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"What I didn’t know – what nothing so far had given me any category for – was that I was stationed amidst one of the oldest Christian communities on earth. The Assyrian Christians of Iraq had been here since the first century. They spoke a dialect of Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke. Their churches had stood in that city for longer than my country had existed. They were my brothers and sisters in the most literal theological sense.
That gap in my understanding wasn’t an accidental oversight. The map my culture had given me for the Middle East was drawn in the categories of geopolitics and end-times prophecy. In Revelation, the bowl of God’s anger is poured out by the sixth angel over the ancient land of Babylon, modern-day Iraq, “on the great river Euphrates, and its water was dried up to prepare the way for the kings from the East,” (Rev. 16:12), who would lead their armies along this river to Armageddon. Shiites, Sunnis, Kurds; friends, enemies, insurgents. The ancient body of Christ still living in the shadow of that tower had been entirely left out of the picture."
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R .T. Hadley
