Dear Rev. Know it all;

There is a place in Orlando, Florida, near Disneyland, called the Holy Land Experience in which they recreate the times of Jesus, literally dropping you into the customs of His time on earth. Do you think this might actually be a helpful way to spread the Gospel?

Yours sincerely, 

Archie O’Logist

Dear Archie,

I have actually been to this “Disney Land of the Soul.” It was interesting, but it didn’t have much to do with the actual time and place of Jesus’ own life. It was a lot of southern evangelicals, both blond haired Caucasians and dark African Americans dressed up in Arab looking outfits doing musical numbers. They are very nice people. It was sort of “Shalom Aleichem, y'all.” It was fun. There was a kind of Disney-esque ancient village, and a little zoo of animals that were supposed to be typical of the period, a sad looking donkey, a goat and a few chickens, if I recall properly, and some animals in cages. There was a model of the central shrine of the temple that was perhaps one fifth size of the real thing. It doubled as a stage for a brief passion play with singing. Inside the mini-Holy of Holies was a movie theater. The niftiest thing there, to my taste, was a recreation of the tent of meeting in the Wilderness, which housed the Ark of the Covenant during the wandering of the Israelites. It showed the priestly ritual that I found interesting. There were gift shops and a cafeteria where one could get a decent falafel. It was great fun and had nothing to do with the actual life and times of Jesus.

There is however, a place one can go to get a real feel for what things were like at the time of Jesus. It is called the Holy Land. I mean the real Holy Land. It is not cheap to get there and you really need a tour, at least the first time you go. (I heartily recommend Steve and Janet Ray; arduous, a real pilgrimage, but really good.)  People are worried that it isn’t safe. It’s very safe, much safer, for instance than a bus ride in Chicago.

The real experience of the real Holy Land is readily available in modern times: constant tension between ethnic groups, poverty and wealth side by side, religiosity so intense that it evokes hatred instead of love, secularism and religious fanaticism side by side, and at war with each other. In short, it is almost exactly the same as when Jesus left his heavenly throne and was made flesh in the Virgin’s womb. It is dry, and hot, and dusty. The sea of Galilee is blue and calm one moment and then swept by ten foot waves the next. There is a little group of people who live there that very few know about. They are the Palestinian Christians. They make up only one or two percent of the population and hang on only by a thread. They are probably the descendants of everyone who ever lived in the land; the Canaanite, the Hebrews, the first Christians, the Greeks, the Arabs, the Crusaders. They are the people of the land and they have always been there. Jesus, I suspect, was one of them. They venerate the Holy Places whose locations they have never forgotten. They are among the nicest people I have ever met. They have resisted the intense Muslim pressure to abandon Christ, but for more than a thousand years they have quietly resisted and remained faithful to their Lord, who is also their kin. Now they face increasing pressure from the Israelis who hem them in with walls and regulations, hoping that they will just go away. Many of them are leaving and moving to places like Detroit and Skokie, Illinois, a charming little suburb near Chicago.  

There was another time that Christians had to flee the Holy Land. It was about 65AD. The Lord Jesus had warned them to flee, and, according to Eusebius of Caesarea, an ancient Christian author, the prophets among the first Christians warned the whole community that the times predicted by the Lord were about to arrive. They fled to Damascus and to Pella across the Jordan among other places, and the Romans swept in and destroyed the Land. When it was all over, they quietly returned and resumed their lives of work and prayer, faithful to their Lord.

When the Persians invaded, when the Romans invaded, when the Muslims invaded, when the British and the modern Israelis invaded they endured and continued their faithful guardianship of the Holy Places. These People of the Land are the real “Holy Land Experience.”

It is this difficult land, as stormy as the Sea of Galilee when the Syrian wind blow downs the mountain passes that “God so loved.” He did not love the polished, varnished, tidy version of the faith that we wish were true. He loved the poor, the sinful, the sick, the difficult. He loved humanity. He loves you with all your sins and so He was made flesh their in that center of the human storm, a land that has never really known peace. “My peace I give you... not as the world gives peace.” Now there is a new storm brewing. Keep the Christians of the Holy Land in your prayers. Do what you can to help them. They are the true Holy Land Experience. 

Yours as ever,

Rev. Know-it-all