Wheaton in the Holy Lands

Roma Roma Roma!

2009-07-02T15:54:00.001-07:00

What happened to Wheaton in the Holy Lands? No internet access the past few days, that is what happened. Rest assured, however, we are all fine. And we are in Rome! It is beautiful here, and though we are all very tired after such a long and stimulating set of travels, what a splendid way to wrap up our trip. I am typing this in an internet cafe, so I will make this really short, but I wanted everyone to know that we are here and in two short days will be flying back home to the good ol' U. S. of A! Many students have already been discussing which favorite restaurant we'll each want to go to first, etc. I have to admit that I too am looking forward to the familiarity of home. And my own bed!

Today we visited the Vatican and were VERY impressed. Wow. (I've visited it before, and I was still impressed all over again!) St. Peter's is amazing. Nothing like it in the world. Tonight the students all had their final exam, and afterwards were high-fiving each other and most decided to celebrate their "beginning of summer" :-) by going out to buy some delicious gelato. Mmmmm...
Tomorrow we have a free day, and I think I'll try to see some catacombs. Oh, time is up here , so I have to leave. Home soon...

Monday (6/22) - Monasteries (and a little bit of Leonidas)

2009-06-26T13:23:00.001-07:00

Wow! What a day! We started with some of the most beautiful vistas we've seen anywhere in this country and end it with our triumphal entry at last into Athens and our home base for the next 6 or so days. Here we go! We started in Kalambaka, and started the day by driving up into the Meteora area right next door. Here is the 2nd largest grouping of Orthodox monasteries, and the setting is beautiful and (by definition) ethereal, as they are all perched up on top of soaring cliffs and free-standing pillars that tower hundreds and hundreds of feet above the ground below. Here is one!

They were built up there specifically for the solitude and quiet. Pathways and roads weren't built until very recent times! Thankfully, we could take the bus up one of the mountain-sides most of the way and get views like this!

Folks, this place truly is amazing. I've just never seen anything like it. Maybe my favorite place so far, at least in the amazing vistas category.
You can visit multiple monasteries during certain hours, but we were only visiting the Varlaam monastery today, and let me tell you we got full value. Up until the 1920's (if memory serves), when a stairwell was cut into the rock face, this crane and basket system was the only way up or down!

The chapel inside the monastery hosts an amazing array of Eastern Orthodox artwork and icons. I particularly liked this one of IC XP (i.e. Jesus).

We couldn't leave without a group picture!

And once on the bus, we had to stop for a last shot of this amazing landscape. Wow.
(hmmm, I can't remember if that monastery in the center of the photo below is Varlaam or not... still, it's very picturesque all the same!)

How can you top such a place of beauty and tranquility? By visiting a place steeped in history and Hollywood testosterone! After our lunch (a fun roadside restaurant), we proceeded on to Athens, and the same highway that you have to take today is the same one that the invading Persian army once took in 480 BC, when they met a fierce (and doomed) little band of Spartans and Thespians who took a stand for freedom at legendary Thermopylae (or "Hot Gates"). Or so the story goes. These days people only remember the Spartans and ignore the poor people of the village of Thespia, but that's how these things go. The movie 300 was a popular film on the subject, but walking the battlefield really made things come to life for me. (no green screens anywhere to be found!) Here I'm standing on the hill that they took their final stand upon, and I'm looking west onto the narrow plain between the mountains and the ocean that the first stages of the famous Battle of Thermopylae took place.

There is of course a monumental statue of the Spartan general Leonidas that we all had to pose under, with a simply epic ancient Greek quote underneath. The Persians are said to have sent a messenger to Leonidas requesting that he surrender his weapons now that he saw how outnumbered they were. The quotation translates: "Come and get them." Awesome.

(Of course, the Persians did come and get them and the Spartans all died, but AHHH what an end...worthy of graphic novels and blockbuster movies!)

Now we made our last drive to historic Athens. Almost there!

We finally entered the edge of the city and came to Kifissia, a NE suburb where we are now staying for the next almost-a-week. Our new home is Bethel, the home of the Evangelical Scripture Union. It's kind of like a mini-retreat center with dorm facilities and a meeting room (with musical instruments that many of us are enjoying) and a recreation court out back with basketball and soccer and volleyball capabilities. What fun! When we arrived, we knew we were in good hands because we were greeted with ice cream bars! Yum! Surely a good sign of great things to come. :-) We celebrated our arrival by enjoying some recreation outside, and we quickly got up a game of Breakout (which I'd never heard of before but it's quite fun) that you see here:

Well, here we are in Athens! The real Athens of the history books and of Acts 17 and the 2004 Summer Olympics and all that! Can't wait! (but first, some sleep)

Tomorrow: Adventures into the ancient heart of Athens!

The Mission

2009-06-26T01:22:00.000-07:00

One of the guiding strategies behind this part of our Holy Lands trip is to retrace Paul's footsteps on his 2nd and 3rd missionary journies wherever possible. The other day, right after we had visited Philippi, and Berea, and Dion (where Paul possibly set sail for Athens), I was sitting in the front of the bus watching the landscapes just roll by, and I began contemplating how these lands were the same that Paul crossed, and then others after him, and then the very first churches grew up in, and then passed the flame of the gospel on to others, and then to others, and they moved on to other lands beyond Greece, and then on to other lands, and eventually to northern Europe, and then on to the new lands of America, and someone passed it on to my great grandparents, and then to my grandfather and then to my parents and then to me -- and here we are representatives of Wheaton College coming back to the same lands where the fire of the Gospel first sputtered to a bright flame amidst the Gentiles.

Wow.

It made me think of this great song, and I want to share it with all of you. Listen to it and think about the power of the Good News of Jesus Christ, come to save the lost and bring a new hope, come to make all things NEW!

Sunday (6/21) - On the Move to Meteora

2009-06-25T14:13:00.000-07:00

I'll make this quick, because I want to go to bed. Today we said our final farewell to the Olympus Bay Resort and headed north to Katerini for church at one of the very rare Greek evangelical churches.

We've been learning about the evangelical church in Greece; it's not very large and it's been frequently persecuted by the dominant Greek Orthodox Church--not violently necessarily, but I'm told that they've been systematically marginalized and/or legally pressured. Thus, the Greek evangelical community is often pretty excited when other Evangelicals from elsewhere come to visit and share relational community together. Here we see Dr. Perrin addressing the congregation and explaining who our group was.

We sat together and were given little wireless headsets connected to a translator back in the sound booth so that we could kind of follow along with the speakers and sermon. Of course, the translation was more of a summary, because after the speaker would talk for like 20 seconds, we'd hear three or four words, so perhaps we got the Cliff Notes version. :-) There was a guest speaker who spoke on the topic of fear and not letting fear keep us captive to its lies, for God has called us to freedom. It was a good reminder for all of us.

After the service, many of the younger Greek ladies talked to our girls and there was some swapping of email addresses. We then walked a short ways to a restaurant in the city where we packed in tight and ate wonderful plates of Greek meats and yummy salad for lunch. Finally we boarded the bus and then headed off to Kalambaka and the region of Meteora. This is the second largest community of Orthodox monasteries in the whole country, and we've been told that they are perched up on top of soaring cliffs! Can't wait.

Shortly before we hit Kalambaka, our stopping place for the night, we stopped at a genuine Orthodox icon factory. For those who don't really understand Orthodox icons, read this. It was pretty neat to see all the icons there in the shop with one of the painters there on-site creating one in front of us.

We learned about the full manufacturing process, and then we perused the icons there for sale. It was a fun challenge to try to read the highly-abbreviated Greek inscriptions on some of them, and I was successful in my own search for a good icon of that truly great hero of the faith: St. Mark. :-)

As we approached Kalambaka, we saw the mountains loom in the distance and the rocks of Meteora just on the edge of town. After finding our hotel rooms, many of us went for a leisurely walk around town to see what we could see. It was a wonderful night, cool temps and cooler breezes, and since it was a relatively small town there was only one main street and all the cafes were full of people just sitting there peacefully. It was a great experience. And look at our view! Up there is where we will visit tomorrow.

On our way back to the hotel, we passed by this one fast-food kind of place that had a few funny items on their bilingual menu. It was very spesial.

Tomorrow: Cliff-top monasteries and our journey to Athens!

Saturday (6/20) - Dion and a Rest Day

2009-06-25T13:23:00.000-07:00

Today was a fun day, with a site visit in the morning to the nearby ancient city of Dion, a nice lunch, and then a free afternoon with opportunities to swim, walk the beach, take a nap, or even just check email or grab a seat near the pool with ocean views. Not a bad way to spend a day in Greece! On to the pictures:

Dion was an important port city in the northern parts of Greece, in what was in ancient times Macedonia. (there is also major controversy over the modern name of Macedonia, with the independent former Yugoslavian country named Macedonia and the Greek administrative district Macedonia fighting over turf...I won't get into that debate here though). Anyway, the site is pretty neat, with some temples and some cool ancient streets. I always like to walk the excavated streets, since we know for a fact that these are the same stones the ancient peoples walked on just the same way.

In the museum on-site, there were a number of interesting artefacts from the area. (okay, I'll admit that I find pretty much all this stuff interesting, since it's my area of professional study... but not all of us intrepid "Holy Landers" are finding museums the most fascinating places anymore... :-) Here are a really neat group of statues representing the children of the god Asclepius, a god associated with healing. It is quite rare to find these together.

I also really like ancient coins, and this is a good one of Philippos (or Philip), I think Philip II, father of Alexander the Great. Anyone able to read the Greek below? (it's genitive case)

There was also a pretty awesome tombstone with the below carving. It commemorates a husband/wife team who have died, and it mentions things that each of them enjoyed and were skilled at in life. The wife (left) enjoyed music and the husband (right) worked as a scribe/writer of some sort.

Finally we broke for a satisfying lunch and then returned to our resort for an afternoon of rest and relaxation. I took a little nap and got caught up on some emails. And baseball scores. :-) Such activities made me thirsty, and when I perused the beverage choices at the little store nearby, I found these little gems.

Hah! I find this so hilarious because the name of this Greek soda is in fact an ancient Greek word that means "youth" or "youthfulness." Looks like it survived into modern times too! Awesome.

Tomorrow: Church service (at a Greek evangelical church!) and then on to Meteora...

Friday (6/19) - To Mount Olympus!

2009-06-20T06:25:00.001-07:00

I'm going to make this post more concise for time's sake and let the pictures do most of the talking.

1) Today we toured Thessaloniki a bit, which is a major city (2nd largest in Greece) and full of its own interesting history, although the connection with Paul's missionary journies are what interested us the most.
2) Then we drove to the site of Berea (Acts 17:10) and enjoyed lunch near a modern shrine to commemorate St. Paul's visit. In fact, they host every June a city-wide festival to St. Paul, which unfortunately we seem to have just missed.
3) After lunch we had a special stop at Vergina, one of the special cities in the ancient Macedonian empire and the burial place of Philip II, the father of Alexander the Great! (yes, this place was great -- the objects of gold and silver found in the tomb are in the museum there and are among the most impressive artifacts I've seen yet on this trip!)
4) On to our destination, a full-blown resort in Leptokarya, literally right at the foot of Mt. Olympus where it descends in full majesty into the sea. Whoah! I have been looking forward to seeing Mt. Olympus for a long time -- the first lecture of my Classical Mythology course (which they don't teach at Wheaton, at least not yet) has a whole bit on Mount Olympus and on ancient people visiting it and how it was just fine in their minds to say that the gods lived there even if they were to go there physically and find no gods on the top, etc. Let's just say that Mt. Olympus beat the hype! (Even better than my other favorite Mt. Olympus... note the shirt I'm wearing in the first pic from yesterday's summary :-)

So, without further ado, here are the pictures from today:

Here we see the Forum at Thessaloniki, surrounded now by modern buildings. There's honestly not too much to see here, but Paul would have come here.

Now in Berea, here enjoy lunch at this shrine to St. Paul. The Greek was fun to try to read.

While waiting for everyone else to finish lunch, some of us invented a new game: No Smiling! You get a group of people in a circle, and when you smile you have to leave the circle; you can't look down or away from other people in the group. I lost pretty much instantly. But look at these two finalists! (Abby is the new no smile queen, awesome skillz there!)

Then we drove to Vergina, site of the burial tomb of Philip II, the father of Alexander the Great. The tomb has been excavated, and below is the entrance. They built it and then covered it with a gigantic mound of dirt, making a hill! Now, the excavated tomb chambers are visible inside along with a whole museum showing the intact artefacts they found there. Lots of beautiful objects, including many of gold and silver. Very impressive!

As were driving to our destination, I kept asking our guide, "Will you tell us when Mt. Olympus comes into view?" And she kept replying, "Oh, don't worry, you'll know." :-) Then I saw it! And she was right, I didn't have to ask.

Over 9,000 feet of awesomeness. The highest peak in the land! It was shrouded partly in cloud in a very numinous, awe-dramatic fashion. One of Zeus's epithets in Homer's Iliad (go read it!) is "Cloud-Gathering Zeus," and now I know exactly why.

Our place for the next two nights is the Olympian Bay Resort, nestled at the base of Mt. Olympus and right on the water. What views! The buffet dinner was fantastic.

After dinner, some of us went strolling along the shoreline for a peaceful moment.

I think we will enjoy this place! We stay for two nights before continuing our eventual journey to Athens. Hope everyone is enjoying the pictures -- I'm sure most of you wish you were here by now! An embarassment of beauty and experiences to be sure. God has given us all many blessings on this study trip, to be sure.
Tomorrow -- ancient Dion and a free afternoon and evening! Sweet!

Thursday (6/18) - Walking the Philippians Road

2009-06-20T05:15:00.000-07:00

Morning, as it usually does, came early today, but I took advantage of the morning sunshine to take a self-portrait on my hotel room balcony. The city streets of Kavala were already alive with morning business, but I was bidding it farewell.

Our first stop of the day was a rise just outside of town where we could see a small part of the ancient Via Egnatia, the original Roman road that connected this part of northern Greece eventually with the rest of the Roman empire. In the picture below, the ancient road coming west out of Neapolis (modern Kavala) emerges from the trees at the bottom of the photo, just left of center. It is neat to think that Paul and his companions walked this very same road as he climbed toward Philippi and the advancement of the Gospel into Macedonia.

We then got on the bus and proceeded a few miles NW to the ancient site of Philippi. Our first view showed us that the acropolis ("high, defensible point of the city"--left side of photo below) stood out from the surrounding plain and would have been visible from quite a distance. The main Roman city stood at the base of that tell.

The site of Philippi is important for two big reasons: it was where Paul visited, wrote letters to, got jailed and then miraculously freed, etc., BUT it was also the location of one of the most significant battles of the Roman world: the Battle of Philippi where in 42 BC Marc Antony and Octavian (the future Caesar Augustus) defeated Cassius and Brutus (the assassinators of Julius Caesar). This major battle during the Roman civil wars helped bring the young Octavian to a position of greater power, which eventually led him to defeat his once-ally Marc Antony later in 31 BC at the Battle of Actium. These events all led to the establishment of the emperors in Rome and the transformation of the Roman state from one led by the Senate to one led by single-man emperors. Which of course is how things are when young Jesus of Nazareth is born in humble Bethlehem. Most people don't realize that Caesar Augustus was the first Roman emperor and thus that the whole system of emperors was still pretty radically new when Jesus enters the world.
Yes, Roman history is sweet! And it tells us a lot about the world in which the Gospel first goes forth and early church must survive and move forward. Anyway, the big battle in 42 BC took place on the plain to the west and south of the city site, somewhere near where the above picture was taken (the pic looks north).

Archaeologists have uncovered a number of interesting remains here in Philippi, including the main Roman forum, the edges of some temples, the commercial agora, a Byzantine basilica, some ancient latrines :-), etc. The forum is a neat place to walk with all its strewn pillars and marble monuments, and also because it becomes just a tiny bit easier to imagine Paul and company walking these streets, getting in trouble for healing the demon-possessed girl, and then getting thrown into prison after getting hauled before the magistrate (politarchos).

Of particular note is a 4th century church they have partially excavated, because this makes it one of the (if not the) earliest-found church in all of Greece! They can date it to the early part fo the 300s because of the Greek inscription found inside mentioning a certain Bishop Porphyrios, and they know when he lived.

"Porphyrios the bishop made this adornment of the Basilica of (St.) Paul in Christ."
Reading inscriptions like this, it's fun to decipher these little clues to the past and unlock their secrets -- they're like my little Indiana Jones moments. :-)

They've also identified a structure as the "so-called Pauline prison" just up the very tall hill at our backs, but it's very unlikely that is the place -- most agree that the prison would have probably been near or at the top of the acropolis. We would have explored these places further, but for the first time on our whole trip, a rain storm popped up right before lunch and we cut the afternoon explorations short. Actually, it was more like a tropical typhoon -- it poured down! We kept wondering we couldn't have gotten a little bit of this while we were down in the Negev... :-)

We thus ate our lunch while trying to wring ourselves dry, and then we boarded the bus once more to finish our drive to Thessaloniki. The landscapes of Greece really do inspire the mind, and as one of the people near me commented, "It's easy to see how people thought that gods lived here in this land."

Our one stop on the way was to see a monumental lion statue called the "Lion of Amphipolis" at the ancient city of Amphipolis. It's really huge! Ancient travelers would have been properly impressed, I'm sure -- we were!

We finally made it to Thessaloniki and found our way to our hotel, the Grand Hotel Palace. When we finally arrived, our wonderful Greek guide announces that everyone can see our great hotel on the left -- which was nothing but an empty, dirt lot with some garbage in it! Then she said, "Oh, I mean on the right! Oh, I am so funny." (in the best Greek accent) And there it was! Pretty fancy-looking really. We had an afternoon lecture on Paul's letters to the Thessalonians and then settled into yet another 4-course meal. Mmmm...I don't think I've ever eaten better in my whole life than this last week.
Tomorrow: Thessaloniki and then down to a resort at the foot of Mt. Olympus! Can't wait!

On a final note, I'm happy to say that a picture I took of our group has made it's way onto the Wheaton College Image of the Week site! Click here (or at least you can for the next few days) for a Sea of Galilee moment -- still one of my favorite from this whole trip.

Wed (6/17) - Let's Drive to Greece!

2009-06-19T12:03:00.000-07:00

Why, what a brilliant idea?

Today our goal was pretty simple -- get to Greece. And not by air. What fun! Check out the route we would get to enjoy: start at Izmir in Turkey and search for Kavala, Greece. Crossing continents and everything! On trips like this, I love the journey often as much as experiencing the destination. I love watching how the landscapes change slowly, or at times very dramatically. Our journey today began at Izmir, and we drove north along the coast, passing through mountain valleys and climbing up into them even at points. The landscape in Turkey is actually quite eye-opening -- an odd mix of mountains and fertile, flat valleys in between them.

Of particular awesomeness to me was the fact that we drove within a mile or so of the ancient site of Troy! But alas, we didn't have time to stop. The reason: we had to catch a vehicle ferry across the Hellespont! From Asia (where I'm standing in the picture) back to Europe (the other side of the very narrow strait)!

We boarded and said goodbye to Asia for the last time...until who knows when?

We enjoyed lunch in historic Gallipoli, right on the water where we could look back across continents, and then we traveled another hour or so until we got near the border. At this point, we had to do an odd drill: swap out buses with another bus company that is licensed in both Greece and Turkey, and then ride them only until the Greek border, then another little ways, then swap buses again with a Greek tour bus company. Ah, politics is alive and well! :-) As we approached the Greek border, I noticed that suddenly it was getting cloudy -- for the first time on our whole trip. Right at the very moment when we were re-entering the so-called Western world, even the weather changed! It was kind of symbolic somehow. The border itself was very uneventful...

But the products in the duty free shop sure gave us amusement!

Nothing like truth in advertising, eh? :-) Because we had all had a very long and relatively uneventful day riding in buses for upwards of 7+ hours, the leadership decided to boost spirits by spontaneously announcing there at some shops at the border: "MAGNUMS for everybody!" The cheering from the students was so loud and hearty that all the other shopkeepers came out of their stores wondering what on earth had happened! My rasberry and vanilla double-layer ice cream bar was delicious, let me tell you! I was especially glad for that, since I had no idea what the Turkish label said when I grabbed it. :-)

When we finally swapped into our Greek bus for the last time (whoo, that luggage was a tight fit!) we had another hour or so and Dr. J and I took the opportunity to have an on-bus lecture for about the history of ancient Greece (my part) and Greek Orthodoxy (Dr. J's part -- cuz they had a paper on the subject coming up). This lasted us until we reached our first destination in Greece: Kavala. This is the site of ancient Neapolis mentioned in Acts 16 and Acts 20. Many people in our group had been looking forward to getting to Greece for a variety of reasons (some because they were glad to leave Turkey behind, but not me -- I like Turkey a lot, but I've been studying Greece for the last 12 years!), and when we reached Kavala right after sunset, we all knew that we were in for some good times here in beautiful Greece! Voila!

Our fun little hotel was literally two blocks from the Aegean Sea, and we all settled in looking forward to our coming Greek adventures.

On a final note, one of our students has taken very ill with what looks like a rather severe relapse of mono, and she may have to be sent home early. She has been in contact with her parents, so if you haven't heard from your child about any sickness yet, don't worry it's not her. Please be in prayer for this student and the whole situation.
[FRIDAY UPDATE: Becky was sent home today on a special flight, and she is presumably closing in on North Carolina as I type this; this is good as her home doctor can now monitor her. Hopefully this will be the only health complication.]

Please keep praying for us: for unity, for consistency in spending more time in scripture and in prayer, for our attitudes, and for our joy. Thanks to all. Tomorrow -- Philippi and Thessaloniki!

Tuesday (6/16) - Ephesus!

2009-06-16T14:53:00.000-07:00

In the footsteps of Apollos and Paul (and of course many others) we headed out this morning from our really nice hotel in Izmir and took the 1.5 hour or so drive south to the ancient site of Ephesus. This city in Greco-Roman times was very important; it was estimated to be the second biggest city in the Roman Empire in the 2nd century AD at around 250,000+. That's a lot of people! And yes, like every good ancient or medieval city, they did it in a comparatively small area. The city is famous to Christians for its appearance in Acts 18 and 19 during Paul's missionary journies (and in the apocryphal Acts of John, for those keeping track at home!). However, for everybody in the ancient world it was famous both as a huge cosmopolitan city with a crucial harbor AND for one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world: the Temple of Artemis. That is also mentioned in Acts 19. This was one of the hugest temples in the whole world, a wonder to behold -- what would we "Holy Landers" see on our visit?

Cool things, that's what! There's a reason people come from all over the world to walk the ancient streets of Ephesus. The Austrians have been excavating here for over 100 years, and they've revealed lots of the city and partially reconstructed enough bits to really give visitors at least a sense of the grand scale of everything. And there are Greek and (a few) Latin inscriptions everywhere! Even an authentic ancient Roman latrine! :-) As I said to a student at dinner tonight: "It's like Disneyland for a Classicist!"

For time's sake, I'll just post a bunch of cool pictures from our day and give only a brief description of each. If you'd like more pictures of this place, check out this site. Now we're off to stroll the streets of Ephesus:

Whoah! This is the reconstructed grand facade of the famous Library of Celsus. Amazing! The big ancient cities of the Roman world were full of structures that evoked this kind of grandeur! Can you imagine a rural country farmer coming to the big city for the first time? Or a Texas boy (hi Michael! :-)?

Next is our trip to a hillside where they are still conducting current excavations of wealthy homes built into terraces in the mountainside. I've studied Ephesus before in classes, but I had never heard of the gorgeous frescos inside that have survived in fragments inside these places! WOW! Most people don't realize that living in the ancient Greco-Roman world would have been a FAR more colorful experience than our world is today. True. What you see here are genuine ancient wall decorations.

Now we're off to the gigantic Theater of Ephesus -- we've heard there is a hubbub going on down there about some foreigner named Paul...

Above you see Dr. Perrin teaching us about the story of Paul from Acts 19 while sitting inside the very place that the text describes. Nice. But the above picture doesn't give you even a fraction of the real scale of the place, which could hold practically 24,000 capacity!

Ruined columns and paving stones and random bits of marble or limestone were everywhere. A wonderful place for anyone, but especially someone like me who studies the Greco-Roman world for a living!

We brought our Ephesus excursion to a close by visiting the old ruins of the Church of Mary Theotokos. Evangelicals typically don't get excited about churches to Mary, but the Mary tradition in Christian history is something we should learn more about and wrestle with at the least to understand things better. Historically, there is a church devoted to Mary mother of Jesus here because one Christian tradition places the last resting place of Mary before going to heaven right here in Ephesus, and this is connected to the strong tradition that John the disciple of Jesus was buried here. Mary aside, this church visit was especially significant for our group because of a very important even that took place here -- the Ecumenical Council of Ephesus in AD 431! This is the one that declared Nestorianism a heresy, which was rather important to the development of Christian doctrine on the nature of Jesus Christ and thus the nature of our relationship with him and thus the nature of our salvation. If you've never heard of any of this, take the opportunity to educate yourself on a key event in Christian history. Here you see Dr. J teaching us about the Council and the theological implications of what was decided -- right in the very place where these events took place! A glorious day.

Okay, it was also a hot day where many folks started to run out of water, get dehydration headaches, have a hard time focusing, etc. But that all comes with the territory of a trip like this, so it's not a huge deal. By the afternoon we had eaten a full lunch (with water to wash it down!) and set off visit the large ruins of the Church of St. John, the Ephesus Museum, and then finally drive back to our hotel in Izmir. This was our last full day in Turkey, as tomorrow we have the joy of facing a 8-10 hour bus drive up the western Turkey coast, across the Hellespont on a ferry (sweet!), and then on into Greece! Whew! It will be glorious. We'll even drive within a mile or two of the ancient site of Troy along the way (the location of the legendary Trojan War, told so excellently by Homer in the Iliad -- read it :-) and also the site of Gallipoli of WWI fame, but we'll have to be content this time with just driving by them as we have no extra time
tomorrow.

When next I post, we'll all be in Greece!

Live from Istanbul!

2009-06-14T13:52:00.000-07:00

Hello friends, I am writing this from a hotel room in Istanbul, Turkey! We are approximately somewhere here. Istanbul is such a change of pace from Jerusalem and Israel, but we've taken to it quite nicely -- especially the more relaxed pace of our days! We feel much more like tourists and less like students madly cramming for the next exam. There is a danger in letting our guard down and becoming tourists only interested in comfort rather than in learning about our surroundings, studying the places we visit, and challenging our minds and perspectives. But at least for the moment, I can safely say we are glad we are visiting museums and eating lunch at restaurants rather than trudging around abandoned, dusty archaeological mounds all day and making pita and hummus and carrot sandwiches for lunch every day. :-) It's a good break.

I am on another laptop right now than the one I store my pictures on, so you'll have to wait for pics until another post. Sorry! Some highlights so far include the Blue Mosque (largest mosque in Turkey), the church of Hagia Sophia (now a museum), the former Ottoman imperial palace (Topkapi), a visit to the national Archaeological Museum (which had a *sweet* collection of Roman/Hellenistic-style burial sarcophagi, so great!), attending an evangelical church here in Istanbul (placed ingeniously inside the Netherlands consulate, so that the government of Turkey can't shut it down or touch it), taking an almost 2-hour boat tour of the Bosporous and sailing under the two bridges that connect Europe with Asia, and even attending an authentic Whirling Dervishes dance. Wow! A group of us capped tonight off by drinking apple tea at a restaurant on a bridge in the middle of the Golden Horn, the bay that separates southern from northern Istanbul, with the full display of city lights twinkling all over the waters and distant hillsides as far as the eye could see. So fun. Istanbul is such an interesting place...part European, part Middle Eastern. There's a reason for that -- it really is the place where Europe and Asia meet. Literally.

(For those readers who like such things, I took a picture on the boat tour today of the point of the mythical Symplegades that Jason and his men finally defeated on their quest for the Golden Fleece -- I was terribly excited. Even if nobody else knew or much cared! :-)

Of special importance was the private audience we had yesterday with Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarch. He's kind of like the Orthodox Church's "pope"-figure, even though the comparison isn't really accurate since he's more like the top spokesperson rather than the literal guy at the top of the chain of command. Still, very cool. He spoke to us some words of greeting and well-wishing, then had to go prepare for a church mass, so he asked a deacon (who is ironically a Chicago native!) to speak with us longer and answer any questions. Since the students had been assigned to read a book on the Orthodox faith and write a paper on it due that morning, of course we had many good questions. To his credit, the deacon Niphon represented the Orthodox Church position quite well. One of the questions that I know many of us are still pondering was on the idea of church unity, across the subdivisions of Christendom. Can there be real unity without all of us compromising on so many things, or do we all just have to become like one branch of the faith, whether that is Greek Orthodox or Assemblies of God or Roman Catholic or Evengelic Free or something else we've not even thought of yet? What makes or "marks" real unity among all believers, among all those who are truly counted by heaven as belonging to the universal family of God?
We have all been challenged in many theological ways on this trip, for sure. That can only be a good thing, however confusing or disorienting it may be right now for some of us.

There's much more I could say, but I'll let this suffice. We are here and mostly well, and enjoying ourselves. We've started to have our first real bouts of illness though among a few, so we would appreciate your continued prayers for us. The municipal water is a known problem here, so we are drinking bottled water all the time. We are also in general recovering slowly from pushing ourselves so hard in Israel, and our bodies are now craving that long-denied sleep! You know, there is a reason the ancient Greek poets called it "sweet sleep" so much of the time.

Tomorrow (Monday) we will visit the Grand Bazaar (should be quite grand!), doing some fun shopping (the dollar goes pretty far here, which is great), and then heading back to the airport for a quick flight down to Izmir to get ready for our big site visit to Ephesus. Can't wait! Again, I'm not sure when I'll have internet again, but until then..

PERGITE CVRSVM CVRRERE

Off to Istanbul!

2009-06-11T15:16:00.000-07:00

Well friends, Wheaton in the Holy Lands is about to leave the Holy Lands. To go to other Holy Lands. That's right, we're finishing our last day in Israel here at JUC in Jerusalem (can you believe that our almost-3 weeks in Israel is already done?!) and packing up feverishly for our 6:30 am bus ride out to the airport. Our next destination: Istanbul, Turkey!

Yes, I know, it's not Constantinople. I've heard. :-)

Since I don't know when I'll have internet again, here's our very rough schedule for the next few days:
Friday - travel to Istanbul, orientation
Saturday - main sights in Istanbul, interview with Greek Patriarchate (rather important)
Sunday - worship with small evangelical congregation
At some point, we head out to Izmir as a base to see sights like Ephesus and other places like that. There is some confusion whether we head out on Sunday or Monday, but I'll try to provide quick updates about things. I rarely have time for the detailed daily posts I had been doing, but as time allows I'll provide you insight into our days here and there.

And now, "To bed, to bed!"

Sunday (June 7) - From Sea to Shining Sea (of Galilee)!

2009-06-09T11:33:00.000-07:00

Hello from the Sea of Galilee! We are on a 4-day trip up to the northern parts of Israel to explore the Galilee region and the places that Jesus and so many of his disciples called home. What an experience it is to be typing this right now a few hundred feet from the shore of the lake where Jesus and his disciples lived and taught. Today is Tuesday June 9, and I'm almost hopelessly behind on detailing each day on the blog, but hey I'll do the best I can. :-) As you can imagine, we're staying so busy and having so much fun that at the end of the day, there's not a whole lot of leftover energy. Hopefully at some point I'll post some things about our 3-day trip to the southern wildernesses, but that will have to wait. To try to catch up everyone with where we are right now, welcome to Galilee, land of crossroads!

Let's jump back to Sunday (6/7) and our trip up here:
Today dawned especially early for our 7am bus ride up to the north for our 4 day Galilee and Golan Heights study trip. The general mood I think is that we've only just started recovering from our previous 3-day trip down to the furnaces of the southern wildernesses, so we'd like some more time to recuperate and process what we're learning. BUT there's just so much to do and see in this rich land, and trying to do enough in just 3 weeks to really start to _understand_ this land instead of being a religious tourist requires a schedule that is more demanding than that of a regular tourist. And besides, we're Wheaties! So we soldier on. :-)

As we headed out of the Judean hill country toward the coastal plain, we could see the marked differences in landscape as we went. We finally emerged onto the coast at the very famous and important site of Caesarea Maritima. I was particularly excited to visit it, since this is the first place we've gone to that is a fully Greco-Roman city! It was built up by Herod the (sort of) Great, and it soon became the provincial capital from which Rome exerted its might over the land. We sat down right on some ruins overlooking the water and heard from Dr. Wright that the building we were sitting in was in all likelihood the very place Paul was held while awaiting his trip to Rome. What a classroom! Maybe we'll call it "Wheaton East"?

We were given a chance to explore the massive site for a bit (oh, but not nearly long enough for a Classicist like myself!), and most of the students enjoyed splashing around in the nearby remains of Herod's seaside palace before heading off to the other sights of the city--such as the massive Hippodrome!

This arena for chariot races and other large community spectacles sat right on the seashore (just off pic to the left) and would have been a great place to take in an exciting race! Next we headed a little ways north to the wonderfully preserved remains of an ancient Roman aquaduct that brought fresh water to the city from distant highlands to the north. Aquaducts are just plain cool -- especially ones that are beachfront property!

The technology is simply amazing to think about, that they could build artificial highways and underground canals to funnel fresh water from springs and mountain streams upwards of 60+ miles so that city dwellers could have water for drinking and bathing. For a bumpkin from the hills--where water is always hard to come by--coming for the first time to a place like Caesarea, the realization that Rome had such power to create rivers of stone out of thin air must have blown them away.

As we headed north after that, we slowly made our way up into the Mt. Carmel range. But lo and behold! Right off the highway we were driving we suddenly came across a genuine 1st-century hill-cut tomb, complete with the original round stone that would have been rolled in front of the opening! When they built the modern highway, they uncovered it and now it's just here by the side of the road with no fanfare at all. To quote one of Dr. Wright's favorite phrases: "Can you believe it guys?"

We eventually came to a ridge of Mt. Carmel where an aptly-named Carmelite order Monastery (Catholic) looks out over the expansive plains of the Jezreel Valley. We found seats for ourselves on the rocky hillside hundreds of feet above the plain and looked for the first time out towards so many places of Biblical significance: Mt. Tabor, where King Saul is said to have died, the famous ancient tell of Megiddo, and especially the Nazareth ridge, just behind the lip of which is where Jesus grew up. Wow.

Jesus himself surely looked out across the same valley many times. He knew his scriptures very well, and everywhere he looked he couldn't help but think of all these stories associated with the places he saw. It's very refreshing and interesting to think about Jesus as a real person in this way, walking the land like I am, except as a native to this soil and in a tradition that stretched back a thousand years. He was the one to fulfil the covenant, the memories of which were embedded in the landscape itself!

Once we descended into the Jezreel Valley, we headed to the ancient and significant site of Megiddo. It was a major city in ancient times, given that almost all the major international highways anywhere in three-continent region went through the Jezreel Valley, and Megiddo had the best location in the south-center of the valley. It also has the reputation for being the future site of "Armegeddon" (the final battle of history, not the movie :-). That moniker is very likely symbolic, since many major and decisive ancient battles were fought here, but it's still interesting to think about. Much of the ancient city site has been excavated, as you can see:

And Megiddo also boasts a very clever underground tunnel system that connects the city up on the hilltop with a source of water lower down. When we all found out we were going through underground tunnels to check them out, our reaction was one of speechless amazement.

:-)

We continued eastward and finally crested the lower Galilee ridge to find ourselves looking down for the very first time onto what will be our home for the next 3 nights: the Sea of Galilee!!

Like the Dead Sea, the Sea of Galilee is below sea level, but not nearly as far. It was an impressive sight -- this is where Jesus lived, and walked -- and walked on water! We were blessed with a very clear day. Our destination was the Kibbutz resort of Ein Gev, on the eastern side just south of the midpoint of the lake.

People, it's a resort! After our previous accomodations, which have admittedly been decent but otherwise not glamorous, for the next 3 nights we are going to be living in comparative luxury! All you can eat buffet dinners, sunsets over the Sea of Galilee, swimming at the beach just a few hundred feet away from our cabin rooms, each and every night. Wow. (A-style!) Naturally, as soon as we found our rooms most of us jumped into the lake for a swim, and what a venue. The sun majestically sinking lower and lower behind the western hills, frisbee flying back and forth over the gentle waves, people on the seashore journaling or reading their Bibles or just letting the reality and presence of it all sink in. And as I stood there in the waters of that lake, that's when it hit me.

Jesus was real. He saw these same hills. Looked at the same sea. Fished and sailed these same waters. This is no abstract Sunday School Jesus. Jesus of Nazareth lived here. And I'm here too. Wow. It's a subtle, almost imperceptible, but absolutely real shift -- Jesus is really real to me now. I get that sense much more powerfully up here than I did down in Jerusalem. Down there in the Old City you see the crowded streets of what is essentially a medieval city, and the ancient places, if preserved at all, are preserved in medieval or later churches and other shrines. But up here it's different -- this lake isn't much different than when Jesus and Peter and John and Bartholemew and all the others walked these hills and sailed these shores. The place is hardly developed at all. I've not seen a single recreational boat on the whole lake since we got here. No jet-skiing or pleasure boating that I've found yet (maybe on Friday or Saturday?) You really get the sense of being sent back in time somehow. What a special feeling. Jesus is real to me now in a way he simply had never been before...maybe couldn't be before.

I guess this is precisely why you come on a trip like this.

Parting shot, to make you wish you were here. :-)

Israel, Palestine, and Obama's Speech

2009-06-06T07:24:00.000-07:00

Out here we are pretty much out of touch with what is going on in the rest of the world. No TV, no radio, slow and spotty internet, put them together and you have blissful ignorance. However, I have gone online to find out a little bit about Obama's recent speech in Cairo on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and his support for a 2-state solution. Take a few minutes and read up on it here. The link is fairly well-balanced in its analysis. Well, I can say that having traveled over many parts of this country, both Israeli, Palestinian, and then mix-habitation, I can say that every possible solution SUCKS. Both sides have at some various points done dirty, nasty things to each other. Feelings and memories run deep. Are you going to uproot hundreds of thousands of settlers all over the West Bank? Ask the Israelis to abandon such incredibly-central Old Testament sites like Shiloh and others? What do you do with Jerusalem? Besides, the current Palestinian are in areas that aren't contiguous to each other. Are you going to create a Palestinian state made of 4 or 5 (or more) little blobs of land that don't even touch each other?

For any peace in this land to come, both sides need to do a LOT of serious forgetting and forgoing justice. Could you do that? Compromise sucks when both parties feel backed into a corner.

Good luck, Mr. Obama. Keep doing your best. Let's hope and pray that other leaders rise to the occasion and mark hard decisions that hurt like hell and feel like betrayal to the dreams of their ancestors.

Monday (6/1) - Exam Time

2009-06-05T23:29:00.001-07:00

The students all have their first exam today, based on everything that they've learned under the teaching of Dr. Wright, the director of JUC and our 3-week class here in Israel. Dr. Wright has been teaching courses on the geographical significance of the Holy Lands (and many other courses) at JUC for many many years, and he has already become somewhat legendary among our students, mostly for how while most of us are getting tired at the end of a long day in the field he is still plugging away, cracking corny jokes, hiking up and down mountains with the greatest of ease, etc. Some students have already begun fashioning tales of what his younger years must have been like, wrestling lions in a pit in the snow, or riding with bedoin across the deserts. The truth is that he grew up in Palatine, Illinois, but myths are more fun if you ignore trifling details like that. :-) He has been great. Here's a small sample of what we are getting everyday -- this is back from our first day in Jerusalem, and we're standing in front of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre:

Anyway, we had a free morning and most people spent it studying and worrying about how hard or not the test was going to be. The test was the hour after lunch, and pretty much everybody came out and said they felt good about it -- they said that it was the kind of test where if you hadn't studied at all, you were screwed, but if you had studied, you were fine. A well-written test, in other words! I spent the morning trying out Hebrew Doritos. Whoah! I love how Hebrew reads right to left, so the name brand on the bag does too. They taste *almost* like regular Doritos (which I grew up on, but you practically can't find anymore), but they don't taste exactly the same. This is true for many foods here. The peanut butter, for example, is less sweet and more oily. Hmm. More sugar, please!

The rest of the afternoon was in-class preparation for our coming 3-day trip down south. I attended some of the class, and then spent the rest of the afternoon (as I had spent most of the morning already) working on an academic research project that will hopefully get published someday soon. My break in the middle of the afternoon was an exploration of the Protestant Cemetery of Mt. Zion, which is attached to the south end of our JUC compound. (trivia: the JUC campus is actually owned by the Anglican Church of England, from whom JUC has a very long lease arrangement on terms agreeable to all sides) There are a few relatively famous people buried here, including Horation Spafford and William Flinders Petrie.

I like cemeteries a lot -- they are such peaceful and reflective places to walk through. One of my favorite memories of visiting my brother in DC was one day when I just walked randomly amidst the war graves in Arlington National Cemetery. So, I enjoyed this exploration. Most of the graves are from the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries, so there's a rather old-ish feel to the place. Well, old but definitely not ancient, considering the surroundings. What really struck me was seeing graves inscribed in English, German, Hebrew, and Arabic all side by side. It was a neat picture of the nations coming together under the image of the cross of Christ here at Jerusalem.

In the evening, I worked some more on research writing, then my roommate "Dr. J" and I and everybody else worked on packing for our 3-day trip. Ack, the bus leaves at 7, and morning will come early.

Sunday (5/31) - Free Day!

2009-06-05T14:13:00.000-07:00

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. :-)

Saturday (5/30) - The Road to Jericho...

2009-06-05T11:19:00.000-07:00

I have heard of the story of the Good Samaritan my whole life, from Sunday School on. They show you fun little pictures of the guy on a donkey coming by the guy who got beat up and they all go the inn and it's a great picture of, well... being a good Samaritan. I don't know why, but I always imagined the path down to Jericho from Jerusalem being this road that goes through some ruggest hilly areas, like down in a canyon bottom. You know, like in the old Western movies when the guys are riding their horses down at the bottom of the canyons and then the bad guys shoot at them from the rocks above? Well, I found out what the road from Jerusalem down to Jericho looks like today, since the mid-point of that road was our first stop today. Ladies and gentlemen, that road looks exactly like this:

Wow. It's called the Ascent of Adummim, and this road boggled my mind. Folks, this is wasteland. There is not one drop of shade anywhere. The route isn't in the valleys at all but up on the ridge-tops. The views are incredible--by the way, that is Jericho you can actually see at the valley floor just inside the top left of the picture. The breeze is decent at least up on this road. But it's desolate. This is the land of the bedouin, the semi-nomadic shepherds -- yes, incredibly, there is barely enough vegetation out here to graze sheep and goats. Sometimes. Not what I was expecting at all. Jesus walked this road many times with his disciples. This is what he saw and experienced as he approached Jerusalem that last time as Passover week approached, scorched under the hot sun the entire time as he pondered what would take place over the next week. Unbelievable.
By the way, we met some local Bedouin who learned a long time ago that they can sell cheap trinkets and camel rides to tourists, just like us. The short camel rides only cost around $3, quite a good price actually. I'm not quite sure why, but I didn't take one. Probably my last chance to get one from a real Bedouin.

We next headed all the way down into the Rift Valley to Jericho, which is deep inside Palestinian West Bank territory -- however, the tensions aren't as high here, since Jewish settlers have never encroached too much on the Jericho. The reason, we were told, is that in the Old Testament Joshua announces a curse on the site and on anyone who would rebuild the city. Thus no Jewish settler in the West Bank (who are mostly religious in outlook) wants to encroach on Jericho, so the place is kind of left to its own. It was a pretty laid back town -- not much in the way of tourism going on, or at least it seemed that way mid-day. We visited both the site of Jericho in the New Testament, where Herod had built a nice summer villa, and the Old Testament site, which is a little ways to the NE. The OT site was famously excavated by Kathleen Kenyon back in the 1960s (and others before and since), and the best dating methods tell us that a brick wall section they found is ~8,000 years old. That makes Jericho the oldest city in the world. A gratifying moment.

Jericho, as indeed the whole of the Jordan River / Dead Sea valley, is below sea level, which was an only-slightly odd feeling to walk around on dry ground knowing that the raging waves of the world's oceans are actually above you somewhere. After Jericho, we climbed back up out of the Rift Valley, above sea level, and continued on into the center of the "Central Benjamin Plateau." Our stopping place was Nebi Samuel, the high point of the region which also hosts a structure and tower that commemorates the burial place of the prophet Samuel. Everybody agrees that it does no such thing, since the OT clearly says Samuel was buried in his home town of Rama, but at some point somebody erected a structure and people have been using the place ever since, so there you have it. :-) What I do know is that from the top of the tower, you can see for miles in every direction all over the land of Benjamin, that region just to the north of Jerusalem (which you can see from the top of Nebi Samuel off in the distance). This is a deeply strategic area, both in ancient and modern times, as this is where the main E-W and N-S roads for the region meet.
What is so interesting to me is how everything in the Hill Country of Israel can be so close and compact together and yet so discrete and separate. As you drive through the countryside, virtually every hilltop or hillside can be its own town (and this works whether we are talking about ancient or modern day). Here's an historic example:

Here I'm looking straight north from Nebi Samuel at the ancient hill-site of Gibeon, of Joshua 9 fame. Gibeon is just that hill in the foreground, right of center. All the other hilltops are their own separate places, and from the high point I'm standing you can see something like 7 or 8 different Biblical cities. Gibeah, home town of Saul, is just off to the NE, and then Jerusalem is off to the SE. I tell you, the sightlines of the land of Israel have to be seen to be understood. This is NOT the Midwest. Or any other place in America.

Last stop for the day was the ancient site of Gezer, a partially-excavated city perched on a strategic high point of land at the far western end of the Benjamin Plateau, with commanding views E back into the hill country and N to Tel Avivm, and W straight into the mists covering the Mediterranean coast! We could actually glimpse the sun glinting off the water when the winds were right. What made this visit extra interesting is that we accidentally bumped into none other than Bill Dever the world-famous archaeologist on site giving a tour for some of his relatives visiting him. What was wild about this for me is that it was a moment of coming full circle: The last time I met Bill Dever he was the keynote speaker at the Midwest Regional ASOR meeting in, oh, 1998 I think in Springfield, MO (home of Missouri State, my fine undergrad institution). As an aspiring undergrad, I nervously approached him and asked his advice about what it took to become a college professor, and he basically told me that it was really stinking hard and only the best make it and even then it's really hard and there aren't that many positions, etc. Well, here I am now a Professor of Classical Languages and helping to lead a group of good students on a study trip to the Holy Lands.

After some exploration of fun Solomon-era (maybe?) case-mate walls, we had an impromptu dance party (filmed for posterity...). There was even some heroic posing on ancient stones, with face firmly set toward sunset's glow:

We headed back for the bus and the trip home to JUC...but soon found another adventure! Our bus had somehow managed to get a big nasty rock wedged firmly between the back two tires on the right side, and there was some danger of puncture if we drove on it too much. We all found a place on the side of the road to pull off, and as a few guys started helping the driver try to get the rock out, the rest of us decided to seek some higher assistance.

After a fun 45-min social time on the edge of a highway in view of a glorious sunset over waving rows of grain and a flying wheeled car-contraption (not even kidding) and which even saw me get into a game of MASH (65 children in a chalk-colored shack, not a good sign), due in no small part to the manly efforts of the bus driver and Andrew Hershey (with a giant scratch on his back to prove it), the rock was worked loose enough so that it fell out once underway again. Hooray! A fine way to end a full day of memorable experiences.

Back from the Dead (Sea)

2009-06-05T08:02:00.000-07:00

Greetings everyone! We have made it back to Jerusalem safe and sound. Well, a lot more sunburnt, but relatively safe and sound. Our 3-day expedition into the southern regions have taught us that Abraham and the Israelites who lived on the edge of (or in) the sun-blasted wilderness were people of much greater endurance than we are! Believe me, none of us will ever look down unsympathetically again on the Israelites who complained while wandering in the desert for all those years. (un)Holy cow. Your whole life starts to revolve entirely around where you can get water, and what you have to do to keep access to it. We saw many marvelous things -- canyons well over a thousand feet deep, desert waterfalls, ruins 3,000 years old overlooking the Mediterranean Sea, cliffs that loomed thousands of feet above the Dead Sea, floating in the Dead Sea itself, the caves at Qumran where they found the Dead Sea Scrolls -- and we are richer for the experience. But boy, was the Sun hard at work!

Over the next couple days, I'll try to catch up a little bit, but no promises. It is hard finding time, and in a couple days we leave for a 4-day trip up to the Galilee region. Maybe they'll have internet there where we are staying. Anyway, thanks for following along with us, and stay tuned!

Down to the Land of Dixie

2009-06-01T20:38:00.000-07:00

Well, okay, that's not quite true, but we are headed for the South! Of Israel, that is.
Loyal readers, in about 20 minutes we're starting our first multi-night trip within Israel, and we're told that we won't have internet access where we're going, so you won't find any more blog updates from me until Thursday or (more likely) Friday. And I'm already 3 days behind or so, so that will put me 6 days behind, which means that all of you fine people may get one or two posts to cover those days instead of one detailed post per day. But that's okay.

Here's our itinerary for those who want to follow along on Google Maps or an Israel map.

Tuesday: Sites southward within Judea; Ashkelon (where some fellow Wheaton students and a prof are conducting an archaeological dig, that will be fun to reconnect since one of them is my former Greek student), along with a swim in the Mediterranean!; stay overnight at a youth hostel in Arad

Wednesday: Study sites over to Beer-Sheva and other places in the Negev; down to Mizpe Ramon and the (completely sun-scorched and heat-blasted) Wilderness of Zin [this will be pretty remote and H O T]; overnight at Arad

Thursday: more time in the (H O T) wilderness in the southlands; up to the Dead Sea, where we'll swim in the crazy water at the lowest point on earth; climb up to the dizzying heights of Masada; Ein Gedi; area around Qumran where they found the Dead Sea Scrolls; back to Jerusalem and our accustomed beds

That's it! I bought last night in the Armenian Quarter a new hat with a wider brim to shield my neck from sunburn (it says "Australian style" underneath, so you know it's of highest quality), and some silver sunglasses. As Garrett said when I was trying them on: "Yeah, Silver Surfer baby!" It's quite the outfit for hitting the wilderness.

Talk to you in a few days!

(5/29) Friday - Sightlines

2009-05-31T04:31:00.000-07:00

Today was a long day -- our "Jerusalem Approaches Field Study" day. This was our first full day of travel outside of of the Old City of Jerusalem, and our constitutions (and I'll admit our attitudes!) were challenged in a good way. I and some others were working off of 4 hours of sleep after our amazing evening locked inside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. [Stay tuned for a post about that! Crazy awesome!] Our day started at 7 am and our first stop was the Mount of Olives, the rise that dominates almost the entire view east from Jerusalem. One of the most significant new discoveries for me thus far has been the awareness of sightlines -- that is, what you can see from a specific place. From David's City (the original pre-Temple city), you can only see the surrounding hills. From the Temple Mount, you are higher but still can't see much more.
The Mount of Olives blocks sight to the east, and the "western hill" of Jerusalem blocks sight to the west. BUT we climbed to the top of the Mt of Olives, and what did we see? Holy ausblick.

You can see all the way to Jordan. Literally you can see all the way. That dark horizon line off in the distance is the upland plateau that lies across the valley. You are at the high point of everything to the east. You can see the Jordan River valley (really the northern extension of the Rift Valley which runs eventually down into central Africa) and a snippet of the Dead Sea and everything! To the west you can see all of Jerusalem laid in front of you like a picnic lunch set out on a table, (a rather slopey table) and then down south practically to Bethlehem. If Jesus wanted to find a place that last night before getting arrested to quietly contemplate what would soon come in the city of Jerusalem, the Mount of Olives is the perfect place to do that because you can see the entire city--you're literally looking straight at the Temple, right over the Kidron Valley. There is a shrine called Dominus Flevit ("the Lord wept") partway down the hillside toward Jerusalem which we stopped at, and I took a picture from inside the chapel which both illustrates the view as well as presents a wonderful symbol of the triumph of Christ through his defeat -- and it all happened here.

We proceeded downhill a bit to the Garden of Gethsemane site -- well, one of a few such possible sights, but this one is commemorated the best so most tour groups come here. :-) For "garden" we shouldn't think of what we in America tend to think of, but a "place of cultivation," and for the kind of soil you have here that means things like olive groves and such. Now at the site there is a large and ornate but still relatively simple church called Church of All Nations, so called because upwards of 10 European nations (if I recall correctly) put money toward the building of the church in the first decades of the 20th century. I particularly loved this place (and not just because there was a lot of Latin inscriptions here...but that was a big one :-). In the Gospels, Jesus lost his disciples to sleep here... we managed to just plain lose a student! The wayward soul eventually turned up at a rendezvous spot and we were then on our way to ...

Bethlehem! We were off to see the place where the Incarnation happened. Where God became flesh and Jesus entered the world in the most humble way imaginable. It also meant the Separation Wall. For the first time we were going to be crossing into Palestinian territory. Most people I think don't realize that Bethlehem, although only 5 short miles straight south of Jerusalem, is politically controlled by the Palestinian Authority, and you have to cross a checkpoint and go past guntowers and drive through the brand-new Separation Wall that literally allows nobody to cross unless you do so at military checkpoints. As we were on a registered tour bus full of American passport holders, we were waved right through. It's a completely different story for Palestinians who want to cross the other way.

Our first stop was Bethlehem Bible College, a wonderful little gem of Christian witness here in the town of Jesus' birth and in the midst of a predominately Muslim population.

Dr. Awad, one of the directers here, graciously hosted us and gave a presentation on what the College strives to do in reaching the community for the cause of the Gospel and in training up Christian leaders to help put that vision into action. He also talked a lot (from his position as both a Christian and a Palestinian) about how the world-wide Church can and should act on behalf of justice and truth and peace regarding the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The day before we had been visited by an Israeli who talked on exactly the same conflict, but naturally from a different perspective. The combination of both these talks have given us a LOT to think about. This is good. It's also bewildering. Most Evangelicals are raised in a very pro-Israel atmosphere; this is also my background. I have, however, read a good deal about the creation of the modern state of Israel in 1947-8 in preparation for coming here, and I have come to the conclusion that nobody is innocent in this equation. I'm still far from done with processing my experiences, but I keep coming back to the thought that that Jesus cares far more about His Kingdom than political borders. I'm starting to see that perhaps I can be pro-both sides in a way that can be so because I am pro-Christ and the redemption that only He can bring. There have been many conversations among all of us on this topic, and we are all trying to process and wrestle with a deeply complex issue and problem. There is no simple solution. At least not politically. But we serve a God who delights in making all things new. Bring your peace quickly Lord! The whole earth groans in expectation... and we along with it...

Then we set out for the Church of the Nativity itself! What a special place and moment. First of all, let's get back to sightlines again. From Bethlehem you can see all the way down into the Rift Valley! All the way to Jordan! Who would have thought. The views are incredible to the east! This also means that anybody traveling from the East could technically have been able to see a star or comet or whatever hovering above this place from a very long way off. The Church of the Nativity was a great way to round out the day. It's very old, from the mid-6th century (!) and you have to stoop through a very low and narrow gateway to enter the church from the plaza. I found some more neat Greek and Latin inscriptions, and then proceeded downstairs to the lower chapel where according to tradition Jesus was born, with a tiny nook right next to it where Jesus was first laid in the manger. According to tradition. Regardless of where it actually was, we were all right there in Bethlehem near where it took place. The event. The Incarnation of God. Immanuel -- God with us. Blessed with the amazing opportunity to reflect on my Savior in both the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the Church of the Nativity in the space of a mere 18 hours, I sat down in the manger niche, quietly read both nativity narratives (Matt. and Luke), then pulled out my journal, and wrote down some thoughts:

What a strange way to save the world.

God came down here. To be with us.

To walk in our footsteps but even more so that we might learn to walk in his footsteps.

Right as I finished, and as I was singing one of my favorite Christmas songs in my head, I suddenly was overwhelmed with emotion. A special moment.

On our way out of Bethlehem, we stopped by an old pre-industrial threshing floor where we talked about the story of Boaz and Ruth. It is a story of loss and redemption. It was a fitting way to end a long and challenging day.

Even though the weather has been comparatively mild, the combination of lots of sun exposure and going all day since 7 am has hit a lot of us harder than we thought it would. The last thing we want to do is get weary already, or start complaining. Fortunately, we are having amazing experiences and get to do so amidst a great community. We have plenty to keep our spirits up, and we will all get more used to the long days. I know I will once I stop forgetting to put on sunscreen! :-)

Tomorrow -- the road to Jericho!

Thursday (5/28) - Up on the Mount

2009-05-29T10:59:00.000-07:00

Thursday was a relatively quiet day for most of us, with a free morning and then classes during the afternoon that served as an overview of geographical considerations of the land of Palestine, ranging from drainage basins to soil types to underlying bedrock types (go Eocene!) and how they all visibly affect the land and its vegetation and its habitation patterns. That was a lot to cover! We will all soon be topography experts, have no doubt.

What we all did with the free morning then is what I'll discuss here. A large group of us decided it was the time to head up to the Temple Mount itself to visit the Muslim holy precinct, with the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque. To say these are important places is complete understatement. If you don't know about these, please check the above links out. Muslims associate the "Rock" with Abraham and Isaac (so do Jews and Christians) but also the ascension of Mohammed to heaven.

Furthermore, it seems very clear to me that the Dome of the Rock is most likely built precisely on the site of the Jewish Temple itself -- the continuity of holy space is evidence enough. It is interesting to note that after the Romans crushed the last Jewish revolt in Jerusalem in AD 135 and kicked all the Jews out (for centuries), they built up on the Temple Mount a great Temple to Jupiter. Thus, the Dome of the Rock replaced whatever the Romans or Byzantines last had up there rather than the Jewish Temple.

After passing through security, we climbed a big wooden ramp that led up to a narrow gate in the western side of the platform wall. This entrance is right next to the Western Wall (the specific place famous to Judaism, not in general the whole western side of the Temple Mount), so it's quite a surreal juxtaposition to pass overhead the hundreds (or more) of Orthodox Jews reciting the Torah outloud and milling about and then to enter the gateway onto the Temple Mount and suddenly be met by silence and what could only be described as, to me, an alien world. The architecture is completely different. The clothing is completely different. There is no background drone of recitation (not out in public areas at least). It's just bizarre. I approached the Dome of the Rock and tried to think about how I was standing right next to what was once the Holy of Holies. (it is for this reason that observant Jews are religiously forbidden from going onto the Temple Mount) But... I couldn't really envision it. The top up there is all Muslim space now. You can feel it just walking around. For the first time on this trip I felt like I really didn't belong somewhere, that I was an intruder. It's not that I was unwelcome, that's not true. I was welcome to come there as a tourist. But I didn't feel like I belonged up there. I just couldn't relate to it. Maybe others could, I don't know. Maybe that's how Middle-Eastern background Muslims feel when they visit thoroughly Christian places, I don't know. All in all, a memorable experience.
Not least because I got into a charming conversation with four 12-yr old Muslim girls (in full garb) who wanted to practice their English and show off their two pet mini turtles .... and then I promptly got in trouble by mosque security for talking to children. Well, specifically for taking their picture, which I asked their permission for first. But I suppose 12 yr-olds don't get the final say in such matters. The guard demanded my camera and identification and deleted the photos and then handed it back. Lesson learned!

I'll close with a few pictures of interest. In a future post I hope to show some more pictures of this fun, quirky place we're staying in to give everyone a visual look at what we now call home for the next few weeks, but for now I give you this pic I snapped of a couple Wheaties enjoying the verdant grounds while doing some journaling of their experiences. We certainly are experiencing a lot and have a lot to process.

And finally I want to show an example of something that I personally get terribly excited about: Greek and Latin! As the Classical Languages prof at Wheaton, of course I have been practically dying to see what kind of fun inscriptions or other epigraphy we'll stumble across (and which I can then point out excitedly to my former Greek or Latin students on the trip)! I give you one here -- can you see why they're so much fun? :-)

This is a fresco in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and depicts Judas's betrayal of Jesus. Here is the Greek text of the above photograph again in all its stylized orthographic glory!

Can you make any of it out? It's actually an abbreviated form of Matthew 26:47 -49. This reads: "Behold, Judas came and a great crowd with him with swords and wooden clubs; and coming up to Jesus he said, 'Hello, Rabbi.' And he kissed him." Gotta love it! I'm getting better at identifying ligatures and abbreviated forms in the orthography. :-)

* * * * * *

And what about the group that had the chance to stay overnight at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre? They did it! And the Armenian priest had so much fun he was happy to host another group Thursday night and I got to go! Can you believe it?! I got to spend 4+ hours locked up in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre after hours along with 9 other Wheaton students at the invitation of the Armenian superior who helps oversee the famous holy site of Jesus' death and resurrection -- what an honor! And what an amazing, unbelievable treasured experience! BUT as you can probably guess that deserves its own blog post.
Until then...

Our Merry Band of Adventurers

2009-05-28T07:21:00.000-07:00

Here is a group photo of WIHL 09! (missing two people)
We are sitting on the ruins of Robinson's Arch with the SW corner of the Temple Mount behind us.

We have come together wonderfully as a group and are looking forward to our journeys still to come. Thanks for keeping us all in your prayers!

Wed (5/27) - On the Steps of Jesus

2009-05-28T05:32:00.000-07:00

Wednesday was another good day. It was also the first day in which we saw clouds, which passed overhead in patches most all day, giving us welcome shade now and then. In truth, the weather here has been generally awesome so far! We've had highs of mid-70s numerous times, with lows at night in the 50s, really wonderful weather. It's also been dry, so not much of that oppressive humidity. We have already been told that things will be a wee bit different when we hit the Dead Sea or the coastal areas later in our stay. :-)

Wednesday morning we had classes on the natural world of Palestine: the water systems, growing seasons, agricultural life, all of which helps illuminate the Bible in deep ways. After lunch, we spent the next few hours exploring the new archaeological park at the southern edges of the Temple Mount area, which explain a lot of the excavations that have been done in this area up until recently. One of the neat things to see was a well-excavated Roman street that passed by the SE corner of the Mount (the so-called "Pinnacle of the Temple").

As Dr. Wright explained, we know Jesus would have walked down this street at some point surely...but the paving stones we see were put in about 30 years after Jesus' time as part of regular road construction work to redo the old street, so NO we didn't actually walk in the steps of Jesus there. However, we next went to the excavated steps along the southern flank of the Temple Mount, where in the time of Jesus (as indeed the whole Second Temple Period 516 BC - AD 70) rows and rows of steps led worshipers up toward the Grand Portico, the ritual baths, and the entrances onto the Temple precinct itself. We do know that Jesus would have passed this way on his way into and out of the Temple area, and it is likely that some of his speeches from the last week of his life would have taken place here. What a thrill it was to find out that the lowest rows of excavated steps were actually from the First Century! Now that's a feeling of suddenly encountering the real force of history come alive! Needless to say, we were all pretty excited!

For me, climbing the steps (even if the upper tiers are modern reconstruction) and touching the places on the walls where the ancient entrances once stood (now they're walled in) was quite moving. It is odd to think that now what lies on the other side is a holy precinct entirely dedicated to Islam. I also found some little folded slips of paper tucked into the cracks in the rocks, much like you find at the Western Wall.

These are written prayers to God tucked in there carefully by observant Jews asking for God's blessings and peace and of course ultimately the restoration to them of their Temple.

After that we headed to the Church of St. Anna, built in the Crusader Period (~12th century) to honor the alleged birthplace of Mary, mother of Jesus. This church was beautiful in its simplicity and especially in its acoustics! What an amplifying echo sound in this stone church! To take advantage of the moment, we all sat in rows and sang three songs. What an amazing experience. Voices raised in harmony and community is a powerful thing. (see below!)

Here we also visited the Pools of Bethesda where Jesus healed the crippled man (John 5:1-9).

As you can see, we have fun spots to hold class outside on our field trips!

On our way out, we bumped into one of the main priests of the White Fathers order which maintains the St. Anna Church, and a fairly hilarious conversation ensued with this kind elderly man that eventually ended up on how he is learning Russian on Skype from some other churchmen he met recently. Ah, a reminder that we are always students and learners, no matter our age or stage in life!

Our final stop on our way home was the Austrian Hospiz (think fancy hostel for adults) and its wonderful roof-top view. Apparently, most people don't know about this gem, which the public can access for free if they but ask politely at the front desk!

What a place to catch a sunrise as one looks south and east over the rest of the tight streets of the Old City, filled to overflowing with its homes, shops, churches, mosques, synagogues, steeples, minarets, Jews, Muslims, Christians, soldiers with guns, and of course tourists who jump into the mix. I hope that the picture above conveys just how tightly packed everything is -- Westerners really need to leave their ideas about "city space" behind when talking about this essentially medieval city where everything is pretty much stacked on top of each other. An amazing place.

Speaking of amazing...
1) There are rumors that one of our students knows someone who knows one of the priests who lives in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and can get some of our group into the church after it is locked at night (which is a whole story in and of itself...for another time)! They're going tonight if they can! (more on this to come...)

2) Listen to the sounds of Wheaton in Jerusalem!

Until next time...

Tuesday Adventures

2009-05-27T13:56:00.000-07:00

What a day we had yesterday (Tuesday 5/26)! We’re all slowly coming to grips with the bewildering wonder, simplicity, and complexity of this place. I put those words together intentionally. The sheer uniqueness of this place, the Holy City of Jerusalem, continues to strike me. It’s hard to put into words. Over the course of our time here, I’ll try to put thoughts to words as much as possible. One thing that has become remarkably clear to my mind just in my few days here is the sheer, utter, irreplaceable importance of THE LAND. It’s central to understanding the setting of the Biblical texts, both the Old Testament and the Gospels. It’s central to understanding the people and their politics, both ancient and modern. You can’t hardly open any passage of the Old Testament and not see the significance of the LAND come shining through.

We’ve been specifically challenged to ask the question: What makes this land of Canaan / Palestine “Holy”? What makes it special? And why would God choose this strange place for a home for His chosen people and for His temple?

We are all just beginning to grasp that the physical, rock/soil/tree/water-source/hill-after-hill LAND is so important to understanding, well, pretty much everything. I’m getting that this is why it’s so valuable for people to come here, to come as learners who will walk the land and get the feel for it and not just come as religious tourists to see a few sites and then leave. That is also valuable if that’s all that time allows, but that approach only merely scratches the surface. Boy, three weeks here will fly by and leave us I think with the feeling that we’ve only just begun.

***** *****
On to Tuesday’s activities! We started the day (early!) at 7am for a solid morning’s walk into the Old City again, this time to see a few Old Testament–connected sites. We got to see an excavated section of the city walls of Jerusalem that was likely built by King Hezekiah of Judah (the so-called “Broad Wall”). Like everything around here, the excavation is just smack in the middle of a tightly-packed part of the city, with homes looming on all sides. Next, we strolled downhill south out of the city through the Dung Gate (can anyone guess why the gate here at the lowest downhill point of the city would be called that?) and onward to a low rise south of the SE part of the Old City. Here is a view of the hills to the E and SE near the southern edge of the Old City walls.

This is the original "City of David" before the Temple was built and the city expanded to the north. (visible in the picture above as the slight rise in the center of the photo above just to the left of the crenel) What really kind of shocked us was how comparatively low this hill is compared to its surroundings. The "City of David" as he would have known it doesn't even lie inside the current city walls! Check out this neat web site to get a visual of the topography here and a neat historical sliding timeline to show what the area looked like at different times in history. Here we paused to read from a couple psalms with an entirely new visual context in mind:

Psalm 121:1 - "I will lift up my eyes to the hills; from whence shall my help come? My help comes from the Lord who made heaven and earth." From David's City all you can see are hills of higher elevation in every direction. You would need to trust in Yahweh to protect you in that vulnerable position.

Psalm 125:1-2 - "Those who trust in the Lord are as Mt. Zion [Mt. Moriah, aka the Temple Mount, which is uphill as you look north from David's City], which cannot be moved but abides forever. As the mountains surround Jerusalem so the Lord surrounds His people from this time forth and forever."

The hills do indeed surround the city at this point! So...why would they build the original city here at all and not up higher on the defensible mountain top? It's simple -- this lower location had access to WATER! And that's where we set off next, to explore the Gihon Spring and the famous Tunnel of Hezekiah (read II Kings 20:20)! For defensive purposes, Hezekiah excavated a tunnel underneath the city over 1600 feet long (!) to redirect the spring water from outside to a point inside the city. Being the intrepid explorers that we Wheaties are, of course most of us chose to hike through the tunnel! And yes, at times we waded through water up to three feet deep!

The water was cold, the tunnel was about 2 feet wide and at times only 5 feet high, and naturally it was pitch black in there without the help of the headlamps some of us had brought along. I tell you, that was an eerie (and awesome) experience, with rushing water at your feet, the ceiling closing down on your head, and random beams of light flashing back and forth in front and behind. Definitely a highlight thus far!

After dinner a few of us decided to head back out to explore the Old City a bit more as the sun was setting. We kind of intentionally got lost to see what we would stumble across, and after some meanderings I looked up and with a start noticed that there was Latin on the wall above me: III STATIO. We'd found the Third Station of the Cross on the Via Dolorosa! (for those unfamiliar with the stations, see here) We don't know quite where Jesus would have actually fallen for the first time under the weight of the cross (the current street system didn't exist at that time anyway), but it was somewhere in this city! Such little discoveries can really put things into perspective.

Our final discovery tonight really put things into perspective for our little band. Once again lost while trying to get back home, we suddenly saw a little tiny sign pointing down a little tiny alley: "Western Wall." We took it and suddenly we found ourselves facing the Western Wall plaza! There were hundreds of observant Jews in the cool of the night walking back and forth, reciting the Torah, praying at the base of the wall, etc. There were very few tourists about and we were able to stay there for a while just taking in the scene and the importance of the place.

What a scene -- the Jews approach the exposed ancient foundation stones of the Temple Mount to mourn the destruction of the Temple and look up to see the Dome of the Rock there...and Muslims who live in town watch huge crowds of Jews gather daily at the Western Wall to pray that God gets rid of the Muslim holy sites up there and rebuilds his holy temple. And Muslims also get to watch IDF military personnel walk throughout the entire city with prominently displayed automatic rifles. The layers of symbols of power here are so fascinating. And a cause for some sadness...when will peace ever come to this land except at the point of a sword or a gun? To the Jews, the Temple Mount is the place where God made contact with earth -- it is the holiest place in the world. It is the veritable center of the created order. Watching the Jews worshiping in such reverence in such surroundings was a moving experience.

What is this place to me? Does God really think the Temple area is still special in some way? Didn't Jesus declare that we should look to him now, that our redeemed lives would be the new Temples as places where the Spirit of the Most High dwelled? Or is Jerusalem still special, a place more holy somehow? I wonder. God surely remembers His past glory and worship here. And we should remember too. I think that means something.

First Impressions

2009-05-25T20:52:00.000-07:00

[Updated]
One day down! Yesterday was our first day in Jerusalem, and it was a fairly overwhelming experience for the senses and indeed one's sense of history. I don't have much time, as our group leaves in about ten minutes, so here's some scattered first impressions:

* * * * * * *
Yesterday we walked around the Old City all over. There are 4 "quarters" to the walled Old City: Christian, Armenian, Jewish, and Muslim. They all have their own churches and mosques and synagogues competing for the same precious plots of holy ground. SUCH a mixture of peoples all on top of each other. It is also true that the quarters retain their own distinct architecture and culture, and predominant people as well. We ended with a visit to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which was built over many centuries and is supposed to encompass the various places where Jesus was crucifed and buried and resurrected. Whoah! That's a lot for one church to commemorate! Nobody knows with certainty where the crucifixion and burial took place, but there is a very high likelihood that the ground the church occupies is at least within a hundred yards or so where they happened! It's such a large thought to think about, I'm not quite sure what to do with all of it ... so I feel both overwhelmed and underwhelmed at the same time, if that makes any kind of sense.

Here you see a picture from inside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the dome above the supposed burial chamber of Jesus.

But I saw the place where they say the cross stood and where they say the tomb was. We didn't spend the time to wait in the long line to actually go inside -- we'll do that in a few days we're told. One thing that does make sense instantly to a visitor is how absolutely hilly everything is. Wow. Not handicap accessible like pretty much anywhere. We will all get workouts every day I think. :-)

I close with a picture taken from a vantage point looking out toward the Temple area, now dominated by the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque. The Western Wall (aka "Wailing Wall") is down at the foot of the mount. If you don't know the full details about the Western Wall, read this. This place is important. Jerusalem -- the Holy City -- is where the monotheistic faiths of the world collide. I'll let it speak for itself.

Off now for another day in the Old City! Today will be a look at certain Old Testament sites -- and we've even heard rumor of an underground tunnel complete with water we have to wade through! Check back for more...

We are here!

2009-05-24T21:59:00.000-07:00

Yes, it's true -- we are here! I am typing this from my room on the 3rd floor of Jerusalem University College, and I am so excited to be here and to take it all in. And I'm also SO tired. I don't have much time here before I crash, but here's a brief run-down of what has transpired for us in the last couple days.

First, we packed and loaded the vans. Everyone was full of anticipation. There was even a pre-trip dance party on the lawn of Blanchard! (yes, that's true, and no, it's probably not what you're thinking.

We made it to O'Hare just fine and then embarked on a very long flight to Zurich, Switzerland, where we had a 10+ hour layover. I don't sleep well on flights at all, and this trip was no exception. However, I found a second wind and after splitting into groups (nobody goes out alone!) we spread out all over Zurich to explore this historic and beautiful city.

Among our Wheatie activities (not all done by me): strolling along the riverside, exploring back alleys for fun cafes, strolling the lakeshore (Zurich lake is quite huge), renting paddleboats, finding shade, taking trains into the countryside, climbing church towers for panoramic views (see above!) and even spotting off in the hazy distance across the lake the Alps! We reconvened for dinner at the airport and then took our final leg to Israel. This was another over-nighter, such that we landed about 4am local time. Some students have managed to sleep a bit on the flights, but I think I've totaled 6 total hours of sleep over the past 3 nights combined! Hopefully that will soon change.

We were met by some fine folks from JUC at the airport, then we all piled into a bus and drove up and up and up into the hill country toward Jerusalem. The benefit of driving at that crazy early hour of the morning is that there is virtually nobody around and you have the rare and rewarding experience of entering Jerusalem just before sunrise and having it all to yourself! I couldn't help but hear a stream of "Ooh's" and "Aaah's" coming from behind me all over the bus. I must say I joined in too. We drove into Jerusalem as far as we could toward JUC, stopping only when the towering stone walls of the Old City of Jerusalem came into view right in front of us. We were told that the final street was too tight for the bus so we'd have to carry our luggage the last quarter of a mile up the hill. This is a pic I snapped as our students were crossing the street, with the masonry walls looming overhead.

Can you believe it! We're really here! I now get my sweet reward of a few hours rest, before lunch and then our first exploration this afternoon. Our on-site professor here, Paul Wright, will lead us on a walking tour of the Old City, passing through the Via Dolorosa and culminating in a visit to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre! Today! I will say more about our welcome surroundings here at JUC in a future post, as well as say more about our coming day's adventures. Until then, thank you for praying for all of us, and please keep lifting us up. We are ready to become learners.

Some basics

2009-05-23T13:09:00.001-07:00

The bus leaves in 1 hour! Thus, I will make this update short and to the point.
For those who are following our journey from home, here are some basics:

1) Israel is 8 hours ahead of Chicago time (central daylight savings). Israel is also on daylight savings. Thus, if you want to Skype with your child or friend, please note that if it is 3 pm in Chicago, it is 11 pm in Jerusalem. For more info on this (and a handly weather forecast for Jerusalem), see this page.
2) We will be staying at Jerusalem University College for most of our time in Israel.
3) To find where JUC is in Google Maps, click here. It is on Aravnah HaYevusi between Mitchell Garden and the Greek Orthodox Cemetery. Yes, we are THAT close to the Old City with all its historical sites! We can't wait.

Okay! See you in the Holy Lands!

Tomorrow we are Canaan Bound

2009-05-22T17:40:00.000-07:00

One of my absolute favorite songs in the whole world is a hauntingly beautiful tune by Andrew Peterson entitled "Canaan Bound." Tonight in a time of prayer and reflection, I had the privilege of playing the song for the gathered students. The lyrics are powerful -- they have at times brought tears to my eyes. I print them here in their entirety, because they are worth reading:

* * * * * * *
Sarah, take me by my arm
Tomorrow we are Canaan bound
Where westward sails the golden sun
And Hebron's hills are amber crowned

So bid your troubled heart be still
The grass, they say, is soft and green
The trees are tall and honey-filled
So, Sarah, come and walk with me

Like the stars across the heavens flung
Like water in the desert sprung
Like the grains of sand, our many sons
Oh, Sarah, fair and barren one
Come to Canaan, come

I trembled at the voice of God
A voice of love and thunder deep
With love He means to save us all
And Love has chosen you and me

Long after we are dead and gone
A thousand years our tale be sung
How faith compelled and bore us on
How barren Sarah bore a son
So come to Canaan, come

Where westward sails the golden sun
And Hebron's hills are amber crowned
Oh, Sarah, take me by my arm
Tomorrow we are Canaan Bound

* * * * *
With a start, I realized tonight in the gathering that it was actually TRUE for us!
Tomorrow we are Canaan bound.

Winding down on campus

2009-05-21T21:46:00.000-07:00

Our week on campus is nearing its end, as formal classes here end tomorrow (Friday). To give you a taste of what it's been like, here is a picture of what we've been doing a lot this week -- sitting in class!

In this particular image Dr. Lauber is giving us a basic introduction to Roman Catholicism. Each day one of the BITH professors comes in and gives a 3-hour crash course lecture on a topic of historical, theological, or Bible-textual significance to our trip. This happens twice a day, one before lunch and then another afterwards. This has been a great time to stretch our comfort zones -- and this afternoon (Thurs) I even got the treat of translating for the class an ancient Roman tombstone in Latin! May it be the first of many. :-)

The students have been keeping busy outside of class time in a variety of ways. Some are scrambling to finish their map projects before we leave, some take advantage of the sunny, peaceful lawn in front of Blanchard, others have been organizing games of ultimate frisbee and soccer in the evenings, and everyone in general is getting more and more excited for our trip! Only about 40 hours away! Meal times have been a great time for getting acquainted. I even think I've got almost all of their names down by now. (sorry Brendan about today, I'll get it don't worry :-)

Friday night we will be having a group time of reflection and prayer as we dedicate these next 6 weeks for God's glory. Please join us in praying that we will remember to put each other before ourselves, love each other, rejoice in the blessing of sharing these adventures, and especially that God will use these next weeks to mould each of us more into His image.

I might find time to give a last Wheaton-side update before we leave on Saturday, but if not -- see you in Israel (after a sure-to-be-adventuresome 12 hour layover in Zurich)!

All aboard!

2009-05-13T21:06:00.000-07:00

Pax vobis gratiaque Domini nostri!

All aboard...

This is an informal blog for the 2009 Wheaton in the Holy Lands program. I am one of the three leaders of the program (my info here) and I'll be updating this blog as often as possible throughout the course of our many travels and adventures. I say this is an informal blog because I want to make clear that this will represent my own personal voice and is not meant to be an official voice of Wheaton College per se.

The reason I'm setting up this channel of communication is to provide updates of our travels for friends and family of those who are participating. I know how much those left behind often want to know the progress of those who get to go on such adventures, so this is meant to be a place to find out!

For program info, click here.

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In this first post, I'll lay out the purpose of this first week of the program. Wheaton in the Holy Lands (hereafter WIHL, since typing all that out each time will get tiring!) officially started last Sunday night (5/17) as the students checked into their temporary housing and reconvened for a time of getting to know one another better and in general discuss how the week would proceed. This first week is a time of preparation here on campus, and the students take 6 hours of coursework per day. This can be mentally taxing, but I've noticed a good amount of frisbee-playing and other relaxing diversions that help break up the day. Saturday morning they will take an exam covering the various subjects they have studied. Then, Saturday afternoon we will say our last goodbyes to Wheaton and board the bus for O'Hare and our flight to the Holy Lands! (actually, first Zurich...but that's another blog post)

In the next post, I'll say a little bit more about the on-campus classes the students are taking and some of the subjects we are engaging with. I've sat in on about half of them so far, and it has been a good time of building a stronger foundation for our appreciation of what we will see and experience culturally, historically, and theologically. But that's all I'll say for now. Off to supper with the WIHLers and then a time of praise and worship afterwards!

For those who will read this blog and follow along from time to time, please do keep us in your prayers! (and feel free to leave comments and/or questions!)