Excerpt from Bethlehem Pastor Rev. Dr. Munther Isaac’s sermon, during the Church service, 23 December 2023*

Christ under the rubble.

We are angry. We are broken.

This would have been a time of joy.

Instead we are mourning. We are fearful.

More than 20,000 killed. Thousands are still under the rubble.

Close to 9,000 children killed in the most brutal ways.

Day after day. 1.9 million displaced. Hundreds of thousands of homes destroyed.

Gaza as we know it no longer exists. This is an annihilation. This is a genocide.

The world is watching. Churces are watching. The people of Gaza are sending live images of their own execution. Maybe the world cares. But it goes on.

We are asking here, could this be our fate in Bethlehem? In Ramallah? In Jenin? Is this our destiny, too?

We are tormented by the silence of the world.

Leaders of the so-called free, lined up one after the other to give the green light for this genocide against a captive population. They gave the cover. Not only did they make sure to pay the bill in advance. They veiled the truth and context providing the political cover.

This war has confirmed to us that the world does not see us as equal. Maybe it’s the color of our skin. Maybe it is because we are on the wrong side of the political equation. Even our kinship in Christ did not shield us.

So they say if it takes killing 100 Palestinians to get a single Hamas militant, then so be it. We are not human in their eyes. But in God’s eyes, no one can tell us that. The hypocricy and racism of the Western world is transparent and appalling. They always take the work of Palestinians with suspicion and qualification. No, we’re not treated equally. Yet on the other side, despite a clear track record of misinformation and lies, their words are almost always deemed infallible.

To our European friends, I never ever want to hear you lecture us on human rights or international law again. And I mean it. We are not white I guess. It does not apply to us according to your own logic.

In this war, the many Christians in the Western world made sure that the empire has the theology needed. It is self-defense, we were told. And I continue to ask: how is the killing of 9,000 children self-defence?  How’s the displacement of 1.9 million Palestinians, self-defence.

In the shadow of the Empire, they turned the colonizer into victim, and the colonized into the aggressor. Have we forgotten, have we forgotten, that the state they talk to, that state was built on the ruins of the towns and villages of those very same Gazans. Have they forgot that?

We are outraged by the complicity of the Church. Let it be clear. Silence is complicity. And empty calls for peace without a ceasefire and end to occupation, and the shallow words of empathy without direct action, all under the banner of complicity.

So here is my message. Gaza today has become the moral compass of the world. Gaza was hell before October 7 and the world was silent. Should we be surprised by that silence now.

If you are not appalled by what is happening in Gaza, if you are not shaken to your core, then there is something wrong with your humanity. And if as Christians are not outraged by the genocide, by the weaponization of the Bible to justify it, there is something wrong with our Christian witness, and we are compromising the credibility of our gospel message.

If you fail to call this a genocide, this is on you. It is a sin and a darkness you willingly embrace.

* transcribed from YouTube videos, crosschecked via other transcriptions. Complete sermon here.