I am standing on a terrace looking across a valley at a small madrasah just about to begin its school day. The children line up begrudgingly, boys pushing one another as boys seem to do everywhere around the world. The girls too act like girls do everywhere, talking in huddled circles, glancing outward, and then talking again.
The dishes from breakfast clink in the kitchen behind me. The remnants of the local breakfast staples—cucumbers, tomatoes, black olives, hard-boiled eggs, and bread—are scraped into a trashcan or kept for later depending on their condition.
I am enjoying my breakfast staple, a café Americano (thanks to my wife for the hand-press espresso contraption in my luggage). For my body it is 1 a.m., but the Mediterranean sun and morning birds beg to differ. Jetlag always leaves me reflective and slow, as one affected with unearned wisdom, ponderous by necessity not choice. The coffee does its work, and my lagging brain begins to put together the opening lines of my lecture on the Mosaic covenant.
As I start up the stairs to our third-floor classroom, the loud speakers of the madrasah across the valley announce the beginning of school.
One unexpected benefit of teaching through a translator: it gives you ample time between sentences to construct what you will say next. If teaching in your native tongue is like fishing (whole paragraphs cast like a line, a tug here, a jerk there, reeling in your argument to its only logical conclusion), then teaching through a translator is like shooting skeet. Sentences must be precisely targeted shots, to the point, concise, and in plain language lest you confuse your translator and thus the class. I need the extra translation time to take aim.
This school trains pastors who operate in majority-Muslim communities. And they are converts to Christianity from Islam.
Most of them have suffered physically, all of them socially and relationally, as a direct result of their confessions. They are acquainted with the suffering of the body of Christ in a way that I can only imagine or hear about as I sit and listen to them tell their stories after class when we gather for singing and prayer. They have many stories to tell, and they tell them late into the night. One speaks of how the police chief in his town would draw him into conversations about faith, dialogues that would often end in police station beatings. Another fled from his hometown in Northern Iraq when he received word one night that he would be kidnapped if he returned to his house. He had shamed his family, and there had to be consequences. He left his country with only the clothes on his back and now works at a refugee church.
What is perhaps more striking than these stories is their desire to return home to minister once the month-long school session is complete.
I am not sure who is teaching whom, and I am not being sentimental when I say that. We gather twice a year to talk about the fruits of our Christian tradition, a system of belief, a method of exegesis, the schema of redemptive history, and the students receive these fruits with exuberance. The Reformed tradition is a “powerful app.” They can see its value, and they take copious notes and ask insightful questions to make sure they get it right.
They teach me, however, about the stance of the global church in the world. Of course, I know my experience in modern-day America presents a bit of an anomaly in global Christianity, in historical Christianity for that matter. My students’ desire for God’s Word brings to my mind the apostle Peter’s logic in John 6:68: “To whom should we go? You have the words of eternal life.” They understand that verse in a way I do not.
Like me, the students bring their own cultural baggage to their Christian life, and their baggage doesn’t look like mine, but that does not make it any less baggage. The gospel after all is what drew us to one another. Here we are with really nothing in common, gathered in this room to study an ancient text that is as culturally different from us as we are from each other, and yet somehow it all works. Our hearts melt together at the story of the cross. We connect around this idea of grace and forgiveness, raising our voices together to proclaim the great wandering word (wanderwort) of faith, “Amen,” with its Hebrew origin but at home in any English, Arabic, French, Kurdish, or Kabyle lexicon once the church is there.
In those moments, I am reminded of the words of the hymn, that when I have “been there ten thousand years, bright shining as the sun,” it is quite likely that an Algerian or Egyptian or Turkish brother or sister will be standing next to me, smiling into the radiant glory with no less days stretching out before us both.
Scott Redd (@scott_redd) is the president and associate professor of Old Testament at Reformed Theological Seminary in Washington, D.C.
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