Move to Jerusalem

At the Orthodox Church

Thursday was our free day and it was as beautiful as the previous day was nasty. At noon several of us rode the bus with Taleb up to “St. Peter’s Restaurant” in Capernaum, a mile or two past the ancient site, right on the sea. It was beautiful there. What was even more splendid was walking back from there, stopping along the way, first at the Greek Orthodox Church of the Seven Apostles at Capernaum, which is a garden of Eden outside, filled with lush trees, hens, ducks, peacocks, and an eyeful of color inside. 

Orthodox Church grounds

Then we stopped and wandered at the ancient site of Capernaum again, and then walked the new sidewalk back past the Primacy of Peter and the church at Tabgha to our hotel. A lovely day for a long sunny stroll.

Inside wall painting--saints in Abraham's bosom

Group shot at Caesarea Maritima Aqueduct

Friday we left Pilgerhaus to drive to Megiddo, then to Caesarea Maritima on the Mediterranean coast. We ate sandwiches and waded in the sea at the aqueduct, then drove on to Jerusalem. In the late afternoon, after checking in to our hotel, we dressed up and met Debbie Weissman at the progressive orthodox synagogue Kehillat Yedidya, where I have taken many groups to enjoy the Friday evening service.

Poria Hospital

Some pictures from the Galilee trip are interspersed with this story. 

Communion service Sunday morning, Mt of Beatitudes

Reconstructed Byzantine home in Chorazim

It rained on us most every day in the Galilee, and when it wasn’t raining it was threatening to do so. This is the rainy season, and the land has needed it badly for several years. I’ve been here many Januaries when there was no rain, and there had been no rain all winter. So though I know they would have preferred the sunshine, the group was more than cheerful about getting wet. And besides, the hills were very, very green.

Crusader capital, mint condition

The hardest day was the Wednesday, when we went to Zippori (Sepphoris) and Nazareth. It had rained and stormed all night, and it rained on us all day as we walked around what is usually a lovely archaeological site, and then made our way through the crowded streets of Nazareth to the Church of the Annunciation and the Church of St. Joseph. Much happened—there were the usual wonders of the little museum under the church, where caves were found that probably resembled the home of Mary and Joseph in Nazareth, and where the amazing Crusader-carved column capitals were found buried, which had never been used and thus still retained all their intricacy of faces and figures, each capital telling a different story from the New Testament.

Kathy and Jennifer, Arbel

Hyrax (also called coney or rock rabbit)

But then one of our group, Susan, fell and hurt her shoulder badly, and ultimately she and I and another pilgrim, Rebecca, who is a nurse, took a trip to the hospital. That in itself was an amazing education in alternative medical systems. This hospital was south of Tiberius in the town of Poria. The first language on signs, as well as in speech, was Hebrew. The second was Arabic. The third was Russian. A distant fourth was English. According to the website one of its specialities is to serve a diverse population of Christians, Muslims, secular, religious, and very religious Jews, Druze, Bedouins, and foreign pilgrims. The doctor who saw us almost immediately seemed sweet and spoke very little English. He pointed the way to the X-ray department—“Right, right, left! Right, right, left!”

Jane and me at Banias Falls

We got to a double door with huge signs on both doors in big red Hebrew letters saying, “No admittance without a magnetic card.” Very menacing. A small sign over the doors included the word “X-ray” in English letters, and we could see people waiting inside, but we didn’t see the authorized way in. We waited for someone to come out and we walked in, quickly got the X-ray, walked (Right, left, left) back to the exam room. By then the doctor had seen it and determined that something was broken. He got out a medical book to show us pictures to explain it, put a “stockinget” sling on the patient, and sent us back to collect a CD copy of the X-ray to take home to the U.S. doctor.

Heron on lakeshore

That didn’t work. We were supposed to go pay first (amazingly, the whole bill was as small as our wait was short—less than $300, which someone later commented would have been the co-pay just for an MRI back in the U.S.). So after the bill was settled, we returned again to X-ray (right, right, left). This time no one came out the door to let us in. We tried a few things on the keypad before I saw a hand-lettered sign on poster board next to it that said, “For admittance press 5555.” So much for the red-letter signs. So much for locking the doors at all.

While we were waiting for the cab to return to Pilgerhaus, we realized that a doctor who had taken courses at the seminary with me, including an Israel trip, and goes to church with Rebecca, and knows all three of us, and whose son is an orthopedist in Louisville—his phone number was in my Iphone. So we called him, and before we were back to the hotel his son had called and made an appointment with Susan as soon as she returns home.

I’ve been to Zippori and Nazareth a dozen times, and I certainly hoped to stay out of the hospital on this trip, but our patient is doing very well, and visiting the hospital in Poria was an experience not to be missed.The treatment was not characterized by endless protections against any kind of frivolous lawsuit. It was fast, friendly, inexpensive, and according to the specialist in the U.S., accurate.

In the Galilee

Part of the beautiful mosaic floor at Tabgha

On Friday in the Tel Aviv airport I caught up with my co-leader Jane Larsen-Wigger and the twenty pastors from the Louisville area who are traveling with us. We are now at Pilgerhaus beside the Sea of Galilee in northern Israel. On Saturday, Sunday, and Monday we did not travel far—the first day we visited Tabgha, the place of the seven springs (Heptapagon), where a Byzantine church was built commemorating Jesus’ feeding of the five thousand with two fish and five loaves of bread. This church was destroyed, possibly  by the Persian invasion in 614 C.E., or possibly by the Muslims who came later in the century. After that it was forgotten until the 1930s, when the mosaic floor was found by archaeologists. A new church was built on the site in the 1980s, incorporating the ancient floors. 

At the Primacy of Peter

The modern church in Capernaum

Looking down at ancient house, house church, and octagonal church

We also visited the church of the Primacy of Peter which is nearby, then drove to Capernaum, the town Jesus moved to from Nazareth as a adult. The house of Jesus’ disciple Peter is close to the sea. It became a worship site: first a “house church” was built from his home, then over this in later centuries another, octagonal Byzantine church was built. Like the Tabgha church, it were destroyed and forgotten until the twentieth century, when a flying saucer-shaped church was built on pillars over the whole thing, so that visitors can still go underneath, and look down through glass windows inside, to see the ancient ruins. Nearby is a large fifth-century synagogue, probably built in the same place where the synagogue would have been in the first century.

What is striking in Capernaum is the proximity of Peter’s home (and later the church) to the synagogue, reminding us that the earliest Christians were Jews, and that for them as well as for Gentile Christians, early Christianity were not so much a different religion as a sect within Judaism.

Capernaum synagogue

I’ve been to Capernaum many times, and I told the group that it is one of my favorite places. Capernaum reminds me of the concreteness of Jesus’ life—he wasn’t a figure in a fairy tale in some non-existent place, but a historical person who walked and ate and slept and worked and tried to do his best with the vocation and circumstances he was given, just as we do. There were four Jewish towns in the northwest corner of the Sea of Galilee—going from south to north they were Magdala (south of Tabgha), Capernaum (north of Tabgha), Bethsaida (further north, where the Jordan River flows into the lake), and Chorazin (in the hills behind Capernaum). It was a very small area that could easily be walked. Jesus expressed frustration with three out of four of these towns because they didn’t listen to him as he thought they should (Matt 11:21-23). It’s a relief to know he could feel frustrated and thwarted as we do.

The group by the Sea of Galilee (minus one)

Yet connecting this minute beginning with what I saw in western Turkey three weeks ago, eight or nine Roman cities in which churches were established and grew in a land relatively far away, and what I will see in Greece next month, Athens and Thessaloniki—a city in northern Greece, true Europe, which became the recipient of the earliest letter of Paul—I am inspired to think Jesus’ efforts bore fruit far beyond what it must have seemed was possible on the day he became frustrated with Chorazin, Bethsaida, and Capernaum.

The group is keeping another blog at: www.louhlp2012.blogspot.com.