Sermon delivered Thursday, Jan. 10, 2013 (Thursday in the Week of the Epiphany) at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Franklin, TN, during a Eucharist in which members of the Sikh community in Nashville were invited to be present to observe and/or participate in our worship, as part of an on-going interfaith dialogue. The scriptures appointed by the Daily Eucharistic Lectionary for this day were: Isaiah 65:1-9; Psalm 147; 1 John 4:19-5:4; and Luke 4:14-22.
It is an interesting spiritual practice to read the sacred texts of your religion with people of a different religion. When I have done this in the past, I always come away with new perspectives and insights that I don’t think I would have been able to see without the presence and perspective of my partners in dialogue.
There are inevitably excited exclamations over the similarities we find between our texts and the texts of others: at a recent clergy interfaith scripture study circle here in Nashville, some Christian pastors were describing the story in Matthew 25 – where Jesus says that whoever has fed the hungry, cared for the sick, visited those in prison, has done these things to Jesus himself – when an imam of one of the local Muslim communities cried out excitedly, “Yes, we have it too! Almost exactly the same story! That in serving others, in serving the poor, you are serving God himself.”
Given what I know about the Sikh faith, I might be bold enough to guess that our Sikh brothers and sisters with us here tonight may have found themselves nodding with recognition at some of the themes that emerged in our sacred texts for this evening: To love God we must love one another and obey the commandments that God gives us. If someone says they love God but treats their brother or sister unkindly, they are not truly loving God. And Jesus’s words in the Gospel today might have sounded like something Guru Nanak would have said: God’s spirit sends us out to bring good news to the poor, release to the captives, freedom to the oppressed. It is a wonderful and exciting thing to hear the Word of God as you know it proclaimed through another religion’s texts. “Yes, we have that one, too!” we say, delighting to see God’s truth showing up in ways we had no idea it was showing up, to people we didn’t know were hearing it.
It is especially delightful to experience this when there are other parts of our sacred texts that would say it is not so, that God does not show up in other religions. Tonight we also read some texts that emphasize God’s unique and exclusive relationship with the people of Israel. The psalm appointed for today ended with the proclamation that God “declares his word to Jacob, his statutes and his judgments to Israel. He has not done so to any other nation; to them he has not revealed his judgments” (Psalm 147:20-21). In contrast to the delight we feel when we encounter similarities in the messages of our sacred texts, it is often uncomfortable to read texts like these in “mixed company.” How many of you felt comfortable saying these words just now while you knew there were people sitting with you who were not part of the nation or spiritual lineage of Israel? “God has only revealed himself to us, not you,” we basically just said to the Sikhs. And then we followed it with, “Hallelujah!”
The more exclusive parts of our tradition can be uncomfortable for us to address in interfaith settings. The temptation is to water things down, to only present the more inclusive parts of our tradition to those we are in dialogue with. But if we do that, we are only allowing our neighbors to see part of the picture. I believe that authentic dialogue happens only when we bring our whole selves and our whole traditions to the conversation – the open and the closed parts of ourselves and our traditions, our delights and the things that make us uncomfortable.
Unlike Sikhism, Christianity is at its heart a missionary religion: a religion that instructs its followers to actively seek converts. Jesus told his followers to “make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit” (Matthew 28:19-20). We call it the “Great Commission,” and it shapes how we understand our mission and purpose as Christians: we are called by God to share the good news of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ – that after being killed by the authorities, Jesus rose from the dead and inaugurated the start of a new creation that offers life and hope to the world. The New Testament contains many passages that insist that in order to receive salvation, one must believe in and follow Jesus. And so some Christians are convinced that no matter how many similarities we might find between Christianity and the ethical teachings of other religions, ultimately none of those similarities matter if the people of those other faiths do not ultimately decide to follow Jesus.
I have a friend named Valarie who grew up as a Sikh in central California surrounded by Christians who held this perspective. For years, she heard from friends and even teachers in school that she would go to hell if she did not accept Jesus as her Savior. These experiences were disturbing to her, but she always thought that these Christians were misinterpreting their own religion, that they were taking it to an extreme or denying the message of love and acceptance of all people that she believed was at the heart of all religions, since her Sikh faith had taught her that this was so. And then, as an adult, she actually read the New Testament scriptures for herself, during her time at Harvard Divinity School, where she and I were classmates.
When she read the Christian scriptures, she suddenly understood why all those friends and teachers had felt so urgently the need to convert her to Christianity. She read passages that said that those who do not believe in or accept Jesus are condemned. Even books like 1 John, which we read from tonight, that contain very inclusive passages like, “everyone who loves is born of God and knows God,” (1 John 4:7) also go on to say things like, “Whoever has the Son [that is, Jesus] has life; whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life” (1 John 5:12). She was deeply disturbed, because she realized that Christianity did not have the same respect for all religious paths written into its sacred texts as her own Sikh faith did.
And so she called me, her Christian friend who was at the time just beginning to discern a call to the priesthood, to ask me how I understood these texts. “Now I understand why they wanted to convert me,” she said to me. “They were just doing what the book says!” She saw that these Christians were not acting out of an intentional mean-spiritedness, but were attempting to be faithful to the teachings of their own religion. She wanted to know how I as a Christian could advocate for a more open perspective, given the content of my sacred texts.
My answer -- and it is just my answer, not the answer of all Christians -- as I have come to articulate it over the years, has to do with different theological motifs in Scripture and in Christian tradition. I believe there are actually two main motifs that are in tension with one another throughout the Bible and the Christian tradition. One asserts that we are the chosen people, that those who are not part of the people of Israel and do not worship the God of Israel will be destroyed, that ultimately we are the only ones who will see salvation, and that we are justified in celebrating over the death and destruction of our enemies. The other motif asserts that God has created and cares for all people, that God in Christ has redeemed not just those who believe, but the whole creation, and that “God does not rejoice in the death of a sinner” (Ezekiel 18:32). I believe it is up to each one of us, both as individuals and collectively as a church, to choose which motif we will privilege over the other as we interpret scripture.
Because I am part of a Christian denomination that recognizes reason and experience in addition to Scripture and tradition as valid ingredients in crafting a theological perspective, I bring my own experiences with interfaith dialogue and interfaith friendships to the way I read the sacred texts. I cannot deny that I have seen God working in and through people of other religious traditions and that I have heard God’s word through the sacred texts of other traditions as well. I am reminded of what Jesus said to the Roman solider who came to him to ask him to heal his servant who was ill. “In all of Israel I have not found such faith!” Jesus says (Matthew 8:10), acknowledging in this “outsider,” who was most likely a practitioner of pagan Roman beliefs, a more authentic faith than many in Jesus’s own religious community. As I have met and gotten to know faithful Jews, Muslims, Baha’is, Sikhs, Hindus, and Buddhists through years of interfaith dialogue, I have often been moved to say, “Not even in the church have I found such faith!” I often see in my brothers and sisters of other religions a devotion and connection with God that equals or surpasses what I have seen in fellow Christians.
And although as a Christian I do believe that salvation comes to the world through Jesus Christ, I understand that to occur ultimately on a cosmic and communal level that transcends the individual, personal level. Although some Christians insist that in order to be “saved” and go to heaven, each individual person must accept Jesus as their Lord and Savior, and if not, they will suffer in hell for all eternity, I prefer another strain in Christian tradition which asserts that has Jesus in essence transformed the very creation itself, an act that is not contingent upon the intellectual belief systems of particular individuals. We are still called to put our faith in Jesus and to follow his teachings, and we still encourage and invite others to do so as well, but the salvation of the world is not contingent upon whether we do or not: the salvation of the world has already been accomplished by Christ, and in the task of evangelizing we are calling people to tap into that cosmic redemption that is already inherent in every aspect of creation. For me as a Christian, interfaith dialogue is an opportunity to recognize and celebrate all the ways in the redemptive work of Christ is moving and present in all of God’s people.
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