In a World Gone Awry ... We Must Love

The past couple of months has seen some of the worst violence against Christians in Muslim countries in many centuries. While some of us express outrage at these incidents, the Church in the West is largely indifferent to it.
       Yesterday a suicide bomber killed 81 people at a church in Peshawar, Pakistan.
       Dozens of churches have been destroyed in Egypt over the past two months. There has been more destruction directed at Christians in Egypt in the past month than in generations before.
       I have learned a valuable lesson from my own personal history as a Jew. Much of my father's family was murdered in the Holocaust when they were deported from eastern Hungary to Auschwitz. We Jews have told the world that we (all) must never forget what happened to us, and we must never allow it to happen again.
       This is not only the case for Jews. It is the case for every people group and culture and religious community that is threatened by another.
       What does this mean? It means we must be equally outraged by these things:
* Christians being persecuted by Muslims in Pakistan and Egypt;
* Bosnian Muslims being persecuted by Orthodox Serbs in the former Yugoslavia;
* Shi'ite Muslims persecuting Sunni Muslims in a country, and vice versa in another country;
* Jews persecuting Palestinians in Israel and the Palestinian territories;
* Palestinians persecuting Jews in that same land.
        The cry and call for justice to whoever is oppressed is a core part of the gospel of Jesus Christ. We must never be selective in who advocate for, and whose lives are most important. God sees PEOPLE - Christians, Jews, Muslims, and others. And for those who are the oppressed He pleads their cause. So should we.