Irresistible Community

A sermon for Pentecost, 2025

I want to teach you two of the most important words in Palestinian daily life. The first one is “khalas.” Khalas is used for endings: it means “we’re done,” or “stop it,” or “that’s enough.” It’s remarkable how useful that word is—once you know it, you use it all the time, especially on a farm. “Khalas” can be a command or a celebration, or just an observation.

The second word is a really fun one: “Yalla!” This means “let’s go,” or “get a move on” or “alright.” Yalla is used for beginnings, and it implies motion. In Palestine it’s not infrequent to hear people say, “khalas, yalla,” meaning, we’re done with that, here we go onto the next thing. Or, one of my favorite common phrases is “yalla bye!” a super informal way to say see you later.

As you all know I spent 5 weeks in Palestine this past winter. I was on a farm called Tent of Nations, near Bethlehem in the West Bank for most of that time. I decided to go there because I’m a farmer with time off in the winter, and because since October 7, 2023 I had been wanting a way to express my solidarity with Palestinians in a tangible way. The best way to express solidarity is to put yourself in someone else’s place and to go through what they go through.

Of course, even though I was there, I didn’t go through the same things that Palestinians go through. Since I am obviously not Palestinian based on the way that I dress, the Israeli occupying forces avoided targeting me. In fact, it was clear that my presence—on the farm, on a bus, or in public places—made the Palestinians safer too. Tear gas wasn’t going to be tossed if there was a white tourist bumbling around, and people were probably not going to be beat up while I was watching.

Lending my international privilege was the primary reason I went there. Even though being in Palestine is constantly dangerous for Palestinians, it is much less dangerous for someone like me, and that safety radiates out from my body and offers some protection for others in my vicinity.

The farm that I supported with my presence has hosted international volunteers almost continuously since 2002, in an effort to maintain control of their family land, which is surrounded by Israeli settlements. Settlements in occupied territory are illegal under international law, but they’ve been a tactic of the Israeli occupation—by moving lots of civilian Israelis to live in settlements, they create “facts on the ground” that are hard to dismantle.

So far, the Nassar family has been mostly successful in keeping their land, despite occasional incursions by settlers and the Israeli military that have resulted in burned or uprooted trees, or hospitalized family members. One year the Israeli military uprooted hundreds of apricot trees just ten days before harvest. While I was there, the nearest settlement built a road along the property line of the farm and started bringing construction materials. They even trenched in electricity and turned on streetlights at night, which is a brazen power play when the Palestinian farm does not have access to the electric grid and has demolition orders on their solar installations.

Despite an intense political situation, though, being on the farm was really a joy. We got to do farm work, and every morning we took a nice leisurely coffee break, which ended with “khalas, yalla.” Lunch was provided by the Nassar family, usually rice and lentils and stewed vegetables and hummus and pita and lebneh and a salad. After dinner the international volunteers would sometimes play cards, and I’d talk to my friends back home, 8 hours earlier. Being there was a really welcome break for me after an intense farming season here. I had an abundance of slow time and a cozy group of other international volunteers to do life with. I would be so glad to go back there, and I heartily recommend it to anyone who has the time!

There’s a lot more I could say about the situation in Palestine, and I’m happy to answer questions and tell stories after the service, but we’re in church today and it’s Pentecost Sunday, so want to pay attention to that.

My first observation is that the Pentecost story occurred in Jerusalem. Part of Acts chapter 2 talks about all of the people who converted to Christianity on that day, and there are Palestinian Christians even now who trace their ancestry back to the families who became Christian on the original Pentecost. Christianity is native to Palestine.

But it’s not just the land of Palestine that Christianity comes from: it is specifically Occupied Palestine. Christianity emerged as a political-spiritual movement that was a response to the Roman empire’s occupation of Palestine. Jesus’s ministry was about showing the common people that they still had the capacity to be human and to live in accordance with God’s kingdom despite the oppression of empire.

And that makes Jesus’s message incredibly relevant today—not just in Palestine, but across a globe that’s been colonized by a culture of domination in its many forms: racism, capitalism, patriarchy. Jesus showed us a way to resist oppressive systems, not by using force against them, but by ignoring them as much as we can, and living instead by our own values and traditions and joy. Jesus healed the sick, he fed the hungry, he made enough wine for all, even as the Roman empire was making people ill and hungry and eroding local traditions of hospitality.

I really like the end of Acts 2, where it says that “all who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need. Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having the goodwill of all the people.” Doesn’t that sound fun? To me, it sounds as political as it does spiritual: these early believers were believing not only in God but also in a way of life that was joyful and affirmed their own humanity.

In Palestine now, there is a real need for that kind of culture. When Palestinians are labeled as terrorists because of their ethnicity, when they are criminalized for just being, the only way to survive emotionally is to know and embody a different truth. To care for your family and neighbors, and to be cared for by your people even when the political system refuses to give care. To make music and art and food, and to connect with the land, and to move through the world with dignity.

I think that right now, in the U.S., Jesus’s message is relevant too. It’s sometimes hard for us to connect to Jesus’s actual message from the heart of empire, from the height of privilege that U.S. Americans have in the world. Jesus was talking to the poor and oppressed, and expressed a politics of resistance that often goes over the head of those of us who are privileged by empire. But in this political moment some of us are experiencing more starkly than before what it’s like to be under the boot of domination. Immigrants and trans people are being criminalized, and it’s scary. So many public services are losing funding, leaving those of us who rely on them to try to get our needs met in other ways.

A radically Christian way to respond to this experience is by looking at what the first Christians did in the book of Acts. They pooled their resources, shared meals, and spent lots of time together! I love a potluck and it seems like early Christianity was just one big potluck. Imagine it: these people didn’t have cell phones, and lots of them weren’t even literate. They were well practiced in having good times together, and I’m sure they had conversational skills far surpassing ours! In modern culture we often think of caring for others as a burden or a sacrifice, but I wonder if we can bring a different lens to that: caring for each other is what humans are meant to do! It’s fun and it feels good!

I’ve heard it said that the role of the artist is to make the revolution irresistible. I like to think that’s what the early Christians were doing. They were living in such a way that everyone wanted to join them. They were having fun, they were feeling belonging and purpose. And all of that was happening in defiance of the Roman empire, which extracted from them and didn’t have time for their humanity and joy.

That isn’t to say that the Roman Empire wasn’t brutal, or that the Israeli Occupation doesn’t deeply affect Palestinians’ daily lives, or that simply ignoring the Trump administration will cause all of its effects to go away. But I do think that what the Jesus movement demonstrated, early on, was that empire doesn’t get to define us. We know who we are, we know that we are acting with integrity, and simply existing in our humanity and joy, and bringing other people in, is profound resistance to empire and to fascism.

So today I’m joining with the early Christians in Roman-occupied Palestine, today’s Palestinians under Israeli occupation, and marginalized people all around the globe to say “khalas” to empire and oppression and a culture of domination. We all know in our bodies how to be human, how being in community and caring for each other is good for us. Yalla. Let’s do it.

The Iowa Writers’ Collaborative

I’m proud to be part of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative. Each Sunday, Julie Gammack shares a roundup of articles that collaborative members have written in the past week. Check out the most recent roundup, here.