At Pinnacle, we have a weekly class we call Project: Faith. This past week, I was on tap to lead a discussion on interfaith tension and pluralism in the US. We called it, "Can a Muslim be an American (and other interfaith curiosities)?" Preparing for this discussion, I read a remarkable recent book by a Fuller Seminary professor named Matthew Kaemingk, called Christian Hospitality and Muslim Immigration and an Age of Fear (Eerdmans, 2018). I recommend it. In the book, Kaemingk looks at the Netherlands as a nation we might learn a thing or two from—about both the challenge and opportunities of "welcoming the stranger" as people of faith.
Along the way, Kaemingk tells the story of Dutch pastor Kees Sybrandi, who made a decision in 2004 worth remembering. At the time he wasn't exactly a model of liberal open mindedness and tolerance. He was a public critic of Muslims immigrating into the Netherlands—because he feared poverty, violence, crime, and a threat of terrorism in their arrival. He believed that Islam is a threat to Christianity, and so a threat to his own people.
After the brutal murder by a radicalized Muslim of a Dutch filmmaker who had made an anti-Muslim film (made from a liberal perspective), Pastor Sybrandi's fears seemed to be coming true. Numbers of mosques and churches were vandalized or burned, violence escalated, and tensions were high across the small country.
According to Kaemingk, as all of this was unfolding Pastor Sybrandi walked to his neighborhood mosque, knocked on the door, entered and told the fearful strangers huddled inside that he would stand outside their mosque every night until the violence subsided. In the days that followed, he called other pastors and more and more folks joined him, circling and guarding mosques in the area for more than three months.
Why did he do that? He had shown no indication of friendships with Muslims, or sympathy for the culture and practices they brought. He wasn't inspired by ideological visions or some dream of a liberal nation. Quite the opposite. When Kaemingk pressed him for a reason, Kees responded, "'Jesus. Jesus commanded me to love my neighbor—my enemy too.'" [Kaemingk, online version, loc 560] Seems this pastor had read the many passages of scripture about befriending strangers, even as he was honest about his misgivings. When the moment of truth came, he landed on the side of compassion, neighborliness, and justice.
More often than by dialogue groups, or political statements, or Sunday sermons, it seems to me that strangers become neighbors, and neighbors become friends, by acts of courage, and acts of sympathy, and acts of protection, and by gestures of curiosity, and understanding, and love.
We may be in a moment in America when such acts mean as much or more than they ever have. May we be open, attentive, and courageous enough to respond.
