by Pastor Dan Baumgartner

The phrase first hit my radar screen when it came out of the mouth of the president of the United States of America. “We can do better.”

President Obama was talking about healthcare, and regardless of how you feel about the intense debate on that topic right now I think most of us would agree – as a country, we can do better than we are doing right now. For millions and millions of people to lack access to adequate medical care in a country as wealthy and resourceful as the United States is…well, we can do better. I mentally filed the phrase away and went on vacation for two weeks.

Vacation was rich and renewing. Lots of Whidbey time, tons of exercise, wonderful days with various configurations of our kids, a quick trip to Portland with Anne…and reading. No great shock there, but I was freer than usual because Anne had a deadline looming for a big school paper.

So I relished the first volume of Taylor Branch’s massive history of Martin Luther King and America, Parting the Waters. I cruised through Blood Brothers, Elias Chacour’s Palestinian Christian perspective on the Middle East. I turned to fiction - a novel called The Book of Air and Shadows by Michael Gruber, and the fantasy A Game of Thrones by Tolkien-wannabe George R.R. Martin. I soaked in Duke professor Stanley Hauerwas’ striking little book Prayers Plainly Spoken, and eased through a book of stimulating Mark Jarman poetry, Unholy Sonnets.

And then, on the last day of vacation I picked up Mirror to the Church: Resurrecting Faith after Genocide in Rwanda. I picked it up, and never put it down until I was finished. Then I picked it up and starting reading it again.

It’s a very important book. Written by Ugandan Catholic priest Emmanuel Katonogle (now teaching at Duke), it tells some of the story of the devastating events in the spring of 1994 when Hutu tribe members killed some 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus in 100 days. Far from enemy armies murdering one another, this was neighbor killing neighbor, friends murdering friends with machetes, church members stalking and killing people who had been worshipping with them just one week prior.

I have actually read quite a bit about the Rwandan genocide, but Katonogle’s book is far more than the story of what happened “over there.” It is an examination of the factors - historical, racial, societal, religious - that set up such a possibility in a strongly Christian country like Rwanda. And his intention is to hold Rwanda up as a mirror to the church in the rest of the world, but particularly the West - our world.

Katonogle is driven by searching for the answer to one particular question: Why did Christianity make no difference in this tragedy? How could killers take a break from their butchery to go to a church and worship, and be served communion by pastors who knew exactly what was going on?

Katonogle’s main answer is that there was a serious confusion of identity. One Rwandan leader said it this way: “Tribal blood is deeper than the waters of baptism.” The mirror that is held up for us, the western church, contains the same question: Is Christianity making a difference in our world? One could easily say “no,” or “a very modest one.”

America may not have tribes with machetes, but are there things here in our history, religion and cultural make-up which relegate our identity as Christians to secondary status - or worse? Are there pressures that cause us to only add our Christian faith as a veneer to all sorts of values and decisions which are simply accepted “givens”?

The possibilities are easy to find: nationalism or race or economic class or vocation can easily be our primary identity instead of Jesus. And moral failures like consumerism, or the huge and increasing gap between have and have-nots can easily become things Christians just accept as part of our landscape instead of saying “no.”

The more I read Mirror to the Church , the more the phrase came back to mind: We can do better. No, we MUST do better. Does Christianity make a difference? If it does not, our situation may look different than Rwanda, but lives - and souls - will be lost in any variety of ways. If Christianity is to make a difference, it means we will have to move beyond mere acceptance of our cultural influences and embrace a radical life with this strange family we call the church - all tribes and nations and peoples.

We will have to live into our primary identity: followers of Jesus Christ. Everything else gets figured out from there. Only one thing is sure:

We can do better.