The other day I was sitting around the firepit with my friend Roger, shooting the breeze as we sometimes do. I shared with him my growing and intensifying convictions about Jews and Muslims. Later that night I remembered that a year ago I was asked to write myself a job description for The Isaac-Ishmael Initiative. This is what I wrote then, and which I continue to pursue:
I was encouraged to write up a description of
what I will do in ministry possibly in regards to Muslem–Jewish
outreach and ministry. This will not be a traditional job description. I have
been unable to write one.
I am a Jew who knows how to hate those who
are not Jewish. I learned this from birth, while attending Hebrew School, celebrating my bar mitzvah, and listening to my elders describe the people who are “out to get the Jews.”
When planes hit two towers in New York City
on September 11, 2001 I was living in Amsterdam. The media in Holland learned
that I was a Jew from New York whose family still lives there. They also knew I
was a pastor of a church in Amsterdam. They saw a news angle and I found myself
being interviewed, asked questions such as, “do
you see Muslems as enemies of America? Are they enemies of Christians?” My
heart was “caught” in my own prejudices.
In the past couple of years God has been
stirring me, causing me to take “baby steps” to break through hatred to
something else – to seek the Shalom of the children of Abraham. I have been all
together reluctant to move in this direction. “I have not been called to
Muslems and Jews” was my rationale.
Perhaps God has other plans.
I do not know what all this means, it is a “crazy”
and “bizarre” idea for a Jew to be an agent of grace toward Muslems, or other
Jews for that matter. I do not know how this will happen, I do not know the
contexts for this to happen, I do not have a strategic plan or even a missional
initiative.
All I know is that I am a Jew who follows a rabbi named Jesus who is
love and calls me to be an agent of that love.
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