What are we doing here?

Rev Maggie Hindley at Foreign Office Memorial Prayers for Gaza

Reflection by Rev Maggie Hindley at Memorial Prayers for Gaza on July 28th 2025 outside the Foreign Office

What are you doing here, Elijah? - you may remember that this is what God asked his prophet Elijah on Mount Horeb after he had faced up to the wickedness of Ahab and Jezebel, after he had come apart, horrified and burnt out, after the wind and the earthquake and the fire, the first thing after the sound of sheer silence.

And the prophet answers with words of self pity and despair but is empowered to go back to do what needs to be done.

What are we doing here? We've come apart, sickened by carnage, exhausted, maybe, by our exposure to new atrocities every single day.

Nevertheless, we've come apart to go deeper than self pity and despair will allow us:

- We've come apart to recognise that the carnage matters; it matters to us as human beings - and it matters to us in a special way because it's happening in the place where our Saviour lived and loved and healed and taught and was killed and lived again
- We've come apart, not to confess the sins of others so much as to recognise our own capacity for cruelty and delusion, for denial and laziness, and the way that has played in to the suffering of others
- We've come apart to pray that the suffering of others, represented by those we have named, may not be for nothing, but may somehow contribute to the coming of the time Jeremiah heralded when God will put his law in all our minds and write it on our hearts.

And in our silence together, in our waiting together on God, to catch the hope of that prophecy and to hear God's command to go back and engage with what needs to be done. The scenes of carnage are real; very real indeed. And they are not the whole story. Cherish the image Christians in Palestine offered us at Christmas, of the Christ child laid among the rubble. God is still there; God is still working his purpose out, mysteriously. We can't fix much; but we are called to continue to do the small things available to us with generosity, with love, with hope.

So we will continue to learn and to talk about Palestine with each other, with friends, with these guys here in government. We will continue to speak the truth about what is happening in the face of the finger pointing it may attract and the damage that may do us. We will continue to call for and work for immediate adequate humanitarian aid for Gaza, for ceasefire, for adherence to international law, for the release of the hostages, for a just long term solution ,for an end to all forms of racism, including islamophobia and antisemitism. We do all this with gratitude for our solidarity with our friends in the Holy Land, with the prophets, with Christ himself who was killed for speaking out.

What happens in and to and about Palestine matters for the Palestinian people, for Israel, for the whole of the Middle East, for the whole human race.

What are we doing here? - we are putting ourselves at God's disposal at this critical point in history, we are putting ourselves firmly on the side of truth and compassion, of solidarity with the whole human race, of a fervent hope for a future of peace, prosperity and justice for all of us.

They will all know me from the least of them to the greatest, says God. Amen. May it be so.