I stand by the door. I neither go too far in, nor stay too far out. The door is the most important door in the world It is the door through which men walk when they find God.
There is no use my going way inside and staying there, When so many are still outside and they, as much as I, Crave to know where the door is. And all that so many ever find Is only the wall where the door ought to be.
They creep along the wall like blind men, With outstretched, groping hands, Feeling for a door, knowing there must be a door, Yet they never find it. So I stand by the door.
– Sam Shoemaker
There was no one standing at the door of St. George’s Church in Tanta, a city just north of Cairo, on Palm Sunday a few weeks ago. The man wrapped in a bomb got nearly all the way to the altar – pushing his way past people whose prayers must have been deeply distasteful to him.
The priests were singing when he got to the front, but he’d already heard all he could stand, and so – as the infidels he despised raised their songs of praise around him – he nudged the button and flung his soul and 28 others into eternity.
We can only wonder at what must have been, for the 28, an incomprehensibly abrupt transition from mortality to immortality. In one blinding, searing moment, two-dozen-plus souls went from closing their eyes – imagining their Savior – to opening them, and seeing Him … as the hymn begun on earth flowed, barely broken, into everlasting song.
A few hours later, 78 miles away, another man with another bomb and a blue pullover tied jauntily across his shoulders was turned away by a policeman at the gate of entry to St. Mark’s Church in Alexandria. He had bypassed the security check a few feet down the sidewalk. No problem: the man turned on his heel, stepped over to the security officers, touched a button – and obliterated 17 people.
You can see them, in the video, there in the last few seconds of their lives: a policewoman … the young woman with the grocery bag …some old folks sitting in the nearby chairs … a bald man on the cellphone … two young boys in a hurry … a parent across the street, holding his little child’s hand. And a Muslim woman, quietly conversing on the sidewalk, whom the bomber shoved past – one last insult on his way to do so much injury.
Preoccupied with their errands and conversations, none of those people thought of themselves the way ISIS thought of them – as figures on a 900-year-old ledger of vengeance. "The Crusaders and their apostate followers must be aware that the bill between us and them is very large,” ISIS leaders said in their post-bombing press release. “And they will be paying it like a river of blood from their sons, if God is willing."
The river of blood ran higher in Tanta, because the bomber reached the heart of the church itself. Witnesses said there was little or no security on duty, even though police had defused another bomb in the street in front of the church just a few days earlier. Perhaps church leaders in Tanta – like so many Christians in the U.S. – just can’t bring themselves to believe that anyone really has it in for the faithful.
How can they hate us? We’re so non-threatening. So compliant. So nice.
Mercifully, the toll of death and wounded among the Alexandria Coptics was lower, because of that vigilant cop. It makes a difference … somebody standing at the door.
Certainly, no one can really silence God’s truth. But it can be awfully hard to hear, amid the deafening roar of our aggressively atheistic, amoral society. These days, believers look less like “nice” and more like evil, to the growing numbers who regard our churches as bastions of bigotry, where the quaint, the deluded, and the hypocrites gather periodically to swap legends, bask in our own self-righteousness, and figure out who we’re gonna go out and hate this week.
Silencing people like that certainly seems justified. And those who reject God are always looking for ways to justify themselves.
“I was shocked … but not angry” said David Saeed, who was on the back row of the Tanta church when the bomb went off. “We're used to it. Every church in Egypt just prepares for this. Everyone knows that some time you will get bombed, you will be killed.”
In America, our churches don’t know that yet. We’ll have time to learn. Judging by the speed at which our governments are moving to end genocide against Christians, ISIS is going to enjoy a long hunting season.
If they do come for us, it would be good to face their fury not as nice people who somehow failed to stay out of their way, but as souls who radiated the courage of Christ. Who spoke a truth, in our churches and schools and workplaces, that was somehow different from what passes for wisdom in every other corner of the culture.
There’s so little we can do for those outside, walking past the church – all those people, many of them good, who will face that sudden, final destruction one day. But we can be the church – not as social club or rock concert venue, not as monastery or fount of spiritual pablum – but as the bold, loving, unflinching witness Christ meant it to be. We can keep the door open.
Maybe, as the bombs get closer, our churches will become more like that. Maybe, in the meantime, more of us could stand by the door.
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