A People with No Home

Judy and I recently visited a new restaurant whose sign advertised Mediterranean cuisine. The menu included an appetizing mix of Greek, Italian, and Arab dishes. As we were waiting for our food, I overheard the man who appeared to be the manager or owner as he was speaking with one of the staff. I couldn’t hear much, but I could tell he was speaking in Arabic. I speak almost no Arabic ("hi", "goodbye", "how are you?", "God is great", counting to ten, and, sadly, a couple of unprintable phrases I picked up on the soccer field in Jerusalem), but it sounded like he had an Egyptian accent.

The waitress let him know that we’d like to meet him, and pretty soon he had pulled up a chair for a friendly chat. We learned he is a Coptic Christian. The Coptic church is sort of the official Christian denomination of Egypt. It is one of the oldest Christian traditions in the world—part of the broad Eastern Orthodox tradition, though somewhat unique. In recent years, Coptics have been facing increasing persecution from fundamentalist Muslims in Egypt. Many have left their homeland in search of religious freedom.

Our host was the second Coptic person I had met in Nashville (the first was a student in one of my Bible classes at Lipscomb). He told us that there are four Coptic churches in Nashville, with a total of some eight or nine hundred families. I knew Nashville had a growing Arab population, but I had no idea that there were so many Egyptian Christians here.

We also chatted a little about what it has been like in America since 9/11. I doubt I’ll ever forget his reply.

“In Egypt they hate us because we are Christian. In America they hate us because we are Arab.”

The first sentence is an indictment of the world, and a fulfillment of Jesus’ warning to his followers that this world would hate them. (Makes me wonder why I haven’t felt hated by my own country.) The second sentence is a stinging indictment of an America continually plagued by prejudice and racism.

Arab Christians increasingly feel like a people with no home in this world. They often face hostility from fundamentalist Muslims in their own countries, and find they are unwelcome among Americans who often see Arabs as the enemy. They are truly strangers and exiles in this world.

As a post-Christian America becomes increasingly secular and increasingly unfriendly to Christian faith and virtues, we may find that the plight of Coptic Christians will one day be our own. Considering the success of early Christianity under Roman persecution, maybe that won’t be such a bad thing.

In the meantime, perhaps we could all just be a little more sensitive to the very real possibility that the Arab person we meet in town just might be a fellow disciple of Jesus.

Christians, Americans, and “English-Only”

As an American citizen, I share the concern of many citizens over the issue of illegal immigration. The flood of undocumented people into our country presents a number of disturbing problems. How can our economy absorb all the people looking for work? How will our health care and education institutions meet the needs of these individuals and their children? Will our welfare system be able to manage the demands placed on it? How does the lack of border security affect safety and security in an age of terrorism? These are troubling questions and I claim to have no answers.

On the other hand, I am also increasingly concerned about the tensions, prejudices, and even hostility I see in our community over immigration issues. Sometimes the language used to discuss these problems sounds like racial prejudice in thin disguise. America has always been a nation that claimed to welcome immigrants (“give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”). But in reality, immigrants quite often have faced much prejudice and hatred—whether the Chinese working on the railroads, the Polish in Chicago, the Vietnamese boat people in Texas, and on and on.

The city of Nashville is about to vote on an “English-Only” amendment. The law would prohibit the city government from publishing official documents in any other language or from hiring translators to communicate with citizens, except to protect public health or safety. The proponents have some good points to make about the importance of immigrants in any country learning the official language so they can function and prosper (http://www.nashvilleenglishfirst.com/). But the opposition raises some very troubling points about the impact this legislation will have on the poor, on recent immigrants who have not yet had time to learn the language, and on the image of our city in a global economy (http://www.nashvilleforallofus.org/).

Sorting out all the social, political, and economic implications of this amendment is beyond my pay grade. For me, though, there is one question that seems pretty clear: What would Jesus do?

Jesus seems to have been little concerned with the politics of his day. For example, he swept aside the debate over Roman taxation with the simple exhortation to “give Caesar what is Caesar’s, and God what is God’s”—which didn’t answer the questions about whether the Romans had any right to be there or whether their tax system was just. Throughout his ministry Jesus made it abundantly clear that he was more concerned about the kingdom of God than worldly kingdoms—and that meant he was very concerned about the poor, the outcast, and the foreigners, even the hated Samaritans. I think Jesus would be less concerned about the cost to the city of providing translations than he would be about the impact on poor immigrants of refusing to do so.

Jesus said one of the two greatest commands is to “love your neighbor as yourself,” quoting Leviticus 19:18. Just a few verses later, God commanded the same thing regarding foreigners:

“‘When foreigners reside among you in your land, do not mistreat them. The foreigners residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt. I am the Lord your God.” (Leviticus 19:33-34)

According to Moses, God loves the foreigners residing among his people, and they must do the same (Deuteronomy 10:18-19).

If I were an immigrant in another country, I would want to learn the language as quickly as I could. But I wonder how welcome I would feel if the citizens said their city would offer me no help until I could master their language well enough to navigate my way through the system. (Well, actually I don’t wonder that at all. I think I know exactly how I would feel.)

And I wonder what Jesus would say to us as we head for the polls. I can’t say for sure, but I think it might be something like: “Treat others the way you would want to be treated.”