Fear the Walking Refugees?

We are all witnesses to a seismic moment in modern history. It is being called the greatest refugee crisis since World War II as hordes of desperate men, women, and children from lands of chaos and conflict seek safety and hope in Europe. The news over the past weeks has been dominated by apocalyptic scenes of crowds swarming razor wire fences and overwhelmed police trying to contain the tens of thousands.

A Tale of Two Churches

Recently, two famous churches on two different continents were attacked within hours, or possibly even minutes, of each other. One attack was against the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, a historic African American church. On Wednesday evening, June 17th, Dylann Roof entered the church joining a Bible study for about an hour before opening fire around 9 p.m. killing nine people.

Birth Pangs of a Jewish Nation

Last week, Israel celebrated its birth. Following the Jewish calendar, on the 5th of Iyyar, 67 years ago in Tel Aviv, David Ben Gurion and the Jewish National Council declared the establishment of the modern Jewish state. Yet, before every birth, there are labor pangs, and before those travails a fetus has slowly developed in the wake of conception. The modern state of Israel’s birth was much more than one miraculous day.

A Loyal Love

In his response about the greatest commandment, Jesus quoted from the book of Deuteronomy, and more specifically, a passage of scripture known as the “Shma” within Jewish tradition.[1] Dt 6:4-5 is a command to the people of Israel to follow God’s Law completely and unequivocally. This call to obedience is curiously phrased as “love.” How can one command love? Who can command that love?

Open Our Hands

A group of three families, which included seven children six years old and under, went to Jordan Nov 15-16 to visit with Syrian and Iraqi refugees. The three families were JCF’s Eva and Danny Kopp, my family, and the Nazarene Church’s Shahade and Annabelle Twal. My wife, Sharon, had an impression that we should go as families, along with our young children, for two main reasons. One purpose was so that we as families could connect with their families on the most basic level—as fathers, mothers, brothers, and sisters.

Israel’s Seven Species: Fig

The FIG is a large tenacious tree which bears a fragile, highly sweet fruit in the hot summer months. The fig, or te’ena in Hebrew, is native to Israel and the Ancient Near East and is well known in many biblical accounts. It is one of the first trees mentioned in the Bible when Adam and Eve used its large, uniquely shaped leaves to sew for themselves coverings.

Israel’s Seven Species: Pomegranate

The POMEGRANATE is a deciduous tree with a deep red, seed-like fruit enclosed in individual pulp kernels. In Israel its fruit ripens at the end of summer, usually during September and October. The pomegranate has a long association with biblical agriculture—from Moses’ twelve spies sent to Canaan who bring back pomegranates as proof of Canaan’s productivity (Num 12:23) to the prophets, Joel and Haggai, who both envision a terrible day when Israel’s prolific fruit trees, like the pomegranate, hang barren.

Israel’s Seven Species: Honey

Honey is a sweet food which is obtained from several sources, the most prominent being bees’ production from flower nectar. Honey was used as a multifaceted, diverse symbol within the biblical text. The Bible’s well-known description of Canaan, as a “land flowing with milk and honey,” has often been interpreted as a testimony to the Land’s abundance and blessing.

What Would We Seek?

This past month, on the evening of June 12th, three Israeli teenagers, Naftali Frenkel (16), Gilad Shaer (16), and Eyal Yifrah (19), were kidnapped by Palestinians with links to Hamas, while hitchhiking home from the West Bank area near Bethlehem. Over the next three weeks, Israel was gripped with nerve-racking emotion, while authorities began a massive hunt for the boys around the West Bank.

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