Sunday (5/31) - Free Day!

Today, in honor of finishing our first week of WIHL, we enjoyed a free day in our schedule. I started off the celebrations by sleeping IN. It was glorious. I had intended to try to find a Protestant church service in the area, and there was a list we could try from, but I ended up sleeping around 10 hours so I missed out on church. I instead had my own quiet time in John 2 and 3. Hmmm...for some reason I'm now finding John 3 very intriguing. John 3:16 gets the lion's share of the attention, but there's some really interesting stuff in the rest of the passage, too. 3:8 - people are "born of the Spirit" to be born again... what is this precisely? Is the author writing to his post-Pentecost audience, or since Jesus is talking long before the rise of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity and the Holy Spirit's place there, should we put ourselves in Nichodemus' sandals and take Jesus' words only in the context of Second Temple Pharisaic views of God as "Spirit" or Divine Breath? (and do the Pharisees of this time even have a view on such? I don't know) Do we do both?
I'm finding John to be far more thought-provoking and less straightforward than I thought. It's good. Being here makes me think about issues "on the ground" so to speak; it helps me be a tiny bit more able to put myself into the shoes of somebody walking the streets of 1st-century Jerusalem, bumping into a upstart rabbi from Galilee who is challenging people with new ideas about true holiness and obedience to the Kingdom of God...

It is usually at this point that I think of the old MWS song "Secret Ambition" -- still pretty much the best, most-straightforward musical exposition of the radical, inverse-to-expectation mission of Christ. Watch the video, laugh at the dated clothing (1988!) and theatricality, but listen to those words. "Nobody knew..." Do they still? Do we? Do we remember?

In the afternoon, most of us gathered for a fun exercusion next door to the Old City for a Ramparts Walk! Here is a our merry throng ready for some action!



For a few dollars, you can walk along the tops of the Ottoman-era city walls (built by the marvelously-named Suleiman the Magnificent in 1538) and get wonderful views both inside and outside the Old City. Below you see the SW corner of the Old City as I look (past Katrina) toward the also-magnificent Dormition Abbey (see more below!).



Afterward, Jonathan and I decided to take a leisurely route back through the heart of (the currently-named) Mt. Zion and check out the Dormition Abbey and the cemetery nearby where Oskar Schindler is buried (of Schindler's List fame). The cemetery was closed, alas, but we were lucky enough to squeeze into the Dormition Abbey minutes before it closed. It is a wonderful Benedictine abbey that is meant to commemorate the place where, according to a very old local tradition, Mary mother of Jesus is said to have died ("fallen asleep" hence the Latin-based "Dormition" for "place of sleeping"). One of the benefits of being a Benedictine church is that there's lots of Latin inside!



After dinner, a group of about 10 of us closed out the evening with an absolutely rousing game of Sardines! What made it so gratifying and memorable is that my hiding-place was the best of all: tucked up on my side crushed up between a wall and a low row of potted plants on the 3rd floor landing in the dark -- nobody found me for about 10 minutes, then nobody else found the two of us for about another 10 minutes, then it was four of us hiding behind plants and garbage cans for the next 6 or 7 minutes until anybody found us! It was so great, because I could barely contain my laughter as people trudged by in frustrated groups wondering aloud where I could possibly be hiding as they stood about 2 feet from my hiding spot. Glorious. :-)