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This Christmas morning, the Rev. David Pileggi will rise early in the Old City of Jerusalem, where he has lived for the past 43 years. As he has done so many times before, he will don his clerical garb before walking next to Christ Church Jerusalem, the oldest Protestant church in the Middle East, to officiate at Christmas services.
What will it say this year? Pileggi could be forgiven for being disconsolate in celebrating the birth of the “Prince of Peace,” when peace in the “Holy Land” must seem very far away. Some churches in Jerusalem have decided not to celebrate Christmas this year, in honor of all the lives lost and the sad situation in Israel and Gaza. But Pileggi will continue with his traditional Christmas practice.
Pileggi and his wife came to Jerusalem from the United States in 1980, intending to stay a year or two, but they never left. He immediately felt comfortable in his new surroundings. “I grew up in an Italian-American home. And the culture of my home life was very similar to the life of Jews and Arabs here,” he says. “So you could say that he was somewhat prepared for this task.”
Speaking to me from his office in the heart of the Old City, Pileggi explains that Christ Church has services in English, Hebrew and Arabic. On Sundays people of about 40 different nationalities attend. Pileggi loves the place and finds it exhilarating, faith-building, and exhausting.
Building bridges of understanding
A key activity of the church since its creation in 1823 has been finding ways for Jews and Arabs to work together to find common ground.
“We’re always trying to find ways to… build bridges of understanding, but I don’t do it with a seminar or an abstract philosophical lecture in a classroom. We do it on the ground,” Pileggi explains.
The Christ Church Mercy Fund serves people in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank. Until the war broke out, they helped cancer patients in Gaza receive treatment in Israeli or Palestinian hospitals. They have a team of lawyers (Arab Christians and Jewish Christians) who indiscriminately help the poor who need assistance in the region.
Christ Church Jerusalem has services in English, Hebrew and Arabic.(Supplied)
Pileggi says his life in Israel involves working between “two traumatized populations” with differences so intractable that more than political solutions are required. He believes that a spiritual change in people is both a necessary precursor and a real-life possibility on the path to reconciliation and peace. “If we can show mercy and empathy towards both sides, then I think there is hope for the future. So I won’t give up,” he says.
That mercy and empathy toward both sides is conspicuously absent in much of the debate over the current war in Gaza, with hard lines drawn between those who are “pro-Israel” or “pro-Palestinian.” Israeli writer Etgar Keret spoke to the New York Times about this disturbing dehumanizing trend and said:
“And when I see people watching the horrible tragedy that’s happening here like it’s a Super Bowl of victimhood, where you root for one team and you don’t really care about the other, empathy becomes very, very selective. It’s just “You see some pain. You don’t want to see other pain.”
Charging…
The shadow of October 7
But what kind of shadow have the October 7 attacks on Israel and the resulting war in Gaza cast on David Pileggi’s hopes for the future? Pileggi has been in Israel long enough to see a lot of violence and hatred, but he admits that recent events have been “shocking to the core.” There has been “a lot of suffering,” he says.
Dr. Salem Jai, originally from Jerusalem, knows that face of suffering. Jai works for World Vision in child health and development, working with the poorest children in the poorest area of the West Bank. He is a Palestinian Christian, a dwindling group of people often forgotten in discussions of the Middle East. He feels a powerful motivation to be a “good Samaritan” in places where the most vulnerable and marginalized are left without adequate services.
Jai cannot ignore the contrast between the life-giving, faith-inspired hope of his daily work and the evil violence that surrounds him. “You believe in a living God and that you must live and love people. You must forgive people, you must live in peace and you must seek justice… But you live in a place where death surrounds you on all sides,” he says . .
When thinking about Christmas and what it means to him this year in particular, Jai remains remarkably optimistic. He speaks of Christmas as a time to reflect, renew his mind and reflect on his blessings and the peace that, according to him, comes only from above. “I am very safe under his mercy and grace,” he tells me.
Gathering bitter enemies
This fearless spirit is in harmony with that of David Pileggi, who admits that he may seem like a naïve optimist in believing that embodying the message of Christ is the best hope for an intractable human conflict.
“The message of the gospel is that people of all nations, all languages and all cultures must retain their nationality, their ethnicity, their language or their culture, but… instead of killing each other, fight each other or always trying to dominate each other, we can really come together in unity.”
The Christ Church Mercy Fund serves people in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank.(Wikimedia Commons)
This is a summary of Pileggi’s upcoming Christmas sermon. He sees his priestly calling as working among people who are culturally bitter enemies and finding a way to unite them as one people. That’s what he believes the Christmas message is about.
And it is the story that will be told in the Old City of Jerusalem on Christmas morning. A defiant message of hope. “There is a way out of this dysfunction and out of this morass,” Pileggi says. “There is healing, there is reconciliation, there is wholeness… I think that’s the message of Jesus.”
I don’t know if the old carol “O Come O Come Emmanuel” will be on the Pileggi church list this year, but it would surely be appropriate if it were. Full of longing, melancholy and anticipation, he advocates for things we would all wish for, whether we are believers or not; whether in Jerusalem, Gaza or Parramatta: “O come, Desire of the nations, unite all peoples in one heart and mind; command that envy, strife and strife cease; fill the whole world with peace.” from the sky”.
Simon Smart is the executive director of the Center for Public Christianity.