Portraits of children killed in Israeli attacks on Gaza

Artwork by artists of For the Most Beautiful Collective

This last year, it has been mind-numbing to watch mainstream media continue to frame what’s happening in Palestine/Israel as a problem that began on October 7. (Not even close, read “The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine” by Rashid Khalidi). Even more horrifying is the way the U.S. government continues to send billions and billions of dollars of weapons and military aid to Israel, which fuels the killing. But additional anguish comes from the continued silence and complicity of the Christian Church. There are a lot of reasons why this might be true. Guilt over the Holocaust, fear of being called an antisemite, anti-Arab racism, and Islamophobia probably all factor in, but at this point I am starting to believe that this void has more to do with the concept called normalization. When things are “normal,” we don’t think twice about them. We accept the situation and go on with our lives.

A recent lectionary text from the gospel of Mark (9:14-29) tells of a boy possessed by a demon since childhood. I imagine that for him being possessed, unable to hear or speak, was normal. He didn’t know anything else. Luckily his father must have remembered a time when something was different, or, at least, had hope for some kind of change, which is what prompted him to see Jesus in the first place. Jesus, if you’re able, the man asked, please have pity. It’s interesting to note that in this story, Jesus shows up right about the time the disciples have tried and failed to cast out the demon from this boy. Of course, Jesus heals the child, but the perplexed disciples want to know why they couldn’t get rid of the demon. Jesus replies that this kind can come out only with prayer. I found that answer quite confusing until reading Ched Myers’ commentary on the gospel of Mark where he puts it quite succinctly – you can’t cast out demons that you are still possessed by.

As we think about what’s normal in our society, or what has become normalized, the list is long. Our country exists on stolen land, but most of us don’t think too much about that. Or what about in the morning, when we drink our coffee? Do we remember that its original extraction came at a high price for the people whose land and resources we harvested for ourselves? When we get dressed, pulling on our T-shirt, do we think about how the textile industry was built on slave labor in the cotton fields and still relies on women in the sweatshops of Latin America and Asia sewing garments together day and night? As we pick up our phone to check our schedule, do we consider children working in the cobalt mines in the Congo? When we hear of homelessness and poverty, well, that’s just the way it is, right? And when it’s not happening to us, violence and bloodshed and war, well, they’re just par for the course.

This is how most of us are socialized in the United States, and the truth is that most of our churches are no different. Instead of understanding ourselves as an alternative community that follows and acts like Jesus, we are impotent in the face of ethnic cleansing and genocide because we ourselves are still possessed by the demons of racism, greed, power, and violence. Unless we spend time in collective self-reflection and prayer, we don’t stand a chance of exorcising the normalization of evil and the apathy it begets.

Our Lord and Savior Jesus said, “Let the little children come to me” (Matthew 19:14). If Jesus has truly freed us, if he is the head of the Body, then Christian individuals and churches must live as if every single child matters. The Jewish child. The American child. The Christian child. The Israeli child. The Muslim child. The Palestinian child. And yet, according to Oxfam, more children have been murdered by the Israeli army in Gaza in the last year than have been killed in a single year of any other conflict for the past two decades.

Is it normal for a 10-year-old girl to write her will? Is it normal for an 8-year-old boy to be shot in the neck? In a recently published list naming the dead in Gaza, the first 14 pages were babies under the age of one. Why do we accept the lie that “collateral damage” is just expected in war? Nothing can be normal when children are being slaughtered.

There are U.S. Christians, thank God, who are working tirelessly for justice and peace through newly founded organizations such as Christians for Ceasefire and Christians for a Free Palestine, as well as longstanding Palestinian Christian organizations such as Sabeel Liberation Theology Center and Bright Stars of Bethlehem, among others. But there are many more non-Christian and non-religious groups that have been advocating for a ceasefire and liberation in Palestine. These folks have been speaking up, while most Christians remain mute. It’s interesting that in Mark 9, the disciples encounter others that are casting out demons, doing what they themselves were unable to do. Jesus’ followers then try to stop them from freeing the people who have been possessed. An incredulous Jesus tells them to knock it off because “anyone who isn’t against us is for us.” Christians need to move beyond our self-centered approaches in the struggle for justice to learn from and join with those who are already doing the gospel work of dismantling oppression, unlocking prison doors, opening the eyes of those who cannot see. Folks like Jewish Voice for Peace, Rabbis for Ceasefire, Students for Justice in Palestine, the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement, Doctors without Borders, Zeteo News, US Campaign for Palestinian Rights, just to name a few.

I encourage you not to let your heart be hardened. Learn more. Get connected.

But the question remains of why these groups exist so often outside of formal church structures with negligible institutional support. I know we congregationally governed folks have a hard time agreeing on much. I wonder though, how many children must die before we, as American Baptists, are collectively willing to say stop?