Can I call you Allah?

"Thank you Mr. Oxbrow", says the young call centre worker in Bangalore when I give him my account details, "can I call you Mark?". When I have spent too much of my precious evening talking to call centres I must admit I am sometimes tempted to reply, "No, please call me Your Majesty". Names are important. The fact that one person calls me "Mr. Oxbrow" another "Padre" but most people "Mark" says something about the relationship I have with those people.

Yesterday an angry mob in Kuala Lumpur felt so strongly about names that they set fire to a church, tried to burn three more and damaged cars belonging to Christians. They were Muslims reacting to a court ruling that Christians were free to call God "Allah". (A friend, Bishop Ng Moon Hing of Kuala Lumpur, has written a response which you'll find on the Faith2Share website.) Whilst Christians in Malaysia have been campaigning to be allowed to use the word "Allah" for God in their local language Bibles, Muslims have maintained that they alone have a right to use this word. Of course there are many Christians as well who would be concerned about calling God "Allah" because of the confusion, they claim, it causes.

Underlying all this is the much deeper question - is the God whom Christians worship one and the same as the God to who Muslims pray in their mosques? That's a 'big question' which I don't intend to answer here ... other than to suggest that if God is really God then there can only be one God and we are not in a position to choose which God we want to worship. So ??

Perhaps, like the call centre worker, we need to ask God what he would like us to call Him. God, Yahweh, Jehovah, Allah, Jesus - in the end they are only names, surely not worth fighting over. Pray peace on Malaysia.

New Year Prayer

Sitting at my desk this morning, my coat collar turned up against the cold - the heating had failed again and it was minus six outside - I opened my first (work) email of the year. It was a leadership briefing from the Micah Network and the words which caught my eye were, "May God bless us with discomfort"!

Thank you Dino Touthang (chair of the Micah Network) for reminding us at the start of this new year of St. Francis' powerful blessing.

May God bless us with discomfort ... at easy answers, half-truths, and suferficial relationships, so that we may live deeply within our hearts.

May God bless us with anger ... at injustice, oppression, and exploitation of people, so that we may work for justice, freedom and peace.

May God bless us with tears ... to shed for those who suffer from pain, rejection, starvation and war, so that we may reach out our hands to comfort them, and to turn their pain to joy.

And may God bless us with enough foolishness ... to beleve that we can make a difference in this world, so that we can do what others claim cannot be done. Amen.

Dare I pray that?