We’re Going to Have to Get Help for Shweyga Mullah
Jan and I are in Turkey where our hotel room has a television (we don’t have a working television in America; wow, look what we have been missing . . . ). All of you who get your news from television must have a stronger stomach than I do, and after watching the CNN report on “Scarred by Gadhafi” I do not know how you can watch every day. We are going to have to help the woman, Shweyga, whose sad, piteous, hopeful story I have just heard. And please, God, we thank you for hearing the cries of Christians and Muslims who were tortured by madman Gadhafi, whose end none have tears left to grieve.
Viewing the stories of the news stirs the question within us, "what is the best thing we can do now to overcome evil with good?"
Here’s what you already know but which hurts me pretty bad right now. “Four months ago CNN correspondent Dan Rivers found Shweyga Mullah abandoned in a Gadhafi compound in western Tripoli with major burns.” Read more here Shweyga says that when she refused an order to beat Gadhafi’s granddaughter, whose mother, Aline Gadhafi, was annoyed by the little girls’ crying. Aline, who is married to Hannibal Gadhafi, then took Shweyga to a bathroom, and with the help of a male employee, tied Shweyga’s hands behind her back, tied her feet together, taped her mouth and poured boiling water on her head. “Now let her die,” said Aline Gadhafi. And die she would have, if not for the help of other workers who drove her to a hospital in Tripoli. There the doctors worked to save Shweyga, a 30 year old Ethiopian Christian.
But the Gadhafi family intervened, and threatened the director of the hospital to return the girl or face “trouble.”
The director complied, whereupon, unbelievably, Aline Gadhafi tied Shweyga again and once more poured boiling water on the girl. And you wonder why everyone in the world wants to move to the Free World. And God bless them, every one. It was an immigrant, you remember, named Irving Berlin. More about that in my previous post. A good non-profit organization named AntiSlavery has raised funds to get Shweyga Mullah to the island of Malta, where she is receiving medical care and making new friends. What is the best thing that we can do now, to overcome evil with good?
The Immigrant Who Wrote “God Bless America”
Irving Berlin[1] was born in Russia in 1888, at the end of the 19thcentury when Jewish families like his were beaten up and beaten down, living with no more security than, say, a fiddler on the roof. Irving Berlin said that his only memory of Russia was of lying on a blanket in the snow, watching Russian soldiers burn his family’s house to the ground. Irving Berlin with his parents and siblings had to leave, but had to move from town to town in secret (it was against the Czar’s law to leave Russia without permission).
Berlin's 40 simple words remind us that freedom and the pursuit of happiness do not occur in every national setting.
They came to New York City and passed through Ellis Island, where they saw the Statue of Liberty, and started over again in a land of liberty and justice for all.
Years later Irving Berlin said that the song was inspired by his mother, who would say “God bless America” often, to indicate that, without America, her family would have had no place to go.” Richard Corliss writes that “God Bless America” is “a simple plea for divine protection in a dark time.”
It has earned millions for the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, to whom Berlin assigned all royalties. In the days following 9/11 Celine Dion, a Canadian, recorded “God Bless America” and it became a number one hit, just as it was 1938 when it was first recorded by Kate Smith. Short and to the point, it is our unofficial national anthem in only 40 words:
God bless America, land that I love.
Stand beside her, and guide her, through the night with the light from above.
From the mountains, to the prairies, to the ocean white with foam;
God bless America, my home sweet home.
Interview with Father Zakaria Published
My interview with Father Zakaria Boutros has been published in the December 2011 issue of St. Francis Magazine. Read it here.
“At first glance,” writes Michael Lodahl in his book, Claiming Abraham: Reading the Bible and the Qur’an Side by Side, “it might seem that a doctrine of creation is something that Jews, Christians and Muslims share alike. In one sense that is true . . . [But] this need not imply that the meaning is identical for Jews, Christians and Muslims.” Let’s take a look:
| Biblical Account | Qur’an Account |
| Genesis 1:1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. | Surah 16:3 He created the heavens and the earth in truth; may He be exalted above what they associate [with Allah]. |
| Genesis 1:11 And God said, “Let the earth sprout vegetation, plants yielding seed, and fruit trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind.” | Surah 36:82-83 “His command is indeed such that if Allah wills a thing, He says to it, “Be!’ and it comes to be. Glory, then, to Him in whose hands is the dominion of everything.” |
| Genesis 1:20 And God said, “Let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the expanse of the heavens.” | Surah 21:30 Then we separated them, and of water we produced every living thing. |
| Genesis 1:22 And God blessed them, saying, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill up the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth.” And there was evening and there was morning, the fifth day. |
We are familiar with the Genesis account, but hopefully not too familiar to learn something new. God brings creation into existence not with the command form of the verb “Be!”, as in the Qur’an, but with “let there be”, the jussive voice in the Hebrew language. The jussive voice has a “softer” tone, we would say, than that of the imperative, the language of command. One can certainly overstate this distinction, but allow me to venture that the jussive voice is more like a tone of permission, of invitation.”
Michael Lodahl draws our attention to the subtle, but important, difference between “Let there be” in Genesis and “Be!” in the Qur’an. Is this difference important? I think so.
The “Playful Labor of Creation”
Lodahl continues, “Perhaps God is, in a certain sense, ‘making space’ for creaturely existence to occur, rather than giving irresistible commands.” God in Genesis brings all into being, but playfully, and then, once created, he endows his creation with its own power to keep on creating. “When we read, ‘Let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures,’ and ‘Let the earth bring forth living creatures of every kind,’ we may hear the Creator inviting the creaturely realm to share in the playful labor of creation.” God endows the swarms of sea life with the power to produce new swarms. Same with land animals and the birds of the air; they procreate new animals and new birds after their own kind.
Examining subtle differences between basic texts in the Bible and the Qur'an often explains how small variances can lead to large divergences of societal paths.
Creation’s Creativity
Michael Lodahl points out that there are Hebrew puns in Genesis 1, in the creation story, and these puns are fun to say out loud. For example, the earth is called upon to “bring forth” (tadshe) vegetation (deshe), and the waters are called to bring forth (yishretsu) swarming creatures from the sea (sherets).” God playfully commands the earth, then, to “produce produce” and the seas to “swarm with swarming swimmers” and the birds and the land animals to keep the creative process going. It’s all in the seed.
But the Allah of the Quran retains for himself all instances of creative power. Muslims ask, “Why would Allah share his glory with animals, birds, and people?” So, you may have thought that the God of Genesis and the Allah of the Qur’an are the same, at least, in terms of being the same Creator God. Not so. Allah retains, but God endows. And, just to make sure the reader understands, the Qur’an (in 16:3, quote above) takes a swipe at the Genesis version of creation referring to it as “associating” creation with God, the great sin known as shirk in Arabic.
Today, Islam suppresses its adherents’ creative urge. An Islamic classroom is a place of stupefying repetition and Islamic artwork is beautiful, perfectly repeating but mindless calligraphy.
I predict that you are not about to see an Islamic business begin to compete with Boeing to build a better airplane or with Apple to build a better laptop. You are not about to hear of a Muslim non-profit corporation set out to triple the production of rice in S.E. Asia, like the Rockefeller Foundation did in the 1960s. These and ten thousand other innovations are suppressed. So seriously is this suppression taken as orthodox Islam that when the nation of Saudi Arabia recently celebrated its independence day its banners proclaimed, “Seventy-five Years of Progress without Change.”
Muslims deserve better. Put your faith in the God of Genesis and He will set your feet on the path of being the creative person He made you to be. For there is no other name by which we shall be saved.
Book Review: Out of the Far Corners
A gripping tale of God's grace poured out upon a youngster with no economic, political or social sway.
My friend Peter Iliyn has written a fascinating book, Out of the Far Corners. It’s a tribute to Peter’s father who, as a boy, was forced to leave his homeland in Russia during Stalin’s reign of terror, only to face starvation and cruelty in northwest China, and then to endure mind-numbing hardships one day at a time, one prays to God that we might never need the grace of God as much as young Vanya did. To hear these stories now is to listen to Peter’s boyhood recollections of his father’s bedtime stories, told in the warmth and safety of San Francisco, stories of deliverance, faith and forgiveness. I recommend “Out of the Far Corners” to all who are desperate for peace on earth and good will towards all people.
Six Things to Know
These are things you may not know after reading it 100 times, but here are six of the important facts about Christmas.
As you celebrate the greatest gift given to mankind, consider these six items to enhance your understanding and change your perspective.
- Jesus was born in a house. Mary laid him in a manger because there was no room for him in the kataluma, that is, the spare room. All the English translations translate kataluma as “inn” except for the NIV, which translates it correctly. I have written about this here.[1] When the wise men arrive, they visit him in a house.
- You already know that the number of wise men is unknown, but you may not know why the church in Bethlehem is the oldest Christian building in the world. In 614 AD when Persian armies overran Damascus and Jerusalem, and all of the Holy Land, their soldiers tore down all the churches and chapels in Palestine. Except one. When they entered the church at Bethlehem, they saw themselves; that is, they saw the mosaic of the wise men, dressed in Persian clothes, and so they turned aside and spared the Church of the Nativity from destruction.
- We all know that there are two genealogy lists, one in Matthew, the other in Luke, but how many readers know that there are four women listed in the genealogy of Matthew as ancestors of Jesus: Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and Uriah’s wife (this is the unnamed Bathsheba). Three of the women are Gentiles.
- The Wise Men deceived Herod (Matthew 2:16) to save the baby Jesus, just as the Hebrew women deceived the Pharaoh when the lives of children are in danger. What does the Bible hiding the truth telling when lives are in danger?
- “His name shall be called Immanuel, God with us” (Matthew 1:23). A person wrote on my blog last week that the only name for God (hmm, an Anglo Saxon name for the deity) is Jehovah, or “I am.” But naming Jesus Christ “Immanuel”, meaning, “the Immanence of El,” releases us from the pressure to call Him by any one name.
- Mary was “with child,” not with tissue (Luke 2:5). The unborn are children, children, children. I need ten minutes of your time to see the glory of an unborn child here.[2]
And Merry Christmas!
What Happened Before the Holy Land Tour Bus Headed to Egypt
Our friend Katie took the trip of a lifetime last month, visiting the Holy Land with a tour group. This was the pastor’s eighth tour group, and every year after seeing all the familiar sights in Israel, they all take a bus across the border to Egypt. This year, 50 Christians went with the pastor and they all had a good time. Except that at the end of the Israel part of the trip, only three Christians wanted to go on to Egypt.
Egypt this year, you can imagine, has not attracted many tourists. Not that it attracted many tourists before the Arab Spring of 2011, for that matter.
Though it has the 17 million more people than France (the number one tourist destination in the world) and though it has fabulous beaches and unrivaled ancient sites, most tourists know better to go there. One tourist (not Katie), wrote this on the BBC travel website in November[1]:
This year's Arab Spring was just a marker along the road of the hopelessness that Muslim countries of the region suffer as the result of lacking the true hope and peace brought through acceptance of the ministry of Jesus Christ.
When cocktail hour comes round in the Egyptian Mediterranean resort of al-Masr these days, there are no tourists to watch the soft darkness snuff out the iridescent turquoise of the sea. Slinky music echoes a little eerily along deserted terraces; this is twilight in the twilight zone. We were a party of three—the only guests in a 550-bedroom hotel.
Only three hotel guests! When I read this I nearly spilled my coffee (except I don’t drink coffee, so I nearly spilled my ice water). The BBC writer continued:
Mohammad Hassin, one of the managers in the al-Masr hotel, supervised the 45-man team that made our breakfast. Staff have been laid off and salaries cut. He admits that it’s not a happy time in the Egyptian travel industry – but he hopes for better times to come when the political situation stabilizes again.
This lament sounds familiar; six years ago Egypt’s Minister of Tourism said that tourists were avoiding Egypt “during these troubled times.” Well, the troubled times in Egypt have been going on for a long time, haven’t they? But it’s not the times that are troubled; it is the Arabs who are troubled by their own hopelessness. The Arab Spring is an uprising against corruption, against hopelessness, against police brutality.
The Arab Spring, in other words, is a desperate struggle to join the Free World. And how shall Arabs become free? Jesus Christ said, “You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (John 8:32); and “It was for freedom that Christ set us free” (Galatians 5:1). The best thing you can do for Egyptians is to send a church planting team, because planting churches is the New Testament model for spreading the kingdom of God. If you have read this far, perhaps you are the rare Christian who will not get off the tour bus before it heads south to Egypt. Cool. I would like to hear from you; you are not alone.
One Billion Acts of Love
My friend Nate said to me, “On our walking mission to the remotest regions of Nepal, porters carrying crates on their heads passed us on the trail. In the crates were bottles of Coca-Cola. We never came to a village, though it be ten days from the road, that Coke did not get there first.”
What is more critical? The delivery of Coca Cola or delivering the Gospel of Jesus Christ to the Muslim World?
That is Nate’s amazing story. So is the story of how Coca-Cola expanded to everywhere on the planet, a story told by Coca-Cola’s Cuban-born President, the late Robert Goizueta: “A billion hours ago, human life appeared on earth. A billion minutes ago, Christianity emerged. A billion seconds ago, the Beatles changed music. A billion Coca-Colas ago was yesterday morning.” That is how Goizueta told Coca-Cola’s amazing success story. “Our goal,” he went on to say, “is to say “a billion Coca-Colas ago was this morning.”1
But our amazement at the spread of bottles and cans of sugar water to remotest regions of Nepal and all the world does not compare to the glory of the spread of God’s love. As Paul Zahl says in his wonderful book, A Short Systematic Theology, Jesus was the first Christian. And Jesus is the starting point for the great change that has occurred all over the world. And that change is love.
“The temple of God on earth is the love we have for one another and for him,” Zahl writes. Christians are a people “rooted and grounded in love” (Ephesians 3:17). And this love is from God, specifically, from God the Father, “who loved us and sent his Son to be the expiation for our sins” (I John 4:10), and from God the Son, from whose love nothing can separate us (Romans 8:35).
This love from God the Father and God the Son is what Zahl calls our “belovedness,” and says that our “belovedness is always prior to loving.” And what has gloriously happened in the world since Jesus changed everything is that people who know they are beloved of God are doing the loving things that Jesus did, and would do if Jesus were here today, and, in fact, are proving that Jesus is here today in the loving things that they do. And this love extends itself further and further, to where there are no roads, to where porters carry it to the most distant places. A billion acts of Christian love ago: that was yesterday morning. Our goal is to make a billion acts of Christian love ago to be this morning.
1 Corporate Cultures and Global Brands, p. 65.
Science and Islam – One Magazine’s Perspective
All over the world, no matter what the cultural or language differences, science is more or less guided by scientific principles. Except in Islamic countries, where it is guided by the Qur’an. A cover article on “Science and Islam” in Discover magazine presents the problem that arises when trying to do science without a scientific method of “systematic observation, measurement, and experiment, and the formulation, testing, and modification of hypotheses.” Discover magazine went to find out for themselves what is meant by “Islamic science.” Here’s what they found.
Even the secular press recognizes the many perils that exist between Islam and science.
“There is no conflict between Islam and science,” Zaghloul el-Naggar declares as we sit in the parlor of his villa in Maadi, an affluent suburb of Cairo. What people call the scientific method, he explains, is really the Islamic method: “All the wealth of knowledge in the world has actually emanated from Muslim civilization.”
Author, newspaper columnist, and television personality El-Naggar is also a geologist whom many Egyptians, including a number of fellow scientists, regard as a leading figure in their community. El-Naggar is a member of the Geological Society of London and publishes papers that circulate internationally. But he is also an Islamic fundamentalist, a scientist who views the universe through the lens of the Koran. He hands me three short volumes he has written about the relationship of science and Islam. These include The Geological Concept of Mountains in the Holy Koran, and Treasures in the Sunnah, A Scientific Approach. There are scientific signs in more than one thousand verses of the Qur’an, according to El-Naggar. El-Naggar quotes from the Qur’an: “And each of them (i.e., the moon and the sun) floats along in its own orbit.” “The Messenger of Allah’ el-Naggar writes, “talked about all these cosmic facts in such accurate scientific stile at a period of time when people thought that Earth was flat and stationary. This is definitely one of the signs which testifies to the truthfulness of the message of Muhammad.”
Elsewhere, he notes that Prophet’s references to “the seven earths”; El-Naggar claims that geologists say that Earth’s crust consists of seven zones. In another passage, the Prophet said that there were 360 joints in the body, and other Islamic researchers claim that medical science backs up the figure. Such knowledge, the thinking goes, could only have been given by God.
But Discover magazine notes that “Critics are quick to point out that Islamic scientists tend to use each other as sources, creating an illusion that the work has been validated by research. The existence of 360 joints, in fact, is not accepted in medical communities; rather, the number varies from person to person, with an average of 307. These days most geologists divide Earth’s crust into 15 major zones, or tectonic plates.” p. 38-39
Brain Drain. Cairo University has not received Western professors since the 1950s, and because of the scientific method has been suppressed many Arab scientists were excluded from the university. “The biggest disaster in the region, I am sorry to say, is the loss of brainpower,” admits Hassan bin Talal, brother of the late King Hussein of Jordan. Muslim scientists come to the Free World and accomplish great things. That is because they are following the scientific method, a method that seems to be suppressed in the Islamic world.
Thanksgiving Prayer!
Our Heavenly Father, when we read in the Bible how your Son, Jesus Christ, adores you and loves you, when your Word reveals the perfections of love, goodness and righteousness, peace and joy which manifest themselves every day in your relationship with your Son; and when we see Jesus Christ’s perfect obedience to you, how He trusted You at Gethsemane, how He called on You from the cross to forgive those who crucified Him, we realize that our greatest desire has come true, that God is love, and only in the Trinity, God the Father and God the Son and God the Holy Spirit, could the command to “love one another” exist before time, before Creation, when there was only you. So we can truly say that all is right in heaven today, for all is perfect love and adoration between Father and Son. So our hearts are made glad, no matter the slings and arrows of outrageous misfortune that burden our souls and what great weights we carry such that our knees about to buckle. 
We can truly say, with all our hearts, “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” And hear us as we pray, our Father, for the lost sheep, our loved ones who do not know their way back to you. Some of them are long-lost friends, and some of them are from our families. But you are great and good, and Christ your Son has shown us the way to perfect trust in you. You are nothing like the false deities that men and demons have imagined. We could not love, nor could anyone love, a deity who traded favors to mortals in return for their bowing and scraping and giving and doing. We could not love if you were not love. But our hearts are open and warmed because of who you are. And we believe we can be kind to one another, tenderhearted too, forgiving one another as You have forgiven us.
This is our Thanksgiving Prayer, Lord God, that another year has passed, and You are ever so much more glorious for the perfection of your relationship, Father and Son, between whom is only love, goodness, righteousness, peace and joy.
At sundown when our thoughts are settling in, like geese landing on a pond in the evening’s last light, when the western sky turns a robins’ egg blue, give thanks that there has always been a heavenly Father and always His Son, and that another day has increased their glory on account of their faithful love, goodness, righteousness, peace and joy for one another. And so we pray “Thy Kingdom Come on earth as it is in heaven.” For Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory forever. Amen.
