To start off the summer, Rachel and I had a wonderful week camping at The Pinery, our favourite Southern Ontario Provincial Park. We happened to be 10 minutes away from the Huron County Playhouse, part of Drayton Entertainment, so we took in a performance of Fiddler on the Roof. As we looked around, we kept seeing familiar faces and found out that 12 of us with some sort of St Jacobs Mennonite connection were taking in the last matinee performance of this show, which was kind of neat to all meet up. It was an excellent performance, well worth it – the music, the staging, the choreography, the fine singing and acting . Alex Mustakas took on the role of Tevye to perfection – ‘tradition, tradition.’ It is a captivating story with all its family drama and catchy tunes. I was drawn right back in again, having watched the movie many times growing up. Afterwards, both Rachel and I commented that Fiddler on the Roof is much darker than we had remembered. There is the dark political cloud of 1905 Imperial Russia hanging over the small Jewish town of Anatevka, with rumours of the Jewish Pogroms and spreading discrimination and violence. The joyous wedding of Tzeitel and Motel ends abruptly with Russian authorities disrupting the party, overthrowing the tables and gifts, and wreaking havoc in the village. As the story continues, the Jewish inhabitants of Anatevka are given 3 days to pack up and leave their beloved village, part of a whole movement of expulsion by the Czar. It’s a sober end to the play as one by one, the inhabitants walk away from their home, carrying what little they have, into an unknown life.
This is a story all too familiar and repeated over and over and over again in our world – across so many geographies and cultures and times. Racism, discrimination, violence, displacement, becoming refugees, forced to leave what once had been called home. ‘By the waters of Babylon, we sat down and wept, as we remembered Zion.’ It is something I can hardly fathom or understand, even as the setting of Fiddler on the Roof was not dissimilar to what my grandparents experienced 20 years later as they too were forced to escape Russia/Ukraine to Canada, or the stories I have heard told from some of the Syrian families our congregation has sponsored. At its core, these are stories about the meaning of home, and the loss of that home, and the resulting displacement, trauma and deep longing for home for those who have lost everything.
In many ways, this loss and longing for home is at the core of the meaning of Mount Zion in the Biblical narrative. The people of Israel keep orienting their lives in relation to Mount Zion. It is where they find their home and identity, with both the comfort and complications that brings. Unlike many of the other Sundays in this summer series, where there is a particular named Mountain, and one, or maybe two Biblical stories that happen on that mountain, the references and images of Mount Zion are scattered all throughout the Scriptures, especially in the Old Testament – at least 200 references. We heard a few of these in the compilation that Sandy put together for us this morning.
The mountain itself is not much to look at – only 740 metres tall, more of a hill than a real mountain. There is a Western and Eastern Hill and has it included the Temple Mount, and what part has been called Mount Zion has shifted over the years, depending on which location people wanted to venerate, appropriate to their own time, and who controlled what part of the overall mountain. As Sandy shared, the site was originally a Jebusite city captured by King David and established as his royal capital. That is where this association of Mount Zion with the City of David began. It is also used then as a title for Jerusalem itself. It was the location of the First and then the Second Temple, but also the location of the destruction of these Temples, and several times the destruction of Jerusalem itself, and the exile of the people – thus that longing for Zion, to return – by the waters of Babylon, we sat down and wept as we remembered Zion. But not only is Mount Zion, the physical place, that hill, it also becomes this poetic and prophetic designation. It arouses feelings of both destruction and deliverance. It is a beacon of hope and a symbol of salvation. Zion is where Yahweh dwells. Ultimately, it is a place of home, of belonging, of meaning and identity. For the Jewish people, it becomes a symbol of a Jewish homeland. In Christian circles, the image sometimes becomes one of heaven and a heavenly home – ‘we’re marching to Zion, beautiful, beautiful Zion, the beautiful city of God.’ We have a danger of spiritualizing Mount Zion and making it totally otherworldly.
So, in many ways, Mount Zion contains this inner tension, this paradox, all around this meaning of home. On the one hand, Mount Zion is this symbol of hope and the possibilities for the future. In desperate times, in times of exile or loss, the people call upon the image of Mount Zion to give them comfort and the promise of something better. God dwells in Zion, and God will be with them. One can find one’s home in God. But then Mount Zion also becomes this exclusive place, this set apart-ness as God’s chosen people that keeps others out, and can even become violent itself. There is a forgetting of the covenant promise to Abraham that you were blessed, not for one’s own sake, but to be a blessing to others. You see this tension playing out within the Biblical text, but also in more extreme ways in our modern day. In 1897 Theodor Herzl first used the term ‘Zionism’ with its vision of forming a Jewish homeland within Palestine. I noted this time in Fiddler on the Roof, that while most of the characters were escaping Anatevka to relatives in the United States, Yente, the meddling gossiping matchmaker, was feeling called to the Holy Land, part of that early Zionist movement that eventually became the State of Israel. There is a long modern history and complexity to that part of the world, and so many nuances and perspective here that are well beyond this sermon, but I wonder about the role of this form of Zionism and the justifications used from Scripture to exclude others rather than live in cooperation and mutual respect. Is that what is playing out in Gaza right now? The actual physical Mount Zion is a powder keg today, the site of both the Temple Mount, the holiest Jewish site, with the nearby Western or Wailing Wall, remnants of the Temple, and the Haram al-sharif with its Al-Aqsa Mosque, the third holiest site in the world for Muslims. They exist side by side within a shaky status quo, with security provided by the state of Israel and Administration or custodianship by Jordan. I remember visiting the site in 1992, and almost feeling the tension and the potential for violence if something provocative would happen on the site. This does not sound like the Biblical vision of Mount Zion, as a beacon of hope and welcome and home.
There are those calls in Scripture in relation to enemies to remember the nation and people Yahweh redeemed, Mount Zion, where God dwelt, and for the Lord Almighty to reign on Mount Zion and in Jerusalem with great glory. There is anger and wrath – ‘I have installed my king on Zion, my holy mountain.’ That tension is there. But there are also passages like Zechariah 9:9, which we hear quoted by the soprano in The Messiah – ‘Rejoice, greatly O daughter of Zion, of Jerusalem – behold thy King cometh unto them, and shall speak peace.’ Or the passage in Isaiah 2, parallel to the passage in Micah 4 that we used to begin our Mountain series with, that calls out the vision of all nations streaming to the mountain of God, to Zion, with swords beat into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks, settling all disputes. It is this inclusive vision of Zion, where the lame and the exiled and those brought to grief all find their place and their home in God.
I find myself in that same place when I think about the concept and experience of home, and holding the tensions that are a part of the idea of home. We all long for home and a place of belonging and trust and welcome and identity. We strive to create home in our families, our neighbourhoods, our congregation. In a certain way, we put a boundary around what and who we have claimed as home – these are the people who are a part of my family, my community, my church. There is something healthy in that. It can create safety and belonging and identity. And yet, the temptation is to hold that concept, that reality of home much too tightly – to not let others in, or to fully feel welcomed. It is the tension of Tevye, the Father, in Fiddler on the Roof, as one by one, each of his strong daughters stretch out the bounds of family by whom they want to marry, and Tevye is caught between the one hand of tradition and faithfulness and what he imagined his family identity was, and the other of welcome and love and trusting a larger vision of God. Can he bend or not? Can he imagine home and identity itself expanding? We are left hanging at the end of the play with the third child who marries outside of the faith.
We also know that home is not always a safe place for everybody. There are families and neighbourhoods and marriages and churches where people are not at home or do not feel safe, or do not feel like that can reveal and be their true selves. We hear about the epidemic and reality of Intimate Partner Violence and abuse. We know families where certain members are estranged. There is violence in communities and neighbourhoods. Is this where we need a Mount Zion – where by the waters of whatever our Babylon is, we sit down and weep, remembering and holding onto the promise of home with God? – a vision of safety and wholeness and belonging. Families have taken on more and more different forms in the past years. It is not just about birth and blood lines. There is so much more flexibility. Some people talk about a chosen family.
This week Rachel and I celebrated our 32nd wedding anniversary, a day when we created a home to each other and promised to respect and honour and love each other. We couldn’t imagine then where we would all live, who would all become a part of our lives, and how our family would expand with 3 children and then some spouses and a grandchild – and their friends, and our friends, and neighbours and colleagues, and contacts from work and church and recreation – a much wider circle than we could ever have envisioned. We intentionally choose the theme of hospitality for our wedding service and used an artistic image of two open hands on our wedding invitations and bulletin. What would hospitality mean to each other and to all we meet? We intuitively knew then that our marriage could become insular and isolated if only focused on ourselves or even our own family. And yet we would strive to keep a strong core, while being open to the gifts of those who entered our lives. Have our hands always been open? Have we always known the right balance? We have lived within that tension, the same one we have with Mount Zion. Home can be both complicated and wonderful. I think about the scientific concept of the permeable cell membranes in plants, or other life forms. Cell membranes are fully permeable to water, molecules and proteins that help the plant thrive, and yet hold out dangers or threats, or monitor when the timing is right or not for things to past through the membrane, to become a part of the home. It is that dance or tension, that permeable membrane, we all have to sort through in our lives.
I shared that we started the summer at The Pinery. When you are camping, you are away from home, and create this temporary little home of a tent or trailer on a small campsite, surrounded by others. We were in a pretty open site to others around us, and yes, at times were irritated by a few other sites that blared music much of the day, and weren’t quiet in the middle of the night. Oh well. Our friends were supposed to camp in the site right next to us, but had to cancel with a family emergency. On a July long weekend, the site got re-booked quickly. The first inhabitant was a single hippie looking man who simply walked in that afternoon with just a backpack – no vehicle. His name was Ian, and he was in the middle of solo kayaking the circumference of all the Great Lakes, over several summers. He had paddled 40 kilometres that day on Lake Huron and walked in from the beach. He shared some fascinating stories of danger and adventure and who he had all met, and we chatted several times. There was a family on the other side of that site, and they basically adopted Ian for the next 3 days while he waited for calm waters to return to the Lake, moving his tent to the higher ground on their site with the rain and feeding him and including him in their family activities. It was a beautiful example of that inclusive and welcoming sense of home as they made room and space for him. For the rest of that weekend, a family from Toronto with roots in Afghanistan moved in to the site beside us. We needed to borrow a lighter for our fire one night and Rachel chatted with them. Soon afterwards, they came over with this huge plate of delicious Afghani rice and lamb and corn on the corn, slow cooked in cast iron over their fire. I know, we borrow something from them, and they give us food. We were the ones receiving hospitality and welcome and an expansive sense of home. We could never have anticipated these unexpected gifts and people on the site next to us. Both of these examples at The Pinery reminded me of the vision of a Mount Zion where all nations and peoples stream to the mountain and find peace, find home.
Sandy started and ended the Reader’s Theatre with words from Psalm 133 – ‘How good and pleasant it is when God’s people live together in unity… like the dew of Hermon falling on Mount Zion. For there the Lord bestows his blessing, even life forevermore.’ The image of Mount Zion and the image of home are complicated and nuanced and challenging. They capture the tensions of our lives and our world. At times we will long for and cry out for a Mount Zion that can protect us and remember us, and offer us a home when we have none. We want to dwell with God. We will even be tempted to use Mount Zion to exclude and reject others. May God give us the grace to open our hands to others, to offer and receive hospitality, and to capture that vision of all peoples steaming to Mount Zion in peace, for there we all can find our true home. May it be so. Amen.