It’s not you, it’s ThUs – facing tragedy

Jonáš and I were standing around speaking Czenglish with another American yesterday, when I checked my phone and first saw the news about the shooting in Orlando. I said in Czech, “There was an attack in Orlando.” Jonáš and our American friend leaned in, asking follow-up questions and looking toward my screen. I skimmed fast, trying to get the basic details.

“Where did it happen?” asked our fellow American.

“In a gay club, early this morning,” I answered.

The other American pursed his lips a bit, and leaned back, crossing his arms over his chest. “Ah. That should be interesting.”

Jet-lagged, homesick me got a picture of Teresa, Lupe, Matt, Peter, Sean, Terrence, Emily, Álvaro, and others in my mind. I looked up from my phone, and my shoulders squared to him. “Human lives are human lives,” and each word pointed more and more. He lifted his hands and shoulders. “Oh no, I know that, I’m just saying, that will be interesting.”

Mitosis is interesting. Kids’ opinions on Marvel superheroes are interesting. The plot twist in Shutter Island is interesting. 50 people dead and 53 seriously injured because of one man is not interesting. It is autocorrected-to-ducking tragic.

People are saying, “it’s an Islamic thing!” “It’s a guns rights thing!” “It’s a terrorism thing!” “It’s a Latin@thing!” “It’s a homophobia thing!” But it’s greater than all of these things. One sick man killed and injured a lot of people. That is evil. If we believe that we humans are truly equal, then if we believe that all people are equally capable of good, we must believe that all people are equally capable of evil. Then just as we share in humanity’s goodness, we must share in the blame of wickedness. We all bear up under the weight of the world. In this way, I believe Christianity does the best job at explaining human nature. It also gives the best hope, that there is a higher, better being than anything on this autocorrected-to-ducked-up globe.

It’s natural to shift blame after tragedy. I get it, I do it too. My thing is judgmental people. And I can tell people are judgmental just by looking at them. But the bottom line is that we are all holding up the weight of the world. If we start to look at others to shift the blame, the weight we bear will shift and hurt us and those around us. At best, we can just bear up under as much weight as we can handle, and help those around us to bear it up too. But it’s wrong to assume that anyone bears more blame than someone else. We always want to say, “it’s you, it’s your fault, we need to fix you!” Who is at fault for everything in the world? It’s them, but it’s also us. It’s ThUs. Ba-dum-PSH.

Back to seriousness for a minute. Ameerah, Imman, Amaly, Mariam: I’m sorry that they have made this about you.

Teresa, Lupe, Matt, Sean, Peter, Terrence, Emily, Álvaro, all the others: I’m sorry that they have made this about you.

One final thought. We live in a false pretense of a big world, with large webs of social media giving us a false sense of our own scope. Ironically, we people can only see the small space that our own limited perspective offers us. We see problems in terms of how they affect us in one way or another. So to close, I will ask you to read the last sentences with me (borrowed and adapted from G.K. Chesterton, I’m not that brilliant!):

 

What’s wrong with the world?

I am.

Part 1. A Muslim and a Christian walk into a teahouse (because everyone loves tea): What might they talk about over a cup of tea

To be human is to be an incarnate paradox. We believe we should treat others as we want to be treated. But as we pray on our drive to work we lose patience with the drivers who take the spot on the highway we were speeding towards. This lost patience is compounded by our frustration with the driver who honked at us five minutes ago as we cut him off. It’s not yet 8 am and we have been three times a hypocrite.

 

To be human is to have the memory of a flea. We praise God’s works with our lips, then five minutes later get overwhelmed with anxiety when one small thing goes wrong, thinking that God has abandoned us. Anna Sewell affirmed that there is nothing in the world more evil than ignorance, which is the Siamese twin of forgetting. It is in forgetting that we create the most ugly paradoxes with our fellow men.

 

We see someone do wrong, and we forget that we have done anything wrong as we condemn the other in our hearts and with our mouths.

 

We see someone who seems different and we forget that we people are at once all different and all alike.

 

We deceive ourselves in thinking that we are the standard for upstanding humanity. We Christians see someone of a different religion and alienate them as an enemy of God, forgetting that we also were once enemies of God.

 

We forget that our adoption into God’s family was not our work, but that of His grace alone – His grace to give us our family who taught us about Him, or His grace to bring us a friend who shared the Gospel with us, or His grace to help us conquer our sins, and His grace to change our hearts to want to follow Him.

 

 

To be human is to have our flaws compounded by each other.

 

We forget. Then we ignore. Then we judge. Then we hate.

 

The forgetting and the paradoxes it creates are all that seem to give sense to the things I see from Christians to Muslims. The xenophobia, and pride God’s people take in it, is jaw-dropping. While I know I have racial preferences and enjoy my privileges as a white American, to see Christians dragging an opportunity for compassion and love through the dirt …

 

We must not be silent. We cannot be silent.

 

This series is born first and foremost of God’s sanctification of me. I am lazy, cowardly, and apathetic when it comes to living out my faith, and greatest to be shamed is this: these are the qualities I condemn most vocally in the church as we face the Muslim refugee crisis of this decade. I would much rather sit behind my computer and condemn the loudest of the uninformed, ignorant racists and other fellow people who have been given access to the Internet. I would love to whitewash my own tomb by passive-aggressively commenting, liking, sharing, whatever on social media.

 

What a hypocrite I am! This is not the life in its fullness for which Christ came and saved me!

 

Mercifully, the world’s salvation is not dependent on the likes of me, but on a God who became flesh in a persecuted Middle-Eastern Man. Mercifully, God did not call me to save the world, but He loved the world enough to send His Son for that. You all have Him to thank and trust for that. Nevertheless, this little book is a step of obedience to God’s calling for His people: to defend the victims of the world’s injustices, to speak up for the voiceless, to love justice and mercy, to walk humbly with God, and to stand up for the orphans and widows (Micah 6:8, Isaiah 1:17, and James 1:27). This little book is an examination of what Christians are called to do as Muslims come into closer and closer proximity with them in Europe. I see the church only pulling more and more tightly into itself for a variety of reasons. At the same time, I see secular humanists stepping up to feed the hungry, house the homeless, clothe the naked, and bring smiles to tearful, traumatized faces.

 

Is this how we respond to the Lord filling our cup with blessings of grace – by pulling away and leaving a void to be filled by someone else? My friends, this must not be so.

 

This is not a series about the differences between Islam and Christianity (for such reading, I recommend Unveiling Islam by Ergun and Emir Caher, scholars of Islamic theology and history). It is, however, based on the belief that Christianity is the one way to the true, triune God, and the logical conclusion Christianity and Islam are fundamentally different religions. It is a series that calls for empathy and compassion for all humans as valuable image-bearers of God. Finally, this series affirms that the writings and teachings of a religion often differ from how it is practiced by its followers. For this reason, we must know and relate to people before we pass judgments of their character. While this series is written to address xenophobia and bad theology directed at Muslims, its principles may be applied to any of “the least of these,” from drug addicts to the homeless to gypsies to prostitutes to residents of white suburbia – anyone who needs the grace of God.

 

I’ll end this introduction with two mission verses that have driven this work:

 

“And let us consider how we may stir one another on to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the day drawing near.” Hebrews 10:24-25. Reading and knowing this verse, I have collected and dared to interpret some Bible verses on God’s calling to the church in the face of the current Muslim refugee crisis.

 

“Therefore, to him who knows to do good and does not do it, to him it is sin.” James 4:17 This verse is mostly for myself. I cannot be silent anymore as Christians get more and more scared of Muslims and say more and more hateful things about them. May God grant me the faithfulness to steadfastly pursue Him and obey what He calls me to do.

 

Up Next: That’s just, like, your opinion, man: How do we know what we know about Muslims?

Special thanks to my beloved editors 🙂