Hotel Rwanda

(Let me begin this by saying that this post started as a response to Mike Cope's blog post today. Yet, as I kept typing away, I decided not to clutter his system with my ramblings, but to post this on my own blog. Snaps to Mike, for prompting me to wander here.)

I haven't gotten to see Hotel Rwanda yet. Of the movies that came out this past year, it is on the top of my must see list. I am glad that the movie has made such an impact this year. The Rwandan Genocide is one of the most horrifying events of the 20^th Century. The killing machine was far more swift than that of the death camps in Nazi Germany.

I have to admit that my thoughts on Rwanda were formed during and after my trip there in the summer of 2000. In the spring semester of 2004, I reentered the conversation when I wrote one of the case briefs for my M.Div. comprehensive exams on the church’s role in the genocide.

I have read Gourevitch's book, We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda. I agree with Mike Cope that it is a must read for Christians. (It is far more important than anything Max Lucado or Rick Warren could hope to write.) I read it the summer I was able to walk the streets of Kigali six years after the genocide and witness the building that were riddled with bullet holes and mud and brick walls that bashed in by relentless mobs.

As if seeing the emptiness in the eyes of people and the physical scars and reminders of the genocide walking beside me were not enough to haunt the sleeping hours, the trip to a little church in a village outside of Kigali was worse. It was a compound into which hundreds of Tutsis and sympathizers were led, promised that they could find sanctuary from the ruthless Interahamwe and other Hutu mobs. I ran my hands across deep lacerations make-shift machetes left in the trees. I vividly remember looking toward the alter through a hole in back corner of the sanctuary. The dust from rotting clothes of the slain swirled in the air, dancing surreally in the light that came crept in through the bullet holes in the eastern wall of the building. Sitting on the alter were three things that haunt me to this day, an open Bible, a cross, and a skull.

As Christians, when we think about those four deadly months in Rwanda and the terror that continues to this day, we cannot forget that the church was complicit in the genocide. Like the Crusades and the Religious Wars, we must answer for the genocide. Rwanda was considered the most Christian nation in Africa before the genocide. And yet this level of hate could still been born in the hearts of people. The gospel must speak something to this situation. The Genocide cannot be the last word. What hope, what life does the gospel speak in the midst of this horror? These are questions that trouble me, that keep me awake at night. Does it say anything at all? If so, what? I think it does, but what do you think?