People are literally A saved by faith.@

Dr. Martin Nemiroff, a Coast Guard flight surgeon who has participated in more than a thousand rescues of stranded people says, A Of all the possible factors which help a person survive a disaster, we cannot measure the most important, the will to live.@

Janet Culver, adrift in the ocean in a tiny rubber dinghy, stayed alive through driving rain and 16-foot waves. She was rescued by hanging on to the hope that if she survived one more day she would have another chance to be saved.

Judith Sleavin= s boat was rammed at night by a freighter off the coast of New Zealand. One of her children was killed on impact, and her husband and remaining child drowned a few hours later in the 50-knot winds and turbulent seas. She survived because she wanted to tell the world what had happened.

Todd Ludeman was buried alive under a Montana avalanche. As he felt himself on the brink of giving up to death because breathing was so difficult, he determined that he had to see his wife and children again. And in spite of being buried in the snow for a length of time that is normally considered fatal, he hung on and was rescued.

The A will to live,@ A faith,@ A hope@ kept them alive. These are marvelous stories, and they contain an important lesson and kernel of truth.

But are they all that A faith@ is about?

As much as we like to make the faith about spiritual enlightenment or ethical ideals or the broad love of God that inspires tolerance, the truth is that the gospel is at root a rescue story.

Even the name of Jesus, Yeshuah, means A the Lord saves.@

But is it just a personal rescue story?

Is it really only about A Just as I am, without one plea...?@ And can we truly be rescued, A saved,@ when the storm still rages all around us?

I don= t know if these are questions you wrestle with, but they are questions I wrestle with since visiting Israel. One of the more powerful experiences I had on the pilgrimage was the trip to Bethlehem. Not because we visited the site of Jesus= birth but because Bethlehem is a Palestinian controlled area.

To get to Bethlehem from Jerusalem, you have to cross the Separation Wall, which is a tall concrete wall that looks like the sound barriers alongside our highways in the U.S. On the Israeli side, the wall is clean and stark looking, except for a colorful banner right next to the opening gate that says, A Peace Be With You; The Ministry of Tourism.@

Go through the wall and on the other side there is graphic, colorful, graffiti with pointed messages about what the wall and the Israeli policies are doing to the Palestinians.

Cross the wall and you are in a different world; filled with poverty, high unemployment, a greater sense of despair.

Speaking with a Palestinian Christian, an Orthodox priest, who has lived in Bethlehem his entire life, we heard stories of restricted movement of Palestinians by Jewish authorities, a restricted economy, a sense of living in prison.

While in Jerusalem we also visited with a Jewish couple who had emigrated from the U.S. who were living in a settlement in the West Bank area that is on the list to be turned back over to the Palestinians by the Israelis in the future.

They had purchased their home in this area and currently there is no talk of compensation when the area is returned to Palestinian control.

The complexities of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are mind boggling.

We did not go on the pilgrimage with the intent in any way to study the political situation, yet we could not avoid it. Wherever you go you are aware there is an armed conflict going on in the land. You often see military aircraft and helicopters moving about or patrolling the skies.

Security is such an issue that when you see school children on a field trip, you also see armed guards with them C it is a law.

I still don= t understand why they cannot live together and share the land. There are Arabs who are Israeli citizens. The Bedouins, the desert nomads who are no longer very nomadic but who still live in the desert, are citizens C they have two members in the Israeli parliament and they can serve in the military.

Yet, there are temporary laws in place making it impossible for Palestinians to be granted citizenship. It is clear there is still a very real struggle over the land itself.

It is also clear that this is nothing new. People have been fighting over this land for millennia. At Tel Megiddo archeologists have identified twenty distinct historical periods from 4000 B.C.E. to 400 B.C.E. That place had been settled by people over 6,000 years ago, and at least twenty different times the city changed hands through conflict, so that a new group of people destroyed it and built a new city right on top of the old one. When Abraham came to the land, people were already living there and had been fighting over the land for thousands of years.

When Moses led the Israelites from Egypt they had to fight the people already living in the land and take it from them.

When they lived in the land they had to fight others, including the Philistines, the Edomites, the Moabites, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Egyptians, the Persians, the Greeks and the Romans.

After the Romans finally destroyed any sort of Jewish national presence in the land in the first century C.E., they eventually lost control of the land to the Muslims, who then fought the crusaders from Europe, who then lost it to the Turkish Muslims, who then lost it to the British.

And the struggle and fighting continue to this day.

So much so that one of the other pilgrims on the trip reflected this past week that she returned from Israel no longer believing that peace in the world was a realistic hope.

A You were dead through the trespasses and sins in which you once lived, following the course of this world, following the ruler of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work among those who are disobedient.@ That is how the author of Ephesians puts it. They are difficult words to accept.

They suggest that we are captive to cultural and spiritual forces over which we have no control, that hey have drained the life out of us, that we are unable to think or feel or crawl our way free.

We don= t like to think that way about ourselves, but look at the news: plenty of it is bad C murders, thefts, fires, war, kidnappings C and that= s just the first five minutes of the nightly news.

The fact is we are addicted to sin C to evil, selfishness, greed, whatever you want to call it, to the point that, as Ephesians describes it, we are dead. Buried. Gone. Lifeless. Without hope.

But that is not all the Ephesians passage says: then God= s grace intervened. God made us alive together with Christ. A By grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing: it is the gift of God.@

That, my friends, is our hope. That is what my fellow pilgrim added to her statement about the hopelessness of peace in the world.

She returned with a stronger faith and trust in the God who holds the whole world in holy hands, whose desire is for peace and wholeness for all people, and who holds the future in those same holy hands.

I would agree with her for in that same land where there is so much conflict and violence, there is also much evidence of the grace and beauty of God. It is evident in the smiles of the Bedouin children playing among the ruins of Avdat in the middle of the desert, oblivious to the armed guards watching over them.

It is evident in the great diversity of so many people living so closely together in such a small area C orthodox Jews, secular Jews, Arab Israelis, Orthodox Christians, Muslim Israelis, Palestinians (Christian and Muslim alike), Bedouins, Druze, Black Hebrews from Chicago, immigrants from Europe, Russia, Ethiopia. Sure there is friction, but on most days in most ways they live in the land together.

Evidence, despite our small pettiness as human beings, of the greatness and majesty of God.

Listen to this poetic paraphrase of Psalm 107, beautiful words describing the God who is our salvation and our hope.

A All around the world, millions of people will attest C

God is good. God will not let you down.

Sometimes that is hard to believe.

Hatred robs black South Africans of hope.

The bias of international mass media

makes Palestinians feel despised and rejected;

they hide their faces from us.

Weapons of war maim women and children in Sarajevo.

Poverty pursues refugees from Sri Lanka,

and starvation those from Mozambique.

Fear and despair crushes them.

But God gives them the strength to continue.

God seals the raw wounds in their souls;

God holds them gently in the terrors of their night.

They do not doubt God= s saving grace.

Listen to them! Hear their story.

Hear, and believe, and rejoice.@

Karl Barth made the comment that Jesus= gift of forgiveness, of grace, was to him more astonishing than Jesus= miracles.

Miracles broke the physical laws of the universe; forgiveness broke the moral rules. A The beginning of good is perceive in the midst of bad...@

The Christian life does not primarily center on ethics or rules but rather involves a new way of seeing. When we can look at the world through > grace-tinted lenses= then we can discover the source of our hope C the God who loves us enough to save us C and not just us, but the entire world. That is reason for hope. That is reason to live.