Thinking on Muslims while gardening.

My day off.

I sit here with a cold beer at hand and delightfully aching shoulders and back. I have had a good day off mostly digging in the garden. I went out to the vegetable garden where I had prepared some ground near a climbing frame. I planted snow peas, the ones you eat pod and all raw. I love them. I put in radish seeds as well, because they are a great encouragement to any gardener - I'll eat them in a few weeks. I was then instructed to fill the hen's hopper with mash. While doing this I noticed that the bolt on the hen house had self destructed. We have a hen house which I constructed out of old walls from a house 23 years ago. It isn't pretty but has housed hens all that time. I set about with carpentry tools to repair the door. We then concentrated on doing some serious work in the vegetable garden. My wife has her patch, which is more fruitful than mine. I have my patches which largely get neglected and any vegetables have to grow among weeds. It was a nice warm day and we worked steadily in our respective patches. We had Max our old dog watching us on one side and our two goats lying in the paddock also checking us out.  Max is very old for his breed and has some health concerns so I suspect he will not be around for much longer.  He seemed to enjoy his day in the vege garden with us. I dug and prepared a big patch of ground, working away in this idyllic setting. A duck and five ducklings wandered in the next door paddock. The birdsong in the surrounding trees was lovely background music. Wood pigeons flew from tree to tree. I saw one and I am sure he was just showing off his flying skills. He would fly upwards fast, stall, slide backwards then break off into a glide like a stunt pilot.  Late in the afternoon the place became more idyllic - for a while. I heard someone singing in the distance and looked on the hill in the farm paddock a distance away. It looked like a teenage boy sitting singing, the sheep munching in the paddock nearby. "How neat" I thought and remembered my son when he was much younger wandering through the long grass of a farmer's paddock singing at the top of his voice. I continued digging and the noise changed. I could not make out the sentences or words except one oft repeated word. It sounds like duck, but starts with an "F". I looked up, he was quite a  distance away, but I think he was talking on his cell phone and yelling, " F.... blah blah F blah blah blah F blah blah blah... F'ing... blah blah blah...F'ed blah blah.. etc." Whoever he was talking to had obviously annoyed him and he was yelling down the phone at them. This word, and no others, kept coming across the paddock at me as clear as a bell. In the end he let out a whole lot of "F's" in a row, put his phone in his pocket and stormed off toward his house. "Oh well" I thought, "Sometimes I have felt like that!" In the quietness and beauty of this scene, it was a funny change.

Muslims

During the day I had to send some emails and checked for responses regularly. Like a lot of people, I receive emails that are circulating around. Some are jokes which are a good laugh. Some have thoughtful and encouraging messages in them. Others I receive seem to be hate mail against Muslims. There seems to be a movement in America itching for an all out war with them, and some of the emails make me angry. Some are concerned about the increasing Muslim presence. Here is an extract from one such email...

There are now thousands of mosques throughout Europe . With larger congregations than there are in churches.  And in every European city there are plans to build super-mosques that will dwarf every church in the region.  Clearly, the signal is: we rule.

Many European cities are already one-quarter Muslim: just take Amsterdam , Marseille and Malmo in Sweden .  In many cities the majority of the under-18 population is Muslim.  Paris is now surrounded by a ring of Muslim neighborhoods.  Mohammed is the most popular name among boys in many cities.

In some elementary schools in Amsterdam the farm can no longer be mentioned, because that would also mean mentioning the pig, and that would be an insult to Muslims.

Many state schools in Belgium and Denmark only serve halal food to all pupils.  In once-tolerant Amsterdam gays are beaten up almost exclusively by Muslims.  Non-Muslim women routinely hear 'whore, whore'.  Satellite dishes are not pointed to local TV stations, but to stations in the country of origin. 

These emails worry me. We have a world which is under stress for all sorts of reasons. Economically the world is struggling. We face considerable environmental problems. There are tensions all around, and such winding up of tensions feels a little like a pile of dry straw around fireworks. People also point to very angry and warlike statements by various Muslims. How do we respond? What does a Jesus follower do? As I dug my garden my mind was stewing on these things. I have no easy answers, but I firmly believe two things.

We desperately need genuine followers of Jesus.

Where there is a vacuum air rushes in to replace the emptiness. I think that in religious terms where the Churches are weak in true faithful following of Jesus, Muslim faith, or any other faith can fill the void. Where Churches have little real influence in western society, other faiths and lifestyles will fill the void. As I look at Church life these days I often see weak imitations of the real thing. Where Christian faith appears strong it is often a very self serving, "bless me Jesus", "spiritual masturbation" type of religion. It can be very fundamentalist in nature. In the face of the increasing presence and awareness of Islam, such a religion feels threatened, builds walls and sometimes even encourages a military response to resist that which is seen as evil. Often in other churches I see a nominalism and a weak "Churchianity", rather than genuine followers of Jesus. Such a faith goes to Church on Sunday but essentially lives by the same secular, materialistic values as the world around about them. I believe in these times it is important that we do our best to be full-on genuine followers of Jesus, truly open to his ways of love. The Apostle Paul pleads, "Let love be genuine" and encourages the early Christians, even in a situation where they were being persecuted to do their best to live in harmony and so commend the gospel.  Jesus presents a picture of a servant community, where his disciples are in the world as servants. Communities of true disciples of Jesus, display a wholesome, useful, life-enhancing lifestyle which is not a vacuum, but an attractive force for good and for love.  As a minister and workplace chaplain I spend a lot of time among non-christian people. One man at a fire-station said recently, "Since when did Churches bring good news? Its always bad news, judgement and death." Of course he is wrong, but because of the weakness of so much that is called Christianity, there seems to be little evidence to counter his statement. Communities of true loving, active servant disciples will not have to defend themselves, they will be living their truth in such a way that it would be hard to argue against.

In these times we need to believe in the power of love.

We call ourselves "christian" and say we are following Jesus, but often we do not believe in the essential truth he died expressing. Our Churches are filled with crosses. The cross reminds us of the power of evil - a good man was put to death by the religious and political leaders of his day. But the cross is seen as a symbol of triumph. We believe that somehow in the death, the love of God in Jesus had power over evil. Jesus went to the cross believing that the path of love, even though it meant death, is more powerful than evil. We as his disciples struggle to have the same faith. When something like Islam threatens us, sometimes in the name of our religion we see the answer lies in hatred, resistance and military force. We forget the heart of the gospel - love conquers evil. Martin Luther King says, "The only thing that has any power to turn enemies into friends is love." Studdart Kennedy writes, "I believe that evil dies, love lives on, loves on and conquers all". I believe that in these times the followers of Jesus must overcome any evil that is in our communities or a part of expressions of the Muslim faith by out-loving the opposition. Whatever our response to the increasing Muslim presence should be, it must remember, trust and rely upon the power of love.