A Message from the Delegation to the U.S. Embassy
Solidarity Delegation, Reflection #6
By, Rev. Marietta Macy
The U.S. Embassy in Israel. Photos and videos were not permitted inside.
As part of our delegation to the Holy Land, we met with an official at the U.S. Embassy in Israel. Many of our delegation members had a chance to address the official directly. Here is what Rev. Marietta Macy said:
My name is Reverend Marietta Macy. I serve a church in West Virginia. I was born in rural Indiana and have served a church in Kentucky as well, so I’m speaking for both rural and young populations who are often underestimated in national politics. As a millennial pastor, I'm stretched between generations and from crossing that bridge multiple times everyday, I can tell you that we're living very different experiences.
Through social media young people know better than most how intertwined our destinies are globally and locally. I had a young woman in my congregation who got the chance to study abroad in the UK and when October 7th happened, she was able to hear international news and get an international perspective. In talking with her about her experience she said she didn't know her country was this evil and she didn't know how to come home and be an American anymore, I'm ashamed to tell anyone where I'm from.
Our American young people can look around their own home towns and see crumbling infrastructure, unhoused and hungry people and know that our government chooses, instead of supporting our own people, to send billions and billions and billions of dollars to support human rights atrocities, illegal occupation, and an ongoing massacre of Gaza. Why should we have any faith in this administration? We will not be supporting Biden administration as long as they are finding genocide. We will be organizing actively against it if he does not take action to interrupt this atrocious violation of human rights. There's no lesser of two evils in this upcoming election. We know we will pay a price if we continue to play nice, fearful politics like generations before us. There's no more business as usual. There's no more church as usual. Long and short term our government 's actions are not making us safer and we are very close to feeling like we have nothing left to lose in the US. That's an unstable and dangerous place for us personally and collectively to be.
A saying I learned long ago while planting olive trees with Palestinian farmers that grounds me in this work says, “Societies grow great when old people plant trees under whose shade they will never sit.” Our government has to think farther ahead, generations ahead, and if they don't, they will be the rocks, brambles, and diseased trees that need to be cleared out for something new to be planted and we will do that clearing for them.
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Rev. Marietta Macy
Rev. Marietta Macy (she/they) was first introduced to the subject of Palestine and Israel while serving as a Youth Advisory Delegate for the PC(USA) General Assembly in 2004 and has stayed connected ever since. She graduated from Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary in 2014 with her M.Div. and from 2013-2019 she served in various roles on the Steering Committee of the Israel/Palestine Mission Network of the PC(USA) including as Co-Moderator.
Having grown up on a farm in rural southern Indiana, she recognized a shared language of kinship with the land expressed by indigenous Palestinian farmers which has greatly shaped her theology of creation and our place in it. Serving as a Christian educator for most of her professional career with children, youth, and youth adults, she now serves as Associate Pastor of Christian Education at First Presbyterian Church in Charleston, West Virginia.
To get the chance to learn from Rev. Macy, join us for the Hosanna Preaching Project!