Having painted something of an amateurish potted 20th Century history of Sarajevo, here is one story that gave me great hope.
Last week, I was meeting in Sarajevo with a small group of pastors in Bosnia. It’s estimated that there are only around 750 Protestant believers in the whole country (pop: 4.6 million) – and one of the hard things about being Protestant in the Balkans is that you’re misunderstood at best, avoided or despised by everyone else (because, of course, religion is integral to Balkan identity: Croatia=Catholic, Serbia=Orthodox, Bosnia=Muslim).
And yet the Christian gospel has the power to rise above and transform these identities.
One friend, R, had been in what was then the Yugoslav army – after the fall of communism, this was commandeered by the Serbian government inBelgrade and in 1991 sentinto Croatia to prevent it seceding from Yugoslavia. S was just a regular soldier, but found himself fighting in Vukovar – the subject of a post from a previous visit to Croatia and a brutal episode in a horrifying decade. R is ethnically Serb but from Bosnia, and wasn’t a Christian at the time. After a year, he went AWOL from Croatia, and left for his home town of Sarajevo. Only to find that this was now under siege. Unlike many of his relatives who joined the Serb army because of ethnic allegiance, S fought to defend his city with fellow Bosnians. But he was lost in life, a feeling exacerbated by month after month guarding his sentry post during the siege. Drink and despair drove him to a friend who told him about the Christian message. He is now full-time in ministry.
P is a Croatian by background, whose family comes from Vukovar. During the 1991 siege of the city, P’s mother was injured by gunfire, but mercifully not killed (unlike many others). P’s family has been in ministry over several generations, and he is now committed to working in Bosnia.
Years later, P was talking about the past in a meeting (not an easy thing to do in this part of the world) and he mentioned what had happened to his family in 1991. And suddenly R realised the implications – in fact, he could even remember the specific day. Horrified, he realised that it could even have been him who fired the very shot that struck P’s mother. And at that point, he was overcome. He asked R for forgiveness, which P was willing to give… to his brother in Christ. The gospel transcended horror, history and ethic strife.
What else could have the power to do this? What else could unite and reconcile like this or in the way I saw during a previous visit?
2 responses
It’s always so frustrating to hear the so-called ‘new atheists’ bang on about how religion is the source of (all?) evil, when it’s painfully clear that the real cause is the broken human heart – far from being the cause, the gospel is the solution, as this so powerfully demonstrates.