Again this week I wonder – what does Jesus’ resurrection mean for us who are living 2,000 years and 5,000 miles from when and where it happened? What does the resurrection look like for those of us who will NOT see Jesus as those who walked to Emmaus, or ate fish on the beach with him?
To say “I believe in the Resurrection” or “I believe that the resurrection of Jesus really happened” is also to say, “Jesus is still alive makes a difference in our lives now and here.”
is also to say God is still creating hope where it seems despair reigns,
is also to say we are not alone when feel lonely,
is also to say the worst thing is not the last thing,
is also to say that sunsets can become sunrises.
This week in Sophia’s school, they had an assembly with a speaker who survived the concentration camps of Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge regime…. And, as she told me about it, we cried and wondered why? and how? and why?
And I continue to think of the millions of refugees fleeing Syria and stuck now in camps on the edges of Lebanon and Turkey and Jordan and Iraq and Greece…
And you know, when I find myself becoming discouraged at the immensity of this – or any – tragic situation, and I wonder what the resurrection of Jesus looks like in OUR TIME, in places like refugee camps, I don’t turn to stories and articles about middle aged white women who live in the suburbs of wealthy America. Rather I turn right to those dark places of chaos and sadness, because it is exactly in those places that Jesus will be found. He may not look like the smiling, neatly coifed, white-faced, blue-eyed, flowing-robe-wearing Jesus of our childhoods, but he is there.
And so today we have another resurrection story, which comes from Richard Flanagan who visited Syrian refugee camps reporting on them for The Guardian. He tells of his encounter with Raghda and Mohammed and Sulaf, a Syrian family who had fled to Lebanon to the south and west.
“My favorite colors,” Raghda says as we sit down in her tent in a Lebanese camp, “are the fire colors.”
An elegant, poised woman in her mid-20s, Raghda wears a pink and scarlet dress and hijab ornamented with embroidery and divided by a black scarf.
“Why fire colors?” I ask.
“Because,” Raghda replies, “they’re about rebirth.”
A sewing machine sits in one corner, a strange interruption to the normal austere emptiness of refugee tents. She teaches sewing and, for $10 a piece, makes dresses for others in the camp. She points to a wall where several are lined up waiting to be picked up. Her clothes are vibrant, resplendent with color, bling, beads and embroidery.
Raghda speaks gently, softly smiling, as she tells of how she has a degree in “woman’s art” – fashion design, sewing, drawing – and hoped for a career in fashion. Then, Daesh arrived – as incomprehensible to Raghda as it is to so many Syrian refugees, as inexplicable as a tsunami or an earthquake – and turned her home town of Raqqa into its capital.
“Daesh came suddenly upon us,” Raghda says. “We don’t know from where they came. They wore scarves around their faces, they only knew a few words of Arabic – they were Chechen, Chinese, Afghans, Americans, Somali, Pakistani – they wore masks.”
Her husband, Mohamed, saw Daesh kill a man in front of him.
“Mohamed didn’t look,” Raghda says. “But the blood follows him.”
We are a few kilometers from the Syrian border, high up in Lebanon’s Bekaa valley. In mid-winter the Bekaa is a bleak world of muddy, littered flatlands bounded by vast snowy ranges. The dreary soot of snow clouds briefly part for a hard red sun that rolls like a severed head over Syria. The plowed winter earth is fallow save for one crop that sprouts like weeds: the plastic-clad hovels that run in colorful ribbons everywhere.
The plastic takes various forms: white tarps, bags, the bright buntings of discarded billboards promoting perfumes and smartphones, honed images of corporate beauty: Kate Moss, Christian Dior and the iPhone 6s. Only when you come close are you able to see this bitter harvest for what it is: endless shantytowns – camps seem too orderly a word for their broken disorder – in which survive perhaps half a million Syrian refugees.
Perhaps more.
Depending on the wealth they bring with them or their lack of it, another million Syrian refugees can be found living in culverts, ruins, slums and better quality apartments throughout Lebanon – a nation itself of only 4.5 million. No one knows the exact number any more as the authorities stopped registering refugees a year ago and closed the borders a few months later.
But still they come.
Forced to choose between life and death, they choose life, even when it means living for years in shelters that are half-hovel, half-tent, framed of scrounged timbers and clad in a motley of plastics. In these shanties pride does daily battle with poverty and the elements.
A weak electric bulb will throw a dull light over the plank-raftered ceilings above, that leak when it rains and drip condensation when it doesn’t. Below, long shadows will crawl over unwaterproofed slabs that wick dampness from the wet earth all day, every day. Sometimes there is a small cathode-ray television, and always a charger for the ubiquitous smartphone that even the starving possess.
Neatly arrayed on the ground are fetid floor mats and a few mattresses and cushions on which all sit. In the centre a small iron box burns either oil or the scraps of wood that can be scrounged – chipboards, melamines, treated pines – the damp, slightly warmed air riddled with the razored scents of pungent carcinogens and heavy metals.
The alternative is hypothermia.
“After a time there was no work,” Raghda continues, “there was no money in Raqqa, no fuel for cooking. We couldn’t even afford to buy potatoes.”
Because Raghda worked with naked mannequins, a crime punishable by death, there was always the danger she would be killed by Daesh.
“I was very afraid,” Raghda says. “Daesh make any excuse to kill you. You must dress as they say – even the men. If you swear they cut you in half. Whoever treats humans like they do, is not human.”
The aerial bombings by the Russians and the Assad regime grew worse. Mohamed saw the school next door bombed; their balcony was blown off by the force of the explosion and shrapnel pierced doors inside their home.
“Ever since,” Raghda says, “Mohamed has had nightmares in which the planes come to kill us all.”
Caught between the cruelty of Daesh and the savagery of the Assad regime, and with Raghda heavily pregnant, the couple finally fled.
Like so many others, they are heavily in debt, owing $1,500. They pay $550 a year for renting the tent; $20 a month for electricity that powers a light and a phone charger; and they must also find $50 every month for the excess electricity to run the sewing machine.
“Still,” Raghda says, “here in Lebanon I feel free. In Syria I was forced to wear a black burqa all the time. Here I can go back to our tradition.”
I am not sure what tradition means.
“Color?” I ask.
“Yes,” Raghda says. “Color.”
The blizzard blows. The tent moves. She looks up.
“In the night,” Raghda says, “we are frightened. My family is still in Raqqa. My happy dreams are of going home – always us going home.”
Two weeks ago – three weeks after they escaped to Lebanon – their baby daughter was born, one of 40,000 refugee babies born every year in Lebanon, stateless, paperless, vaccine-less, with little chance of a formal education. Raghda breastfeeds her in front of us.
“She is called Sulaf,” Raghda says. “It means sunrise.” (http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/mar/05/great-syrian-refugee-crisis-exodus-epic-inconceivable-witness-lebos-islamic-state)
Raghda held sunrise in her arms as she sat in hell on earth.
And that’s why when we say the Apostles’ Creed, there’s that line – which I know is a stumbling block for some – Jesus descended to hell.
Because if his resurrection is for EVERYONE – and it is – then it’s for Raghda and Mohammed and their baby Sulaf, as well as for you and me.
What in your life could use a sunrise – a resurrection – this week? Or maybe you can be the sunrise in someone else’s life this week?
Because to say “I believe in the Resurrection” is also to say that God is still creating hope where it seems despair reigns,
is also to say we are not alone when feel lonely,
is also to say the worst thing is not the last thing,
is also to say that sunsets will become sunrises.
Amen.