I was in Lebanon from just after midnight May 19th to 2:30 am May 25th, certainly six of the biggest days in my life.  You can return from Beirut to the States through Amsterdam any time you want, so long as it's 2:30 am!  My main purpose was to attend a conference with Evangelicals for Middle East Understanding and the Middle East Council of Churches from May 19th to May 22nd.  The highest leadership of most if not all major Christian denominations including evangelicals, several Orthodox groups and those affiliated with Rome from Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Palestine, and Jordan was represented, so the final statement of the conference fairly represents the views of the Church of Jesus Christ in this region.  The main thing Christians of the Middle East want from American Christians - what they told us over and over with one voice - is that we should love them as fellow members of Christ and help them, instead of supporting  the American and Israeli governments in destroying their presence and witness.

This happens in several ways.  Economic distress and persecution of the population create pressure to leave, which especially in Israel's case is exactly the plan.  It's easier for Christians to leave because there are large Middle Eastern Christian populations in the West to receive them, and Christians find it easier to think of moving to the United States and other Western countries than Muslims do.

The Muslim world tends to see the United States as a Christian nation, American Christians contributing to this deception by identifying with America and excusing or even approving its crimes.  Thus the Church's witness is compromised in the Middle East by the adulterous relationship of American Christians to their nation state, just as when the "Christian" Crusaders came to the Middle East 900 years ago with the gospel of massacre, pillage, and rape.  Once again, the Middle East must endure genocide (the American embargo in Iraq), Milosevic-style ethnic cleansing (in Palestine), and plunder (of oil wealth, by supporting compliant and corrupt dictatorships) under the pretext of a noble crusade (the war on non-American terror by means of unending open-ended American terror) at the hands of a supposedly Christian civilization.

This does nothing for the name "Christian" in this part of the world, or for those who bear that name.  Indeed, for this region the problem goes back 1700 years, to when Christians in the West identified with the Roman empire and Byzantium, and thereby made big problems for Christians in the Parthian empire.  American Christians need to bear witness clearly to the truth that the United States is in fact a godless, violent, commercial empire in the tradition of Babylon and Tyre which is utterly hostile to the Christian gospel.  In its abortion clinics it slaughters even its own children in the pursuit of peace and safety, security, and wealth - just as the Phoenicians used to do.  What then can we expect it to do to the children of others?  Jesus was hated by the world, as He said, because He testified of it that its deeds were evil.  To testify likewise concerning our world, the American empire, is one of the greatest things we can do for the Church and for the gospel in the Muslim world, and indeed among the poor everywhere.  Simply put, we owe it to the Middle Eastern Church not to identify with their tormentors, especially when one of their principal tormentors is the nation whose citizens we are.

Some highlights for me:

• The 33 hour prayer vigil.  Due to jet lag, I would hit the wall at 2 in the afternoon, but I would awaken bright-eyed and bushy-tailed around 2:30 am, so that worked out well.  I went down there to pray a little before 3 am and took the hour, since the appointed person had not shown up, and the area for that hour was Israel and Palestine.  I began by having to admit that Israel behaves as it does because they drew the conclusion from Hitler that God Himself does not love them, so that they think they have to behave like Cain and his descendant Lamech - who behaved as they did because God had cast them off.

I wept as I have not for many years, because they are in an impossible position.  It is written, "Do not take your own vengeance, beloved, but give place to God's wrath" (Romans 12:19-20) and the most important word there is "beloved."  Without knowing God loves you and will avenge you as needed, you just can't go there.  They need to hear from us that their conduct is as abominable as some of their own people are telling them, but that God loves them anyway, and will rescue them if they will only repent and trust in Him - even before we mention the name of Jesus.  Jesus said Himself that they won't believe Him even if He should rise from the dead, if they refuse to believe Moses and the prophets (Luke 16).

Instead, American Christians mostly make excuses for them and justify their hideous conduct, often even claiming for Israel the right to commit genocide, even though they read in their Bibles that a flattering tongue works ruin (Proverbs 26:28).  And Middle Eastern Christians are failing them too, denying that they have any claim to the land - by which they mean only to deny them the right to behave in it as they do, but which Israelis hear as justifying their eventual expulsion.
 

• The caves of Jeita.  Stalagmites and stalactites of all different colors.  A fabulous place, near Beirut.  If you're in Lebanon, go see them.  Unfortunately, they don't let you take pictures.

• My eyes - and ears - were opened by hearing familiar Christian praise songs or hymns in Arabic, and even by learning the Arabic word Ain, spring.  It is almost exactly the same as the Hebrew word, as often happens between Arabic and Hebrew.  How pleasing both languages sound!  I saw clearly that the current fashion in evangelical churches of trashing Arabs and Islam in order to justify godless treatment of them is just like how they used to trash Jews before that became unfashionable 50 years ago.  Then it was how Jews drink the blood of Christian children at Passover and how the Elders of Zion are controlling the world.  Now it's how Islam teaches terrorism and how the Quran says that all non-Muslims must be put to death until Islam is all that's left in the world, quoting verses to prove it that are just like those  in our Bible - and which evangelicals quote themselves to defend the oppression of Palestinians and others!  Whether you hate Jews or Arabs, they're both Semitic people whose languages are almost the same, but now the respectable way for Christians to be anti-semites is to hate Arabs and Muslims, instead of Jews as in days past.  And even now they love Israelis for NOT acting like Jews.

 
• Again the prayer vigil.  The hour was given to Syria, and I found that I had always been reluctant to pray about Syria, and so I asked the Lord what was my problem.  I promptly recalled that President Hafez al-Assad had massacred around 25,000 people in Hama in 1982 to suppress a Muslim fundamentalist revolt (provoked by the insolent and cruel behavior of his security services in a poor neighborhood, which drove them out) - and that the Christian churches in Syria were therefore in a sense indebted to this monstrosity for the religious liberty they would have lost if Assad had not prevailed.  I didn't feel comfortable considering how we're indebted to a crime like that.

I went on to realize that the churches of Iraq are similarly indebted to Saddam Hussein for the religious liberty they enjoy, and that in fact the churches of the United States likewise have always relied on cruel American power to safeguard themselves and open opportunities - consider the hundreds of thousands annihilated by the Americans in the Philippine-American War with the eager support of missionary organizations.  Indeed, there are countless examples - Middle Eastern churches relying on the Russians, British, and French to push around the Ottoman empire on their behalf in the 19th century, Chinese Christians relying on European powers against their government, for which they paid in the Boxer rebellion and still suffer today, and Christian identification with Roman, Byzantine, and Czarist power.  We always come out of these deals with shame.  It's not how Jesus sends us out as sheep into the midst of wolves.  We don't necessarily seek these relationships, either; in the Syrian and Iraqi cases the church is quite innocent.

I think I understand better why Paul on several occasions took 39 stripes from the Jews although he could have used his Roman citizenship to ward this off.  I know also that I am not much like that, and that following Christ means becoming more so, as He was.  I foresee some schooling in my future!
 

• A conversation with an Arab evangelical and one of the Americans as the American explained that her job was doing blood tests to detect fetal abnormalities so women could abort their babies if they had some handicap, although most refused - the Arab Christian confused, and then stunned silent, as I had to explain that some among us think it's acceptable to kill babies through abortion.  Some "Christians" justify it as service to God to cleanse inconvenient innocent life from the belly, while others justify it as service to God to cleanse inconvenient innocent life from the West Bank.  When will Christians realize all around that God is into preserving inconvenient life? - and a good thing, too, considering how inconvenient we are!

Later, with the Syrian Orthodox bishop in Zahle, when he mentioned how his people coming from the Turkish southeast and other places were poor but with big families, and one suggested that this must be a big problem for them - and wouldn't they find it easier to have fewer kids?  The bishop turning quietly to him and explaining that they have a saying in the church that God takes care of all his children, and that it is true.  The church stood ready to help those in real need, and there were a few, but whoever was there, God was taking care of them - no problem.  God's church in action: the poor, rich in faith as James says, giving some pastoral care to a "rich" American who does not even know that God loves and cares for poor people who trust Him, as this bishop has seen.
 
•  My conversation about Israel and Palestine with the Hizbollah man on the steps of Archbishop Elias Kfouri's residence in Marjayoun, described in my letter to David Brickner of Jews for Jesus - how the Hizbollah man knows, unlike American Christians who justify the annihilation of Iraqi children by the American embargo, that to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God does not permit anyone, at any time, to oppress a three-year-old, whether Israeli, Palestinian, or any other.

 
• The way we sharpened one another over theological and political issues.  A Syrian pastor standing six inches from my face to discuss the relevance of the humanity and Jewishness of Jesus Christ, of his descent from Abraham,. Isaac and Jacob and how they are therefore our fathers too, while people took pictures of the show.  A discussion with the Anglican bishop of Jerusalem which I began after his (to my mind) excessively pro-Arab speech by telling him that my objection to his word was that he sounded like a Zionist.  We eventually adjourned with his taking my website address and my ordering his book and getting his email address, so that we might continue with more information all around.

I remembered how I'd seen in John Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion that among many things he got right, he was dead wrong in his failure to distinguish between weakness and sin.  Those that followed, even if they forgot all about him and even about Christianity, kept that delusion, at least in the back of their minds.  In this way, being both post-Christian Calvinist societies, apartheid South Africa and the United States have both despised weakness and admired strength, thus feeling justified in crushing the weak - who after all wouldn't be weak if they were not sinners.

Israel, for rather different reasons, also came to despise weakness and to glory in power, and so for these three societies, it was love at first sight.  Loving apartheid South Africa became awkward at home for the US (with the rise of the civil rights movement) and too expensive abroad (with the collapse of the Portugese empire in 1975).  The last, lingering kiss was over ten years more in coming, but the breakup could not be avoided forever.  There is a lesson for Israel in this, should its apartheid society and colonial war prove too inconvenient for the American national interest.  As I was musing on these things, I got into a conversation with a Syrian Christian woman - who understands well how wrong this theology is - and had the pleasure of showing that while this is indeed an Israeli and American thing, it is NOT a Jewish thing.

Where live ammunition is used, people seem more likely to realize that straightforward, tough discussion of real issues is better than making nice and keeping everything vague, going along to get along - how do you suppose Jesus felt, and still feels, about this?  People in Lebanon are more about the business of living, instead of trading real life for safety and distance.  I think of the couple in Zahle, who when they saw I'd like a picture of their baby, said, "You hold the baby!"  So they took the picture for me with the baby up on my shoulders.  Like all such babies, the baby just wondered why all the big people were acting so strange, but he humored us.

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