The year 2000 was a great year to be in Bethlehem. Indeed, it may have been the best of all possible years. The Bethlehem 2000 project was underway, bringing millions of dollars of investment into the city. New hotels were being built, old sidewalks were being replaced, the city was looking forward to a tourist boom. Throughout the year that I was there, several international performing groups came to share music and other talents. I remember hearing the Russian symphony orchestra play in the open air on Manger Square, I remember seeing French acrobats dangling fifty feet in the air as part of some special circus-like performance. Every year Europe elects one city as a cultural center -- it was like that for Bethlehem that year.

I had fun doing other things as well. I would pass the checkpoint between Bethlehem and Jerusalem a few times a week in order to study Arabic or Hebrew in Jerusalem, and to spend time with friends on the Mount of Olives. Many of my friends lived there, Americans, Danes, Germans, and others, we would hang out together and smoke apple-flavored tobacco in the water pipe, or sometimes we would go out for a night on the town in Jerusalem. Then there was the time I went with two German friends and my Belgian roommate to go off-roading in the Negev desert with a 4 wheel drive United Nations vehicle, out in the middle of the breath-taking desert, miles from civilization. Or the times that we would go dancing in Bethlehem at the club called "Memories" -- I can remember dancing with pleasure to that strange song "Blue" that came out while I was there. It felt a bit weird to be say "I'm going clubbing in Bethlehem", the whole phrase felt rather anachronistic, clashing as it does with the sterilized and timeless image of the little town of Bethlehem that so many of us have in our minds. Then there was the night of New Year's Eve, on the eve of a new millenium, that some friends and I spent camping in the Judean desert, looking up at the stars after I had introduced my international friends to the heavenly delights of smores.

At some point during my time there, however, in the midst of all the fun, something happened to me. I can't quite say when it was, it didn't happen at once, it was a gradual change. I suppose there were several experiences that contributed to it. The conversations I had with my Palestinian co-workers in Bethlehem, for example. I remember in particular conversations with Daoud and Jihan, a young couple pregnant with their first child. Daoud and his family were engaged in an ongoing struggle to protect their land against a neighboring Israeli settlement, some of whose armed settlers periodically tried to destroy or confiscate the property of Daoud's family. Or maybe it was the conversations I had with the Palestinian junior and senior high students in the English class I taught, conversations through which I learned about their despair for the future and frustration with the present. I suppose the times that I visited Gaza had their effect too, as did the time that I spent in the refugee camps. I particularly remember standing with a Palestinian family whose home had been bulldozed for about the fifth time, because they had not received permission from the Israeli occupying authorities to make any changes or additions, permission that is almost never granted to Palestinians.

You see, what happened was that I changed. Or, to put it differently, what happened was that these relationships and encounters changed me. I saw things differently, I understood the conflict differently than I had before. As a result of my research and my personal experience, I learned that the perception that Palestinian violence is the root cause of the conflict, a perception sold by an Israeli ambassador on National Public Radio this week, is a lie. I grew to see the roots of the conflict in the apartheid-like system that dispossessed the Palestinians and continues to deny them basic rights. But more importantly, it wasn't just that my understanding had changed, no, it was deeper than that, it wasn't just a change in my head, it was a change in my heart. Through the persons with whom I had worked and laughed and empathized, everything had become more personal. I cared at a depth that I hadn't cared before. The intimacy of my relationships there inexorably sucked me into the Israeli-Palestinian struggle for peace and justice. It wasn't something I just decided. It wasn't something I had expected before the year began. It just happened.

It was of course a different relationship, but I nevertheless think I see a similar dynamic at work in one of the great stories of American literature. Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn tells the story of a young Huckleberry Finn and the adventures he has with the slave Jim. The story begins with young Huck living with Widow Douglas and Miss Watson, who are trying to "reform" him and make him "respectable" in rather self-righteous ways that Huck rightly resents. Huck's alcoholic father comes on the scene, kidnaps Huck from his guardians, and beats him. Huck escapes by faking his own death, and soon meets up with Jim, a slave who has runaway rather than being sold down the river into more difficult circumstances. Huck and Jim make a rather unlikely pair as they sail down the Mississippi River together on a raft. They face different kinds of danger and tests of their morality, but in and through it all, they each grow closer with each other. An intimacy is formed. Near the end of the book, Huck faces a difficult choice. All he has been taught about God and about doing the "respectable" thing suggests that he should turn runaway slaves over to the authorities. That is what good, white, God-fearing and law-abiding Christians do. But somehow Jim isn't just any runaway slave, he is Jim, the problem isn't just an abstract one anymore. Because it touches upon someone Huck cares about deeply, it touches upon him. You see, somehow his relationship with Jim has changed him, in a way that he could not have foreseen or merely chosen. From the lens of that new intimacy with Jim, the question of whether or not to turn in Jim is no longer the easy one it once would have been, he cares more now, it is more personal.

I hear further echoes of this kind of story, a story about intimacy and justice, in the movie For the Bible Tells Me So that we showed here earlier this month. One of the families featured in the documentary was Lutheran. They attended church regularly, and had always been taught to believe that homosexuality was an abomination. That's what the Bible says, or at least, so they were told. And so they believed. But then their son Jacob told them that he was gay. They wished it wasn't true, they thought and hoped Jacob was just temporarily sexually confused, they grieved the loss of certain hopes and dreams. All that they had been taught suggested that gays are sinners, but this wasn't just anybody they were talking about, this was their son, Jacob. Somehow it didn't compute anymore, it didn't make sense. As they witnessed the struggles their son faced, little by little, his struggles became their own. Little by little, their relationship with him changed them, it changed what they thought about homosexuality, it changed how they felt.

Have you ever had that kind of experience? Have you ever had your perspective on an issue changed or shaped by an intimate relationship you have had? You probably didn't choose it. Maybe it surprised you. Without quite being able to pinpoint exactly when it happened, or how it happened, somehow another's pain becomes your own, their struggle becomes your struggle, before you know it, it has become personal, your very identity is at stake as you share a loved one's struggle for justice.

That connection between intimacy and justice is at work in our Biblical text for today. Our story tells of the deepening oppression of the Israelite slaves by their Egyptian masters. Pharaoh has become increasingly harsh in his treatment of the Israelites. The Israelites had been forced to make bricks from straw given to them, but now Pharaoh demands that they find their own straw to make bricks. And yet they are still being forced to make number of bricks. The Israelites react to this new burden by complaining bitterly to Moses.

As I read the text, however, this story is at least as much about Moses as it is about the Israelites. I see the key verses of the passage coming at the end, when Moses cries out to God in anger and despair, saying, "O Lord, why have you mistreated this people? Why did you ever send me? Since I first came to Pharaoh to speak in your name, he has mistreated this people, and you have done nothing at all to deliver your people."

You have to give it to Moses -- he had some guts to speak in such a way to God. We could certainly learn from him. Perhaps more importantly, these words by Moses suggest that something has happened to him. The personal encounter with the oppression of his fellow Israelites leaves a mark on Moses, it changes him. And here, in these words of Moses, for the first time, we see that the cry of the Israelites has become the cry of Moses. This story, in other words, is a conversion story. It suggests that Moses' relationship with his fellow Israelites has reached a new depth. This story highlights the connection between intimacy and justice -- it as if having a deeper understanding of the injustice under which the Israelites suffer was somehow important to Moses' relationship with them, indeed, to his relationship with God. God heard the cries of the Israelites several chapters ago, but Moses' newfound solidarity with them is somehow important in preparing him to be God's appointed leader.

I suppose justice isn't the first thing that comes to mind when people think about intimacy. Yet the story of my time in Palestine, the story of Huck Finn, the story of the Lutheran parents of Jacob, and the story of Moses, all of these stories are about the connection between intimacy and justice. That connection is a deep one, one of the deepest of all. I think it is no accident that justice is such a central theme of the Bible.

Whether we know it or not, these stories are conversion stories, they are holy stories, they are stories of transformation, of seeing the world differently, of becoming more deeply convicted by the truth. And that truth is that while God is undoubtedly the God of all of us, our God is especially the God of the oppressed, there is a special place in God's heart for the persecuted, for the widows and the orphans of the Old Testament, for gays and Muslims and the poor and the powerless, etc. I don't know why that is, but that is what the Biblical witness suggests, that is what human experience suggests. To put it in other words, there is a depth of intimacy with God that cannot be known without knowing the oppression of God's people. Let me repeat that -- there is a depth of intimacy with God that cannot be known without knowing the oppression of God's people. In other words, because God is especially a God of justice, God can never fully be known apart from the struggle for justice, God can never fully be known without making that struggle our struggle.

I confess that all too often, I think the churches fail in this regard. We want an intimacy with God that comes without a price, without a struggle, we want an intimacy with God that doesn't offend anyone, that doesn't deal with issues of power, that doesn't have to take a stand, that simply feels good. I can't help but feel that the churches should be doing more in the struggle for justice. If the church wants to be in the business of intimacy with God, it has to be in the business of justice. Period. It's not optional. That's where it's at, that's where God is at.

Indeed, I tell you that communities that struggle together for justice, those communities are the church. They are the church at least as much if not more than buildings with crosses on them. Communities that gather together in small groups to work for peace, communities that advocate for the poor and the weak and the alien in our midst, those are communities in which the Holy Spirit is alive and active, those are communities in which the power of the resurrection is at work.

Moses' participation in the struggle and deliverance of the Israelites eventually led him to perhaps the most intimate relationship with God in the entire Old Testament. The Bible says the Lord knew Moses face to face. Similarly, through the parents participation in the struggle of their gay son Jacob, they not only grew to love him more deeply and grew into a deeper relationship with God, they also became part of a different community, a church, if you will, of those who joined them in their struggle. What they had once seen as an occasion for grief had become, by the power of the Holy Spirit, an invitation for deeper communion with others and with God.

Even Huck Finn, in his own way, eventually takes a similar path himself. In a telling witness to the transformative power of intimacy in its relationship with justice, Huck writes of his struggle over what to do:

So I was full of trouble, full as I could be; and didn't know what to do. At last I had an idea; and I says, I'll go and write the letter -- and then see if I can pray. Why, it was astonishing, the way I felt as light as a feather right straight off, and my troubles all gone. So I got a piece of paper and a pencil, all glad and excited, and set down and wrote:

Miss Watson, your runaway nigger [slave] Jim is down here two mile below Pikesville and Mr. Phelps has got him and he will give him up for the reward if you send. Huck Finn.

I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my life, and I knowed I could pray now. But I didn't do it straight off, but laid the paper down and set there thinking -- thinking how good it was all this happened so, and how near I come to being lost and going to hell. And went on thinking. And got to thinking over our trip down the river; and I see Jim before me, all the time in the day, and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a-floating along, talking, and singing, and laughing. But somehow I couldn't seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind. I'd see him standing my watch on top of his'n, stead of calling me, so I could go on sleeping; and see him how glad he was when I come back out of the fog; and when I come to him again in the swamp, up there where the feud was; and such-like times; and would always call me honey, and pet me, and do everything he could think of for me, and how good he always was; and at last I struck the time I saved him by telling the men we had smallpox aboard, and he was so grateful, and said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the only one he's got now; and then I happened to look around and see that paper.

It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling, because I'd got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:

"All right, then, I'll go to hell" -- and tore it up."