic site. The city was once home to a thriving Jewish community. It was significant that someone has taken the care and committed the funds to re-build this historic synagogue.


Then we walked around a neighborhood with four mosques, and an immense, beautiful new mosque built very recently. Near this new mosque is the burial site of the Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri who was assassinated in 2005, and the tombs of his body guards and driver who were blown up in the explosion. Hariri was a Sunni Muslim, an entrepreneur, and the P.M. who oversaw the re-building of downtown Beirut after the civil war in the 1990s and first half of the last decade. We went into the tent over his grave and viewed pictures of him on the tent walls, and then walked into the next tent where his guards and driver are buried and saw their pictures.


Later we had dinner al fresco in a beautiful neighborhood near where the new souk (marketplaces) have been located. The Lebanese dishes reminded me of eating tappas in Barcelona. The Lebanese wine was outstanding. As we dined and the WCC members honored President Mary and Conrad Reisner, a group of clowns were posing for pictures with  families. This part of downtown Beirut felt like a Parisian street corner on a Friday evening.


Most of our group returned to NEST in taxis, but a few of us walked back in the darkness with President Mary. At one point we had to cross very near the home of an important public official that was well guarded by police and soldiers. Mikhael stopped to chat with the soldiers and then gave them most of her chocolates, her gift from the WCC group she had just received. 


As I remember this evening now, it was like a dream finally to see the center of this city and country about which I have heard from Presbyterians & other Christians for so many years.