Nadim Nassar of the Awareness Foundation spoke to us at Federation Worship on Tuesday 23rd February on the plight of Christians in Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East. He drew attention to the scales which often blind our eyes to the reality of what is going on. None of us left unmoved; many were deeply shocked and shaken. It’s always difficult to be faced with hard truths from the pulpit, and one of us said that “for me the talk felt less like a sermon, more like a psalm of lament. I think we should be humble enough to accept its bleakness as a very understandable response to the context he comes from.”
I’m really grateful for those who had time to respond to my email, and what follows is a collation of those comments (in inverted commas) and my own reflections. I take full responsibility for it all, of course, and am simply trying to work out what it all means for me as a disciple of Jesus Christ.
The first thing, of course, is that we need to speak out the hard truths, especially as the pressures of our innate desire to be ‘nice’ or kind collude with certain forms of political correctness and cultural politeness. “I agree that we ought not to feel helpless or be driven by guilt, and I really do think that we should be preaching the good news. However, I also think that sometimes it is of value to be left feeling 'hanging', uncomfortable and challenged, without a tidy conclusion. I wonder if too often we seek to sanitize what we hear from the pulpit…” Another said that it’s ‘good to feel uncomfortable’.
Secondly, the call in the service and sermon to pray is exactly right. Prayer is not what we are called to do when all else fails, but the starting point for everything else. To use a journeying metaphor, it gives the only true compass bearing. I know that some weeks ago, God gave me a clear sense of responsibility to pray for Syria until peace comes, and I’ve been neglectful of that. So part of my prayer has to be an act of sorrow for my blindness, without wallowing in unhelpful guilt. We spent long enough in South Africa to know how much difference, in sometimes miraculous ways, the prayers of millions made to the desperately tense first elections in 1994.
Many of you spoke about this call to prayer: “It is easy for us to say that we are not blind and that we are doing things in certain places, but I think we are blind to the power that our prayers have in regards to the heavenly realms, when we pray, when we intercede for a place, a nation, a people, we are crying out for God's mercy and we are advancing the troops in the heavenly places. I am preaching to myself here. Prayer is powerful. I think we have lost touch with its power and necessity and we should be praying more and thinking about how we can be practical at the same time. Praying “Lord have mercy” seems to be the best words to utter sometimes in the darkest of times and for the places where pain and suffering is in abundance.” I found myself running the Cambridge Half Marathon and praying the Jesus Prayer: ‘Lord, Jesus Christ, son of the living God, have mercy on Syria.’
Thirdly, there were those of you who pointed out that “‘you should never pray a prayer that you are unwilling to be the answer to.’…The thing that I need to remember is that there is a big difference between being willing to be the answer to a prayer and being able to be the answer to a prayer.” There were lots of practical suggestions, ranging from getting involved in organizations like Open Doors or Nadim’s own Awareness Foundation all the way through to various kinds of political action. Ridley Runners’ own small involvement with refugees – many of them Syrian - through the half-marathon is a little example of the way in which many small acts of engagement ultimately add up to something more significant.
It would be easy to romanticize our little attempts not to play helpless, and I don’t want to do that. For me, the opportunity to run was both a 2 hour space to pray for Syria and an uncomfortable reminder that all this is not going to go away any time soon. Small engagement leads to personal connection, and when ‘victims of war’ become flesh and blood people with names and lives like us, the scales begin to fall away.
Part of the process is certainly helping our Christian communities and congregations to understand and engage better. Some reminded me that many churches are very active in a whole range of ways, for which we ought to give thanks. Little churches can have little engagements just as individual Christians can, and Christian leaders have a responsibility to call us to shared action in the public square. We might even dare to call it political action.
Finally, we might be able to apply what Paul says in 2 Corinthians 1 about the paradox of tribulation and consolation to our experience of this crisis. The heart of the matter is that here as in so many places, we see Christ crucified, and we are called to accompany him wherever he calls. Our tribulation somehow becomes consolation to others. Don’t get me wrong. I can’t ever say that the Syrian tribulation can be read in this way. I can only speak thus of my own tribulations. So in Colossians 1.24, Paul speaks of “rejoicing in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am completing what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church.” I find it difficult to get my head around this, but feel instinctively that it is really important for me.
Maybe it's better put in these last words from another of you: “On reflecting this morning on my feelings last night I started to see something: the good news perhaps, is that in the darkest of places; in the bloody pain and torment; the torture and systematic killing of Christians - we have hope. In that dark, bleak, painting there was light. This man standing in front of the people holding his arms outstretched was trusting in God in a way that I have never. His passion for God shone through. The passion of his people for God and their reliance on Him was a beacon of hope. We can do something — we can trust in God to help us to speak out about the situation, to call for justice for our brothers and sisters in Christ, to cry out as His Body as it is beaten and kicked by those who would stifle our God. The very fact that Christianity is such a threat to those people should give us cause to rejoice, and to reach out to our brothers and sisters who suffer and let them know that whilst we have never known their torment — that we stand with them.”
