It’s the Autumn of 1995 in the heart of Macedonia and winter is coming. The Spradley’s, a young American couple together with their two daughters, roam the streets of Skopje, an ancient city hidden under vestiges of Islamic rule and remnants of the Iron Curtain. A myriad of ghostly empires permeate the architecture, the landscape, and the air. We’re here, the Spradley’s sigh. A delighted woman nearby makes a comment about their one-year old child.

In that moment, God commissioned baby Heather, whose namesake is a flower that thrives in barren lands. At age one, she is a talking point, a conversation starter—an evangelist. Now twenty-one years later with two Macedonian churches planted, countless conversations, papers, and studies on faith in her armory, Heather is entering her senior year at Biola and in the Torrey Honors Institute; passionate about the work of the global church and passionate to say something, to do something about what is happening in Macedonia today.

Macedonia and the Syrian Refugee Crisis: Generosity and Love

Half of the Syrian nation is displaced. Many have died in their northward journey, and far more lives have been lost in the civil war that has decimated the state’s population. Heather has started a student campaign to raise funds for Syrian asylum seekers to obtain food and clothing for the harsh Eastern European winter as they journey by foot, train, and sea through the Macedonian border towards the open doors of Germany and Sweden.

Why do you care?, I asked Heather.

Because Jesus said when we clothe the naked, we are clothing him. She looked at me quizzically as if to say, How can we not?

It’s true. For however much we talk about it, we innately know so little about self-sacrificial love, and so we tend to overlook the fact that generosity and love are inextricably intertwined. The problem, it seems, has always been with us. For instance, the apostle Paul deploys an age-old parenting trick to motivate the Corinthian church towards genuine love. Look at how the Macedonians are doing. How despite their severe test of affliction and extreme poverty, they overflow with generosity.

In other words, Why can’t you be more like your sister?

But as any good parent does, the apostle Paul continues by explaining exactly why generosity of all stripes is a good thing. He reasons: such generosity, such costly giving of self (as Christ gave of Himself), is evidence that your love is genuine. Costly. This is not limited to our wallets because Christ’s riches were not monetary, but relational. His poverty was not merely economic in the way our culture defines it, but that he was separated from God. Your store of love includes but is far greater than what is in your bank account.

The Church in Macedonia

Seldom do I use the word “literally,” but circumstances merit the use just for today. It’s amusing to me that we can read 2 Corinthians 8, literally. What was true of Paul’s small Macedonian church-plants of Philippi, Thessalonica, and Berea is true of the Macedonian church today. Here are a couple of stats on modern-day Macedonia:

• GDP less than that of Amarillo, Texas (Do you know where that is? It’s okay. I don’t either.)
• The first border stop after Greece in an international migration pathway receiving and sending 5,000 asylum seekers with food and winter clothes every day. 

Joyous Love is Costly Love

The single most striking piece of Paul’s call for Corinthian generosity is that he explicitly renounces it as a command. Where it is evident that a heart of hospitality and generosity was legally binding in a more ancient time, such genuine love is now a fruit of joy, rather than the law.

Specifically, it was so ordered in the Old Testament that you shall not do the sojourner wrong and that you shall love and treat him as the native among you. The reasons given were that we were also sojourners in Egypt and because mistreatment of such beings is antithetical to God’s heart of justice. In fact, fitting retribution for such misconduct was to drink the wrath of God: death by the sword— your wives shall become widows and your children fatherless.

What does Paul mean then?

The work of Christ transmutes the giving of costly love. I’ve recently been enraptured by Jonathan Edwards’ The End for Which God Created the World, in which he argues that the enduring purpose of all God’s creative work is to reflect his glory. The beauty of this highly methodical work is that Edwards reconciles God’s creating the world for himself with our individual happiness—that they are not mutually exclusive.

We are image bearers of the mutual joy God shares in the Trinity. That is, sharing of our selves reflects God Himself and the delight he shares in his own personhood. The “end” is that He shares with us the pure, complete delight He already had, from before we existed. Mirroring this premise in our lives, we can see how giving genuine love is truly an act of happiness.

It is written in Hebrews that the joy of showing hospitality to the stranger is that we may be entertaining angels unawares. This is divine musicality, that by giving genuine and costly love we receive the delight of God.

For I was hungry and you gave me food,
I was thirsty and you gave me drink,
I was a stranger and you welcomed me,
I was naked and you clothed me… (Matthew 25:35-36)

What Does It Mean to Love Your Neighbors?

Nadine met Andy, and they went on a truly, romantic first date: to a missions informational meeting. The same thought somersaulted through their young, twenty-something hearts: We could change the world together. Just over six months later, the Spradley’s were married. They weren’t sure what the next step was until they witnessed the coming down of the Berlin Wall. The Eastern Block countries were open for the first time. The couple found Bible classes that they could take at night, after working full-time jobs as an engineer and nurse. Then the day finally came when with two baby girls, twenty suitcases full of supplies, and hearts eager to serve Jesus in Macedonia, Nadine watched her toddlers say goodbye to their loved ones.

What will it be like, she wondered, when we finally get there?

— Heather Spradley, on her parents, Nadine and Andy.

Heather was young in 1995, and so was Macedonia. Only 4 years prior had it declared independence from the former Republic of Yugoslavia. And at the time of the Spradley’s arrival, the entire country had a population of 2.1 million, it was the poorest of the former Yugoslav states, and it was characterized by jarring ethnic and religious strife. The unemployment rate was at a high 30 percent. With very few practicing evangelical Christians, planting their church was a true challenge; but over the last 20 years the community has been able to witness God work miracles by creating one self-sustaining church and by starting another.

Love Your Neighbor

But what has happened for the Spradley’s in Skopje started with a call. It started at home.

When Mother Teresa accepted the Nobel Peace prize in 1979, she said,

“…[W]e in our family don’t need bombs and guns, to destroy. To bring peace, just get together, love one another, bring that peace, that joy, that strength of presence of each other in the home. And we will be able to overcome all the evil that is in the world.”

We know how much Mother Teresa gave for her neighborhood children in Calcutta. We know her as the poster-saint of “loving thy neighbor.” Yet, how does she advise that we even begin to partake in such love? To start exactly where we are.

Okay. Possible. Doable.

But as I look around my house, my workplace, and even my street, I am cautioned to ask, what exactly am I supposed to be doing? In likely one of the most directive sermons in his archives, Charles Spurgeon expounds not only on the phrase love thy neighbor, but also, significantly, on its oft-neglected reflexive pronoun: as thyself. He asks, “How much does a man love himself? None of us too little, some of us too much.”

What do we want for ourselves? If we could, if it was right, we would want the finest for ourselves. We are already inclined to do so; inclined to know how to best love our selves. So there is our benchmark: Love your neighbor with that measure of love.

But Who Is My Neighbor?

Something remarkable happens when we begin to love each other in our homes and in our neighborhoods. The current outpouring of universal solidarity marks me as the Western world mobilizes in love for those lost in Paris. This is a point of common grace. This is community love and solidarity, as we know it in our intellectual lives, touching hearts where our words may fail. Brazilian philosopher and critical legal theorist Roberto Unger describes solidarity as this: “The essence of solidarity is our feeling of responsibility for those whose lives touch in some way upon our own and our greater or lesser willingness to share their fate…”¹

Paris is our neighbor. We are called to love her as we love ourselves.

But Paris is just the beginning. Paris is a place that looks like us, feels like us; she shares a related heritage, culture and lyricism. What moves Paris, what art, light, and beauty lies there lies in our own hearts.

With Paris we can begin to understand what Thomas Merton meant when he said, “Charity cannot be what it is supposed to be as long as I do not see that my life represents my own allotment in the life of a whole supernatural organism to which I belong.”² I like to think that Merton is using the word charity in its Greek form, caritas or the virtue of altruistic love. The Colossians are exhorted to “put on” or wear caritas above the rest, “which binds everything together in perfect harmony.”

So Beirut is our neighbor. And Kenya. And Mali. Merton wrote with reference to the poet John Donne in No Man Is an Island, “Every other man is a piece of myself, for I am a part and a member of mankind.”³ Perhaps then the better question is, who is not my neighbor?

In Addition to Common Grace

At its foundation, consideration of the self as a part of a whole is the beginning of what it means to wear the new self, and putting on Christ and his love can thus be seen as the beginning of sanctification. An alternate benefit of neighborly love is seeing the image of Christ borne in those that look different from us, acknowledging that underneath the garments of culture, heritage, and image we have the same law written on our hearts. After all, who else will we call family, who else will we love and share in the grace and majesty of our Lord when these outer garments have turned back to dust?

After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands, and crying out with a loud voice, “Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb!” (Revelation 7:9-10)

What Does It Mean to Love Your Enemy?

When the poor and needy seek water, and there is none, and their tongue is parched with thirst, I the Lord will answer them; I the God of Israel will not forsake them. I will open rivers on the bare heights, and fountains in the midst of the valleys. I will make the wilderness a pool of water, and the dry land springs of water. I will put in the wilderness the cedar, the acacia, the myrtle, and the olive. I will set in the desert the cypress, the plane and the pine together, that they may see and know, may consider and understand together, that the hand of the Lord has done this, the Holy One of Israel has created it. (Isaiah 41:17-20)

Isaiah’s image of a forest in the desert describes an idiosyncratic, paradoxical community that does not exist of its own accord. The only reason for its existence is that God brought it to be and sustained its existence. God speaks into dry and barren lands trees that bear different kinds of fruit and foliage— trees that flourish in a wilderness where they are not meant to flourish together. The image comes after a command in Isaiah 41:10: Fear not, for I am with you.

What do we fear? The differences we do not understand. Why should we not? God addresses, I am the one who helps you.

Above, we imagined caritas, or altruistic love, as both a catalyst for individual sanctification and as a means for joining in with the whole of humanity.

But what do we do with the exhortation to love our enemies?

The Lucky Think of Love: Meting Out Justice

The foremost ethical argument for loving our enemies is that the act of doing so delivers justice to the hand of God. The basic premise here is this: Vengeance belongs—is owned by—the Lord. It does not belong to man. By instead loving the enemy, by giving a thirsty enemy something to drink, you are heaping burning coals on his head.

For the unlucky administrators of justice here on earth, mismanagement of such governance comes with a heavy price. I once worked in chambers where judges occasionally had to sign death sentences, delivering capital punishment upon a criminal. I remembered one. It appeared to weigh on the judge physically—in his posture and speech. His signature would kill a human being. He didn’t sign the document for days. What if, after all the motions and years—trials and appeals, what if the criminal was innocent? Studies show that isn’t impossible. Imagine having to sign that sheet of paper. Could you?

But this isn’t a statement on capital punishment. This is an illustration to say that in every issue of justice, we are presented with a sliding scale. The more we can defer to God in his providence to deliver his perfect justice, the more we can be the blessed receivers of his deliverance from the burden of distributing what we ourselves once ought to have absorbed. Therefore, as my favorite Constitutional Law expert Kenji Yoshino so delightfully states, only the unlucky think of justice on their deathbeds. The lucky think of love.⁴

Fear Not: Enemy Love Is a Gift, a Mercy

Loving our enemies is a gift of grace and a difficult privilege bestowed to us, a mercy. It simultaneously prevents us from touching and transporting wrath, and also builds in us the virtues of courage, patience, and hospitality in our journey forward in striving to put on the divine qualities of caritas, and, ultimately, the very person of Christ.

Before the Lord builds this vision in Isaiah of a forest in the desert comprised of trees that ought not survive in the same climate together, he encourages the listener: Fear not. The architect of this sublime community is with us, is building in his sovereignty a plan to cultivate members of the plane with the pine into a new creation brimming with living water, to change organic enemies into friends that we may come seek the face of God.

Macedonia’s History with Islam

In 1371 Macedonia was subsumed into the Ottoman Empire.⁵ Sharia or Islamic law spread with Islamic faith and thought to many parts of the globe through the imperial reach of the Ottoman Empire.⁶ Not to be ignored, this conquest arrived on the spine of the Christian crusades and upon the fall of the Byzantine Empire. Today, Macedonia is two-thirds Eastern Orthodox Christian and one-third Muslim. But over the centuries, Macedonian street culture has developed within itself a strain of collective denounciation of their Islamic Ottoman rule as a mark of foreign conquest and oppression.

This context makes the current Macedonian response one of caritas. The response of the Macedonian church in welcoming Syrians is remarkable because Syria is comprised of a 90 percent Islamic majority. This makes Macedonians and Syrians historical and cultural enemies. A member of Andy Spradley’s church and ex-military veteran of the Macedonian army is the first to raise his hand and deliver provisions to the people of an ideology and faith that he swore to fight against years ago.

Europe is experiencing its largest migrant shift since World War II. There are 4.2 million registered Syrian refugees and half of the population has been displaced due to a nearly half-decade long civil war. Note: When the United Nations is notified of an asylum seeker, registration generally depends on the records of the host nation. For example, applicants to the United States undergo a rigorous screening process involving the FBI, the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security. Migration patterns indicate refugees are crossing by sea through the Mediterranean by two main routes: through Greece and through Italy. Those escaping war sojourn through Greece by sea and continue by walking or taking trains through Macedonia, Serbia, Croatia, and through to Western Europe, namely Germany.

This migration route is not a route that was organized by the United Nations or by any human force. This migration route and the Christian hands and feet that deliver life-giving provisions forge a sojourning people together and Christ is meeting them at every border.

Loving the Refugee

Several days ago, Andy Spradley and his church members met a Muslim woman and her family in a crowd of hundreds. He offered to carry her bag—filled with the only possessions she owns—to the Serbian border. She accepted and they struck up a conversation. A boy traveling with them had been lost at sea. They had lost countless loved ones. When he told her he was a Christian, she looked at him warily and defended her faith. At the Croatian border, she will meet more Christians; and all the way through to Germany, Christians are volunteering to give food and water and warm clothing for the winter. In Germany, churches are opening their doors to house the weary traveler.

I myself have worked in a similar church during a cold, English winter to talk with refugees fleeing war and poverty from all different worlds. We taught each other how to make Darfurian drums, Serbian cakes, and English roasts. They taught me songs in their language and we taught them Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind.” Gathered together on the snowy streets of London, we became a small forest in the desert.

And God is working still. Just as it was in our church then, it is now in churches across Europe. It is written on our skin, in our hearts, and through the pale stained-glass sunlight of these ancient churches: Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.