Welcome To Communion

My attention was caught by the following paragraphs about a Palestinian family      living on the Gaza Strip.

The Salach's main family home was destroyed in 2001. Eight Israeli bulldozers crossed the nearby border and flattened the fields. Shortly thereafter, they came back and flattened the home with some family members still inside. That day Abu Assad, the Salach family grandfather, had a stroke, and he and his wife, Om Assad, were taken to the hospital. By the end of the day, Om Assad had lost her husband, her home, and the trees that had adorned the family's fields. She moved half a kilometer down the road to her other son's home.    Today, Israel has taken him as well.

Despite a cease-fire, five of the Salach family members remain imprisoned  without even a court case. Their fields still lie in ruin as the Israeli army fires at them when they try and approach it. Their old home remains demolished while the memories of the past continue to haunt them daily.

Assad and Sa'id used to collect the tank shells, things of ugliness, which Israel fired on them as they tended to their goats and fields. They would paint them, fill them with flowers, and turn them into vases -- things of beauty. "The day they started doing that the Israelis almost completely stopped firing at us,"    Assad's wife told me. As soon as the media spread pictures of their act --   turning death into life, ugliness into beauty -- the shells stopped falling. When the men were detained, so were the vases.

                     Philip Rizk is an Egyptian-German Christian who lived and worked in Gaza from 2005-2007.          Extract from Turning Weapons into Things of Beauty in Gaza in Sojourners

Communion invites us to become participants in the drama of the crucifixion and burial and the resurrection of Jesus. The communion story is one of death and    ugliness. But it is also the story of turning death into life, of ugliness into beauty.

Lindsay

Informal Praise and Worship tonight at 7pm