Let Us Not Plant Sorrow

When I woke up this morning, I read of the terror attacks on mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, and I felt deeply grieved. We have many mosques in our community, and many Muslims are our friends and neighbors. I believe that I have not spoken out enough about respecting and protecting them. It should not take a tragedy of this magnitude for me to remedy this. But here I am.

I have come here today to address my fellow Christians in particular. Of course you are welcome to read along if you are not a Christian. But this is a message that I believe that Christians need to hear. Because we have been the ones who have helped to create this problem.

I grew up being taught that anyone who did not accept Jesus into their heart was destined for hell. Various religions were mentioned, and Islam sometimes singled out. I was told things that were incorrect about what Muslims believe. Seeds were planted that would lead me to think of others as lesser, as wrong in the worst way possible. Friends, it is not a long walk between telling people that God is sending others to hell and deciding it's okay to send them there yourself. If we believe otherwise, we are fooling ourselves and creating a world full of sorrow and pain. Small seeds can grow into giant plants.

The honest truth is that none of us know for sure what happens on the other side of death. This is why it is called faith. But the Bible is clear, has always been clear, that judgment is reserved for God alone, and we are not to engage in it ourselves. And so, fellow Christians, we need to stop doing this. We need to stop planting seeds of judgment in our hearts and the hearts of others. Look what these seeds have grown into! Oh, what sorrow have we wrought for others?

I believe that God weeps for these people who were killed today when they came to worship, to pray. The people who were slain this morning seek to worship the God of Abraham; we too seek to worship the God of Abraham*. Muslims are not the enemy; we have this common goal of worship. We have differences in beliefs, yes, significant ones. But the fact remains that not only are we instructed not to judge, but we are told to love our neighbors.

I Corinthians 13 has been the gold standard within Christianity to explain the importance of love. I think we would do well to read this and meditate upon what it means to truly love our neighbors. We can refer to the story of the Good Samaritan. Let us protect and care for our neighbors, whoever they are and whatever they believe. Let us rip out by the root these evil plants that we have unwittingly grown, and pray that God has mercy on us to help us never to plant them again in the future.




*J has pointed out to me that the official Orthodox Christian view of whether we and those who follow Islam worship the same God differs from mine. Referring to I Corinthians 13, we understand that we "know in part," so I will say that I absolutely do not know what is exactly correct. But we do know that we are to abstain from judgment and to love our neighbors, so I'm going to do that and encourage others to do that. If we err, let it be on the side of love.