Among Muslims

On Sabbatical from my normal duties as senior pastor, I have examined race relations in America because I think that the church in America should be where black and white, Asian and Hispanic, Arab and Native American people come together.  How do we lead the church to be that uniting space where people delight in one another, celebrating our differences and rejoicing in our shared life in Christ?

            While race has been the topic of my study (through reading and interviews with church leaders), I am aware that followers of Jesus in America also need to set a tone of love and peace in relation to Muslims.  Many high profile “evangelicals”[i] have been downright hateful in their stance toward Muslims.  This antipathy is combined with woeful ignorance.  I pray that a part of my church’s renewal and step toward multiethnic worship and community will be the witness of peace and love extended to Muslims.

            Here, I offer my own experiences, which I grant are limited.

            First, I have traveled in a town that is 70-80% Muslim.  Each year from 2011-2016, I have spent time in Kombolcha, Ethiopia.  There, I have been a part of the Children’s Hope Chest work that provides school uniforms, school supplies, meals, and other support to extremely poor children and their families.  The CHC program is run out of a church and part of the curriculum is the presentation of the Gospel.  In my times there, I have never been confronted or threatened by any of the 180,000 Muslims who live there.  I do not know of any of our kids in the program who have suffered because they are participating in a Christian program.  It is has been peaceful and safe. 

            Second, shortly after the election of President Trump, his attempts at travel bans from 7 majority-Muslim countries, and the fears aroused in American Muslim communities, one of our church members reached out to a Mosque in Durham, NC.  Her efforts lead to me actually speaking at an ecumenical event there.  The hospitality was generous.  I felt welcomed and the Holy Spirit led me to publically repent on behalf of Christians for the ways we have failed to show love to our Muslim neighbors.  My repentance was graciously received.

            Third, as I blogged earlier this summer, I read A Common Word (editor, Miroslav Volf).  In this book, I learned that Muslims place as high a value on the two great commandments as do Christians.  Love of God and love of neighbor are central tenets of Islam.

            Fourth, as a part of our Sabbatical, my family had the opportunity to travel to Egypt.  There I learned that no one dislikes the Muslim Brotherhood and ISIS more than your average everyday Egyptian.  Cairo is an enormous Muslim city (over 20,000,000 people).  From the rooftop of the Barcelo Hotel, you can hear Mosques across the city issue the call to prayer.  It echoes through the canyons of buildings.  As in Kombolcha, I felt safe, and never threatened.  Now, I need to acknowledge that the people who worked so hard to assure my comfort there are in the tourism business.  They need my dollars and they need me to come home to the U.S.A. and put in a good word for them.  They are financially motivated to makes things nice for Americans willing to spend money.  Even so, I met others not a part of that business.

            One day, we were enjoying the rooftop pool, a cool relief from the unrelenting sun’s heat, and I met a man from Bagdad, Iraq.  He and I discussed religion and life in Iraq.  He felt that my wife and I, as adoptive parents, were a blessing from God.  He was charming and genuine. He is an engineer and was in Cairo for a conference.  He had no personal gain in being nice to me.  His kindness was just that, kindness.

            These experiences through reading, conversation, and the receiving of generous hospitality lead me to think that Muslims are people just like my neighbors in Chapel Hill are people.  Some Muslims are terrorists – a few.  So too are some of the members of Westboro Baptist Church.  I don’t condemn all Baptists as terrorists because of what they do.  Among the 20,000,000 Egyptians in Cairo there are good-hearted people, lazy people, thieves and liars, hard workers, and every variety of humanity you’d find anywhere. 

            It broke my heart to read the Voice of the Martyrs report that more than 100 Coptic Christians have been killed in Egypt.[ii]  There are terrorists Muslims (and terrorist Christians and terrorist Buddhists in South Asia and terrorist Hindus in India).  Most Muslims (and most Christians and Buddhists and Hindus and Jews) are just people, people God has called us to love.  What happened to our Coptic brothers and sisters calls for lament and for prayer.  But it is not an indictment of Egypt any more than Dylan Roof’s villainous act at Mother Emmanuel Church in 2015 is an indictment of all white people in Charleston, SC.

            More than simply acknowledging the humanity of Muslims, we who follow Jesus are to affirm Muslims as our neighbors.  We believe they are wrong about Jesus.  They see Jesus as a venerated prophet.  We see Jesus as the Son of God, the human incarnation of the second person of the Trinity, and the Savior of the world.  You can’t believe that and be a Muslim.  You can’t not believe it and be a Christian.  The differences are irreconcilable.  Muslims worship the same God we do, but their belief about God, in my view, is wrong.  But the difference I have with my Muslim neighbor, my Muslims friend, should be discussed over a cup of coffee in a friendly environment.  I don’t need to condemn him.  I can befriend him and share God’s love with him.

            As we rode to the airport on our last day in Egypt, the sun was setting and we passed a church, one of the few.  In the fleeing sunlight, I looked at the crosses on the church roof.  I realized how powerfully I felt God’s presence, the Holy Spirit’s hand, there in Cairo, a sprawling Muslim metropolis.  The crosses on the church reminded me God is there.  I and all Christians need to remember God is present in our interactions with Muslims.  God is love.  When we are with our Muslims neighbors and aware of God’s presence, we are to show love through neighborly friendship, welcoming conversation, and Holy Spirit empowered grace. 

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[i] I put “evangelicals” in quotes because the term is one I really don’t want to surrender.  The perception in America is that evangelicals are white, are people who vote Republican, hate homosexuals and Muslims, and are quick to condemn to Hell anyone whose theology does not align with their fundamentalist hyper-Calvinism.  My definition of evangelical is a person who shares the good news that in Jesus, God had come, the Kingdom is inaugurated, and all who repent of sin and turn to Him can have eternal life in His name.  I put “evangelicals” in quotes because I think true evangelicals are those who lovingly point the world to Jesus, not those who constantly condemn others to Hell.

[ii] http://www.icommittopray.com/request/589/targeted-egyptian-christians/

Orlando Shootings, LGBT, Islamaphobia, Gun Control

          Omar Mateen carried an assault rifle and a pistol into the Pulse club, a gay night club in Orlando Florida.  He killed 49 people.  It was Sunday morning, June 12, 2AM.  I woke for church on Sunday around 6:30.  My son was watching the news around 8AM.  The weather was on.  After the weather, we turned off the TV and began getting ready for church.  I had no knowledge of the shooting. 

          At church, no one mentioned it to me and I did not look at any news outlets.  So, as the service began and then throughout the service, I had no knowledge that the worst mass shooting in U.S. history had happened a few short hours earlier.  During our prayer time, I did not know.  No one mentioned it to me.

          After the worship service, our family ate lunch at home, with no media on.  Then, my middle son and I got in the car for the 3-hour drive to my parents’ place in Roanoke.  We listened to a Hardy Boys mystery on CD the entire way.  Upon arrival, we hung out with my parents, played games, shot baskets on their backyard hoop, and ate.  Finally, around 8:30PM, I was flipping channels and stopped at CNN.  Over 16 hours after the shooting, I finally found out.  If I had known Sunday morning, we would have had a time of prayer in our worship service.

          For what would we pray?  Of course, we’d pray for the family members and friends of the victims. We would ask God to provide solace and comfort.  We would pray for the more than 50 people who were injured but not killed.  We would pray that God would heal their wounds and soothe their shattered psyches.  And we’d pray for the survivors.  They may be alive and uninjured, but they are not unscathed.  We would pray for them as they carry the burden of survivor’s guilt and the horrors of watching their friends die.  The images they see when they close their eyes to sleep will haunt them in their dreams for a long time. 

Yes, there is much to pray for and we carry all of it to God on behalf of these wounded people.  What else?

We must pray for the family of the shooter, Omar Mateen.  They will be ostracized.  American society as a whole feels the shock and the anger of such an event.  Unstable persons could escalate the violence if in a misguided attempt at justice they were to lash out at Mateen’s relatives.  These people will carry shame and will need God’s help to be free. 

What else?  What do else do we say when we pray?  An interesting thing about this story is the convergence of many different political hot potatoes.  There is homophobia, the hatred of the LGBT community.  There is Islamophobia, the hatred of all things Muslim.  That fact that the killer was Muslim and self-identified as an ISIS supporter arms Islamophobs with all they need to demonize the entire religion and all who practice it. 

Then, there is the issue of gun control.  Those who abhor the accessibility of military style assault weapons will have a field day attacking, ideologically, those who defend their 2^nd amendment right to “keep and bear” arms. 

This story has created strange bed fellows.  I read and posted an opinion from a conservative Christian who wants to damn all Muslims and to liken the religion to the circumstances in 1920’s Germany that set the table of the rise of fascism and Nazism.  The Orlando shootings show that if we don’t stop ISIS now, it will become another Hitler-led Nazi type of power that wreaks havoc and propagates genocide. Many of my Facebook friends pointed out several leaps of logic that in the article.  What I found fascinating in it is that the author, a conservative, linked arms with high profile atheists Bill Maher, Richard Dawkins, and Ayn Hirsi Ali in order to brand Islam as violent and evil.  And he did this in defense of the victims, gay people.  Recall the last time you remember conservative Christians aligning with Atheists to defend gays from Muslims.  I bet you cannot think of time.  I can’t. 

The enemy of my enemy is my friend?

For the record, I know all Muslims are not violent because I spend a week in a community that is 70% Muslim.  While I am there, I talk about Jesus and try to convince people to follow him.  The Muslims react in violent ways. They sell me bread and fruit.  They welcome me into their homes and heap hospitality on me.  And at the hotel bar, they sell me beer and soda.  Smiling the entire time.  I have never felt safer anywhere.

For the record, I do not keep weapons in my home.  Yet, I am good friends with card-carrying NRA members.  I don’t think the issue is as simple as some of my dogmatic anti-gun friends.  But, I do believe it would be helpful to significantly reduce the number of assault weapons and automatic, high volume, rapid fire guns.  Nobody needs those.  You don’t need an arsenal that Rambo would envy to protect your home.  And having a gun doesn’t make you safer.  The guard at the Pulse night club was armed, but 50 people still died.

For the record, I love gay and lesbian people.  Not all of them.  I don’t know all of them.  But, I love the ones I know.  My neighbors.  Old friends who now take care of my nephews and nieces.  Dear friends who are still “in the closet.”  Based on my reading of Matthew 19:1-12 and Romans 1:18-32, I do not believe same sex marriage is God-honoring or sanctified by God.  I believe homosexuality is outside God’s plan for human sexuality.  But I want you to pay attention to something.  I wrote my theology after identifying how many gay and lesbian people I love. 

And please notice this.  I don’t count homosexual sex as an unforgivable sin.  Some Christians don’t think it is a sin at all.  If they and I are to discuss the divergence in our theology, I’d like to do it in an atmosphere of friendship and love.  And I do believe that someone can hold the opinion that same sex marriage is OK in God’s eyes and at the same time that person can be a disciple.  To put it simply, in theological terms, I oppose same sex marriage.  But I don’t think someone is disqualified from the title ‘Christian’ just because they disagree with me on this point. 

So where are we?  I think the way of Christ is the way of compassion.  His encounter with the rich young ruler is an example.  He was working to correct this man’s understanding by helping the man shift his priorities from a dependence on material wealth to a dependence on faith in God.  But, Jesus knew the man would not respond, not the way Jesus preferred.  Still, the Gospel say that when Jesus told him to part with his riches, before Jesus said a word, he looked at him and “loved him” (Mark 10:21).  That’s where we are.  We are to love people.

We – followers of Jesus – are to be peddlers of the Gospel.  When it comes to social issues, we start from the cross and resurrection and base ourselves there.  If we find ourselves in disagreement with someone on any of the issues I have raised, we enter the conversation compassionately seeking to love the other even in disagreement.  Most importantly, we do not settle for the prevailing narrative. We loudly but compassionately proclaim a counter narrative, one in which the love of Jesus rules the day.  That story must be told and lived, and we must be the ones to tell it and live it.

I close with a tweet from Russell Moore:

 Following

Russell MooreVerified account‏@drmoore

Christian, your gay or lesbian neighbor is probably really scared right now. Whatever our genuine disagreements, let's love and pray

Divinity of Jesus: The Difference between Christian and Muslim Views

 

            The ocean is a big place.  We had a chance, as a family, to go to the beach earlier this summer.  For a second time in my life I was humbled by having to ask a fellow swimmer to help me out of a riptide.  It was pretty close to shore but it caught me.  Most people don’t like to need help and I felt especially small considering this wasn’t a place with w0rld-class surfing waves. 

            The ocean can do that – make one feel small.  In ancient times, the ocean was a place of industry; fishermen could make good money.  The ocean was the pathway to exploration.  What’s out there?  The ocean was the highway to commerce and the means by which people encountered one another.  Dominant armadas could enable empires to rule the world.

            The ocean was a also a source of mystery and fear.  What creatures lurk beneath the black depths?  How deep does it go?  There were no satellites, no light houses, no GPS, and no coast guard.  The ocean was seen as a place of danger and death. 

            When we were at the ocean and I was raucously riding the waves but also trying to stay close enough to the shore so I could handle any riptides, we looked out, far out to sea.  We watched fishing boats.  We tried to sight dolphins.  We think we saw one.  But the most amazing thing was a man, guy.  He was way, way out there, swimming for all his might.  He’s wasn’t swimming in.  He was swimming parallel to the shore.  I thought, who is this guy?  If he got a cramp or if he became complete exhausted, he was dead because he was so far out, no one could get to him.  In fact, it’s unlikely anyone would see him unless they were looking hard.  He must be a serious triathlete who does the iron-man competition. 

            As amazing as his stamina and strength are in swimming, even he is small next to the expanse of the ocean.  It is beautiful, breathtaking, and awe-inspiring.  And the ocean declares that Jesus is God. 

            Why is this declaration so important?  And why is it so important to do more than just say, “Jesus is God?”

            I write a blog and occasionally I write on the way Islam and Christianity co-exist in the world.  Sometimes this coexistence is a violent collision.  Sometimes it is a warm friendship.  In my writings I make it clear that I see the two faiths as fundamentally contradictory.  They cannot both be true because Isalm sees Jesus as a prophet.  To be sure, Muslims believe in most of the miracles reported in the New Testament.  Muslims revere Jesus.  Muslims love Jesus.

            However, Christians worship Jesus.  This is anathema to Isalm.  To say something is anathema is to say it is so detestably untrue it calls for damnation.  Muslims feel it is damnable to call Jesus ‘God’ because this is a direct assault on monotheism.  God alone is God, and in their view, to say that Jesus is God is to have a second God.

            Christians are as fiercely monotheistic as Muslims or Jews for that matter.  We believe there is one God.  And this one God exists in three forms and three manifestations and the three have a relationship with each other within the Godhead.  Father God, Son Jesus, Holy Spirit – one God; God is three in one.  It is utterly against Islam to say Jesus is God.  It is utterly essential to Christianity that we acknowledge Jesus as fully human and fully God. 

            The two religions can co-exist.  We can and should befriend Muslims.  We can and must love Muslims.  That love includes respecting their commitment to their faith.  Respect means if we want to invite a Muslim to consider Jesus, it has to be that, an invitation.  If he’s not interested, we still love him and respect him and honor him as a friend even when we’re completely convinced that he’s wrong about Jesus. 

            Along these lines Muslim readers have commented on my blog writings.  There is no way Jesus could be God, they say.  One reader linked me to a Muslim talk-show.  It’s a setting that skews younger, is hip, cool and the host had a guest who was a Christian pastor but then converted to Islam.  He was giving 10 reasons why Jesus could not be God.

            We can stop right here and just say, “Who cares.”  We think Jesus is God and he doesn’t so we think he is wrong.  There.  Now can we all just get on with our lives?  We can, sure, but if we take that kind of a shrug-of-the shoulder approach, then our faith is not a reasoned faith.  It is not a thought-out faith.  It is one we inherit, one we accept because it was given from people we trust, and it is one based on our emotions.  Our emotions tell us we are sinners who need Jesus; people we trust – authors of scripture, pastors, youth pastors, Sunday school teachers – tell us Jesus forgives us and we need Him.  And so by trust and by emotion we are Christ-followers. 

            That is all good and nothing I am saying negates that or detracts from it.  What I offer this morning adds to that emotional confession born out of a faith community and relationships with Christians and relationship with the Holy Spirit.  We are to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, strength, and mind.  To Love God with the mind, I think includes a reasoned defense or explanation of why we believe what we believe to be true.  And this is where the ocean and Jesus’s demonstration in Mark’s gospel comes into the conversation.

            The ex-Muslim turned youth pastor gives 10 reasons why Jesus never says he is God.  We might say, “Oh yes he does say it.  He says, ‘the father and I are one,’ in John 10:30.”  Be careful with that response.  Remember, this Muslim was a Christian.  He knows many of the references on which we base our belief that Jesus is God.  He looks at that and says, ‘wait a minute.   That means Jesus and God are united, one in purpose, not one in being.  In those terms, God and I are also one because I am united with God.’  He makes this point pretty clearly.  His articulation is not good but his arguments have logic.  Many of the standard verses we use to show that Jesus is God are well-known to Muslims and they have a ready refutation. 

            The host of the talk show says, “If Jesus was really God, why doesn’t he say, ‘I am God?’”  A few years, this very question troubled me, and I went searching for that verse, and it’s not in there.  It’s not in John’s gospel, the primary source for Jesus’ “I am” statements.  It is not in the other gospels.  Why doesn’t Jesus say, “I am God”?

            We need to be able to answer that.  The world is shrinking.  It’s not just in college towns and big cities.  Across America people are setting up homes, people who do not have a Protestant or Catholic worldview.  We can stay isolated, stick to spending time with people who think like us and talk like us.  But if we do that, we dare not call ourselves Christ-followers.  He calls us beyond our familiar circles and once we step out of our comfort zones and into conversations and friendships with people who see the world total differently, we have to be prepared to say why we think what we think.  “Jesus is God.” 

            Why do we think so?  Did he say that?  Not in those words. 

            The statement would have been absurd to the ears of the first century Jew Palestine.  So instead of saying, “I am God,” Jesus said things only God can say.  Jesus did things only God will do.  And Jesus received things only God can receive.  In this way, there was no mistake.  Everyone around him understood him to be claiming to be God; otherwise, they would not have killed him. 

            I am thankful for David Garland’s commentary on Mark’s Gospel.  Before reading it, I always thought the place to look for declarations of Jesus’ divinity was the Gospel of John.

            In Mark 6, Jesus is rejected by his old neighbors in his home town of Nazareth.  Herod, the Jewish King, a puppet of Rome, imprisons and executes John the Baptist, Jesus’ cousin and the prophet whose preaching and practice of baptism paved the way for Jesus’ ministry.  On a remote hillside, Jesus feeds 5000 people by miraculously multiplying one person’s lunch. 

            Then he does something very human.  He sends the disciples off on their boat out into the Sea of Galilee.  And in isolation, he prays.  Human beings pray to God.  Jesus was exceptional as a human being and he was 100% human.  His wisdom was supreme; his prayer life incredible; and his love perfect.

            While he was praying, the disciples were out to sea and straining against the wind.  This is different than what we read in Mark 4.  There the windstorm was so fierce, it kicked up the waves to the point that the boat was swamped and in real danger of sinking.  In that situation, Jesus commanded the storm to be silent and it obeyed.  That account illustrates the same truth this one does, but the circumstances are different.  There Jesus was in the boat and the disciples were about to die.  Here in Mark 6, the disciples are not going to die, but they’re also not making progress.  They’re straining at the oars against the power of the mighty sea and the uncontrollable wind.  As he’s praying, he sees them.  This must have been a vision.  Still, this is a human thing.  Peter, Paul and many others had visions while praying.  The clincher is what Jesus does next.

            Alone on the land, praying, in a vision, Jesus sees the disciples as they row at night, and he walks on the sea.  Who does that?  Who just walks across the water?  Jews in the first century would have had a ready answer that they would have accepted without question.  Thinking back to their scripture, they would remember the prophet Habakkuk.  “Was your wrath against the rivers, O Lord?  Or your anger against the rivers or your rage against the sea?  … You trampled the sea with your horses” (Habakkuk 3:8a-b, 15a).

            They would remember the book of Job where God says to Job, “Who shut for the doors of the sea? … Have you entered the springs of the sea or walked in the recesses of the deep” (Job 38:8a, 16).  Who?  God.  God walks on the sea.  People were terrified of the unseen depths, but God walks in the recesses of the deep at His pleasure.  At His pleasure, he shuts the sea as you or I would shut a door.

            The disciples and later, Mark’s first readers would remember Psalm 107.  “They saw the deeds of the Lord, his wondrous works in the deep.  For he commanded and raised the stormy wind, which lifted up the waves of the sea.  … He made the storm be still and the waves of the sea were hushed” (107:24-24, 29).  Ancient Israelites spoke in scripture; “it was written;” “as the prophets said;” “Moses wrote.”  This is how they conveyed ideas and understood the world.  So, in these terms, Jesus made very clear statements and some of his statements came through actions.

            Note the end of Mark 6, verse 48.  Jesus is walking on the water and it says he intended to pass them by.  He didn’t.  They were terrified and he got into the boat to calm them.  They had not been terrified by the wind.  They strained against but did not fear it.  But a man walking on the water sent them into heart-thumping panic and Jesus came to them.  But his intention was to pass by.  Why?

            Moses, the greatest of prophets wanted to see God.  God set Moses in the cleft of a rock, and passed by and Moses saw God’s backside glory.  Elijah, the great prophet in the book of 1^st Kings, the one who never died but was just taken up to Heaven in a Chariot of Fire, got so depressed in his fear he was suicidal.  Again, God set him in a cave, and in silence passed by him.  Who are the Old Testament two prophets who join Jesus on the mount of transfiguration in Mark 9?  Moses and Elijah. 

            The disciples out on the sea were not in trouble in the sense of needing Jesus to save them from imminent death.  He didn’t need to walk on water to save them.  He walked on the water so they could see that God was passing by again.  The final verse of this section says their hearts were hardened.  Shortly after this, James, John, and Peter, would come with Jesus to a mountain top where Moses and Elijah visited from the Heavenly beyond to watch God pass by. 

            When Moses asks God’s name in Exodus 3, God says, “I am.”  That is God’s self-identification.  In Greek, that phrase is rendered “ego emi.”  “Ego emi” from Greek to English can be rendered, “It is I,” or “It is me,” or “I am.”  Knowing this, it is pretty clear in John’s Gospel that Jesus is saying “I am” to indicate that he is the same God who visited Moses and named himself “I am.”  I never paid attention to “I am” statements from Jesus in the other Gospels.  But, here, on the sea, a place of dread and terror, the disciples see what sailors fear most, a phantasm, a ghostly creature come to take then to death.

            To their fear, Jesus says, “Take heart, Ego emi, it is I, I am.”  In Mark’s symbolic world, no clearer declaration can be made.  Mark’s gospel shouts that Jesus is God in human flesh, to be followed and worshiped.  To hear Jesus say, “I am God,” you have to turn to Revelation 1:17.  At the end of the verse he says, “I am the alpha and the omega, the first and the last, the living one.”  That is a direct reference to God in apocalyptic language, and Jesus makes that reference to himself.

            Some skeptics won’t be satisfied by such evidence and that’s just the nature of things.  Muslim friends will believe Jesus walked on the water and say it didn’t mean he was God.  Jewish friends will deny that it really happened.  Modernists and naturalists will say it could not have happened and thus it is just a legend.  When Mark wrote it, he did not believe he was writing a legend.  He believed he was describing how Jesus demonstrated for his disciple who he was and is. 

            This is who we worship and follow.  This is the Lord, the master of our lives.  We are in service to Him for eternity.  This is our creator, redeemer, protector, defender, and savior, the one who forgives us of all sin, and makes us new each day.  All that we are depends on who He is.  And thus we submit ourselves to Him completely.

AMEN