As a church that aims to live into God’s call
to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly,
we must acknowledge where we’ve fallen short —
particularly when it comes to the horrors
that Palestinians have faced in a Western-backed colonial project
since the British Mandate for Palestine in 1922,
into the Nakba, or great catastrophe of ethnic cleansing in 1948,
and up through the present day,
in these many months of violence escalated to genocidal levels.
If our desire for peace is true,
we will let go of any false peace
built on top of silenced voices and disenfranchised bodies.
We will cease to cry “Peace! Peace!”
at a people that has not known peace for over 100 years.
As one step towards a true peace, let us confess together the ways in which, individually and collectively, through action or inaction,
we have aided and abetted atrocities
against fellow human beings with whom we share God’s image:
We confess our compliant silence
from inside the heart of Empire.
Allowing hopelessness to collapse us into inaction,
we shrug in despair as Western powers fuel our excess
with African, Asian, Latin American, and Arab suffering,
and the stealing and stripping of Indigenous lands
all across the weeping Earth,
including in Palestine.
We confess our complicity as Christians
with our long and ongoing marriage to Empire —
our bloody past of crusades and pogroms,
missionary schools, eugenics, and all kinds of evil
wrapped in a guise of Christian “love” —
that extends into our present.
We confess our ties to Christian Zionism
begun in the nineteenth century British Empire
and continued through our “progressive” theologies of the late 1900s.
We confess the ways we reduce all Jewish people into a monolith
instead of respecting the diversity of perspectives and allegiances therein.
We confess how we treat our Jewish siblings as pawns
in our guilt and savior complexes, our various redemption myths:
We imply our faith supersedes Jews’ own on the one hand,
while on the other, we twist the very real issue of antisemitism
into a weapon to forward our colonial projects and anti-Arab racism.
When nationalism and Christian supremacy
erect murderous walls and stifle the reality
of one Beloved Community of all human beings,
Forgive us, redeemer God. Move us into honesty.
In our complicity, we confess our willful ignorance,
our failure to seek out accurate information —
allowing vital stories to be silenced
or twisted into lies.
We allow ourselves to be lulled by pretty propaganda
lifting up modern Israel as a “promised land” for Holocaust survivors,
for environmental justice and queer inclusion,
because that feels better than the truth:
survivors silenced and kept in poverty;
desert biomes forced into European molds,
ancient olive trees obliterated,
and the searing truth that no place that enables racism and apartheid
can ever be a queer friendly or environmental paradise.
When fear or uncertainty keeps us from speaking up;
When we choose our own comfort over courageous conversations,
Forgive us, redeeming God. Move us into courage.
Finally, we confess a collective failure of imagination.
We have fallen for the lies that this conflict
is too complicated to resolve,
that justice is impossible,
that hope is dead —
instead of listening for Spirit’s wisdom
and noticing God’s inbreaking Kin-dom
in the vision and voice of Palestinians
who have never given up on justice,
on believing in peace,
on believing in a multicultural, interfaith future for the land.
Forgive us, redeemer God.
Move us to seek, center, and celebrate
Palestinian visions of justice and peace.
In repentance and hope,
we pray to the God of both Sarah and Hagar, both Isaac and Ishmael,
Parent of all peoples and protector of the oppressed:
Help us recommit to seeking your Spirit at work among ruins,
to lifting up the voices Empire aims to silence,
to God’s Kin-dom where all peoples, all Creation,
can live together in joy.
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Friends, our shortcomings are great, but God’s love is greater.
In his invitation to peace
after his execution and resurrection,
Letting go of the betrayals of the past
in order to initiate a faithful future,
Jesus reminds us that it is never too late
for collective wholeness and healing.
Thus reminded and redeemed by the God who crosses every border
and tears down every wall,
we may extend the peace of Christ to one another —
not an easy peace, not a halfhearted peace,
but a peace built on justice and mutuality —
both here in this space, and across the world.
The peace of Christ be with you…
Please feel free to make use of this piece in worship or Sunday school, in ceremony or across social media. Just credit it to Avery Arden of binarybreakingworhsip.com — and I invite you to email me at queerlychristian36@gmail.com to let me know you’re using it!
You may make small adjustments to fit your own particular context.
About this piece:
We are many months into genocide, and misinformation still abounds; the USA and other Western nations continue to fund Israel’s violence; Palestinians continue to be bombed, starved, imprisoned, defamed.
We cannot lose steam; we must continue to speak up, to educate one another and get active till Palestine is finally free.
My hope is that this Confession can be one piece igniting further conversation and action in faith communities. If your community is not at a place where a confession like this could be shared in worship, make it the subject of a Sunday School lesson or coffee hour conversation instead.
For resources describing the various claims in this piece, see this post.
- My top recommendation on Palestine & Christianity is Mitri Raheb’s book Decolonizing Palestine; read a summary of it here.
- For discussions on fighting antisemitism while supporting Palestine, my top rec is Safety through Solidarity by Shane Burley and Ben Lorber.
Binary-Breaking Worship 