Country or Kingdom?
This morning I came across this article on cnn.com: Iraq: Businessman killed as attacks on Christians continue.
Unfortunately, there have been dozens of similar articles published over the course of the past several years that we have been at war in Iraq.
I think stories like this one should raise some serious questions for followers of Jesus. The war in Iraq has dramatically worsened the situation of our Christian brothers and sisters who live in that country. I remember back in 2003 having a conversation with an Iraqi friend that I made while I was in Egypt. He said that Christians enjoyed a great deal of freedom under the regime of Saddam Hussein, and that our decision to go to war in Iraq has been very difficult for many Iraqi Christians.
I have to say — I believe Saddam Hussein was an evil man. There is no question about that. And I am glad that he is no longer in power. However, I worry about how many American Christians have viewed the war in Iraq.
I believe that our Biblical mandate is to place our allegiance to the Kingdom of God and to our fellow brothers and sisters in the body of Christ above our allegiance to any other group, including our country. I fear that many Christians have unquestioningly supported a war that is causing our brothers and sisters an unthinkable way of suffering and persecution.
There is no easy answer or solution here. It’s a difficult and complex situation. But I would urge all of us to ask some hard questions. How are our actions affecting our brothers and sisters? How can we stand side by side with them, love them and support them? Where have we been guilty of placing country before Kingdom and allowing those two things to become dangerously intertwined? And I would urge all of us to take some time to stop, reflect, pray, and allow our hearts to break for them.
hi matt!
Yes, christianity demands that we place ourselves not in the cut and dry answers of our present systemic, political and global problems, but in the tension and gray area of “right and wrong”. It oversimplifies it all to say this, but the weakness of fundamentalism- not just in christianity, but in terms of nationhood, politics and relationships- is that it ignores many of the nuances and tensions of what certain decisions and positions imply. The simplification is just a way of distancing us from the complications of situations… or if we look a little deeper- it distances us from relationship.
keep pursuing the tension