Transcription of the Video: Misguided Faith

Listen to audio with the transcription: https://otter.ai/s/vzw0LJmETH2eXUBcR_tfZQ

The ancient land of Israel is a testimony, an evidence of the greatness of what God did in that country, a testimony to the truth of the words that we find in the pages of the Bible. The Bible teaches to be a follower of Jesus, we need to imitate the methods he chose to use to bring his message. 

One of the great tragedies in the history of the church is that often, people have heard parts of the message of Jesus but have chosen to use methods other than his own. I believe the Crusades were one of those great tragedies, as Christians from Europe, chose to use violence as their means of presenting the Gospel of peace. 

Well they probably took their building material out of there, but the idea was you're a European. Everybody knows you have a fort; you've got to have a moat. So let's build a moat. But what's kind of neat is to go to the tower and then there's still a stairway where you could get down, and then there's a small gate down at the bottom of the tower where you go out into the moat. 

A lot of them were underneath here where this one's all vaulted. And there's a second story on the whole thing. Because this formed the first story and then the second story up above. In typical European fashion, you have an outer fort and then an inner fort and then even an inner fort yet, where you had the church and other rooms. 

We're here on a beautiful afternoon at a Crusader fort up in an area in Israel called the Heights of Issachar. The fort itself has a French name - Belvoir. Let's talk a little bit about where we are geographically. To the east of us here across the very beautiful and deep Rift Valley are the mountains of Gilead. You can see them over there. In biblical times, there were tribes of Israel living over there, at least in the iron age period. Today, that's the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.

Now we're in a Crusader fort. It was founded by a French order of Hospitallers. There was at one time 50 knights in this castle and about 450 soldiers with their families and with the other supporting people. So you get a little bit of an idea of the size of this community. 

This was an incredibly strong fort. It's built on the European model of forts. You noticed you haven't seen anything like this in the country to this point - mainly because this is a European transplant. They came from Europe and planted it here in a European fashion. 

Saladine, at the end of the Crusades period, which lasted over 100 years, Saladine came and began to retake the land. And in 1180, he laid siege to this place. For seven years, the siege went on and it didn't fall. He left, came back in 1189 and began the siege again, and finally the knights decided that since the rest of the country was gradually falling to Saladine and his troops, the knights here decided that they ought to surrender. So one afternoon, they opened the gates and they were given free passage and they marched down to Akko, just north of Mount Carmel in the Mediterranean, and they got in their boats and sailed away. In a sense, the chapter on the Crusades ended, in some ways, here. 

The Crusades came from Europe in the 11th and 12th centuries. It began in a very bloody way already as in Europe there was an economic problem. The feudal system was beginning to break down, and there really was not enough land and place for all of those who belonged to the feudal system, so there was this pressure to expand economically. And people began to look for places to go. 

A rumor spread that in Jerusalem a bishop had been killed in some brutal fashion. And as a result, there was a stirring of sentiment that people should rise up and come to this country from Europe in order to deliver this country from, as they called it, the Infidel. In the process of that, of European soldiers, knights, and Crusaders coming from Europe to this country, we enter into probably what is one of the most bloody, brutal periods in the history of Christianity. 

As the knights left Europe, for some reason, they decided that all those who did not specifically belong to the tradition of Christianity deserved somehow not to live. And so as they left Europe and began to move on all of those crusades, the slaughter began. It began already in Europe before they left Europe where Jewish people who had lived in communities and were part of the fabric of communities for hundreds of years already began to be slaughtered one community after another. People who were brutally killed in cold blood, pregnant women whose bodies were cut open so that their fetus would be killed, synagogues where Jewish communities were locked up into the synagogue and the entire synagogue burned. As they came across Europe, whole towns plundered. 

People whose only crime was to be Jewish in race and in ethnic or religious background were suddenly, for no reason, just slaughtered by their neighbors. As the Crusaders came into Constantinople and Istanbul, Turkey, the people they were slaughtering whom they called Infidels were in fact Orthodox Christians but were dressed differently and looked differently, and here we have an example of where Christians in the tradition of Christianity were actually killing brothers and sisters in the faith even simply because they were different.

The Crusaders arrived in this part of the country and simply continued that spirit of the crusade which was encouraged not only by economics but encouraged by the religious leaders of the day - even popes - and came into this country and systematically decimated cities and towns and villages, stripping them not only of the people who lived here but stripping them of the ability even to continue to function as a given economic area.

They arrived in Jerusalem and they killed and they killed until the sewers of the city ran red with blood. And so the Crusades had arrived. The unfortunate thing for us is that the Crusaders did what they did not simply as Europeans. That would be bad enough. Because most of us are European. But the Crusaders did what they did in the name of Jesus Christ. 

And they took a message that we've been following around here in the Galilee. A rabbi who came and said, "I'm rooted in the Old Testament idea that I'm called to be a witness and a testimony for God's new system or change of system. But let's do it by being meek and humble and loving our enemies and loving our brother." They had taken that message of Christianity, and they had turned it into something where Christianity was done with the edge of the sword for economic and political gain. 

In the history of the Christian church, the Crusades have stood between us and both and Jew and Muslim. How do you present information about Jesus to someone whose history includes our ancestors coming here and with the edge of the sword, destroyed entire communities for being Jewish or for being Muslim? How do you tell somebody that Jesus Christ has a message of love when the focus of that message, as far as this country is concerned, is seen here in fortresses and in battlements and in city gates that represented people who came here simply to destroy and to kill? 

Some people estimate that the number of people who died at the Crusaders’ swords reaches levels that were only equaled at the time of the Holocaust. In some ways, it planted the seeds for what happened later in Christianity so that only a couple of hundred years after the Crusades, you get a great Christian hero like Martin Luther saying unbelievably virulent things about Jewish people. 

The largest Lutheran denomination in our country has decided to renounce the sayings of Luther as far as they apply to Jewish people. And they've certainly stood in the way of relationships between Jews and Christians. 

Every Good Friday, for 1,000 years in the Christian church, the local bishop or priest would get up and berate the congregation with their need to punish the local Jewish population for the death of Jesus Christ. Basically, we need to remember the Romans killed Jesus if you're talking about crucifixion. That was a Roman punishment. But more than that, Jesus died because of me. It was my sin that put him there. If anybody's guilty, it's me. And to blame somebody else for what Jesus freely came to do for my sake, totally in my opinion, misunderstands his message. 

It seems to me that we in Christianity have to own up to the fact that this is part of our tradition and our history. I think about schools who take the name Crusaders. I think about churches whose song books are called Crusader Hymnals. And even wonderfully effective Christian people who call their religious meetings Crusades really don't understand how much people in this part of the world and from that tradition feel betrayed and hurt because of what we've done in the name of the One who came to Galilee, as a Jewish rabbi no less, to bring a message of a new Kingdom of love and peace and harmony. 

I know from experience, having studied with Jewish scholars and Jewish students and having Jewish friends, that it's very important for us to say very clearly that this may be a chapter of Christianity. And for that, we're embarrassed and sorry. But this is not what we understand Christianity to be and we renounce it. We renounce it by not wearing its symbols. We renounce it by not using its names. And we renounce it by showing, by our attitudes, that we respect all people for what they are and for who they are. 

And in that life, I think we have the right to share with them our faith in Jesus. And I really encourage you to think about that as we have a world where there are a lot of Muslim people who've experienced that, and there are a lot of Jewish people who have experienced that. And I think that has to be part of our faith lesson.

There's a second aspect that we ought to think about too. That is the fact that the message Jesus brought was a very confrontational message. He said, "Take on the power of evil in your culture." He sailed across the sea over there to take on the power of evil. He went to Caesarea Philippi to say, "Take on the gates of hell."

Now it's very easy for that kind of confrontation to lead us to saying, "Well how do you do that? You do it with a knife, you do it with a sword, you do it with a gun." 

But Jesus didn't do it that way. Jesus left Caesarea Philippi, walked, interestingly, on that far bank over there in the mountains right past this location, and went to Jerusalem to take on the power of the devil by giving his life. 

It's very important for us, I think, to understand that while we need to be confrontational with what's wrong, what's broken, what's unjust, and immoral in our society, we need to do that in a way that says we're going to imitate our rabbi, our Jewish teacher, Jesus, who said, "I'll give up my life for your sake. I'll sacrifice myself."