A Christian Response to Islamic Extremism | Rev. Adam Hamilton | Church of the Resurrection

2:18 If you're joining us online at home, I'd love to invite you to have a pen and paper handy. We're going to talk about a lot of information today, and I think you'll want to write some of this down just to be able to remember it. So there's a pen in the seat back of the chair in front of you, and be prepared to do that if you feel led to write things down and to remember them. On the back side, our daily scripture readings, they all tie back into today's message, and I want to encourage you to take the time to read the Bible on your own in the coming week. Okay, so we're in the midst of a series of sermons on the issues that divide us, but in this case, the principal issue is one that unites us. We are bound together as Americans, both the left and the right, conservatives and liberals, Republicans and Democrats, in recognizing that ISIS is a bad player on the world scene, that Islamic extremists have done some horrible things and that they need to be defeated in one way or another. Where we disagree is exactly how to do that. And our disagreements, you hear them in the political campaigns. There are some that are saying, you know, we shouldn't use the word Islamic when we talk about these extremists because using that word ties them with a whole bunch of really decent people.

3:19 We should just talk about extremists. And others say, no, no, no, you have to use the word Islamic when you're talking about extremists. Why aren't you using that word? There are some who are saying, we need to put boots on the ground in the Middle East. And there are other people who are saying, we shouldn't put boots on the ground in the Middle East. There are some that are very careful about the military response we have. It needs to be strategic and it needs to be careful to avoid noncombatants. There are others who say we're going to carpet bomb cities if these people don't submit. And even a handful of folks who have talked about using nuclear weapons and lighting up the sand in the Middle East. And so, you know, our strategies for how we're going to address Islamic extremism are different, even though we all agree that this is something that has to be defeated somehow. Now, what I'd like to do today is to suggest to you what you might do to defeat Islamic extremism on American soil. And that that is in keeping with your Christian faith, and in fact, it's in living out your Christian faith that you stand the greatest chance of defeating any hopes that ISIS might have or Islamic extremists have on American soil.

4:19 But before we do that, we want to learn a few things. What I'd like to do is to begin with a brief summary of the origins of the Islamic faith. So as we begin, I just remind you that Muhammad was born in the year 570 A.D. So 570 years, give or take, after Jesus was born, Muhammad comes on the scene. Muhammad was born in the town of Mecca. You find Mecca is right here, and this is where he was born, the Arabian Peninsula you see here. At the age of six, both of his parents had died. By the time he was six, both of his parents had died. He went to live with his uncle. Mecca was a major trading hub in the Arabian Peninsula. It was on one of the major trade routes. There was also a shrine there where people of different faiths, of the tribal religions in the Arabian Peninsula, would come to worship. So Mecca was known for its pagan worship, the worship of various gods captured by the idols that were there, and it was known for being a major trade center. He was taught how to trade.

5:11 Muhammad learned he grew up being mentored to trade, and by the time he was a young man in his teen years, he was known for his honesty, his forthrightness. People believed he was a fair trading partner, and people sought him out because of these qualities of his character. Now, very early on, he was influenced by the Christian faith. So he had cousins who were Christians. There was a Christian monk who at one time spoke to him and said, Muhammad, God has a calling on your life. You're called to be a prophet one day, a prophet of God one day. And he took that very seriously as a young man and continued to meditate upon that and think about that. He also had contact with Jews. So Jews and Christians were a part of the groups that he had come to know and influenced his life, and then there were the pagan traditions which he ultimately would come to reject. Now, by the time he was age 40, he began seeking God in the wilderness just outside of Mecca. So, two miles away from his home, there was a cave that became important to him. Now, many of the monastics in those days, Christian monastics, would go to the caves to spend time in prayer, and he would go there. This cave was about 12 feet deep, about 5 feet wide. We have a photo of it here. It's called, I think it's pronounced Hira or Hira, and it was here that Muhammad would go and he would pray. Well, one day while he was praying there, he had a visit from the angel Gabriel. Now, some would argue that that was a literal visit and the angel Gabriel was there. Others might say it was a vision, like Joseph had visions of angels. But in either case, he claimed to have seen the angel Gabriel, who spoke to him and told him that he was indeed being called by God to preach. And the angel told him, you are to recite these words. And the angel would give him certain words. And it's thought that perhaps Muhammad couldn't read or write, so he was told to recite the things that he'd heard enough times that he could memorize them and other people could memorize them. The sayings that the angel Gabriel gave him over a period of years are what are contained in the Quran. Now, again, you know, this is the story from an Islamic perspective. Now, Muhammad is taught this. These are some of the basic things that he's told at first by the angel Gabriel. He's told to preach that there is only one God, that there is a resurrection of the dead, that there is a paradise that awaits the righteous and hell for the damned.

7:14 He was told to preach the forgiveness of sins, the need to pray regularly to help those who are in need. He was called to preach repentance from sin and to turn away from the idols. Now, if that message sounds familiar to you, that's what any Christian might have preached in the same period of time. This was a message that when Christians heard him saying these things, they said, yes, that's right. Jews probably said the same thing. That basic kernel of a message is something that that both Jews and Christians of his time would have agreed upon. Now, there are other ways in which Muhammad came to see Christian doctrine differently, reinterpreting it. He came to look at the scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, and he took the stories from these scriptures, but he reinterpreted them, he changed the stories a bit, and of course Muslims believe that he was getting it back to what the real message should have been after it was corrupted by Christians and Jews over time. These are places where we differ between Muslims and Christians. Well, as Muhammad began to preach, there were some who were interested in his message and began to listen to him, but as he began to call people away from the idols of the city of Mecca and the people were coming to worship at the shrine, he began to be persecuted by people who came. There were traitors who would come, there were Arabs from all over the Arabian Peninsula would come, and some began to persecute him for his message against their gods and the shrine in Mecca. Eventually, Muhammad had to leave Mecca, and he traveled 200 miles north to the city of Medina.

8:40 And his followers went before him, and then finally he went. And when he arrived in Medina, the people there, some of whom had come to hear him preach before, asked if he would be willing to stand as an intermediary between the conflicting sides in Medina. There was conflict in Medina, and he was asked to mediate that conflict. Eventually, he wrote a charter or a constitution for the city of Medina, and it became the first Islamic city. Islam became the religion of Medina, and because of this, this marks a real turning point in the establishment of Islam, and Muslims measure time from the journey that Muhammad made from Mecca to Medina. That was called the Hijra, which is the migration, and time is measured from before the Hijra or after the Hijra. So this year, I don't remember the exact year this is in the Islamic faith, but it's something like year 1450 AH, after the Hijra, so important was that migration and the establishment of a city where Islam was the official religion. This marked really the beginning of the Islamic religion as an organized entity. Now, the last nine years of Muhammad's life, so he was 52 when he migrated, the last nine years of his life from 53 to 62 were marked by war. So, the people of Mecca were fighting with the people of Medina. There were other tribal groups that would come and wage war against Muhammad, and sometimes Muhammad and his fighters would wage war against others. And this was commonplace in the Arabian Peninsula at the time. Muhammad was known, and his fighters were known as valorous warriors. They were effective fighters. And so many of the things that Muhammad teaches from the last nine years of his life have to do with how you wage war, how you fight battles, the rules of conflict and combat. And so much of what we find, in fact, almost all of what we find in the Quran that deals with fighting, there's I think 109 verses in the Quran dealing with fighting, come from this period of time in which Muhammad and his troops, his warriors, were fighting constantly battles either defensive or offensive. And ultimately, by the end of his life, they would control most of the Arabian Peninsula, and Islam would become the official religion of most of the Arabian Peninsula. So I want to pause there for just a second,

10:48 because sometimes you'll hear people talk about what a violent religion Islam is, and we see examples of that in Islamic extremism, and yet you hear ordinary Muslims say, wait, we're a religion of peace, and which is it? Is it peace or is it not? And then you find these passages, and you can say, well, look, there's 109 passages about violence or about fighting in the Quran, and when I've asked Muslims in our community, so what do you do with that? They'll say, well, you know, we understand that this was the context, that they were fighting these battles, and he's trying to tell them how you fight battles in that time. We don't take that, that this is what we're supposed to be doing today. We understand that that was dealing with that time. Muslim extremists look at these violent passages and say, this dictates how we can live our lives and act out our faith today. To give you some comparison, if you look in our scriptures, what you'll find in the books of Joshua and Judges and a bit in Deuteronomy are the period of time in which the Israelites were waging war against the Canaanites and conquering the land of Canaan. And you'll find there commands where God says that they are to slaughter every man, woman, and child in 34 different villages or city-states in the land of Canaan. And no Jew and no Christian looks at those verses and says, oh, well, that's what we're supposed to do today. What we look at, we wrestle with how we make sense of those passages, but when we look at those, we recognize, well, whatever they mean, they meant something in that time different than what they mean for us today. And we recognize the context, and no Jew or Christian that I know thinks we ought to be living in that way. The same is true for most Muslims. They look at those passages and recognize this is not really about conquering America. It really is about the period of time in which Muhammad and his warriors were fighting on the Arabian Peninsula. All right, so at the age of 62, Muhammad dies. The year was 632.

12:25 There was a power struggle over who would succeed him, and some said that Muhammad had anointed his son-in-law, Ali, to be the leader of the Islamic movement, and now this vast territory. And others said, no, we should vote on who should be the leader. And a group of them voted, and they elected Muhammad's father-in-law, Abu Bakr, to be the leader of the Islamic movement. Now, this marked the beginning of the division, the primary division within Islam between Shia Islam and Sunni Islam. So the Shia believed that Muhammad's son-in-law and those who came after him should be the leaders of the Islamic movement, the Sunnis believe that a tribal council might decide who that leader would be and that they had decided on Abu Bakr. Now, that name Abu Bakr might sound familiar to you. You probably have heard it on the news because the man who leads ISIS has taken the name Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. And so, he's identifying himself as a Sunni Muslim, and he's identifying himself with the first person who led Islam after the death of Muhammad.

13:22 So Sunni and Shia. When it comes to the divisions in the world, about 10 or 15% of the world's Muslims are Shia, and 85 to 90% of the world's Muslims are Sunni. Now, as we think about this, shortly after Muhammad's death, Islam continued to spread like wildfire across northern Africa, across Turkey, into Persia, and then finally within 150 years, even into southern Europe. There was a power void, and this faith and its people really champion this across this region. And to this day, we find that these are locations of major Islamic communities, not so much anymore in southern Europe, but in the rest of these places. I just want to show you on a map what this looks like. So this is a map of Islam in the world today and its distribution. And you'll notice that the northern half of Africa is Islamic. You'll notice not only the Middle East, but then you start going into the Far East, you get into India and Indonesia. Now, Indonesia is the largest population of Muslims in the world live in Indonesia. The light green that you see here represents Sunni Islam, and the dark green represents Shia Islam. And so you'll notice that the dark green is really primarily centered around Iran and Iraq. So almost everywhere else is Sunni Muslim. In Iran and Iraq, you find a majority population of Shia Muslims. And so there's a conflict really between, say, Saudi Arabia and Iran because of their different ways of viewing their faith. Now, this week we had a forum on Islamic extremism here at the church. It was really excellent. I was pleased that we were able to host it. 1,500 of you joined us, either in person or online. And we have this available as well on our website. I'll give you the web address in just a few minutes for that.

15:05 But one of the people that we had as a part of the forum, a part of the panel discussion, was Minaj Shabir. And Minaj Shabir is a longtime Kansas City, and her husband was a physician. He died some years ago. You may not know her name, but if you've ever been in St. Joseph Medical Center in the medical mall, you've stepped into something that she was a part of making possible. She was a part of that design and development group that created the medical mall, and she played a pivotal role in that. She also teaches in Fort Leavenworth on Islam. She's spoken to a large number of Christian groups across the country. And I asked her after the forum if she could just quickly summarize the five pillars of Islam. And Sunni Islam looks at these as the five foundational practices of any Muslim. Take a listen. From the Sunni perspective, the five pillars are the Shahada, which is the, there's only one God and Prophet Muhammad is the last messenger. Then the second one is to pray five times a day. So we pray once before sunrise, twice in the afternoon, and twice in the evening.

16:07 Then we have Ramadan, which is that fasting period where I was saying we should have an iftar at the end. And then there's the charity, so the minimum is 2.5% minimum of your disposable income should be given to charity. The last is going on the Hajj, which is the pilgrimage to Mecca, which is the mosque that was built by Prophet Abraham and his son Ishmael. it follows the rituals of what happened to prophet Abraham and as well as what happened to his wife Hagar. And you find, of course, some parallels between Christianity and Islam. We believe in one God, not multiple gods, although we see that God differently. We have different ways of talking about that one God. And the idea of giving to charity is an important part of our faith. And though we don't require it, of course, we encourage you to go to the Holy Land at least once in your life to have a chance to experience walking in the land of Jesus and those who came before him. and prayer. And one of the things I learned some years ago when I was studying Islam is I began reading about their prayer practices five times a day in prayer, and I began thinking, you know, for me as a Christian, I wasn't praying five times a day. And I decided I wasn't going to let the Muslims show me up in prayer, and I started making a commitment to pray at least five times a day. And I became a better prayer because of my encounter with Islam and trying to understand their faith. It shaped and helped me become a better person of prayer. Well, I want to fast forward from the end of Muhammad's life all the way to the early 20th century. The year was 1916.

17:36 Now, the Ottoman Empire had controlled much of, well, all of Turkey, some of Eastern Europe, had controlled on into the Middle East and into Northern Africa. And it had done so for centuries, but it was beginning to crumble. And in World War I, the Allied forces were fighting against the Germans and the Ottoman Empire. And it became clear by 1916 that the war was likely going to end in favor of the allies. And so the French and the British got together, and they had a secret meeting in which they talked about how to divide the plunders of war among the victors. And among those plunders were the Middle East. At this time, oil was becoming an important commodity in Europe, and so the French and the British began talking about how to divide up the countries that were rich in oil. And there was a decision that was made. The agreement was called the Sykes-Picot agreement. I'd never heard of this, or if I had, I'd forgotten it in some history class years ago. But some months ago, I was watching ISIS recruitment videos to understand what's inside these people's heads. And Sykes-Picot was mentioned on the screen, and I thought, what is that?

18:41 And I went back to try to figure out what Sykes-Picot was, and pretty quickly I learned that this was this agreement, this secret agreement between the British and the French, and the agreement was that after World War I was finished, the French would control the north and western portions, the northwest portion of the Middle East, and the British would control the southeast portion of the Middle East. And so this looks like this map we have here, if you'll put it up on the screen. Now, this is a map from the 1920s, and it shows what the agreement called for. Area A was going to be the French. Area B was going to be the British. The pink was also part of the British Empire, or British-controlled areas. The blue would be part of the French-controlled areas, and so life was divided in this way. The French gained control of Lebanon and Syria and parts of Turkey, and the British gained control of Iraq, Transjordan, and Palestine. There was no Israel at the time, but Iraq, Transjordan, and Palestine. Now, what happened after that helps us understand some of the continuing conflict in the Middle East to the present day. So the French came into Syria. Let's use that as an example. They came into Syria. The population in Syria is 80% Sunni, 10% Shia, and 10% Christian. So when the French decided to install a government in Syria, which party do you think they chose, the Sunni or the Shia? They chose the Shia, the minority population. They chose the 10% because in order for the Shia to remain in power, they would need the French to help them remain in power, which meant there would be French military bases in Syria, and they would have access to a favored nation status when it came to trading for oil.

20:14 At least this is what many historians believe was the reason for this. And so a Shia government was set up and continues to run the country to this day. And so Bashar al-Assad, who you've all heard of, is a Shia Muslim ruling a country that is 80% Sunni. Now, the Shia and the Christians quickly formed a pact. And so today you'll find that America is supporting and most Western countries are supporting the right for the Sunnis to be able to have, you know, greater control of their government. while the Christians are standing by the Shia minority because they have been treated well by the Shia. And so we find ourselves in a place where America is supporting Sunni Muslims against Christians who are supporting Shia who are oppressing 80% of the population. You begin to see how this kind of becomes a mess. And it's hard for us to figure out, well, who should we be supporting? Now, the British did just the exact opposite in Iraq.

21:07 Now, in Iraq, the majority population were Shia and the Sunnis were a minority. So who did the British put in power? They put in power the Sunnis minority over the Shias. And so up to just recently, Saddam Hussein, he was a Sunni. And his government was controlling and held power over the Shia majority in the population, which was why when we came and fought in the Iraq War and we toppled the statues of Saddam Hussein, so many people were happy about that. Because suddenly the majority population was going to have a chance to have their own government. What ended up happening in the years since then is that the Sunni minority has continued to fight against the Shia majority, and the Shia majority hasn't been always kind and generous to the Sunni minority because the Sunni minority didn't treat them well over the years. So we have this continuing civil war that's going on, or, you know, this struggle that's going on in Iraq. And so part of what I'd just suggest here is that sometimes what Western powers have done in the last century, 100 years ago, we're still paying the price for today in terms of how the conflict unfolds and the continuing war that's taking place.

22:10 When you think about Syria, so just to show you a map of Syria, and we're thinking about the Syrian civil war and the millions of refugees, the Shia are in the dark green areas here, and this is where Bashar al-Assad and most of the Syrian Shia live, and you'll notice there are pockets of Christianity in here in the red areas, and then the rest of this country is Sunni Muslim. And so today what we find is this conflict continues to go on as a result of the Arab Spring. The Sunnis began feeling like maybe now they could have control over their government and the civil war is a clash between the Shias trying to hold on to power and the Sunnis trying to gain power and people who are caught in the middle who are fleeing the country because their villages have been completely destroyed or they're threatened in one way or another. All right, so that helps us understand just a little bit of what's going on there. So just to think about ISIS now. So in Iraq, where the Sunni government has been toppled, you have a lot of Sunnis who are disenfranchised and no longer feel like they have power in Iraq.

23:09 In Syria, you have a Shia government, and you've got a large number of Sunnis who don't yet have power, and they're disenfranchised. So you've got all these disenfranchised Sunnis who are here, and ISIS is a Sunni extremist group, which means that when they would go into villages that were Sunni villages, the people actually were grateful to have them come because they felt like finally Sunnis are going to have power. When the ISIS movement started talking about creating a caliphate, that is an Arab or a Muslim nation, not an Arab nation, but a Muslim nation that spread across Iraq and Syria, many of the people rejoiced because they were tired of being oppressed and disenfranchised year after year after year. Now, once people got to know ISIS, there wasn't quite the same level of joy that they were present there. But I want you to think about the places where ISIS has its greatest control. So if you look at this map, you'll see a map of Syria and Iraq, and remember that the areas that you see in red on this map are largely Sunni Muslim areas. The areas that are over here that are fighting against ISIS and other rebels are the predominantly Shia areas, and the same is true in these areas down through here. It makes sense when you understand all this how it is that ISIS has managed very quickly and pretty easily with a very small army to gain large swaths of land because the Sunnis were there, and they hoped at least that the ISIS movement might actually create a more fair and just society. That isn't exactly what's happening, but that was certainly part of the hope for people who are welcoming them. Okay, I want to pause here, just recognize ISIS vision of the world and of Islam is extreme. So let's just figure out what that means. Within any movement, within Christianity, Judaism, Islam, I would say within Republican Party and Democratic Party in almost any philosophy, you have a variety of places you might stand. So there are liberals or progressives, there are moderates, there are conservatives, there are fundamentalists, and there are extremists. Now, fundamentalists will say, you know, pretty much see the world in very black and white terms, and they read their sacred texts, whether it's the Constitution or whether it's the Bible or the Quran, in very literal ways. Not a lot of interpretation,

25:19 not a lot of willingness to understand where someone else is coming from or to compromise. But that doesn't make you an extremist. You become an extremist when you decide that I see the world in black and white, and if you don't agree with me, you may not have a right to live anymore or to live here. And so suddenly I'm going to act upon my impulses, not understanding that it's possible you could disagree with me, but understanding that you are wrong and evil for disagreeing with me, and you may not have the right to live if you don't agree with me. That's what marks extremism. advocates at least in part the elimination of those with whom they disagree alright so this week we talked about Islamic extremism in our forum here at the church and it was a great forum and I want to give you the web address we took the two hours of information and we edited it down to an hour and 15 minutes a little less than that and you might want to write this down and I'd really like to encourage you to go online and to watch this because you'll have a chance, you're not going to hear from me but you're going to hear from experts and from members of the local Islamic community and I'd like to encourage you to share that on Facebook and with other people because I think it was really a remarkable presentation. I'd really love for you to have a chance to listen to it. One of the speakers we had was Brian Steed, a lieutenant colonel in the Army who spent eight years as a foreign service officer in the Middle East. So he's had lots of experience working in the Middle East. He's written a number of books on ISIS, on Islam, on militant Islam. He currently is a professor, assistant professor at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, where he teaches military history. And so we asked him to come and help us understand and gain some perspective on who ISIS is and what is it that motivates them in their faith.

26:55 What are they thinking? And this is what he had to say. Take a listen. I think the most important things to understand about ISIS is first that ISIS believes what they're saying, that they really do see themselves fighting an end of days. To put it in sort of a way that your congregation would understand, for them this is a biblical fight. They believe that they are the one right version of Islam. And that anybody else who doesn't believe their way is not just an unbeliever, but is an apostate and is an enemy of God. And therefore needs to be either corrected or destroyed. That they are the end of days final kingdom, if you will, that's going to be the one that welcomes in Jesus to bring about the end of days battles and the success that will bring about the day of judgment and the day of resurrection.

27:58 So when we think about this, we're talking about eschatology. That is the study of the last days or the end things. And in Christianity, we study eschatology. In Islam, there's this field of eschatology. But a couple things I want you to notice. You hear the extremism. We have the one truth. We have the right way. And everyone else is apostate, and either they need to be corrected or they need to be eliminated. What's interesting is you are not the primary enemy of ISIS. Now ISIS would love to draw you into a battle, and they see you as the evil empire. But you aren't the primary target of ISIS. The primary target of ISIS is other Muslims. It's moderate Muslims. It's Shia Muslims. In fact, their latest issue of their magazine is focused on how the real enemy is the Shia. So Shia Muslims, moderate Muslims, conservative Muslims who don't go along with everything that they're saying, Muslims in America would be considered part of the enemy. Now the goal is to attract them and to help them understand and see the truth, and then they can continue to live peacefully in their new caliphate.

28:55 But if they won't, they're as much to be destroyed as anybody else. And so I was thinking about what they say about the end times. I hadn't really studied much about eschatology and Islam until this week, but here's how things are said to unfold at the end. First of all, remember, Islam takes much of what it has, at least the kernel of what it teaches and what it knows, from the scriptures. So if you're talking about the end times, you're going to go to the book of Revelation, right? So in the book of Revelation, there's a mention of a final battle that's going to take place, an epic battle. It's called the Battle of Armageddon. The Battle of Armageddon is going to happen in the Valley of Megiddo in Israel, where all the nations of the earth are going to gather there, and they're going to fight and war against God's people. What happened for Muslims is this gets transferred over, and it's the Battle of Dabik. And Dabik is a small village just south of the Turkish border in Syria. And the idea is that all the nations of the earth will gather there to war against God's people. And when this happens, God's people will nearly be defeated by all these enemy armies. So ISIS is expecting to get defeated. They're not thinking they're going to win. They're anticipating that they're going to get defeated or nearly defeated. And then just at the last minute, Jesus is going to return and save them and liberate them and give them a period of peace and justice and prosperity. And then after that, the judgment day is going to come and the resurrection of the dead. And you might say, well, what's Jesus doing in Muhammad's story? Well, Jesus is all over in the Quran, and he's not the divine son of God. He didn't die on the cross. Someone else died in his place, and since he never died, he can come back, whereas Muhammad's not coming back, but he can come back and lead this great triumph in the end. He's a great prophet, and so Jesus comes back to do this. Well, some of the interesting things about this are that, you know, some of the ways we talk about waging battle against ISIS plays right into their narrative. That is that they are wanting us to show up with boots on the ground sometime in the future around Dabik, Syria. The name that they give to their magazine, you remember the PR magazine they have, this is an issue of it. The name of their magazine is Dabik.

30:59 It's all about this sort of last final battle that's going to take place. You know, I was watching, you know, their strategy and I kept thinking, I scratched my head going like, are these people stupid or what? Like, why are they picking a fight with Russia at the same time they pick a fight with the U.S. and with France and with Saudi Arabia? Who picks this many battles when there's no way they could win? And the idea, finally I understood, they're not trying to win. They're trying to get all of those forces gathered around Dabik and nearly get defeated so that Jesus can come back.

31:27 So when you begin to understand that, you begin to say, well, maybe how we're fighting them needs to be, you know, we need to take that into account in how we're trying to wage this battle against ISIS. And I'm grateful for people like Lieutenant Colonel Steed and others in the American military. Many people are talking about this in the American military and how this needs to change. Now that we understand this, it needs to change our military strategies. Well, there was something else that Lieutenant Colonel Steed shared that I found very helpful. And he talked about the fact that the military is really taking this into account that ISIS is waging a different kind of war than what we're used to fighting, because they're waging a war of narratives. That is that they have a story to tell. They know they can't win against drones and against fighter planes and tanks, and they're not trying to wage that war. They're waging a war of public relations. And what they've found is if they can slit someone's throat on television and put it on the internet, they're going to have all the nations of the world paying attention with one person dying. We drop a bomb and maybe three or four hundred people might die, or, you know, somebody else in another nation does this, and we knock out a village with, you know, sustained air attacks, and we don't really get much publicity for that. But with one person whose throat they slit, they can have the whole world afraid. And that's their goal, of course, is to get attention and to make us afraid, and then to lead us into doing the things that they'd like us to do.

32:53 And so they're fighting a narrative battle. This is why their PR, their videos, you know, the Twitter, all of these things that they're using as tools to try to get people's attention. And part of what they're doing is to try to bait us, but part of what they're doing is to try to get people who are disenfranchised Muslims around the world who feel like they've been treated like second-class citizens, who feel like they don't really have a place in their community, to leave their community to come and fight with them, to be a part of establishing this Muslim caliphate across the Middle East. So one of the things, a slide that Steve had put together I found helpful, we recreated it a bit, but ISIS wants to fight this battle in the narrative area. They've got very little in the way of military might to fight with, but they're focusing almost all their attention on how do we do something big like, you know, how can we have a group of people go kill people in Paris? That's not a lot. We only need a handful, but we're going to get the world's attention or in San Bernardino or in other places. How do we make the most of the little bit that we have? And then how do we tell that story and how do we make it clear that those other nations of the evil empire, and we're being lifted up by God in the last days. Whereas Americans, we typically are used to fighting with military might. We've got this amazing military, the greatest power in the world. We spend more money than any other country on military might. We know how to do this, but we're spending very little of our energy down here in the narrative space.

34:14 And so what the military is thinking about now is we've got to figure out how to win this battle, and maybe we're still going to be using military power, but maybe this isn't where the battle to defeat ISIS is primarily going to happen. It's going to happen somewhere else. And that to me was, it was very helpful to hear that and to understand that. So that leads me to thinking about our role that we play as Christians and as Americans in combating ISIS. If this is a battle of narratives and there's a story that's being told, then how do we defeat that so that less and less people want to go join ISIS and their narrative begins to sound sillier and sillier. Now, as I was asking Brian Steve this, I said, so tell us what do you think we ought to do? And this is what he had to say. We have a fantastic positive narrative. We have more goodness in this country than anywhere else, and that's a powerful message that we need to broadcast.

35:11 And I think that partly how we welcome in refugees, how we treat the Muslims in our midst, because if we treat them well, not that ISIS is ever going to broadcast that message, but they will broadcast when we treat them poorly, when we say hurtful things, when we say things that are against our very nature and what we say we believe in. We need to be more of who we are and who we're supposed to be rather than focusing on just being counter to them. So we either live into their narrative and we prove them to be right or we disprove them by our actions. Now, we may not have a lot of control over what happens with the military in Iraq and in Syria. We may have some control over the debate that's going to happen over the next year. You know, we can say this is what we think needs to be talked about among the political candidates. But, you know, often the fiery speeches on either side of the political divide are the things that get people riled up and excited, and it may be the very things that are going to cause the greatest pain and not the defeat of ISIS in the end.

36:15 And that's why we're talking about this today. And I think that, having listened and having tried to read and study, and I'm no expert, clearly, that it's our narrative as Christians that might be the one narrative that makes all the difference in the world. 70% of Americans claim to be followers of Jesus Christ. And in our communities, so we're not waging war in Iraq and Syria, we're actually living this battle in our own communities. And this has to do then with how we treat Muslims. Now, when we talk about the Muslim community in Kansas City, we're not talking about ISIS. We need to understand that we're talking about conservative, moderate, even progressive Muslims they disavow what ISIS is doing. But if ISIS makes us afraid of our Muslim neighbors and then we end up treating them like second-class citizens or with suspicion or we gossip about them or we, you know, we begin to make them feel like they don't fit, then not only are we giving into the darkness that ISIS claims we really are, but we end up moving people further and further away from the kind of Islam that they are confessing in which they wish to live themselves today. Now, there's not a lot of Muslims who would ever embrace what we see in ISIS, but there are a handful of people who feel disenfranchised or like they don't fit or they don't connect. And then with enough suspicion and being treated and enough things being said about people, you find it can move people to a place where they're looking for a community where they're not made to feel second class. I think about what the Apostle Paul wrote in the book of Romans. And here he's writing to a Christian community in Rome. It's a very tiny minority population in a predominantly a huge city, predominantly pagan people, the Christians were not always treated well, and within 10 years, Paul would be beheaded in the city, and the Christians would be burned at the stake by Nero.

37:52 But Paul says this, bless those who persecute you. Bless and do not curse them. Do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly. Do not repay anyone evil for evil. Beloved, never avenge yourselves. No, if your enemies are hungry, feed them. If they are thirsty, give them something to drink. And then I love this last line. I want you to say it with me. Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good. This is the Christian strategy for winning. This is the Christian strategy for defeating evil, not giving in to the evil and becoming the evil itself, but instead overcoming the evil with good. This was Paul's strategy. This was Jesus' strategy. This is the strategy that we have. Today, we are suspicious of Muslims. We just have to admit that. After 9-11, we experienced a great pain in our country, and we still haven't figured out how to get over that. I was in New York City with my mom last week, two weeks ago. We went to the 9-11 Memorial.

38:47 If you've never been there, it's an amazing, the architecture, go ahead and show that slide if you would. This is looking from above where the two trade centers once stood and the museum in between them. And as you go ahead and go to the ground level, the close-up, and you walk alongside them and you see the photos, the names of every, or you see the etched names of those who died in the World Trade Centers. Then you see the water spilling over the walls, down into the foundations of what had been the World Trade Center. and then finally the reflecting pool and the water spilling into the abyss where you can't even see it anymore. And you're just silenced by it. And then you go into the building that's just behind there and that's the museum. You go downstairs to the level where the trains used to come in and drop off passengers who would either go to the North Tower or the South Tower. You see one of the original stairs that's still left in place. And then you go into the museum and we're walking through the museum and I'd been in it before but we all separated, my family and I, my siblings and my mom and I because we could go at our own pace and I found myself standing there watching the planes hit the buildings and once more move to tears as I'm standing there. I just, I can't hardly speak, choking back the tears. And then I'm listening to the man who's calling his wife on the voicemail from the airplane saying he's probably not coming home. And I'm watching people jump off the buildings. And all of that, you know, I find myself, it all comes back and it's fresh again. And I find myself filled with anger when I walk out of the building. Who could do something like this? But part of what I have to remember is that this was a small group of extremists who don't reflect their faith. And when I decide that I'm going to look at all Muslims with suspicion, and I'm going to treat them in a certain way, I'm allowing them to win the battle.

40:21 And the only way the battle is ultimately won is when we don't give into that, but we give into our faith. I'll tell you, it's so easy. There's a mosque being built on 151st Street in South Overland Park. And about three or four months ago, I heard somebody say that, you know, that's one of those radical extreme mosques. I'm like, come on, seriously? So then I went online to try to find out about this mosque. I start reading everything I can find about them. I found one document that tried to pinpoint them to, or link them with extremist groups somewhere. Some of the people they were linking with them are people that I personally know and have no way that they are connected with this. And so I'm looking at that, but see, it doesn't matter if you can just whisper it and you get people to begin to think it, that's all it takes. I mean, somebody could say, well, Pastor Adams is a communist, and you know what? There's a thousand people in Kansas City who believe that instantaneously if somebody said that. I am not a communist, by the way.

41:13 And so, you know, I began meeting some of the people who were there, and I met two of the leaders, you know, one of whom is a physician who works at KU Med Center, who's a friend of many of the physicians in our own congregation. You know, the sermon that he preached, he was a lay leader who was preaching one Sunday, or one Friday, was almost exactly the sermon that I'd preached the Sunday before, the same basic themes. I went to their newsletters, and I started reading their newsletters. You know what they said? They had an article, one of the lead articles was about women, Islamic women wanting to lose weight. Another one was about children that were going to be collecting mittens and gloves and hats for the homeless at City Union Mission. Another one was about how they just fed a hundred people at City Union Mission at the men's shelter. I mean, this sounds like our newsletter, right? And so, you know, it's possible they have some secret newsletter that's on their website, but my hunch is these are pretty ordinary people who live in our community trying to live out their faith the best they can, recognizing there's a whole lot of people who are suspicious of them. and so I think the answer for us as Christians is to actually be Christians, right? It's to bless, it's to love, it's to care for, it's to eat with, it's to connect with, it's to demonstrate who we are and our defining narrative. One of the most frequently asked questions I received in the forum this last week was, why aren't moderate Muslims speaking out to condemn the violence in the name of their religion.

42:32 And I'd like to encourage you just to go online and to research whether they are speaking out or not. Thousands of Islamic leaders around the world condemned what happened in Paris, condemned what happened in San Bernardino. The mosque here in South Johnson County immediately posted on their website, the front thing you come to is not welcome to our mosque, it's we abhor the violence or we reject the violence in our religion's name that has happened in other parts of the country, and then they have the banner, not in my name. And you know, that's been on their website, the front page, for four months now. When the KKK or Fred Phelps did something horrible, we didn't put that on the front page of our website because people just understood resurrection is not Westboro Baptist Church. But we associate all of these people together and they're still trying to say, that's not us and we don't believe that and we regret that that ever happened, but it's not us. Fighting ISIS at home means actually showing what it means to be Christians. It means loving our neighbors.

43:26 Finally, I'd wrap it up with this. I was reading something, one of the staff at Christianity Today wrote last fall. I don't agree with the whole article, but I really appreciated this quote. Now, he's writing from Chicago, and he says this, Just as we would not want someone to judge all Christians by the actions of a few, we need to not think all Muslims because of the actions of a few. On the day that two Muslims pulled the trigger in San Bernardino, there were 3,300,000 others in America who got up and went to work as anesthesiologists, pharmacy assistants, and small business owners. In fact, statistics would say that you and I have a much higher risk of being shot by a citizen of Chicago than by an American Muslim. But we don't hate all Chicagoans because of it.

44:05 ISIS wins when they make you afraid. ISIS wins when they make you disfrustful. ISIS wins when you become mean or cruel or you're willing to talk about other people in ways that are not in keeping with your faith. ISIS has won the battle when you make other people feel isolated and that they don't fit. But when you treat people with love, when you surprise them by your willingness to bless them and to stand by them, ISIS has been defeated by your actions. The Apostle Paul says this, do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good. So here's my challenge for you today. Let's go out of our way to meet our Muslim neighbors. Let's connect with them. Let's invite them to dinner. Now, find out what they do and don't eat before you have them over. Don't serve them pork. That's not a good idea when you have them come over. But let's treat them with respect and compassion. let's go out of our way to connect with those who are in the workplace and those who live down the street from us.

45:00 Let them see our faith. Let us learn from their faith. Let us have meaningful relationships with one another because it's hard for me to buy into ISIS narrative when I've come to know you as somebody who loves me. It's hard for me to agree that something bad should happen to America when you are America and you are somebody who I really care about. But as long as you isolate me and say things about me that aren't true, it's easy to believe and buy into the ISIS narrative. So Paul says this in Philippians 2. He's writing from a Roman prison cell about to be executed, and he says that we are to shine like stars in the world. And in doing that, we live out Dr. King's famous words. He said, darkness cannot drive out darkness. Only light can do that. And hate cannot drive out hate. Only love can do that. I believe we push back ISIS darkness and make it unlikely that others will be drawn to their distorted vision when we are practicing the love that Jesus calls us to.

45:56 And that's my hope and prayer for us. Let's pray. Lord, you understand and know how fearful we can be, especially in the light of terrible violence that's committed in the world by people with such a distorted picture of who you are. God, we pray for wisdom for our military leaders, for our government leaders, as they try to understand how best to address in the Middle East the brokenness of the past and the violence in the present.

46:30 Help us, O Lord, as people not to be afraid, not to give in to our fears, but instead to practice love, to demonstrate kindness and compassion and concern, to develop friendships, and in the process to let our light so shine before others that they see our good works and give glory to you. Help us, O Lord, to push back the darkness and to love the Muslims in our midst. In Jesus' name.