Our lectionary for today presents us with two of the most frequently cited passages on the topic of Christianity’s relationship to other religions. From Acts 4: “There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among mortals by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12) and from John 10: “I have other sheep that are not of this fold. I must bring them also” (John 10:16). In the volumes that have been written about how Christians should approach people who follow other religious paths, these two passages inevitably come up. The Acts passage is cited by those who believe we should convert all non-Christians to Christianity, and the passage from John is cited by those who believe Jesus might already have a relationship with people of other religions without their explicit conversion to Christianity.
In the academic study of religion, there is an entire discipline called “theologies of religion,” which has to do with how people make theological sense of the fact of religious diversity. What does the existence of other religions say about my religion? What is God’s relationship with people who follow a different religious path than I do? Is it possible for people of other religions to be “saved” without following my religion?
Classically, scholars have grouped the way people answer these questions into three basic categories: exclusivism, inclusivism, and pluralism. Allow me to briefly define these terms before we return to examining the scripture at hand.
Exclusivist theology holds that there is only one true religion, and that everyone must convert to that religion in order to be “saved.”
Inclusivist theology holds that salvation comes through one particular religion, but acknowledges that people who follow other religions may achieve salvation without converting to that religion. How is this possible? Well, inclusivists generally understand any saving power of God at work in the world to be part of their religious framework, whether or not people acknowledge and name it as such. Thus, an inclusivist Christian would say that salvation always comes through Jesus Christ, but that Jesus may save Sikhs, Muslims, and Hindus through their own religious metaphors and understandings.
Pluralist theology holds that there is only one truth, but that all religions are equally valid ways to access that truth. The analogy is often given of one mountain with many paths on it, but all of which ultimately lead to the same spot on the summit. Thus, no matter which path you follow, you will reach the same end.
Returning to our scriptures at hand, the passage from Acts is clearly of the exclusivist perspective: “There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among mortals by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12). The passage from John sounds like it might be pluralist: “I have other sheep that are not of this fold. I must bring them also” (John 10:16) -- as pluralist theologians often cite this passage, but we have to go on to read the rest of the passage in context. The entire verse says, “I have other sheep that are not of this fold. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice. So there will be one flock, one shepherd.” So while Jesus is bringing in these “other sheep,” they are still listening to him and following him, ultimately coming to be part of the “one flock” that is the church, which makes this passage inclusivist, not pluralist. Although much ink has been spilled over who exactly the “other sheep” are in this parable, if they are taken to refer to people of other faiths, we still must acknowledge that in this vision, those people of other faiths ultimately come to follow Jesus.
Given my interest in and passion for interfaith dialogue, you might have guessed that I have devoted quite a bit of time to pondering these passages, and others like them elsewhere in the Bible. In my study, I have come to the conclusion that I do not believe it is possible to argue for a pluralist theology with scriptural support. While there might be certain aspects of a pluralist theology that appeal to me, and while there are Christian theologians who hold a pluralist theology of religions, I think that if we are going to remain faithful to the New Testament, the furthest we can go in our theological openness to other faiths is an inclusivist perspective like that expressed in John 10: “I have other sheep that are not of this fold. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice. So there will be one flock, one shepherd” (John 10:16). People of other faiths may be part of Jesus’s “other sheep,” but they will ultimately come to be part of the “one flock” under the “one shepherd” – whether that happens explicitly in this lifetime or not.
Christians often see a tension between evangelism and interfaith dialogue – arguing that the moratorium on proselytizing often required as a “ground rule” of interfaith dialogue conflicts with our call to proclaim the Gospel to others. But I’m not convinced that there has to be a conflict between the two. As a Christian, our goal should always be to share our love of Jesus with others, whether through evangelism or interfaith dialogue. If someone is interested in learning about Christianity and feels drawn to follow Jesus, I am delighted to invite them to learn more about the faith and will encourage them to unite themselves with Christ in baptism. It has been one of the highlights of my ministry to accompany an adult catechumen, Sharmila Patel, on her journey of faith this year and watch her become a Christian through baptism at the bishop’s visit last week. But I also believe we can authentically and powerfully share Christ with people of other religions even if they do not decide to become a Christian and be baptized.
An example of this from my own experience is my relationship with my friend and colleague Valarie Kaur, who is a follower of the Sikh religion and a nationally-known interfaith leader and speaker. You may remember that I have mentioned her in sermons before; she and I have had a long and complex interfaith friendship that has stretched us both to grow spiritually.
In 2007, I was doing an internship with a parish in Nebraska as part of my year of discernment for the priesthood, and Valarie participated in an interfaith Stations of the Cross project I presented as the Lenten series for that year. Based on a similar project organized in the Church of England a few years prior, my interfaith Stations of the Cross project invited people of different religions to take one of the classic Stations of the Cross and reflect on it through the lens of their own faith. So, for instance, a Muslim participant made a connection between Jesus’s death on the cross and the execution of one of the martyrs of his own faith.
Valarie was the Sikh participant in the project, and she took the first station, “Jesus is Condemned to Die.” In it, she reflected on the death of Balbir Singh Sodhi, a Sikh man shot and killed in Arizona just four days after 9/11 by a man who thought he was a terrorist because of the turban and beard he wore as part of his Sikh faith. Participants were encouraged to write a meditation generic enough that it could be read as describing either the event from the non-Christian faith or the story of Jesus’s crucifixion. This is what Valarie wrote for the first station, “Jesus is Condemned to Die”:
“They were afraid of the ones they could not understand. They reached for their weapons and marched in the streets. ‘You are the enemy,’ they said to the man with light in his eyes. His face shone with God, but they could not see the divine in him. They could only see strangeness. The man was condemned, but he accepted God’s will and turned to God and said, ‘God, I am ready for you to use me in whatever way you wish.’ There was blood on the ground when he died, and the ones who knew him gathered at his grave and wept. The women and men took comfort and sang in the streets, ‘He died so that others would not,’ and the echo tried to confirm it: ‘He died so that others would not.’”
Everything about this meditation – the condemned man accepting God’s will, those who knew him seeing greater meaning in his death – was a description of the death of Balbir Singh Sodhi, a 21st century Indian-American Sikh gas station owner in Mesa, Arizona, but the similarities between this story and the condemnation and death of a 1st century Jewish Palestinian man we Christians call our Lord and Savior were striking, to me and to the congregation who participated in the study – and to Valarie herself. She wrote this reflection on what the experience of participating in the project was like for her:
“As a 26-year old Sikh American who had many childhood encounters where friends and teachers tried to convert me to Christianity, I did not feel that Christian theology spoke to the heart of my own experience - until I wrote this reflection. I discovered that the themes of suffering, sacrifice, and service defined not only the Christian story but the human story - and the way I understand my own life experience.”
The Sunday after that Wednesday night program, Valarie attended church with me for the first time. Although I’d been to Sikh services with her before, she’d always somehow respectfully declined my invitations to attend church, perhaps because she had a negative taste in her mouth for Christianity after her childhood experiences with Christians telling her she was going to hell. But this time she agreed, and she chose to come forward and receive communion during the service. As we pulled out of the parking lot after church, she grabbed my arm and said to me with tears in her eyes, “Tracy, now I understand why you want to be a priest.” She later told me that her experiences at my parish in Nebraska that week were some of the most powerful experiences of spiritual belonging she’d ever felt, something she never expected to find in a community of Christians.
My more evangelical brothers and sisters might say that because Valarie has not become a Christian, I have not effectively “shared Christ” with her. But to me, the experience we had that winter in Nebraska was one of the most powerful and effective ways I have ever “shared Christ” with anyone. An intentionally interfaith encounter more effectively communicated the story of Christ to someone who is not a Christian than any overt attempts to convert her ever did. So as a good Anglican, taking into account reason as well as scripture and tradition in formulating my theology, I have come to identify as an inclusivist in terms of my theology of religions. When I read today’s Gospel passage, I believe deeply that Valarie and others like her are included in those “other sheep” that also belong to Jesus.
Showing posts with label Muslim. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Muslim. Show all posts
Sunday, April 26, 2015
Sunday, February 16, 2014
Focusing on the positive is "choosing life"
Sermon delivered Sunday, Feb. 16, 2014 (6th Sunday After the Epiphany, Year A), at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Franklin, TN (Deuteronomy 30:15-20, Matthew 5:21-37).
“I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life, so that you and your descendants may live” (Deuteronomy 30:19).
Our reading from Deuteronomy today comes near the end of that book, as the Israelites are preparing to cross into the Promised Land after 40 years of wandering in the wilderness. As they stand on the brink of the fulfillment of the promises God has made to them, Moses is near death, and these last several chapters of Deuteronomy detail his “parting words” to the people before naming Joshua as his successor. After a long recounting of the laws given at Mount Sinai, Moses reminds the people that if they obey the laws God has given them, they will prosper, but if they do not, they will perish.
Although only one of these choices offers a desirable outcome, inherent in this exhortation is a reminder of their free will: the Israelites actually do have a choice in the matter of whether they will love God and follow his commandments or not. God does not make them obey him, controlling them like puppets; he grants them the freedom to choose disobedience, even if it leads to their destruction.
Like the Israelites, we too have a real choice as to whether we will love and obey God or not, whether we will choose life or whether we will choose death. We too are free to choose disobedience, even if it leads to our destruction. We only need to take a brief look at the evening news to find plenty of examples of how often people choose destructive behaviors over life-giving ones. And truth be told, there are probably plenty of examples a lot closer to home than the evening news.
Within our own lives and choices, we can all find examples of times when we chose to break our own religious covenant – the vows we made at our baptism – and the negative consequences that resulted. The times we turned a blind eye to someone in need, the times we spoke harshly to our spouse or children, the times we neglected to spend time with God in prayer and worship, the times we knowingly participated in unjust social systems simply because it was easier than challenging the status quo – in all of these times, we broke the covenant we made at our baptism to be regular in prayer and worship, to share our faith with others, to seek and serve Christ in all persons, to strive for justice and peace among all people and to respect the dignity of every human being. [1]
Each time we break one of these vows, we are, in however small a way, choosing death instead of life. Although we may not feel like we are making a conscious choice to disobey our baptismal covenant in those moments, we could have chosen to behave differently. We could have chosen to see the person in need rather than walking past them. We could have chosen to hold our tongue when we felt negativity and harsh words rising up. We could have chosen to get up and come to worship even when we felt like sleeping in. We could have chosen to challenge the policies and programs in our communities that perpetuate social inequalities and injustices. We do have the ability to be conscious and intentional about our actions, and to make choices that are life-giving rather than destructive.
But lest we think “choosing life” is a matter of simply doing the right things, Jesus’s teachings in today’s Gospel passage (Matthew 5:21-37) from the Sermon on the Mount remind us that obeying the letter of the law is not enough – we must embody the spirit behind the law in our thoughts and attitudes. It is not enough just to refrain from killing someone, Jesus says, because nurturing anger and ill will towards someone can be a kind of “death” as well, both for the other person and for us. Focusing only on our outward actions neglects to take seriously how powerful our thoughts really are. This is why so many religious traditions teach that it is important to purify one’s mind as well as one’s actions.
What we dwell on mentally has an enormous impact on our emotional and even physical well-being. We have the choice between life and death not only in our actions, but in our mindset. If we choose to focus on the negative all the time, we are essentially choosing death. If we choose to focus on the positive, we are choosing life. This is why the Apostle Paul offered the following advice in his letter to the church at Philippi: “whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things” (Philippians 4:8). To a church dealing with disagreements and conflict amongst themselves, Paul urges them to focus on the positive. Find some common ground. Emphasize what they can agree on. In doing so, they “choose life” for their community, because we all know how destructive it can be to only focus on conflicts, disagreements, and things that divide us.
And this holds true not just within the church, but in broader contexts as well. If we can focus on the positive, on the things we share in common, on the ways we can get along with one another, we can choose life rather than death not just for the church, but for the world.
One of our current Sunday School classes for adults at 10 a.m. is called “Embracing Interfaith Cooperation.” The class is based on a series of videos of talks and interfaith group discussions led by Eboo Patel, founder of an organization called the Interfaith Youth Core in Chicago. The Interfaith Youth Core strives to hold up the stories of interfaith cooperation throughout the history of our various religious traditions, and to train college students to become the next generation of interfaith leaders. They seek to educate people about the fact that the dominant assumption that people of different religions have always fought and will always fight is simply not true. Although our history textbooks and the evening news tend to tell us the story of the “clash of civilizations” and the inevitability of religious strife, Eboo and the Interfaith Youth Core remind us that there is actually a long history of interfaith cooperation in our respective religious histories that is often unknown to the general public.
Tonight at our Nourish program, we will welcome some of our Muslim neighbors in Williamson County to St. Paul’s for dinner and conversation. Because today’s dialogue is a Christian-Muslim one, let me highlight a few stories of interfaith cooperation between Christians and Muslims from our shared histories.
We are all familiar with the storyline that tells us that Christians and Muslims can’t get along, that we must fight and compete with one another about religious claims and political views. But as far back as the 8th century in what is now Iraq, Christians and Muslims were engaging in peaceful dialogue and debate in the courts of a Muslim caliph named Harun al-Rashid, who intentionally invited people of many religious faiths to his court to participate in an exchange of ideas that would broaden the minds of all involved. [2]
In the 13th century, in the middle of the Crusades, St. Francis of Assisi met with the Egyptian sultan, Malik al-Kamil. Although Francis’s initial aim was to stop the wars over the Holy Land by converting the sultan to Christianity, when he actually met and spoke with the sultan, he discovered a devout man of God in whom he recognized something holy. The sultan likewise acknowledged Francis as a holy man, despite their disagreements on matters of religious doctrine. Francis came away from the encounter with at least some respect for Islam, and instructed his followers to live at peace with their Muslim neighbors. [3]
And closer to our own day, despite the news we hear in the U.S. about Christians being oppressed and mistreated in majority-Muslim countries, friendships and support between Christians and Muslims continues to go on at the grassroots level. During the political uprising in Egypt in 2011, hundreds of Christians joined hands to create a human chain to protect their Muslim neighbors as they prayed in Cairo. [4] And after an Anglican church was bombed in Pakistan last year, hundreds of Muslims joined hands to form a human chain around the church to protect their Christian neighbors as they returned for mass the next week. [5] The images of these two events (see below) went viral on Facebook and other social media sites, showing the power of the people to lift up positive stories to counteract the dominant narrative of conflict. These powerful displays of solidarity show that it is possible for us to choose life rather than death, to choose cooperation rather than competition and conflict.
Some might say that focusing on the positive is a form of living in denial, that if we only look at what we have in common, we miss the importance of our very real differences, that if we ignore our points of disagreement, we sweep things under the rug and don’t get a realistic view of the complexity of our relationships, whether we’re dealing with family dynamics, church conflicts, or interfaith dialogue. This is certainly a valid critique; if we deny that we have any differences at all, we do ignore the reality of our uniqueness as individuals and the particularities of our various traditions. But given the extent to which our culture encourages us to focus on conflict, it is important that we remind ourselves that conflict is not the only storyline out there.
And so, we keep lifting up the positive, we keep looking for common ground – not to ignore our differences or particularities, but in order that we might choose life rather than death, that we might choose peaceful encounters and life-giving friendships rather than fear, suspicion, and violence.
“I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life, so that you and your descendants may live” (Deuteronomy 30:19).
----------
Footnotes:
[1] See the Baptismal Covenant, p. 304 in the Book of Common Prayer
[2] See the introduction to Zachary Karabell, Peace Be Upon You: Fourteen Centuries of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish Conflict and Cooperation. Vintage Books, 2008.
[3] The Saint and the Sultan, Paul Moses. Online information at http://www.saintandthesultan.com/about.html
Hoke, Wendy A. “St. Francis and the Sultan: Lessons for Today.” Catholic Universe Bulletin, 31 October 2006. Accessed online at http://www.catholic.org/diocese/diocese_story.php?id=21816 10 February 2014.
[4] “Images of solidarity as Christians join hands to protect Muslims as they pray during Cairo protests,” The Daily Mail (UK), 3 February 2011, accessed online at http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1353330/Egypt-protests-Christians-join-hands-protect-Muslims-pray-Cairo-protests.html 10 February 2014.
[5] “Pakistani Muslims Form Human Chain to Protect Christians During Mass,” Huffington Post, 8 October 2013, reprinted from The Express Tribune. Accessed online at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/08/muslims-form-human-chain-pakistan_n_4057381.html 10 February 2014.
“I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life, so that you and your descendants may live” (Deuteronomy 30:19).
Our reading from Deuteronomy today comes near the end of that book, as the Israelites are preparing to cross into the Promised Land after 40 years of wandering in the wilderness. As they stand on the brink of the fulfillment of the promises God has made to them, Moses is near death, and these last several chapters of Deuteronomy detail his “parting words” to the people before naming Joshua as his successor. After a long recounting of the laws given at Mount Sinai, Moses reminds the people that if they obey the laws God has given them, they will prosper, but if they do not, they will perish.
Although only one of these choices offers a desirable outcome, inherent in this exhortation is a reminder of their free will: the Israelites actually do have a choice in the matter of whether they will love God and follow his commandments or not. God does not make them obey him, controlling them like puppets; he grants them the freedom to choose disobedience, even if it leads to their destruction.
Like the Israelites, we too have a real choice as to whether we will love and obey God or not, whether we will choose life or whether we will choose death. We too are free to choose disobedience, even if it leads to our destruction. We only need to take a brief look at the evening news to find plenty of examples of how often people choose destructive behaviors over life-giving ones. And truth be told, there are probably plenty of examples a lot closer to home than the evening news.
Within our own lives and choices, we can all find examples of times when we chose to break our own religious covenant – the vows we made at our baptism – and the negative consequences that resulted. The times we turned a blind eye to someone in need, the times we spoke harshly to our spouse or children, the times we neglected to spend time with God in prayer and worship, the times we knowingly participated in unjust social systems simply because it was easier than challenging the status quo – in all of these times, we broke the covenant we made at our baptism to be regular in prayer and worship, to share our faith with others, to seek and serve Christ in all persons, to strive for justice and peace among all people and to respect the dignity of every human being. [1]
Each time we break one of these vows, we are, in however small a way, choosing death instead of life. Although we may not feel like we are making a conscious choice to disobey our baptismal covenant in those moments, we could have chosen to behave differently. We could have chosen to see the person in need rather than walking past them. We could have chosen to hold our tongue when we felt negativity and harsh words rising up. We could have chosen to get up and come to worship even when we felt like sleeping in. We could have chosen to challenge the policies and programs in our communities that perpetuate social inequalities and injustices. We do have the ability to be conscious and intentional about our actions, and to make choices that are life-giving rather than destructive.
But lest we think “choosing life” is a matter of simply doing the right things, Jesus’s teachings in today’s Gospel passage (Matthew 5:21-37) from the Sermon on the Mount remind us that obeying the letter of the law is not enough – we must embody the spirit behind the law in our thoughts and attitudes. It is not enough just to refrain from killing someone, Jesus says, because nurturing anger and ill will towards someone can be a kind of “death” as well, both for the other person and for us. Focusing only on our outward actions neglects to take seriously how powerful our thoughts really are. This is why so many religious traditions teach that it is important to purify one’s mind as well as one’s actions.
What we dwell on mentally has an enormous impact on our emotional and even physical well-being. We have the choice between life and death not only in our actions, but in our mindset. If we choose to focus on the negative all the time, we are essentially choosing death. If we choose to focus on the positive, we are choosing life. This is why the Apostle Paul offered the following advice in his letter to the church at Philippi: “whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things” (Philippians 4:8). To a church dealing with disagreements and conflict amongst themselves, Paul urges them to focus on the positive. Find some common ground. Emphasize what they can agree on. In doing so, they “choose life” for their community, because we all know how destructive it can be to only focus on conflicts, disagreements, and things that divide us.
And this holds true not just within the church, but in broader contexts as well. If we can focus on the positive, on the things we share in common, on the ways we can get along with one another, we can choose life rather than death not just for the church, but for the world.
 |
| Eboo Patel (center) in the midst of an interfaith dialogue. Image from Inside Islam, http://insideislam.wisc.edu |
Tonight at our Nourish program, we will welcome some of our Muslim neighbors in Williamson County to St. Paul’s for dinner and conversation. Because today’s dialogue is a Christian-Muslim one, let me highlight a few stories of interfaith cooperation between Christians and Muslims from our shared histories.
We are all familiar with the storyline that tells us that Christians and Muslims can’t get along, that we must fight and compete with one another about religious claims and political views. But as far back as the 8th century in what is now Iraq, Christians and Muslims were engaging in peaceful dialogue and debate in the courts of a Muslim caliph named Harun al-Rashid, who intentionally invited people of many religious faiths to his court to participate in an exchange of ideas that would broaden the minds of all involved. [2]
 |
| An icon of St. Francis greeting Sultan Malik al-Kamil. |
And closer to our own day, despite the news we hear in the U.S. about Christians being oppressed and mistreated in majority-Muslim countries, friendships and support between Christians and Muslims continues to go on at the grassroots level. During the political uprising in Egypt in 2011, hundreds of Christians joined hands to create a human chain to protect their Muslim neighbors as they prayed in Cairo. [4] And after an Anglican church was bombed in Pakistan last year, hundreds of Muslims joined hands to form a human chain around the church to protect their Christian neighbors as they returned for mass the next week. [5] The images of these two events (see below) went viral on Facebook and other social media sites, showing the power of the people to lift up positive stories to counteract the dominant narrative of conflict. These powerful displays of solidarity show that it is possible for us to choose life rather than death, to choose cooperation rather than competition and conflict.
 |
| Christians protecting Muslims at prayer in Cairo, 2011 (image from the U.K.'s Daily Mail) |
 |
| Muslims surrounding church to protect their Christian neighbors in Pakistan, 2013 (image from Huffington Post) |
Some might say that focusing on the positive is a form of living in denial, that if we only look at what we have in common, we miss the importance of our very real differences, that if we ignore our points of disagreement, we sweep things under the rug and don’t get a realistic view of the complexity of our relationships, whether we’re dealing with family dynamics, church conflicts, or interfaith dialogue. This is certainly a valid critique; if we deny that we have any differences at all, we do ignore the reality of our uniqueness as individuals and the particularities of our various traditions. But given the extent to which our culture encourages us to focus on conflict, it is important that we remind ourselves that conflict is not the only storyline out there.
And so, we keep lifting up the positive, we keep looking for common ground – not to ignore our differences or particularities, but in order that we might choose life rather than death, that we might choose peaceful encounters and life-giving friendships rather than fear, suspicion, and violence.
“I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life, so that you and your descendants may live” (Deuteronomy 30:19).
 |
| Participants in the interfaith scripture study circle between St. Paul's, the Islamic Center of Williamson County, and the Nashville Gurdwara (Sikh community). The group met once a month for three months, January-March, to study common topics in our sacred texts (the Bible, the Qur'an and the Guru Granth Sahib). |
----------
Footnotes:
[1] See the Baptismal Covenant, p. 304 in the Book of Common Prayer
[2] See the introduction to Zachary Karabell, Peace Be Upon You: Fourteen Centuries of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish Conflict and Cooperation. Vintage Books, 2008.
[3] The Saint and the Sultan, Paul Moses. Online information at http://www.saintandthesultan.com/about.html
Hoke, Wendy A. “St. Francis and the Sultan: Lessons for Today.” Catholic Universe Bulletin, 31 October 2006. Accessed online at http://www.catholic.org/diocese/diocese_story.php?id=21816 10 February 2014.
[4] “Images of solidarity as Christians join hands to protect Muslims as they pray during Cairo protests,” The Daily Mail (UK), 3 February 2011, accessed online at http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1353330/Egypt-protests-Christians-join-hands-protect-Muslims-pray-Cairo-protests.html 10 February 2014.
[5] “Pakistani Muslims Form Human Chain to Protect Christians During Mass,” Huffington Post, 8 October 2013, reprinted from The Express Tribune. Accessed online at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/08/muslims-form-human-chain-pakistan_n_4057381.html 10 February 2014.
Sunday, September 1, 2013
Seeing with "kingdom eyes"
Sermon delivered Sunday, Sept. 1, 2013 (15 Pentecost, Year C, Proper 17), at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Franklin, TN (Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16; Luke 14:1, 7-14).
Both our readings from the New Testament today focus on the themes of hospitality and solidarity with both neighbors and strangers.
The author of the letter to the Hebrews encourages us to “let mutual love continue,” and reminds us “not to neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it.” We are also encouraged to “remember those who are in prison, as though [we] were in prison with them; those who are being tortured, as though [we ourselves] were being tortured.” In the Gospel passage from Luke, Jesus encourages us to choose humility over arrogance, and to invite and include the most vulnerable and marginalized members of society in our community gatherings.
We should give to others and extend hospitality not only when we can expect to receive it in return, but even when we know the recipients cannot reciprocate. For in doing so, we mirror God’s love to us – God gives to us freely, despite the inability of human beings to “repay” God for the gift of our life.
And we also offer a foretaste of that kingdom to come where all people will stand equal as children of God, where we will treat one another with love and respect not out of a desire to receive anything in return, not out of an attempt to lift ourselves up, but out of a recognition that we are all brothers and sisters in the family of God. With our worldly eyes, we see inequalities, separateness, and divisions, but with kingdom eyes, we will be able to see the oneness of humanity and the equal value of every human being.
Our faith gives us the opportunity to see with kingdom eyes now; we don’t have to wait for the kingdom to come. In the Lord’s Prayer, we pray for God’s will to be done “on earth as it is in heaven.” As we strive to live out our faith and follow the teachings of Jesus, God will use us to bring a glimpse of that kingdom to the world here and now, on earth as it is in heaven.
Because our natural tendencies as human beings can be so contrary to kingdom values, in order to do this, we must be intentional about our behavior. We must choose to see with kingdom eyes. We must choose to offer hospitality to strangers and neighbors alike – to push against our natural inclinations to speak only to those people we already know, to invite only our friends to our parties, and instead, choose to see the stranger as a brother and a friend.
The letter to the Hebrews tells us that we should “remember those who are in prison, as though [we] were in prison with them; those who are being tortured, as though [we ourselves] were being tortured.” The kingdom reality is that all Christians are one body in Christ, and when one member suffers, the whole body suffers with it. The kingdom reality is that all people – Christians and non-Christians alike – are God’s children and thus part of the greater family of God. When one of us is hurting, we all hurt. But so often, we don’t even know that one of us is hurting, because we don’t know one another. We see each other with worldly eyes, as “other,” as “different,” as “stranger,” as a statistic rather than a human being, and our empathy fades. But if we take the time to get to know one another as fellow human beings, as brothers and sisters in the family of God, we begin to hurt when others hurt, to care when our brothers and sisters are in prison, or tortured, or murdered, or deported, or slandered. When we know one another, when we hear one another’s stories, we can begin to see with kingdom eyes – we can recognize one another as a brother or a sister.
Allow me to share an example of this with you from my own life. Shortly after 9/11, I heard that a Sikh man had been murdered at a gas station in Arizona. I had never heard of Sikhism, and when my religion professor explained that Sikh men wear turbans and beards as part of their religious faith and that this man had been mistaken for a “terrorist” because his shooter thought he looked like Osama bin Laden, I shook my head at what sounded like an awful situation, but it quickly faded to the back of my mind. Two years later, I happened to be at a conference where a young Sikh woman presented a collection of video footage of interviews with the relatives of this man, as well as interviews with other people who had experienced discrimination and hate crimes in the weeks and months after 9/11. As I listened to story after story of people who had been yelled at, beaten, shot, and killed simply because of the way they looked, I felt like the Apostle Paul when the scales fell from his eyes at his conversion experience (Acts 9:18). I had had no idea about what had been happening to the Sikh community, the Muslim community, the Hispanic community – really, anyone with brown skin – in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, because I didn’t know them. Our paths never crossed, and so I had never heard their stories. I had been seeing with worldly eyes rather than with kingdom eyes. I hadn’t known that my brothers and sisters were suffering.
After the screening, I introduced myself to the woman who had shown the footage, whose name was Valarie Kaur. Her goal was to take this footage, which she had collected for a project as a college student in the year after 9/11, and turn it into a feature-length documentary film. I offered to help in whatever way I could, and eventually became the film’s communications director through a second stage of production and its eventual national tour. It was my work with that film that made me so sensitive to the shootings that happened last August at the Sikh temple in Wisconsin, that motivated me to buy those sympathy cards for you all to sign and to take a group of you to visit the gurdwara here in Nashville.
In the middle of the film, which we titled “Divided We Fall,” there is a scene where a college-aged Valarie and her 18-year-old turbaned cousin Sonny, who was her cameraman for the project, discuss what the turban means to them as Sikhs. When it is Valarie’s turn, she says, “I see somebody with a turban, and I say, ‘There’s a sadar, he’s a Sikh man. He’s like my uncle, he’s like my brother, he’s like my grandfather. I know him. We come from the same place. He probably speaks Punjabi. He says the same prayers that I do.” She looks down, with a pensive look on her face. Her cousin pauses, then asks, “Why are we making this documentary?” Valarie looks away thoughtfully, smiles, then looks directly into the camera and says, “So other people don’t look at the turban and see fear, hatred, something laughable, something less than human… so that other people don’t look at the turban and see an enemy where I see a brother.”
I wonder if that isn’t why Jesus asked us to invite “the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind,” to our luncheons and dinners – so that we wouldn’t look at them and see something laughable, something less than human – so that we wouldn’t look at them and see fear where Jesus sees a brother. So that, as we ate together, we could hear their stories, stories that would make us human to one another, stories that would allow us to see each other with kingdom eyes, as brothers and sisters in the family of God.
This is what we’re about as a church whenever we go to Church in the Yard and listen to the stories of people who are experiencing homelessness, or when we sit down at Spring Street to share a meal with our African-American neighbors, or when we visit the mosque or gurdwara and share tea with Muslims and Sikhs. We are intentionally connecting and building relationships with people we might not otherwise get to know. We are pushing back against the default mode of society that keeps us apart in separate circles of community that never touch one another. We are choosing to see one another with kingdom eyes, so that we will know when one of our brothers and sisters is suffering and remember them as if we were suffering ourselves.
Jesus says that if we show hospitality to those whom society separates from us, we will be blessed, and will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous. But, as I’m sure anyone who has participated in any of the ministries I just mentioned could tell you, the blessings are also available here and now. Because as we extend hospitality to both neighbors and strangers, we discover that there are no strangers in the kingdom of God, and we are able to touch a glimpse of the kingdom, breaking in to our everyday lives, on earth as it is in heaven.
Both our readings from the New Testament today focus on the themes of hospitality and solidarity with both neighbors and strangers.
The author of the letter to the Hebrews encourages us to “let mutual love continue,” and reminds us “not to neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it.” We are also encouraged to “remember those who are in prison, as though [we] were in prison with them; those who are being tortured, as though [we ourselves] were being tortured.” In the Gospel passage from Luke, Jesus encourages us to choose humility over arrogance, and to invite and include the most vulnerable and marginalized members of society in our community gatherings.
We should give to others and extend hospitality not only when we can expect to receive it in return, but even when we know the recipients cannot reciprocate. For in doing so, we mirror God’s love to us – God gives to us freely, despite the inability of human beings to “repay” God for the gift of our life.
And we also offer a foretaste of that kingdom to come where all people will stand equal as children of God, where we will treat one another with love and respect not out of a desire to receive anything in return, not out of an attempt to lift ourselves up, but out of a recognition that we are all brothers and sisters in the family of God. With our worldly eyes, we see inequalities, separateness, and divisions, but with kingdom eyes, we will be able to see the oneness of humanity and the equal value of every human being.
Our faith gives us the opportunity to see with kingdom eyes now; we don’t have to wait for the kingdom to come. In the Lord’s Prayer, we pray for God’s will to be done “on earth as it is in heaven.” As we strive to live out our faith and follow the teachings of Jesus, God will use us to bring a glimpse of that kingdom to the world here and now, on earth as it is in heaven.
Because our natural tendencies as human beings can be so contrary to kingdom values, in order to do this, we must be intentional about our behavior. We must choose to see with kingdom eyes. We must choose to offer hospitality to strangers and neighbors alike – to push against our natural inclinations to speak only to those people we already know, to invite only our friends to our parties, and instead, choose to see the stranger as a brother and a friend.
The letter to the Hebrews tells us that we should “remember those who are in prison, as though [we] were in prison with them; those who are being tortured, as though [we ourselves] were being tortured.” The kingdom reality is that all Christians are one body in Christ, and when one member suffers, the whole body suffers with it. The kingdom reality is that all people – Christians and non-Christians alike – are God’s children and thus part of the greater family of God. When one of us is hurting, we all hurt. But so often, we don’t even know that one of us is hurting, because we don’t know one another. We see each other with worldly eyes, as “other,” as “different,” as “stranger,” as a statistic rather than a human being, and our empathy fades. But if we take the time to get to know one another as fellow human beings, as brothers and sisters in the family of God, we begin to hurt when others hurt, to care when our brothers and sisters are in prison, or tortured, or murdered, or deported, or slandered. When we know one another, when we hear one another’s stories, we can begin to see with kingdom eyes – we can recognize one another as a brother or a sister.
Allow me to share an example of this with you from my own life. Shortly after 9/11, I heard that a Sikh man had been murdered at a gas station in Arizona. I had never heard of Sikhism, and when my religion professor explained that Sikh men wear turbans and beards as part of their religious faith and that this man had been mistaken for a “terrorist” because his shooter thought he looked like Osama bin Laden, I shook my head at what sounded like an awful situation, but it quickly faded to the back of my mind. Two years later, I happened to be at a conference where a young Sikh woman presented a collection of video footage of interviews with the relatives of this man, as well as interviews with other people who had experienced discrimination and hate crimes in the weeks and months after 9/11. As I listened to story after story of people who had been yelled at, beaten, shot, and killed simply because of the way they looked, I felt like the Apostle Paul when the scales fell from his eyes at his conversion experience (Acts 9:18). I had had no idea about what had been happening to the Sikh community, the Muslim community, the Hispanic community – really, anyone with brown skin – in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, because I didn’t know them. Our paths never crossed, and so I had never heard their stories. I had been seeing with worldly eyes rather than with kingdom eyes. I hadn’t known that my brothers and sisters were suffering.
After the screening, I introduced myself to the woman who had shown the footage, whose name was Valarie Kaur. Her goal was to take this footage, which she had collected for a project as a college student in the year after 9/11, and turn it into a feature-length documentary film. I offered to help in whatever way I could, and eventually became the film’s communications director through a second stage of production and its eventual national tour. It was my work with that film that made me so sensitive to the shootings that happened last August at the Sikh temple in Wisconsin, that motivated me to buy those sympathy cards for you all to sign and to take a group of you to visit the gurdwara here in Nashville.
In the middle of the film, which we titled “Divided We Fall,” there is a scene where a college-aged Valarie and her 18-year-old turbaned cousin Sonny, who was her cameraman for the project, discuss what the turban means to them as Sikhs. When it is Valarie’s turn, she says, “I see somebody with a turban, and I say, ‘There’s a sadar, he’s a Sikh man. He’s like my uncle, he’s like my brother, he’s like my grandfather. I know him. We come from the same place. He probably speaks Punjabi. He says the same prayers that I do.” She looks down, with a pensive look on her face. Her cousin pauses, then asks, “Why are we making this documentary?” Valarie looks away thoughtfully, smiles, then looks directly into the camera and says, “So other people don’t look at the turban and see fear, hatred, something laughable, something less than human… so that other people don’t look at the turban and see an enemy where I see a brother.”
I wonder if that isn’t why Jesus asked us to invite “the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind,” to our luncheons and dinners – so that we wouldn’t look at them and see something laughable, something less than human – so that we wouldn’t look at them and see fear where Jesus sees a brother. So that, as we ate together, we could hear their stories, stories that would make us human to one another, stories that would allow us to see each other with kingdom eyes, as brothers and sisters in the family of God.
This is what we’re about as a church whenever we go to Church in the Yard and listen to the stories of people who are experiencing homelessness, or when we sit down at Spring Street to share a meal with our African-American neighbors, or when we visit the mosque or gurdwara and share tea with Muslims and Sikhs. We are intentionally connecting and building relationships with people we might not otherwise get to know. We are pushing back against the default mode of society that keeps us apart in separate circles of community that never touch one another. We are choosing to see one another with kingdom eyes, so that we will know when one of our brothers and sisters is suffering and remember them as if we were suffering ourselves.
Jesus says that if we show hospitality to those whom society separates from us, we will be blessed, and will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous. But, as I’m sure anyone who has participated in any of the ministries I just mentioned could tell you, the blessings are also available here and now. Because as we extend hospitality to both neighbors and strangers, we discover that there are no strangers in the kingdom of God, and we are able to touch a glimpse of the kingdom, breaking in to our everyday lives, on earth as it is in heaven.
Thursday, January 10, 2013
Reading Scripture with people of other faiths
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.
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.
Tuesday, June 14, 2011
A crisis of faith
My trip to the West Bank affected me more than anything else on my three-week trip. The night after I returned from my trip, I found myself going on and on at dinner at the convent to several college students who were part of a study abroad trip who were staying at the convent for a month. I told them about my visit and all the things I'd seen, as they sat, captivated, listening to the things I described. That night, I sat in my room and tried to process all the things I'd seen and experienced that day. I thought about the starkly different versions of history I'd gotten on either side of the Wall.
In Manger Square, there was a large display showing the "History of the Occupation," from 1948 to the present day, showing the shrinking amount of land that Palestinians have had access to over the years. At the Sea of Galilee Guest House where I'd stayed the weekend before, there were old photographs on the wall with accompanying captions about the Jewish "pioneers" who'd settled that area in the late 40s. The Israel Museum in Jerusalem spoke about the "War of Independence" in 1948 and had plaques honoring various soldiers who had died. On the West Bank side, that war was referred to as al-Naqba, "the Catastrophe."
The Jewish "spiritual travel guide" I'd bought for the trip included political sites related to the founding of the state of Israel as religious pilgrimage sites complete with prayers of thanksgiving to be recited for the restoration of the state of Israel. The Knesset, the governmental center of the state of Israel, was included as one of the pilgrimage sites. The opening scripture passage was Amos 9:11, 14:
In that day,
I will set up again the fallen booth of David;
I will restore my people Israel;
I will plant them upon their soil, never more to be uprooted.
The introductory material for this chapter waxed philosophic about the creation of the state of Israel: "Modern pilgrims can only imagine the thrill of receiving a letter from the British government in 1917, saying that Israel might some day be born; or standing near here in 1948, hearing the Declaration of Independence of the State of Israel being read. But at least we can imagine it by reading the historic letter from Britain lord Balfour, known ever after as the Balfour Declaration." The book went on to reprint the entire Balfour Declaration and the entire "Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel." I read with some irony these words from the famous (or infamous, depending on which side of the Wall you're on) Lord Balfour:
His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine...
As I read this, I thought of the third generation of Palestinian families living in refugee camps, denied the right of return to their homes. I thought about the Israeli annexation of land in the West Bank and the denial of water to Palestinians there. I thought about the massive bloodshed and violence that followed the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, and I shook my head sadly at Balfour's naiviety and ignorance in 1917. "Nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine," huh? What an empty promise that has turned out to be.
I picked up a copy of the International Christian Embassy Jerusalem newsletter that had been given to me by one of the Jewish Israeli participants in the Jewish-Muslim interfaith dialogue meeting on Sunday night. "Here, I get this magazine that's about Christians' support of Israel," he'd said to me as he dropped us off back at Bob's apartment after the end of the evening. "You might find it interesting."
"Thanks," I said, taking it and shoving it into my bag. Now I pulled it out and looked at it. The ICEJ was founded in 1980 "as an act of comfort and solidarity with Israel and the Jewish people in their claim to Jerusalem," and represents Christians "who share a love and concern for Israel and an understanding of the biblical significance of the modern ingathering of Jews to the land of their forefathers."
The magazine included articles about how the Second Coming of Jesus was clearly immanent since the state of Israel has been restored and since there is much international resistance to it.
"The miracle of Israel's restoration is the validating sign heralding the return of our dear Lord," one of the articles asserted. "It is also true that the Word of God portrays Israel's restoration as taking place amidst great international resistance to it. The nations will eventually mobilize, as they did in AD 70, against Jerusalem and they will try to remove it from Jewish hands (Zechariah 12). They will be thwarted and Jesus will return in glory and splendour to set up His throne in Jerusalem and from which He will rule the nations with a "rod of iron" (Revelation 19:15).
Another section of the magazine exhorted its readers to pray for Israel as it came under increasing international pressure to cede control to parts of the land to Palestinians, including the parts of Jerusalem that were annexed by Israel in 1967 on so-called "Jerusalem Day" - June 1 - the day I had first set out to explore Jerusalem. Some of the parades celebrating the "unification of Jerusalem" were scheduled to go right through predominantly Arab neighborhoods. The Rev. Bob Carroll, the canon pastor to the English-speaking congregation at the Episcopal cathedral in Jerusalem, told me how Jewish families would walk up and down the streets of his predominantly Arab neighborhood in East Jerusalem, pushing their baby carriages.
"They don't have to come this way," he said. "There are plenty of other routes they can take. They do it to make a statement. They're saying, 'We're here, and don't you forget it.'"
Or, in other words, "F*** you."
And yet, this very large Christian organization stands "in solidarity with the Jewish people in their claim to Jerusalem." I found myself wondering how many of this organization's supporters and subscribers to this magazine had ever actually been to Jerusalem or the West Bank, how many of them had ever met a Palestinian and heard their story and their family history. Christians supporting the kind of behavior that has taken place in Israel in order to return the land to Jewish ownership seems to me a blatant violation of what Christians should stand for. Even if you truly believe that God wants the land to be given to the Jews, at what cost? Would God approve of the violation of basic human rights and dignity for the sole purpose of giving the land back to the Jews? If they're the "chosen ones" and everyone else is chopped liver, maybe so. I began to see how very dangerous this kind of theology of "chosenness" can be, and realized that I do NOT believe, with any ounce of my being, that God has "chosen" any one group over the other and wants this kind of violence and slaughter to continue.
But what about those passages in the Old Testament where God tells the Israelites to slaughter the Canaanites (who were in this land before the Jews!) so that they can "possess the land that I am giving to you"? I opened my Bible and leafed through some of those passages and felt my blood boiling as I did. It was one thing to have been disturbed by these passages, as I always had been, when I encountered them in church and in religion classes and it was merely an intellectual conundrum over something that happened over 5,000 years ago and the way the people interpreted those events and attributed divine significance to them. It was quite another thing to see the ways in which this kind of theology had caused violence and injustice and oppression to VERY REAL HUMAN BEINGS in the HERE and NOW.
"How can I become a priest and be a part of a tradition that considers these passages Scripture?" I thought. "How can I vow at my ordination that I 'believe the Old and New Testaments to be the Word of God and to contain all things necessary to salvation' when there are these kinds of texts that essentially justify genocide? How do I preach on these texts when they come up in the lectionary?"
Before my experience in the West Bank, I probably would have tended to spiritualize or metaphorize the biblical stuff about the "Promised Land" (it's really heaven) or about being "chosen" (we're ALL chosen), but now I felt the need, the moral imperative, even the CALLING to actively preach AGAINST those notions. Although one of my seminary professors advises us to "never preach against the text" -- as in, don't directly contradict something the Bible says; find some way to use it positively, even if it's through a metaphorical interpretation -- I found myself feeling very strongly that I would not be able to do that with these passages. Tip-toeing around these passages and not tackling them head-on is exactly the kind of hands-off approach that has produced a kind of blindness and apathy and even tacit acceptance of the kind of things going on in the West Bank. I cried myself to sleep that night as waves of heart-wrenching pain wracked my body as I took in all that I had seen.
A few days later, I went to meet with Bob Carroll at the Episcopal cathedral to talk about the world of the Episcopal Church in this region. I was beside myself with frustration at the things I'd experienced and I wanted to know what the Episcopal Church was doing about it. "What kinds of things are the church doing in this area to help advocate for Palestinians?" I asked. He gave me lots of resources, including information about the World Council of Churches' Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme in Palestine and Israel (EAPPI), which sends volunteers to regions where injustices are going on to be witnesses to the activities of the Israeli government and Israeli settlers in the West Bank and to provide protection to the local people by their presence. If the Israeli government and settlers know they are being watched by an international presence, the violence they inflict on the Palestinians tends to decrease. A quote from one of the local people in the village of Yanoun in the booklet Bob gave me said this:
He also told me, as I talked about my encounters with different folks working in interfaith dialogue in the region, that interfaith work in Israel is often a ruse, a way of avoiding dealing with the hard political issues in the area. Interfaith dialogue, often initiated by the dominant Jewish community, is a way to make themselves feel good about reaching out to Muslims and Christians while not really changing anything about the oppression of these groups in the country. He told me a story about a rabbi approaching the diocese about starting an interfaith dialogue with the Episcopal Church.
"Our bishop [who is a Palestinian Arab] sat right here and said to him, 'Look, rabbi, with all due respect, are you going to do anything to help my people in the West Bank?' Do you want to work together to get medicines to the hospitals there and help with education? Because if not, I think this conversation is over.'"
I remembered the woman from Elijah Interfaith Institute that I'd met with saying that St. George's was "not known for their openness to interfaith dialogue," which surprised me, since the Episcopal Church in the U.S. is very open to such things. I'd wondered what that was all about -- and after talking to Bob, got an interesting insight into a dynamic that I hadn't been aware of in my previous encounters with the interfaith scene in Israel. Suddenly it made sense that a man who was involved in interfaith dialogue with Palestinian Muslims could also be a subscriber to a magazine about Christians supporting the Jews' exclusive right to the lands there, and advocating only for injustices committed against Jews by "Muslim extremists," with no mention on their website of the injustices committed by the Israeli government against Palestinian Arabs (who are not just Muslim but also CHRISTIAN, by the way!) that had provoked those extremists to such action!
Bob also warned me that when I went to the airport that night (it was my last day in Jerusalem), I should expect to be questioned severely, since "young women traveling alone are considered a security threat to the government of Israel."
"What??" I asked, surprised. I wasn't used to being lumped in the "security threat" stereotype category, and actually felt somewhat proud to be given that distinction. "Why?" I asked Bob.
"Well, because young women tend to come over here and visit the West Bank and get all sympathetic to the Palestinian cause," he said, and I laughed sheepishly. Well, I certainly fit the bill on that one! I guess stereotypes do come out of some sense of reality.
But perhaps the most important thing Bob said to me was his advice to not get caught up in my anger.
"This is a lot to take in right now," he said, "and it's natural that you'd get very upset upon first encountering these things. But once you've gotten home and have some time to settle in and process, it's very important to let go of the anger. Holding on to the anger is not productive, it doesn't really help anyone, and it'll just destroy you. You have to move past the anger if you want to do something productive."
I've thought a lot about "moving past the anger" since I've been back. In general, that's something that's very difficult for me to do, especially when I feel that I or someone else has been wronged. I get my hackles up in what I consider to be a "righteous anger" about some wrong or injustice done to me or someone else and I want the offending party to be punished or to apologize for their behavior before I'm able to let it go. This has been a subject of discussion for me with spiritual directors and confessors, about the importance of letting go of this feeling in order to truly be able to forgive others. Forgiveness does not come easily to me -- at least not a forgiveness where the other party is unrepentant. Since I don't see the Israeli government "repenting" of their actions any time soon, I think I'll have to find a way to move forward if I don't want to come to demonize the entire state of Israel -- which is also against my principles.
On the flight home, I read a book by Mitch Albom, author of Tuesdays With Morrie, about several years he spent with his childhood rabbi before he died, after that rabbi asked him to write his eulogy. The book, called Have a Little Faith, helped me to move past some of my anger at the state of Israel and, by extension, all Jewish people. I remembered going to hear Mitch Albom speak at a synagogue in Boston with the Jewish girls who used to live in my apartment. I thought about my dear friend and former roommate Ayala, who was born and raised in Israel. I thought about Naomi and Yinon who I'd stayed with in Tel Aviv at the beginning of my trip, Naomi an American Jewish woman who had "made aliyah," using her "birthright" as a Jew to be able to immigrate there, and Yinon a born-and-bred Israeli who was a member of that Israeli military that I was so angry at. I thought about their daughter Aya, born here and oblivious to all the political implications of her birth as a Jewish child on this highly contested soil. Certainly I wasn't going to lump all of them into this one big category of "Israel" and "Jews" that I was mad at?
In the book, there is a passage where Mitch finds an old photograph of an Arab family amongst the rabbi's belongings.
"Who are these people?" he asks, and the rabbi tells him how the photograph came from a home in the north of Israel that was demolished during the war in 1948 after the creation of the state of Israel. He tells how the people fled their homes and nothing was left but a few remnants like this picture, found in a crack on the floor by one of the Zionist soldiers. I can't remember how the rabbi came to be in possession of it, but I think it said that he kept it to remind himself of the capacity of humans to do harm to one another.
"But these people were the enemy!" Mitch protested.
"Enemy, schmenemy," the rabbi replied. "This was a FAMILY."
As I sat on the plane with tears rolling down my face, I found my crisis of faith abating somewhat. This was the kind of faith I could stay on board with.
"The miracle of Israel's restoration is the validating sign heralding the return of our dear Lord," one of the articles asserted. "It is also true that the Word of God portrays Israel's restoration as taking place amidst great international resistance to it. The nations will eventually mobilize, as they did in AD 70, against Jerusalem and they will try to remove it from Jewish hands (Zechariah 12). They will be thwarted and Jesus will return in glory and splendour to set up His throne in Jerusalem and from which He will rule the nations with a "rod of iron" (Revelation 19:15).
Another section of the magazine exhorted its readers to pray for Israel as it came under increasing international pressure to cede control to parts of the land to Palestinians, including the parts of Jerusalem that were annexed by Israel in 1967 on so-called "Jerusalem Day" - June 1 - the day I had first set out to explore Jerusalem. Some of the parades celebrating the "unification of Jerusalem" were scheduled to go right through predominantly Arab neighborhoods. The Rev. Bob Carroll, the canon pastor to the English-speaking congregation at the Episcopal cathedral in Jerusalem, told me how Jewish families would walk up and down the streets of his predominantly Arab neighborhood in East Jerusalem, pushing their baby carriages.
"They don't have to come this way," he said. "There are plenty of other routes they can take. They do it to make a statement. They're saying, 'We're here, and don't you forget it.'"
Or, in other words, "F*** you."
And yet, this very large Christian organization stands "in solidarity with the Jewish people in their claim to Jerusalem." I found myself wondering how many of this organization's supporters and subscribers to this magazine had ever actually been to Jerusalem or the West Bank, how many of them had ever met a Palestinian and heard their story and their family history. Christians supporting the kind of behavior that has taken place in Israel in order to return the land to Jewish ownership seems to me a blatant violation of what Christians should stand for. Even if you truly believe that God wants the land to be given to the Jews, at what cost? Would God approve of the violation of basic human rights and dignity for the sole purpose of giving the land back to the Jews? If they're the "chosen ones" and everyone else is chopped liver, maybe so. I began to see how very dangerous this kind of theology of "chosenness" can be, and realized that I do NOT believe, with any ounce of my being, that God has "chosen" any one group over the other and wants this kind of violence and slaughter to continue.
But what about those passages in the Old Testament where God tells the Israelites to slaughter the Canaanites (who were in this land before the Jews!) so that they can "possess the land that I am giving to you"? I opened my Bible and leafed through some of those passages and felt my blood boiling as I did. It was one thing to have been disturbed by these passages, as I always had been, when I encountered them in church and in religion classes and it was merely an intellectual conundrum over something that happened over 5,000 years ago and the way the people interpreted those events and attributed divine significance to them. It was quite another thing to see the ways in which this kind of theology had caused violence and injustice and oppression to VERY REAL HUMAN BEINGS in the HERE and NOW.
"How can I become a priest and be a part of a tradition that considers these passages Scripture?" I thought. "How can I vow at my ordination that I 'believe the Old and New Testaments to be the Word of God and to contain all things necessary to salvation' when there are these kinds of texts that essentially justify genocide? How do I preach on these texts when they come up in the lectionary?"
Before my experience in the West Bank, I probably would have tended to spiritualize or metaphorize the biblical stuff about the "Promised Land" (it's really heaven) or about being "chosen" (we're ALL chosen), but now I felt the need, the moral imperative, even the CALLING to actively preach AGAINST those notions. Although one of my seminary professors advises us to "never preach against the text" -- as in, don't directly contradict something the Bible says; find some way to use it positively, even if it's through a metaphorical interpretation -- I found myself feeling very strongly that I would not be able to do that with these passages. Tip-toeing around these passages and not tackling them head-on is exactly the kind of hands-off approach that has produced a kind of blindness and apathy and even tacit acceptance of the kind of things going on in the West Bank. I cried myself to sleep that night as waves of heart-wrenching pain wracked my body as I took in all that I had seen.
A few days later, I went to meet with Bob Carroll at the Episcopal cathedral to talk about the world of the Episcopal Church in this region. I was beside myself with frustration at the things I'd experienced and I wanted to know what the Episcopal Church was doing about it. "What kinds of things are the church doing in this area to help advocate for Palestinians?" I asked. He gave me lots of resources, including information about the World Council of Churches' Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme in Palestine and Israel (EAPPI), which sends volunteers to regions where injustices are going on to be witnesses to the activities of the Israeli government and Israeli settlers in the West Bank and to provide protection to the local people by their presence. If the Israeli government and settlers know they are being watched by an international presence, the violence they inflict on the Palestinians tends to decrease. A quote from one of the local people in the village of Yanoun in the booklet Bob gave me said this:
"Harassment by the settlers has decreased by maybe 80 or 90 percent. The reason is that you are in the village. The biggest effect has been on the children. I have asked how they feel, when the settlers come and you are here, and they say they are no longer scared like they used to be."Bob also directed me to several websites: the UN's website for monitoring injustices in Israel and Palestine, Sabeel, an ecumenical liberation theology center in Jerusalem (I later found out that another FTE Ministry Fellow, Staci Imes, had spent time working with them this summer), and a site called B'Tselem, an Israeli-run organization that monitors human rights offenses in the occupied territories.
He also told me, as I talked about my encounters with different folks working in interfaith dialogue in the region, that interfaith work in Israel is often a ruse, a way of avoiding dealing with the hard political issues in the area. Interfaith dialogue, often initiated by the dominant Jewish community, is a way to make themselves feel good about reaching out to Muslims and Christians while not really changing anything about the oppression of these groups in the country. He told me a story about a rabbi approaching the diocese about starting an interfaith dialogue with the Episcopal Church.
"Our bishop [who is a Palestinian Arab] sat right here and said to him, 'Look, rabbi, with all due respect, are you going to do anything to help my people in the West Bank?' Do you want to work together to get medicines to the hospitals there and help with education? Because if not, I think this conversation is over.'"
I remembered the woman from Elijah Interfaith Institute that I'd met with saying that St. George's was "not known for their openness to interfaith dialogue," which surprised me, since the Episcopal Church in the U.S. is very open to such things. I'd wondered what that was all about -- and after talking to Bob, got an interesting insight into a dynamic that I hadn't been aware of in my previous encounters with the interfaith scene in Israel. Suddenly it made sense that a man who was involved in interfaith dialogue with Palestinian Muslims could also be a subscriber to a magazine about Christians supporting the Jews' exclusive right to the lands there, and advocating only for injustices committed against Jews by "Muslim extremists," with no mention on their website of the injustices committed by the Israeli government against Palestinian Arabs (who are not just Muslim but also CHRISTIAN, by the way!) that had provoked those extremists to such action!
Bob also warned me that when I went to the airport that night (it was my last day in Jerusalem), I should expect to be questioned severely, since "young women traveling alone are considered a security threat to the government of Israel."
"What??" I asked, surprised. I wasn't used to being lumped in the "security threat" stereotype category, and actually felt somewhat proud to be given that distinction. "Why?" I asked Bob.
"Well, because young women tend to come over here and visit the West Bank and get all sympathetic to the Palestinian cause," he said, and I laughed sheepishly. Well, I certainly fit the bill on that one! I guess stereotypes do come out of some sense of reality.
But perhaps the most important thing Bob said to me was his advice to not get caught up in my anger.
"This is a lot to take in right now," he said, "and it's natural that you'd get very upset upon first encountering these things. But once you've gotten home and have some time to settle in and process, it's very important to let go of the anger. Holding on to the anger is not productive, it doesn't really help anyone, and it'll just destroy you. You have to move past the anger if you want to do something productive."
I've thought a lot about "moving past the anger" since I've been back. In general, that's something that's very difficult for me to do, especially when I feel that I or someone else has been wronged. I get my hackles up in what I consider to be a "righteous anger" about some wrong or injustice done to me or someone else and I want the offending party to be punished or to apologize for their behavior before I'm able to let it go. This has been a subject of discussion for me with spiritual directors and confessors, about the importance of letting go of this feeling in order to truly be able to forgive others. Forgiveness does not come easily to me -- at least not a forgiveness where the other party is unrepentant. Since I don't see the Israeli government "repenting" of their actions any time soon, I think I'll have to find a way to move forward if I don't want to come to demonize the entire state of Israel -- which is also against my principles.
On the flight home, I read a book by Mitch Albom, author of Tuesdays With Morrie, about several years he spent with his childhood rabbi before he died, after that rabbi asked him to write his eulogy. The book, called Have a Little Faith, helped me to move past some of my anger at the state of Israel and, by extension, all Jewish people. I remembered going to hear Mitch Albom speak at a synagogue in Boston with the Jewish girls who used to live in my apartment. I thought about my dear friend and former roommate Ayala, who was born and raised in Israel. I thought about Naomi and Yinon who I'd stayed with in Tel Aviv at the beginning of my trip, Naomi an American Jewish woman who had "made aliyah," using her "birthright" as a Jew to be able to immigrate there, and Yinon a born-and-bred Israeli who was a member of that Israeli military that I was so angry at. I thought about their daughter Aya, born here and oblivious to all the political implications of her birth as a Jewish child on this highly contested soil. Certainly I wasn't going to lump all of them into this one big category of "Israel" and "Jews" that I was mad at?
In the book, there is a passage where Mitch finds an old photograph of an Arab family amongst the rabbi's belongings.
"Who are these people?" he asks, and the rabbi tells him how the photograph came from a home in the north of Israel that was demolished during the war in 1948 after the creation of the state of Israel. He tells how the people fled their homes and nothing was left but a few remnants like this picture, found in a crack on the floor by one of the Zionist soldiers. I can't remember how the rabbi came to be in possession of it, but I think it said that he kept it to remind himself of the capacity of humans to do harm to one another.
"But these people were the enemy!" Mitch protested.
"Enemy, schmenemy," the rabbi replied. "This was a FAMILY."
As I sat on the plane with tears rolling down my face, I found my crisis of faith abating somewhat. This was the kind of faith I could stay on board with.
Sunday, June 5, 2011
Interfaith dialogue in "No-Man's Land"
On Sunday evening, I went to a meeting of the "Circle of Light and Hope," an interfaith dialogue group that is part of the Interfaith Encounter Association, an organization "dedicated to promoting peace in the Middle East through interfaith dialogue and cross-cultural study." I was put in touch with Bob, a rabbi who was one of the chairs of the group, through the Elijah Interfaith Institute, my primary point of contact for the interfaith connections I made while on this trip.
Bob is an American rabbi from Ohio who had moved to Israel in the early part of the 21st century, just before the second intifada. He has a fondness for geology, and this interfaith group of Israeli Jews and Arab Muslims spawned out of his friendship with Taleb, an Arab Muslim man who was also a geologist. (After buying a sampler of geological specimens from the Holy Land from Taleb at the meeting that night, saying I would give it to my husband since he loves rocks, Bob invited me to come up to his apartment after the meeting to "see my rocks," showing off several lighted cases of geologic specimens from around the world.)
As we corresponded about meeting logistics beforehand, Bob told me that the group's discussion topic for that night would be "Jesus: What each religion teaches about him, and what each religion believes about a Messiah." He swore to me that they did not pick this topic because an American Christian seminary student would be with them, but that Taleb had suggested it at their last meeting before they even knew I'd be coming. But he did ask me to speak on this topic "from a Christian perspective," since he said it was often difficult to find Christians to participate in their interfaith dialogue group. This was fascinating to me given the over-population of Christians in most interfaith groups in the U.S., but again I was reminded of the very different demographics of this land -- Christians are not the dominant majority here the way they are in the U.S.
On Sunday afternoon I walked to Bob's apartment in Jerusalem to meet up with the group that was going to the meeting. We piled into a car with three other Israeli Jews and headed off to a restaurant just past the border between Israel and the West Bank. Bob explained to me that the group had chosen this particular spot to meet since it was in a sort of "no-man's land" between Israel and the West Bank -- it was an area to which both Israeli citizens and Palestinians could travel freely. Since Israeli citizens are not allowed in the Palestinian territories and Palestinians are not allowed into Jerusalem without a serious vetting process and a permit, this was a compromise zone where all parties would be able to meet together. I thought of Ghassan Manasra in Nazareth and the physical danger that interfaith work had brought to him and his family, and the military metaphor of an interfaith dialogue in "no-man's land" seemed rather appropriate.
As we drove down the highway toward our destination, my Israeli hosts pointed out various landmarks to me -- there's such-and-such monastery, there's so-and-so church. As we got further outside of Jerusalem, I noticed what appeared to be a large sound barrier wall beside the interstate.
"Is that 'The Wall?'" I asked, referring to the infamous separation barrier between Israel and the West Bank.
"Um... hmm... no, I don't think so," was the consensus from my Israeli travel mates. "No, that's not it. You'll see it when we get to the restaurant, you can see it from there."
As we drove up to the restaurant area, we passed a turn-off for a road into Beit Jala, an area in the West Bank. "You see that road there?" Bob asked. "That goes to Beit Jala and the West Bank. We're not allowed to go down that road."
"Yeah, but I was in Bethlehem the other day," a Jewish Israeli woman with a strong New York accent piped up from the back seat. "I was with some people and we went to the church. I know we're not supposed to be there, but I went anyway. They can't stop me from going there."
We pulled in to the restaurant parking lot and a minor quarrel ensued as all of my travel mates argued amongst themselves as to where "The Wall" was, trying to find a place where it was visible to point it out to me. "It's over there!" "No, it's right here!" "No, that's it... you can see it there." "No, that's not it." Finally it was determined that it was actually about 600 feet from where we stood. "Oh, there it is" -- right above our heads.
We walked in to the restaurant and found our Palestinian dialogue partners already seated and waiting for us. I was introduced around, and a few other people who hadn't been to the group before were introduced, including a young Palestinian college student who was studying in Jerusalem. As we talked, Taleb, the other co-chair, translated what we were saying into Arabic for the few Palestinian folks who did not speak English.
After our dialogue, we heard a brief presentation from a young Jewish Israeli man who was working with young adults in Jerusalem on a project called "Oil for Peace," which was about bringing "Jews and Arabs, both religious and secular" together to cultivate olive oil. (The organization has a website at www.oil4peace.org, but unfortunately for me and my English-speaking readers, seems to be only in Hebrew at the moment.)
At the end of the day, we drove back toward Jerusalem and encountered an amazingly beautiful sunset over the mountainous landscape of the West Bank. I pulled out my camera and took pictures, to the "oohs" and "aahs" of my fellow travelers, and stern instructions for me to send them a copy of these pictures!!!
As we re-entered the Jerusalem area, we came to a checkpoint on the road, where several soldiers were pacing about and checking cars on their way through. A car a few spaces in front of us was being searched thoroughly; the soldiers opening the trunk and sifting through the stuff inside. I started to fumble for my passport in my bag, to be ready and prepared.
"So, are these Israeli soldiers or Palestinian soldiers?" I asked naively.
"Oh, they're Israeli, of course," Bob replied. "All soldiers at the checkpoints are Israeli."
I pondered this for a minute, feeling somewhat confused that the Palestinians would not be involved in patrolling the borders of their own land, if this land was indeed the "Palestinian territories."
Finally it was our turn. We drove up and Bob rolled down the window on my (passenger) side and waved at the guard who approached our window. "Shalom!" he said cheerfully, and the soldier waved us on through. No asking to see ID, no searching the car, nothing. I awkwardly shoved my passport back into my bag.
Bob had mentioned to me in an email as we were coordinating our trip that he is also a soldier in the anti-terror unit of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). Perhaps these guards knew him? I was surprised by the ease with which we passed, compared to the cars in front of us. Was it our Israeli license tags? I couldn't make heads or tails of any of it.
After we got back to Jerusalem and Bob showed me his rocks, he called me a cab and walked downstairs to wait for it with me. As we stood there, I started to ask him about his experience in Israel, how long he'd lived here, etc. Given that he was a solider with the IDF, I was curious as to his perspective on the murmurings in the news about the recognition of a Palestinian state by the U.N. in September. (I had arrived in Israel on the same day that Obama made his speech about the Middle East advocating for the creation of a Palestinian state.)
"So what do you think will happen in September?" I asked him.
"Bah," he said, shrugging it off with a rather indifferent look. "Nothing will happen. Nothing will really change."
"Do you think it will start another wave of violence, maybe a third intifada?" I asked.
"Eh," he said, again sounding nonchalant. "Maybe. I hope not. Who knows what will happen."
He got quiet for a minute, then volunteered without any prompting, "People can say whatever they want about the Wall. But you have to understand where it's coming from. A bunch of extremists had holed up in Beit Jala -- that neighborhood we drove by today on the way to our meeting -- and they were shooting at us. Most of the people over there are really wonderful people, like the folks we met with tonight. The problem is when these extremists come in and start creating violence. You can say whatever you want about the Wall. But what else were we going to do? They were shooting at us."
I found myself wishing I had a lot more time to talk with Bob and to meet other Israeli soldiers to get their perspective on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I had a feeling, as with the military in my own country, that they were a more diverse and complex group than anti-war activists often made them out to be. But perhaps that's for another trip.
The Temple Mount/Haram Ash-Sharif
Sunday morning I got up early to visit the Haram Ash-Sharif or Temple Mount area, which is only open to visitors from 7:30 a.m. - 11 a.m. on Sundays through Thursdays. I planned to go to a Eucharist in Arabic at St. George's Episcopal Cathedral at 9:30 a.m., so I had to get to the Haram Ash-Sharif area very early if I wanted to have any time to spend there before the service.
Given all the restrictions around entering the Temple Mount area, I almost gave up on trying to visit it, especially knowing that as a non-Muslim, I wouldn't be allowed to go in the mosques, even during the times I was allowed to be on the Haram Ash-Sharif area. But, this was supposed to be an interfaith pilgrimage, so I couldn't really be true to my intentions without at least coming in close proximity with the main prominent Muslim sites in the city, so I decided to go early on Sunday morning to visit the Haram Ash-Sharif.
After trying unsuccessfully to enter at two different entrances, I finally found the one entrance through which all non-Muslims are required to enter -- which, interestingly enough, is through a long covered wooden walkway that begins right next to the Western Wall security checkpoint! So my initial assumption that I could visit the Western Wall and then go right up to the Temple Mount area was actually correct after all! After waiting in a line and going through the security screening, I walked up the long wooden walkway to the Temple Mount entrance, passing Israeli soldiers along the way and a huge section of plastic crowd-control barricades stored right outside the entrance to the Haram Ash-Sharif.
Right before exiting the wooden covered walkway, there was a large sign in Hebrew and English with a message from the chief rabbi of Jerusalem, warning that entrance to the Temple Mount area is forbidden, since it was once home to the Holy of Holies, the most sacred space where the Divine Presence was believed to dwell. Since the Temple's destruction in 70 CE, it is not certain where exactly the Holy of Holies was located, so some rabbis have determined that it's best to avoid the entire Temple Mount area, lest you accidentally step into what once was the Holy of Holies, where only priests were permitted to enter. The Rabbi of Jerusalem is obviously of this opinion.
It was rather interesting, seeing this sign posted there saying all people are forbidden to enter this area, and watching large groups of people walk right up there and enter it anyway. This raised again the question about boundaries between traditions -- at what point do we respect the boundaries set up by other traditions (you're not allowed to enter this space, you're not allowed to take part in this or that ritual), and at what point do we ignore them, saying they don't apply to us because we're not part of that tradition? So, if I can just walk past this warning by the chief rabbi and enter the Temple Mount anyway, reasoning that I'm not a Jew and thus his authority is not binding on me, and also that I don't believe that entering the Temple Mount is "dangerous" because of the presence of the Holy of Holies, can my non-Christian friends just come forward to receive communion in a church because they want to and because they don't believe that the restrictions against it are valid and true? If they can't or shouldn't do that, then perhaps I shouldn't have entered the Temple Mount at all, out of respect for the rules set up by the Jewish authorities about their sacred site.
And perhaps the Jewish authorities are right about the Divine Presence dwelling there, because as I climbed the steps up to the area where the Dome of the Rock stands and stepped onto what used to be the Temple Mount, I was overcome with an intense sense of the presence of God. My body seemed to sense the sacredness of this site on an instinctual level as my eyes filled with tears in an involuntary, automatic reaction that took me by surprise and I almost began to sob. I felt drawn to drop to my knees in that very spot (although I didn't, since overt displays of prayer by non-Muslims on the Haram Ash-Sharif area is forbidden and I didn't want to get myself in trouble with the Muslim authorities who were stationed around, keeping a close watch on the visitors).
Stepping onto the Temple Mount was probably the single most intense religious experience that I had on this trip, which totally took me by surprise. (I'd assumed it might happen in a Christian site like the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, which, although powerful, was not nearly as powerful as this.) I thought of the generations and generations of people who had come here to worship, of Jesus himself visiting the Temple in the first century. As I walked around the Dome of the Rock and looked up at its sheer size and magnificence, all I could think was, "It's so beautiful. It's so beautiful." And the fact that I couldn't go inside filled me with an intense sadness, for the boundaries and restrictions enforced on peace-loving people because of the violent actions of a few extreme individuals.
I was also struck by the sheer size of the Temple Mount area, and how much of it was large, open space. Huge plazas stretched out all around me, and although I'm sure these plazas are full of people during Friday prayers, it seemed like such a waste of space during the relatively un-crowded time of early Sunday morning. As I wandered around the area, it struck me that there would be room here for a Jewish place of worship, and a Christian place of worship as well, in addition to the Dome of the Rock and Al-Asqua mosque. What if there were to be three places of worship here, all on top of the Temple Mount, symbolizing interconnectedness and harmony between the three faiths? A very similar project is taking place in Omaha, Nebraska, as the Tri-Faith Initiative plans to build a church, a mosque, and a synagogue on a shared piece of land, to model interfaith cooperation and peace. I wept over the thought of how beautiful such an interfaith sharing of this space could be, of how powerful it could be to see the three Abrahamic faiths praying and worshipping together, at the same time realizing that such an endeavor of cooperation is so very far out of reach here.
As I left the Temple Mount and mulled over my interfaith vision, I was reminded of Peter's words to Jesus on the Mount of the Transfiguration: "Lord, it is good for us to be here. Let us make three dwellings: one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah." (Matthew 17:4) In the story of the Transfiguration, Jesus does not respond directly to Peter's suggestion, but a voice from heaven booms out, "This is my Son, the Beloved, listen to him!" and then all the other prophets disappear, suggesting Jesus's primacy over the prophets of old (Moses and Elijah), and presumably Peter abandoned his idea of a multi-chapeled Abrahamic shrine on this mountain. All the preaching and teaching I've heard on this passage have taken Peter's words to be misguided, saying Peter wanted to try to "capture" the divine moment he saw taking place, and that he missed the point of the Transfiguration by wanting to build these dwellings on that mountain. But after my visit to the Temple Mount, I'm not so sure Peter was misguided.
Lord, it is good for us to be here. Let us make three dwellings: one for you, one for Moses, and one for Muhammad.
Given all the restrictions around entering the Temple Mount area, I almost gave up on trying to visit it, especially knowing that as a non-Muslim, I wouldn't be allowed to go in the mosques, even during the times I was allowed to be on the Haram Ash-Sharif area. But, this was supposed to be an interfaith pilgrimage, so I couldn't really be true to my intentions without at least coming in close proximity with the main prominent Muslim sites in the city, so I decided to go early on Sunday morning to visit the Haram Ash-Sharif.
Right before exiting the wooden covered walkway, there was a large sign in Hebrew and English with a message from the chief rabbi of Jerusalem, warning that entrance to the Temple Mount area is forbidden, since it was once home to the Holy of Holies, the most sacred space where the Divine Presence was believed to dwell. Since the Temple's destruction in 70 CE, it is not certain where exactly the Holy of Holies was located, so some rabbis have determined that it's best to avoid the entire Temple Mount area, lest you accidentally step into what once was the Holy of Holies, where only priests were permitted to enter. The Rabbi of Jerusalem is obviously of this opinion.
It was rather interesting, seeing this sign posted there saying all people are forbidden to enter this area, and watching large groups of people walk right up there and enter it anyway. This raised again the question about boundaries between traditions -- at what point do we respect the boundaries set up by other traditions (you're not allowed to enter this space, you're not allowed to take part in this or that ritual), and at what point do we ignore them, saying they don't apply to us because we're not part of that tradition? So, if I can just walk past this warning by the chief rabbi and enter the Temple Mount anyway, reasoning that I'm not a Jew and thus his authority is not binding on me, and also that I don't believe that entering the Temple Mount is "dangerous" because of the presence of the Holy of Holies, can my non-Christian friends just come forward to receive communion in a church because they want to and because they don't believe that the restrictions against it are valid and true? If they can't or shouldn't do that, then perhaps I shouldn't have entered the Temple Mount at all, out of respect for the rules set up by the Jewish authorities about their sacred site.
And perhaps the Jewish authorities are right about the Divine Presence dwelling there, because as I climbed the steps up to the area where the Dome of the Rock stands and stepped onto what used to be the Temple Mount, I was overcome with an intense sense of the presence of God. My body seemed to sense the sacredness of this site on an instinctual level as my eyes filled with tears in an involuntary, automatic reaction that took me by surprise and I almost began to sob. I felt drawn to drop to my knees in that very spot (although I didn't, since overt displays of prayer by non-Muslims on the Haram Ash-Sharif area is forbidden and I didn't want to get myself in trouble with the Muslim authorities who were stationed around, keeping a close watch on the visitors).
Stepping onto the Temple Mount was probably the single most intense religious experience that I had on this trip, which totally took me by surprise. (I'd assumed it might happen in a Christian site like the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, which, although powerful, was not nearly as powerful as this.) I thought of the generations and generations of people who had come here to worship, of Jesus himself visiting the Temple in the first century. As I walked around the Dome of the Rock and looked up at its sheer size and magnificence, all I could think was, "It's so beautiful. It's so beautiful." And the fact that I couldn't go inside filled me with an intense sadness, for the boundaries and restrictions enforced on peace-loving people because of the violent actions of a few extreme individuals.
Lord, it is good for us to be here. Let us make three dwellings: one for you, one for Moses, and one for Muhammad.
Friday, June 3, 2011
Friday in Jerusalem
Even though I'll be in Jerusalem for over a week, I'll only have one Friday here. And after this Friday, I'm extremely grateful I had a chance to experience Friday in Jerusalem, which is certainly a religious extravaganza!
Friday is the Muslim prayer day, and Friday evening marks the beginning of the Jewish sabbath. Friday is also the day of the week that Jesus was executed, and so has particular significance for Christians as well, even though our day of worship is Sunday, the day of the Resurrection.
Unfortunately, due to tensions between Muslims and Jews, non-Muslims are not allowed on the Haram Ash-Sharif, the "Noble Sanctuary," on Fridays. Jews call this area the Temple Mount -- the top of the area where the Jewish Temple once stood until its destruction in 70 CE by the Romans. After Jerusalem came into Muslim hands in the 7th century CE, the Dome of the Rock (pictured at right) and al-Asqa mosques were built on what was formerly the Temple area. This was not just a case of the Muslims marking their conquest of the area; the Temple area was sacred to Muslims as well, since there is a story that Muhammad was transported to the Temple area in Jerusalem during a vision and from there, ascended into heaven, where he conversed with Moses and Jesus and other Jewish prophets, who confirmed the validity of his message. The Dome of the Rock marks the spot where Muhammad is believed to have ascended into heaven.
The tension around the Temple Mount/Haram Ash-Sharif comes from the fact that some Jews want to rebuild the Temple and think that that is in fact God's will for Jerusalem -- to see the Temple re-established as the center of Jewish worship in a Jewish state. Obviously, this large Muslim shrine sitting smack dab in the middle of where the Temple should be is considered a problem by Jews of this bent. After several outbreaks of violence against Muslims at prayer by Jews who want to rebuild the temple and thus destroy the Dome of the Rock, the Muslim community in Jerusalem decided to not allow non-Muslims on the Haram Ash-Sharif area on Fridays, the Muslim prayer day.
As a result of this troubled history, I was not able to attend Friday prayers at the Dome of the Rock, or even go to the Haram Ash-Sharif area to observe Friday prayers. So much for my "interfaith pilgrimage." But part of my "guiding question" for this trip was a question about the value of clear boundaries between traditions, spurred by my internal conflict over the issue of open communion in the Episcopal Church. If it's ok for Christians to restrict communion to only Christians, why shouldn't it be ok for Muslims to restrict attendance at Friday prayers to only Muslims? But more on this later, when I tell you about my actual visit to the Haram Ash-Sharif/Temple Mount, on Sunday morning.
I'd asked around when I arrived about doing the Stations of the Cross on the Via Dolorosa, and was told that a group of Franciscan monks lead a public procession of the stations every Friday at 4 p.m. -- which seemed an odd time to me. I wondered why it was not at noon, the traditional hour of Jesus's crucifixion. When Friday arrived, I got my answer.
The Muslim call to prayer echoes from the loudspeakers every few hours throughout the Old City, and just before Friday noon prayers, the main time Muslims gather together at the mosque to worship and pray together, sure enough, the call to prayer came like clockwork. But afterwards, the broadcast continued -- with a very long spiel in Arabic over the loudspeakers. I couldn't tell what was being said, but I could only assume that perhaps the Friday khutba (sermon) at the mosque was being broadcast over the loudspeakers for the entire city to hear, whether you chose to attend Friday prayers or not. Although I don't know for sure that this was behind the later time for the Stations of the Cross, I can only imagine that it would be difficult to lead a public procession in the streets of Jerusalem in the middle of a very loud sermon being broadcast over loudspeakers.
I ventured out around 12:45 or 1 p.m. to get some lunch, and the place I wound up eating was right on El Wad (Hagai), one of the main thoroughfares of the Old City. Sometime after 1 p.m., I started to notice a steady stream of Muslim women in hijab (the headscarf) and Muslim men in taqiyah (the skullcap) all walking northwest down the street, away from the Haram Ash-Sharif area and towards the Damascus Gate, one of the exits from the Old City. "Ah," I thought. "The prayer service must have just let out." As I finished my lunch, I sat people-watching as this parade of Jerusalem's Muslim population went by. I was amazed by how long and continuous the stream of Muslims was -- I must have sat there for 30 minutes watching people walk by. There was virtually no one walking in the other direction, against the "flow of traffic," so to speak, except a few lost-looking tourists here and there, easily spotted by their shorts and backpacks, their water bottles and maps in hand, and slightly confused looks on their faces. Even though I didn't get to actually experience Friday prayers, I felt like I had gotten a slight flavor of the energy of it from this post-prayer parade.
After lunch, I visited St. Anne's Church near the Lion's Gate, just a few steps away from where I'm staying at the Ecce Homo Convent. St. Anne's is a 12th century church built by the Crusaders, but I went to see the archeological excavations they have on site of some pools believed to be the site where Jesus healed a paralytic (see John 5:1-15). However, it was the church, and not the archeological site, that had the most impact on me.
I wandered in to the church almost as an afterthought; I'd come really just to see the archeological site since it was a "biblical site," a place mentioned in the Gospels. I'd never heard of St. Anne's Church, and who cares about some Crusader church anyway -- that's a part of Christian history I'd rather forget. But as it turned out, the church was an amazing oasis of beauty and sound in the middle of the city. I had no idea before visiting St. Anne's that it is known for its acoustics, and pilgrims make special trips just to sing in the nave there.
I wandered in to the church, which was rather simple overall, nothing extremely striking visually, and found my way to the chapel where the Reserved Sacrament (bread and wine left over from Communion) was kept. I decided to sit there for a while with the Sacrament, where Christ's presence is believed to reside. I sat for a while, then knelt, and finally went face-down into a full prostration, something I had never done before but had seen my colleagues do at ordinations and on Good Friday services. Something about that posture of utter humility -- laying completely flat on one's face before the glory of God -- had always struck me and I had always felt drawn to do it myself, but I never had -- not even in private prayer in my own home.
As I lay there on my face, my eyes closed, my nose touching the rugs that were spread out in this area and smelling the musty smell of wool, my hands stretched out above me and my running shoes baring into the floor behind me, suddenly I heard a voice. A crystal clear, angelic voice, letting out the first few notes of a chant that echoed and rang throughout the church. Then a whole host of other voices joined hers, producing a beautiful chorus that rose and fell, bouncing off the rafters and wafting down to envelop me in a palpable caress. It was the tour group that I'd seen outside at the archeological site, I realized, whose tour guide was pointing and lecturing loudly in German. I'd been irritated and annoyed at their presence, standing all huddled around the main observation point and making it impossible for me to get there to read the informational signs and see the view. I'd mentally written them off as more irreverent tourists, but now, they were bringing me some of the sweetest religious music I'd ever heard.
They sang for a long time, and I lay there in a position of humble adoration of God, listening to them and allowing their prayers to become my own. Although I could not understand what they were saying because they were singing in German, I recognized some familiar tunes in the mix -- Amazing Grace, and some songs from Taizé, including "Bless the Lord, My Soul." When I knew the songs, I started to sing along in English, but always stopped myself, feeling led instead to allow myself to experience the music from the outside rather than to try to join in and participate. After nearly an hour spent in that sacred place, I felt I was in a perfect state of spiritual preparation for the Stations of the Cross, which were scheduled to begin in about 20 minutes.
I left St. Anne's and walked down the road to the area near the convent where the Stations begin. The first Station of the Cross, where Jesus was condemned to die by Pilate, is now enclosed within an elementary school for Arab children. As the group began to gather to await the start of the stations, the kids were leaving after school had let out for the day. There was something interesting about standing in front of classroom doors with Winnie the Pooh on them and watching kids walk out of school with their backpacks, dodging groups of pilgrims and monks and nuns and priests as they just tried to make their way to the exit of their school. But this wasn't an entirely unusual occurrence for them, I realized, since this spectacle happened every Friday afternoon. They were probably used to seeing all the religious people gathering in their courtyard as they left school for the weekend.
The atmosphere before the stations started was less than spiritual. A bunch of opportunists were walking throughout the crowds, selling brochures on the Via Dolorosa for "One dollar, one dollar! Five shekels, five shekels! One euro, one euro!"One particular man with a very gruff voice kept approaching people and guessing their language based on their appearance. "Chinese, one dollar!" He shouted in English at a group of Asians, who walked on by, ignoring him. (If they were Chinese, perhaps they didn't speak English, and they might not have even been Chinese!) "Deutsch, one euro! Deutsch, one euro!" he yelled at a bunch of blonde tourists with backpacks. When he got to me, he started to yell, "English, one --" but I held up my pamphlet, showing him I already had one, which I had purchased from a boy on the street who was standing there at the entrance to one of the churches, handing them out like an usher handing out programs for a service, and then said, "Five shekels" after I'd already taken one.
Finally, the circus atmosphere faded away as the Franciscans gathered and started the stations, with a booming, "In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti," to which the crowds responded, "Amen!"
One of the brothers was carrying a wireless speaker, which was connected to the microphones that the other brothers were using to read the stations at each stop. Each station was read in Italian, then in English, then in Spanish, each brother passing the microphone down to another for the translation into the next language. It was quite a sight to see this crowd of people from all over the world walking together the Way of the Cross, re-tracing Jesus's steps in the actual city where he was crucified.
The stations were created in the 15th century as a substitute "pilgrimage" experience for those who could not afford to travel to Jerusalem and visit the actual sites of Jesus's crucifixion, death, and resurrection, but eventually it became a prominent practice within Jerusalem as well, to re-trace Jesus's steps from his condemnation to his crucifixion. Although the stations are not all specifically associated with historical events, if the area where Pilate's governor's palace once stood is correct (where the Arab school and the Ecce Homo convent now are), and if the place of the crucifixion at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher is correct, then the path between the two would be roughly accurate in terms of the path Jesus walked, carrying the cross -- even though the locations of the streets are different now than they would have been in Jesus's time.
After the 7th Station, there was a bit of a traffic jam at an intersection in the Old City, as a group carrying a cross and singing loudly in Spanish proceeded in the opposite direction that we had been traveling. I thought the Via Dolorosa continued in the direction they were coming from, but when I got to that intersection, there was a man there waving everyone on in the same direction as the cross procession was going. Somewhere along the way, I lost the Franciscans and wound up inadvertently joining this other group, which was a group of Spanish-speaking people with some priests dressed in albs and red stoles (as opposed to our group, led by the Franciscan monks in their brown habits). The group stopped in front of the Church of the Redeemer, near the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, and recited some things and read some Gospel passages in Spanish. Although I couldn't follow all of it, despite the class I took in pastoral Spanish last fall, I was able to recite the Lord's Prayer in Spanish with them at the end of the station. (Thanks, John Solomon, for making us say the Lord's Prayer at the end of so many of our Spanish classes!)
As the group moved on toward the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, I moved ahead of them to try to catch up with the Franciscans, having realized once the group came to a stop and was speaking only in Spanish that this was not the group I started with! Inside the Holy Sepulcher, I realized that the Franciscan group was up top, on the hill of Calvary, doing the stations of Jesus's crucifixion and death up there. As they came down the staircase, I joined them, and followed them to the site of Jesus's tomb for the final two stations, "Jesus is laid in the tomb," and "Jesus is raised from the dead." As I stood with that group of pilgrims before the site of Jesus's tomb and heard the Franciscan brother read in a heavily-accented English, "Why are you looking for the living among the dead? He is not here, he is risen, just as he said. Come and see the place where they have laid him," tears filled my eyes and I felt a shiver run through me.
"Come and see the place where they have laid him" -- a phrase I had heard so many times on Easter Sunday morning, as the pastor read the Gospel passage about the Resurrection -- and now I was standing at the actual place where they laid him. Now the invitation was real and literal, "Come and see the place where they have laid him."
So I did. I waited in the long line of pilgrims gathered behind police barricades around the side of the tomb area, waiting for their turn to go in and see the place where they have laid him. As I walked around the outside of the structure built around the tomb and saw people praying and leaving candles along the railings on the outside of the tomb, I felt a sense of excitement, anticipation, and joy, realizing and recognizing that, unlike the other tombs I'd visited on this trip so far, this tomb was empty! Jesus was not here! The spot was sacred for the fact that he had once died and laid here, but his body was not here. We gather around an empty tomb, and that makes all the difference. I was reminded once again of the reason that I find my spiritual home in Christianity, of the thing that distinguishes Christianity from all other religions to me -- the Resurrection.
The line for entrance to the tomb was moving right along, when suddenly it was halted due to a procession of Orthodox monks coming through to chant and sing and pray at the tomb. The Franciscan Catholic monks had come through just 30 minutes before, and had moved on to a chapel beside the tomb area, where an organ was now playing loudly, drowning out the sounds of the Orthodox chant. Many different sects of Christianity share this most sacred site, but unfortunately they don't really share it. Instead, they co-exist, each doing their own liturgies, not worshipping together. I had a similar feeling to the one I'd felt at the Mosque of the Ascension on Thursday morning: a sense of gladness at seeing the different Christian communities in one place together, but a sense of sadness that they felt they could not worship together as they commemorated the death of their Savior on that Friday in Jerusalem so many years ago. I remembered Jesus's prayer for his followers in the Garden of Gethsemane: "…that they may be one, as we [Jesus and the Father] are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me" (John 17:22-23). I thought of all the songs we sing in church about being "one body in Christ." And I looked at the competing liturgies around me, sighing and mourning that we as the Christian community have not lived out Jesus's prayer that we all be one, and in that way, that we are not witnessing to the world in the way that Jesus prayed we would.
Finally, it was my turn to enter the tomb. I walked in, placed my hand on the shelf where Jesus's body once lay, and knelt in silent prayer. "Ok, come on, let's go," barked the monk in charge of regulating traffic, hurrying me and the three or four other pilgrims out so the next set of five or so could go in. I sighed, wishing for something like the silence and quiet and calm that I'd found at the tomb of Baha'u'llah in 'Akko. How do they expect anyone to have a religious experience on a timetable?
Surprisingly, one of the most powerful parts of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher for me was one of the least historically verifiable spots. The "stone of anointing," which commemorates where Jesus's body was laid after being taken down from the cross and where it was anointed for burial before being placed in the tomb, is right at the entrance to the Holy Sepulcher, and was only placed there in the 19th century. But when I knelt there and placed my hand on it, I realized that the stone was covered in anointing oil -- rich, smooth, fragrant oil, which soaked into my fingertips. I rubbed it on my hands and made the sign of the cross on my forehead with it, and the smell of the oil stayed with me for the rest of the day, transporting me back to this sanctuary of holiness. Whether or not this was the actual spot where Jesus's body was laid for anointing, the memorial to it that has been created was very moving to me.
After exploring all the chapels and levels of the Holy Sepulcher complex and spending time in silent meditation and prayer there for around an hour and a half, I left the Christian Quarter of the Old City and made my way to the Jewish Quarter and joined the throngs of Jews headed to the Western Wall to pray to usher in Shabbat. As I walked past historic synagogues and tons of shops tightly closed up for the Sabbath, I saw a group of Jewish schoolboys pouring out of a building (maybe another synagogue?) and singing and clapping joyously, galloping and jumping down the stairs to the courtyard and forming a circle, dancing and clapping together as they prepared to go to the Wall. I went on ahead of them, and as I entered the Western Wall plaza, I was aware of the fact that I was one of about only five women total in the sea of people there who was wearing pants. Women in long skirts and head scarfs surrounded me, pushing strollers, talking with one another, carrying their prayer books, rocking slowly back and forth while reciting their prayers. I walked down to the Wall on the women's side (which was about one-third of the Wall, while the men's section took up two-thirds of it) and walked through crowds of Jewish women, some singing joyfully in a group, some gossiping and socializing, some praying individually and silently.
After sitting and watching the festivities for a long while, a man approached me and asked where I was from, and if I wanted to get a drink with him "after." So prayer time at the Wall is apparently a time to pick up women??? I decided to make my exit, discreetly, after this encounter, disappearing into the crowds so he wouldn't see me again.
I walked down El Wad (Hagai) back toward the convent, and stopped for dinner at a restaurant just a few doors down from the place I'd had lunch earlier that day. From that spot, I watched a different parade -- this one of Jews in yarmulkes and Russian-looking fur hats and broad-rimmed hats, dressed mostly in black, the Orthodox men with their long curls hanging down their faces -- as they all walked toward the Western Wall, and later, after dark, as they all walked back out toward the Damascus Gate exit of the Old City, walking the exact same path the Muslims had walked earlier, after noonday prayers.
Just another Friday in Jerusalem.
Friday is the Muslim prayer day, and Friday evening marks the beginning of the Jewish sabbath. Friday is also the day of the week that Jesus was executed, and so has particular significance for Christians as well, even though our day of worship is Sunday, the day of the Resurrection.
The tension around the Temple Mount/Haram Ash-Sharif comes from the fact that some Jews want to rebuild the Temple and think that that is in fact God's will for Jerusalem -- to see the Temple re-established as the center of Jewish worship in a Jewish state. Obviously, this large Muslim shrine sitting smack dab in the middle of where the Temple should be is considered a problem by Jews of this bent. After several outbreaks of violence against Muslims at prayer by Jews who want to rebuild the temple and thus destroy the Dome of the Rock, the Muslim community in Jerusalem decided to not allow non-Muslims on the Haram Ash-Sharif area on Fridays, the Muslim prayer day.
As a result of this troubled history, I was not able to attend Friday prayers at the Dome of the Rock, or even go to the Haram Ash-Sharif area to observe Friday prayers. So much for my "interfaith pilgrimage." But part of my "guiding question" for this trip was a question about the value of clear boundaries between traditions, spurred by my internal conflict over the issue of open communion in the Episcopal Church. If it's ok for Christians to restrict communion to only Christians, why shouldn't it be ok for Muslims to restrict attendance at Friday prayers to only Muslims? But more on this later, when I tell you about my actual visit to the Haram Ash-Sharif/Temple Mount, on Sunday morning.
I'd asked around when I arrived about doing the Stations of the Cross on the Via Dolorosa, and was told that a group of Franciscan monks lead a public procession of the stations every Friday at 4 p.m. -- which seemed an odd time to me. I wondered why it was not at noon, the traditional hour of Jesus's crucifixion. When Friday arrived, I got my answer.
The Muslim call to prayer echoes from the loudspeakers every few hours throughout the Old City, and just before Friday noon prayers, the main time Muslims gather together at the mosque to worship and pray together, sure enough, the call to prayer came like clockwork. But afterwards, the broadcast continued -- with a very long spiel in Arabic over the loudspeakers. I couldn't tell what was being said, but I could only assume that perhaps the Friday khutba (sermon) at the mosque was being broadcast over the loudspeakers for the entire city to hear, whether you chose to attend Friday prayers or not. Although I don't know for sure that this was behind the later time for the Stations of the Cross, I can only imagine that it would be difficult to lead a public procession in the streets of Jerusalem in the middle of a very loud sermon being broadcast over loudspeakers.
I ventured out around 12:45 or 1 p.m. to get some lunch, and the place I wound up eating was right on El Wad (Hagai), one of the main thoroughfares of the Old City. Sometime after 1 p.m., I started to notice a steady stream of Muslim women in hijab (the headscarf) and Muslim men in taqiyah (the skullcap) all walking northwest down the street, away from the Haram Ash-Sharif area and towards the Damascus Gate, one of the exits from the Old City. "Ah," I thought. "The prayer service must have just let out." As I finished my lunch, I sat people-watching as this parade of Jerusalem's Muslim population went by. I was amazed by how long and continuous the stream of Muslims was -- I must have sat there for 30 minutes watching people walk by. There was virtually no one walking in the other direction, against the "flow of traffic," so to speak, except a few lost-looking tourists here and there, easily spotted by their shorts and backpacks, their water bottles and maps in hand, and slightly confused looks on their faces. Even though I didn't get to actually experience Friday prayers, I felt like I had gotten a slight flavor of the energy of it from this post-prayer parade.
I wandered in to the church almost as an afterthought; I'd come really just to see the archeological site since it was a "biblical site," a place mentioned in the Gospels. I'd never heard of St. Anne's Church, and who cares about some Crusader church anyway -- that's a part of Christian history I'd rather forget. But as it turned out, the church was an amazing oasis of beauty and sound in the middle of the city. I had no idea before visiting St. Anne's that it is known for its acoustics, and pilgrims make special trips just to sing in the nave there.
I wandered in to the church, which was rather simple overall, nothing extremely striking visually, and found my way to the chapel where the Reserved Sacrament (bread and wine left over from Communion) was kept. I decided to sit there for a while with the Sacrament, where Christ's presence is believed to reside. I sat for a while, then knelt, and finally went face-down into a full prostration, something I had never done before but had seen my colleagues do at ordinations and on Good Friday services. Something about that posture of utter humility -- laying completely flat on one's face before the glory of God -- had always struck me and I had always felt drawn to do it myself, but I never had -- not even in private prayer in my own home.
They sang for a long time, and I lay there in a position of humble adoration of God, listening to them and allowing their prayers to become my own. Although I could not understand what they were saying because they were singing in German, I recognized some familiar tunes in the mix -- Amazing Grace, and some songs from Taizé, including "Bless the Lord, My Soul." When I knew the songs, I started to sing along in English, but always stopped myself, feeling led instead to allow myself to experience the music from the outside rather than to try to join in and participate. After nearly an hour spent in that sacred place, I felt I was in a perfect state of spiritual preparation for the Stations of the Cross, which were scheduled to begin in about 20 minutes.
The atmosphere before the stations started was less than spiritual. A bunch of opportunists were walking throughout the crowds, selling brochures on the Via Dolorosa for "One dollar, one dollar! Five shekels, five shekels! One euro, one euro!"One particular man with a very gruff voice kept approaching people and guessing their language based on their appearance. "Chinese, one dollar!" He shouted in English at a group of Asians, who walked on by, ignoring him. (If they were Chinese, perhaps they didn't speak English, and they might not have even been Chinese!) "Deutsch, one euro! Deutsch, one euro!" he yelled at a bunch of blonde tourists with backpacks. When he got to me, he started to yell, "English, one --" but I held up my pamphlet, showing him I already had one, which I had purchased from a boy on the street who was standing there at the entrance to one of the churches, handing them out like an usher handing out programs for a service, and then said, "Five shekels" after I'd already taken one.
Finally, the circus atmosphere faded away as the Franciscans gathered and started the stations, with a booming, "In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti," to which the crowds responded, "Amen!"
One of the brothers was carrying a wireless speaker, which was connected to the microphones that the other brothers were using to read the stations at each stop. Each station was read in Italian, then in English, then in Spanish, each brother passing the microphone down to another for the translation into the next language. It was quite a sight to see this crowd of people from all over the world walking together the Way of the Cross, re-tracing Jesus's steps in the actual city where he was crucified.
As the group moved on toward the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, I moved ahead of them to try to catch up with the Franciscans, having realized once the group came to a stop and was speaking only in Spanish that this was not the group I started with! Inside the Holy Sepulcher, I realized that the Franciscan group was up top, on the hill of Calvary, doing the stations of Jesus's crucifixion and death up there. As they came down the staircase, I joined them, and followed them to the site of Jesus's tomb for the final two stations, "Jesus is laid in the tomb," and "Jesus is raised from the dead." As I stood with that group of pilgrims before the site of Jesus's tomb and heard the Franciscan brother read in a heavily-accented English, "Why are you looking for the living among the dead? He is not here, he is risen, just as he said. Come and see the place where they have laid him," tears filled my eyes and I felt a shiver run through me.
"Come and see the place where they have laid him" -- a phrase I had heard so many times on Easter Sunday morning, as the pastor read the Gospel passage about the Resurrection -- and now I was standing at the actual place where they laid him. Now the invitation was real and literal, "Come and see the place where they have laid him."
The line for entrance to the tomb was moving right along, when suddenly it was halted due to a procession of Orthodox monks coming through to chant and sing and pray at the tomb. The Franciscan Catholic monks had come through just 30 minutes before, and had moved on to a chapel beside the tomb area, where an organ was now playing loudly, drowning out the sounds of the Orthodox chant. Many different sects of Christianity share this most sacred site, but unfortunately they don't really share it. Instead, they co-exist, each doing their own liturgies, not worshipping together. I had a similar feeling to the one I'd felt at the Mosque of the Ascension on Thursday morning: a sense of gladness at seeing the different Christian communities in one place together, but a sense of sadness that they felt they could not worship together as they commemorated the death of their Savior on that Friday in Jerusalem so many years ago. I remembered Jesus's prayer for his followers in the Garden of Gethsemane: "…that they may be one, as we [Jesus and the Father] are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me" (John 17:22-23). I thought of all the songs we sing in church about being "one body in Christ." And I looked at the competing liturgies around me, sighing and mourning that we as the Christian community have not lived out Jesus's prayer that we all be one, and in that way, that we are not witnessing to the world in the way that Jesus prayed we would.
Finally, it was my turn to enter the tomb. I walked in, placed my hand on the shelf where Jesus's body once lay, and knelt in silent prayer. "Ok, come on, let's go," barked the monk in charge of regulating traffic, hurrying me and the three or four other pilgrims out so the next set of five or so could go in. I sighed, wishing for something like the silence and quiet and calm that I'd found at the tomb of Baha'u'llah in 'Akko. How do they expect anyone to have a religious experience on a timetable?
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| The Stone of Anointing, with Franciscan monks praying at it |
Surprisingly, one of the most powerful parts of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher for me was one of the least historically verifiable spots. The "stone of anointing," which commemorates where Jesus's body was laid after being taken down from the cross and where it was anointed for burial before being placed in the tomb, is right at the entrance to the Holy Sepulcher, and was only placed there in the 19th century. But when I knelt there and placed my hand on it, I realized that the stone was covered in anointing oil -- rich, smooth, fragrant oil, which soaked into my fingertips. I rubbed it on my hands and made the sign of the cross on my forehead with it, and the smell of the oil stayed with me for the rest of the day, transporting me back to this sanctuary of holiness. Whether or not this was the actual spot where Jesus's body was laid for anointing, the memorial to it that has been created was very moving to me.
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| Jews gathering to pray at the Western Wall |
After sitting and watching the festivities for a long while, a man approached me and asked where I was from, and if I wanted to get a drink with him "after." So prayer time at the Wall is apparently a time to pick up women??? I decided to make my exit, discreetly, after this encounter, disappearing into the crowds so he wouldn't see me again.
I walked down El Wad (Hagai) back toward the convent, and stopped for dinner at a restaurant just a few doors down from the place I'd had lunch earlier that day. From that spot, I watched a different parade -- this one of Jews in yarmulkes and Russian-looking fur hats and broad-rimmed hats, dressed mostly in black, the Orthodox men with their long curls hanging down their faces -- as they all walked toward the Western Wall, and later, after dark, as they all walked back out toward the Damascus Gate exit of the Old City, walking the exact same path the Muslims had walked earlier, after noonday prayers.
Just another Friday in Jerusalem.
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