Sermon delivered Sunday, May 29, 2016 (Second Sunday After Pentecost, Proper 4, Year C) at St. Cuthbert's Episcopal Church, Oakland, CA. (1 Kings 8:22-23, 41-43; Psalm 96:1-9; Galatians 1:1-12; Luke 7:1-10)
Shortly after 9/11, I worked on a documentary film about the backlash that happened in the weeks and months following the attacks on New York and D.C. As you may know, the increase in anti-Muslim sentiment after 9/11 led to a wave of violence against people perceived to be Muslim. People were told to “go back to your country,” their homes and places of worship were vandalized or burned, and 19 people across the U.S. were killed in a misplaced attempt at revenge against our “enemy.”
Muslims experienced their share of this, but so did Sikhs, followers of a religion from northern India whose turbans and beards reminded people of Osama bin Laden. South Asians of all religions were attacked, whether Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, Sikh, or Muslim, and so were Native Americans and Latinos – basically anyone with brown skin was seen as “the enemy” and thus became a target. We titled our documentary Divided We Fall, and its “tag line” was, “In a world divided into ‘us’ and ‘them,’ who counts as ‘one of us’?”
In that context, that question was a question about national identity, but that same question can be asked about religious identity. That question runs throughout our Scriptures and the history of the church. Who counts as “one of us”? Who are “we” and who are “they”? It’s not always explicitly stated like that, but defining religious identity always involves drawing boundaries between those who are part of the group and those who are not. Today’s scripture readings all have to do with Israel’s complicated relationship with the “other,” the foreigner, the outsider.
In our first lesson, from 1 Kings, chapter 8, we have an excerpt from the prayer King Solomon prayed when dedicating the Temple in Jerusalem. As part of a long prayer to God asking God to hear the people of Israel when they come to the Temple to pray for various things, he also says this:
“Likewise, when a foreigner, who is not of your people Israel… comes and prays toward this house, then hear in heaven… and do according to all that the foreigner calls to you, so that all the peoples of the earth may know your name and fear you.” (1 Kings 8:41-43)
The psalm speaks about telling God’s glory among “the nations” and among “all peoples,” repeatedly saying that the “whole earth” should sing and praise the God of Israel.
In the second reading, Paul is passionately scolding the Galatians for “turning to a different gospel” – and although the passage does not explicitly identify what that “different gospel” is, a complete reading of the letter to the Galatians reveals that it is the instructions some Christians have given Gentile converts – they told the Gentiles that if they wanted to be “one of us,” they had to first be circumcised and obey the Jewish law. Paul is adamantly against this idea, asserting that those who do not bear the physical marker of group identity and do not obey the same religious rituals are still “one of us,” since, as he says in one of the most famous passages from Galatians, “there is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28).
And finally, in the Gospel, we have another question about the boundary between Gentile and Jew. A centurion, a soldier in the Roman army, asks Jesus to heal his slave. Although he is a Gentile, Jesus grants his request, and the scriptures tell us that Jesus was “amazed” by this man, saying, “I tell you, not even in Israel have I found such faith” (Luke 7:9).
All of these passages speak favorably toward “them” – the “other,” the “foreigner,” the Gentile – but we all know that there are plenty of biblical passages that do not. One commentator points out that Israel’s relationship to the “foreign” “is usually marked by an attitude ranging from cautious to defensive,” and probably for good reason: there was always the potential of violent conflict breaking out between the people of Israel and their neighboring countries.
A former parishioner of mine who is a biologist says that discrimination is a biological construct, one that is necessary for survival. Discrimination between “us” and “them” allows us to decide very quickly, based on appearance, what is safe and what is not. These decisions are based on memories and experience: sometimes individual memories, but sometimes collective memories passed down through the species. For example, if I’m a gazelle and my only experience with tigers is that they try to eat me, I will probably not approach the tiger and try to be friendly with it. And even if I’m a baby gazelle and I haven’t had any experience with tigers yet, I’m probably going to be instinctually afraid of them because I’ve inherited the instincts of my ancestors who have had experience with tigers. Being afraid of them is evolutionarily advantageous for me; taking a “cautious and defensive” attitude toward the tiger will likely help me stay alive.
Although human beings are more complex intellectually than our other mammal relatives, we still have a part of our brain that operates out of that base, instinctual fear toward anything that is different. If something is unknown to us, we have no way of knowing whether it is safe or dangerous -- and on the off chance that it might be dangerous, we have to be ready to protect ourselves. Distinguishing between different groups of people is not the problem. The problem is assuming that if something is different, it is threatening – that is what leads to the kind of racism and violence that we saw after 9/11, and that we continue to see any time there is a terrorist attack against Westerners that is attributed to Muslims, or when political rhetoric intensifies a sense that Muslims are our enemy (or whoever the "enemy" happens to be at the moment).
Given the evolutionary advantage of being “cautious and defensive” toward anyone who is not “one of us,” any embrace of the “foreigner” must be an intentional act, one that will involve controlling our “reptile brain,” that part of us that instinctively sees otherness as a threat and wants to fight or flight. My personal view is that the passages of scripture that play in to the “foreigner is the enemy” concept are evidence of the sinful nature of the scriptures’ very human authors. The scripture is inspired by God, yes, but I also believe it is tainted by the humans through whom the message was filtered. Sometimes they allowed the Spirit to flow through them without any interference, and sometimes their particular biases colored how they expressed the message God was sending. Our scriptures for today remind us that there is a divine mandate to welcome the foreigner, the stranger, the outsider, to break down the walls between “us” and “them” – and I happen to believe that that is the unadulterated divine message – one that is certainly not “of human origin,” because it goes against our very biology.
In our redeemed state, we are called to rise above the reptile brain, to acknowledge that “they” might actually have a lot in common with us, that “they” might not seek to do us harm, that we don’t need to defend ourselves against “them.” We are called to realize that our relationship with “them” can be one of collaboration rather than competition, and that “they” can even become “one of us” – as the Gentiles did when they joined the Jewish followers of Jesus to form what became the Christian church – a new “us” that was different than the “us” that had existed before.
But even when “we” stay distinct and separate from “them” – even when we don’t ultimately come to share the same religion – we can work to move our relationship with “them” from our natural state of fear and suspicion to one of trust and respect. Through my work in interfaith dialogue, I have learned to acknowledge the sacred and holy when I find it among “them” just as joyfully as when I find it among “us.” In dialogue with other religious communities, I often find myself remembering today’s Gospel reading and saying, “Not even in the church have I found such faith!”
Showing posts with label interfaith. Show all posts
Showing posts with label interfaith. Show all posts
Sunday, May 29, 2016
Sunday, April 26, 2015
"I have other sheep that are not of this fold:" Sharing Christ through interfaith dialogue
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.
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.
Sunday, February 1, 2015
Placing love of neighbor above personal freedom
Sermon delivered Sunday, Feb. 1, 2015 (4th Sunday After the Epiphany, Year B), at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Franklin, TN.
1 Corinthians 8:1-13
In our second reading today, the apostle Paul is advising the church at Corinth about whether or not Christians should eat food sacrificed at the temples of other gods.
This was an issue of some controversy to the church in Corinth, a Greek city composed mostly of Gentiles who worshipped the traditional Greek deities like Zeus and Hera. When Gentiles became Christians, they were taught to stop worshipping those Greek deities and to worship only the Jewish God, who Christians believed had become incarnate in the form of Jesus Christ. One of the ways they had worshipped at the Greek temples was to eat the meat that had been sacrificed to those gods, so many of the new converts were abstaining from that meat after they became Christian.
But some Christians insisted that it was ok to continue to eat the meat that had been sacrificed in the Greek temples because the Greek gods did not exist anyway, so eating meat that had been sacrificed to them was harmless. It was probably an inconvenient hassle in that society to avoid meat sacrificed at the Greek temples, since much of the meat sold in the public market would have come from that source. Rather than having to go to great lengths to avoid it, some members of the church reasoned that it was not actually a problem to eat it after all.
Paul writes to address this conflict and to advise the community on how to stay in relationship with one another despite their disagreements. Although Paul agrees in principle with those who insist that it is harmless to eat the meat from the Greek temples, he calls them to abstain from doing so if it causes harm to their fellow Christians’ faith. He encourages them to be willing to inconvenience themselves by voluntarily giving up a behavior that is harmless to them for the sake of their neighbors, to give love of neighbor a higher priority than the exercise of personal freedom.
Earlier in this first letter of Paul to the Corinthians, there is a summary of this point in chapter 6, verse 12: “All things are permissible, but not all things are beneficial” (1 Corinthians 6:12). Although we may have the freedom in Christ to know that we will be forgiven of our sins no matter what we do, the command for us to love our neighbor as ourselves demands that we consider how our actions will affect other people, and limit our freedom accordingly.
This tension between personal freedom and responsibility to the common good comes up in secular terms in our discussions of the right to free speech. In general, though we pride ourselves on “freedom of speech” in this country, the courts have generally upheld the idea that that does NOT give one the right to yell “FIRE” in a crowded theater if there is not in fact a fire. It may be technically permissible to do so, but it is not beneficial to the common good and safety of those gathered to create a situation where people would panic and perhaps hurt one another in their haste to leave the theater. Thus, even though it is permissible for Christians to eat the meat sacrificed to the Greek gods, it may not be beneficial to the greater community of the church for them to do so.
Paul refers to those who are likely to be led astray by seeing other Christians eat meat in the Greek temples as “weaker” Christians, and although this term carries with it a judgment call about who is “right” and “wrong” in this argument, his point is that in order to most fully reflect God’s love, we must always consider the weakest or most vulnerable members among us and how our actions will affect them. There is a well-known saying that the greatness of a society is measured by how it treats its most vulnerable members, and that is certainly true about the body of Christ. Paul encourages us to always be aware of the lowest common denominator, of the most inclusive course of action possible to keep the most people together at the table.
This call to inclusivity and awareness of our most vulnerable members may mean that we are asked to voluntarily give up something we enjoy doing or to change our behavior in a way that perhaps we would prefer not to do, out of consideration for others. B.W. Johnson, a late 19th century Church of Christ pastor and professor, said this in his commentary on this passage from 1 Corinthians:
“The Christian principle, the rule of love, is, ‘If eating meat, or going to the theatre, or going to a ball, or attending the fair, or drinking wine or beer, causeth my brother to offend, I will not do these things while the world standeth.”
Now, we may think that sounds like an extreme statement, and in general, we in the Episcopal Church tend to pride ourselves on the fact that we allow and even celebrate many things that other Christian communities frown upon – whether that be going to a ball, or attending the fair, or drinking wine or beer. But sometimes, the emphasis we place on the freedom we have in our actions in this church can take such a priority that we can forget to consider the effects of our actions on others. We can sometimes act in accordance with the secular principle of celebrating our right to do whatever we want rather than in accordance with the Christian principle of placing love of neighbor and our responsibility to the community above our own wants and desires.
To put a little flesh on this concept with a specific example, I would suggest that one of the areas where this plays out in the Episcopal Church is in our attitude toward the use of alcohol. Now, I know this can be a touchy subject, but I assure you that it is probably a fairly good parallel to how touchy the subject of eating food from the Greek temples would have been to our brothers and sisters in the first century A.D., so let’s think about it carefully for a little bit.
Many of us appreciate the fact that the Episcopal Church is not as “uptight” as some other denominations in its approach to alcohol. In fact, that accepting view of alcohol use is even part of the reason some of us chose this church as adults. We appreciate the fact that this is a place where having a glass of wine is not looked upon as a sin. We know that even in those denominations where drinking is forbidden, members often do so in secret and feel shamed about it, so we reason that if people are going to drink, at least in our church it can be done in the open and without shame, and thus hopefully in a more moderate and healthy manner. But in certain contexts in the Episcopal Church, from church functions to seminary parties, I have seen drinking taken to excess, and this kind of behavior laughed about and even encouraged. We all know the jokes about alcohol and the Episcopal Church – whether it’s the reference to us as “Whisky-palians” or the joke that “wherever there are four Episcopalians, there’s a fifth.” I’ve laughed at these jokes as much as the next person, but when I take a step back and really think about it, I find this levity toward excessive drinking to be somewhat disturbing in light of the issue Paul raises in today’s passage from 1 Corinthians. Are we causing our brothers and sisters to stumble by our attitudes in this area? How are we caring for our most vulnerable members, those in our midst who struggle with addiction to alcohol?
Certainly people with addictions are ultimately responsible for making their own choices to abstain, but remember what Paul said to the church at Corinth. “If food is a cause of their falling, I will never eat meat, so that I may not cause one of them to fall.” I doubt Paul became a vegetarian for the rest of his life as a result of this issue, but even so, his rhetorical point should give us pause. If alcohol is a cause of our brother or sister’s falling, should we not consider more carefully how we approach it within our Christian community together? Heaven forbid that the church should be the place where someone is led to a relapse of their addiction, but it could happen.
People who don’t currently have problems with alcohol may resent this call to restraint or consideration, protesting that it is unnecessary for them, but if we are to take the Scripture seriously, this passage encourages us to be willing to limit our freedoms based on love of neighbor, to be willing to alter our behavior in ways that may be unnecessary for us in order to more fully include and welcome our brothers and sisters in Christ.
I’m not suggesting that we all give up drinking, necessarily, but that we be more intentional and aware of the effects drinking can have on others, and of the way we talk about and present our drinking in the church. And it’s not my intention to unfairly pick on alcohol – there are certainly many other topics we could consider from this perspective. Interfaith dialogue is one of them. For some Christians, seeing Christian leaders participate in prayer and worship with people of other faiths can be a stumbling block to their faith, and this is certainly an area where one could call me to be more considerate and careful toward others as I engage in interfaith work in the church. So this sermon is not intended to be a moralistic condemnation of all alcohol consumption, but simply a call for us to be more thoughtful and considerate of the effects of our actions on others in all areas of our lives.
During this season of Epiphany, we are called to consider the ways in which Christ was made known in his day – the historical events and miracles that revealed his identity as the Son of God – and also to consider the ways Christ is made known today through our lives and witness. At the end of the service, we pray in the Epiphany blessing that Christ the Son of God may be manifest in you, that your lives may be a light to the world. During the rest of this season, take time to examine some of your actions and choices in light of how they affect those around you. Ask yourself, “What does this action manifest in my life? Does it make Christ more fully known to those around me?” Even if the behavior is something you think is harmless, consider whether it might make your neighbor stumble in their faith, and if that is a possibility, think twice before you do it.
1 Corinthians 8:1-13
In our second reading today, the apostle Paul is advising the church at Corinth about whether or not Christians should eat food sacrificed at the temples of other gods.
This was an issue of some controversy to the church in Corinth, a Greek city composed mostly of Gentiles who worshipped the traditional Greek deities like Zeus and Hera. When Gentiles became Christians, they were taught to stop worshipping those Greek deities and to worship only the Jewish God, who Christians believed had become incarnate in the form of Jesus Christ. One of the ways they had worshipped at the Greek temples was to eat the meat that had been sacrificed to those gods, so many of the new converts were abstaining from that meat after they became Christian.
But some Christians insisted that it was ok to continue to eat the meat that had been sacrificed in the Greek temples because the Greek gods did not exist anyway, so eating meat that had been sacrificed to them was harmless. It was probably an inconvenient hassle in that society to avoid meat sacrificed at the Greek temples, since much of the meat sold in the public market would have come from that source. Rather than having to go to great lengths to avoid it, some members of the church reasoned that it was not actually a problem to eat it after all.
Paul writes to address this conflict and to advise the community on how to stay in relationship with one another despite their disagreements. Although Paul agrees in principle with those who insist that it is harmless to eat the meat from the Greek temples, he calls them to abstain from doing so if it causes harm to their fellow Christians’ faith. He encourages them to be willing to inconvenience themselves by voluntarily giving up a behavior that is harmless to them for the sake of their neighbors, to give love of neighbor a higher priority than the exercise of personal freedom.
Earlier in this first letter of Paul to the Corinthians, there is a summary of this point in chapter 6, verse 12: “All things are permissible, but not all things are beneficial” (1 Corinthians 6:12). Although we may have the freedom in Christ to know that we will be forgiven of our sins no matter what we do, the command for us to love our neighbor as ourselves demands that we consider how our actions will affect other people, and limit our freedom accordingly.
This tension between personal freedom and responsibility to the common good comes up in secular terms in our discussions of the right to free speech. In general, though we pride ourselves on “freedom of speech” in this country, the courts have generally upheld the idea that that does NOT give one the right to yell “FIRE” in a crowded theater if there is not in fact a fire. It may be technically permissible to do so, but it is not beneficial to the common good and safety of those gathered to create a situation where people would panic and perhaps hurt one another in their haste to leave the theater. Thus, even though it is permissible for Christians to eat the meat sacrificed to the Greek gods, it may not be beneficial to the greater community of the church for them to do so.
Paul refers to those who are likely to be led astray by seeing other Christians eat meat in the Greek temples as “weaker” Christians, and although this term carries with it a judgment call about who is “right” and “wrong” in this argument, his point is that in order to most fully reflect God’s love, we must always consider the weakest or most vulnerable members among us and how our actions will affect them. There is a well-known saying that the greatness of a society is measured by how it treats its most vulnerable members, and that is certainly true about the body of Christ. Paul encourages us to always be aware of the lowest common denominator, of the most inclusive course of action possible to keep the most people together at the table.
This call to inclusivity and awareness of our most vulnerable members may mean that we are asked to voluntarily give up something we enjoy doing or to change our behavior in a way that perhaps we would prefer not to do, out of consideration for others. B.W. Johnson, a late 19th century Church of Christ pastor and professor, said this in his commentary on this passage from 1 Corinthians:
“The Christian principle, the rule of love, is, ‘If eating meat, or going to the theatre, or going to a ball, or attending the fair, or drinking wine or beer, causeth my brother to offend, I will not do these things while the world standeth.”
Now, we may think that sounds like an extreme statement, and in general, we in the Episcopal Church tend to pride ourselves on the fact that we allow and even celebrate many things that other Christian communities frown upon – whether that be going to a ball, or attending the fair, or drinking wine or beer. But sometimes, the emphasis we place on the freedom we have in our actions in this church can take such a priority that we can forget to consider the effects of our actions on others. We can sometimes act in accordance with the secular principle of celebrating our right to do whatever we want rather than in accordance with the Christian principle of placing love of neighbor and our responsibility to the community above our own wants and desires.
To put a little flesh on this concept with a specific example, I would suggest that one of the areas where this plays out in the Episcopal Church is in our attitude toward the use of alcohol. Now, I know this can be a touchy subject, but I assure you that it is probably a fairly good parallel to how touchy the subject of eating food from the Greek temples would have been to our brothers and sisters in the first century A.D., so let’s think about it carefully for a little bit.
Many of us appreciate the fact that the Episcopal Church is not as “uptight” as some other denominations in its approach to alcohol. In fact, that accepting view of alcohol use is even part of the reason some of us chose this church as adults. We appreciate the fact that this is a place where having a glass of wine is not looked upon as a sin. We know that even in those denominations where drinking is forbidden, members often do so in secret and feel shamed about it, so we reason that if people are going to drink, at least in our church it can be done in the open and without shame, and thus hopefully in a more moderate and healthy manner. But in certain contexts in the Episcopal Church, from church functions to seminary parties, I have seen drinking taken to excess, and this kind of behavior laughed about and even encouraged. We all know the jokes about alcohol and the Episcopal Church – whether it’s the reference to us as “Whisky-palians” or the joke that “wherever there are four Episcopalians, there’s a fifth.” I’ve laughed at these jokes as much as the next person, but when I take a step back and really think about it, I find this levity toward excessive drinking to be somewhat disturbing in light of the issue Paul raises in today’s passage from 1 Corinthians. Are we causing our brothers and sisters to stumble by our attitudes in this area? How are we caring for our most vulnerable members, those in our midst who struggle with addiction to alcohol?
Certainly people with addictions are ultimately responsible for making their own choices to abstain, but remember what Paul said to the church at Corinth. “If food is a cause of their falling, I will never eat meat, so that I may not cause one of them to fall.” I doubt Paul became a vegetarian for the rest of his life as a result of this issue, but even so, his rhetorical point should give us pause. If alcohol is a cause of our brother or sister’s falling, should we not consider more carefully how we approach it within our Christian community together? Heaven forbid that the church should be the place where someone is led to a relapse of their addiction, but it could happen.
People who don’t currently have problems with alcohol may resent this call to restraint or consideration, protesting that it is unnecessary for them, but if we are to take the Scripture seriously, this passage encourages us to be willing to limit our freedoms based on love of neighbor, to be willing to alter our behavior in ways that may be unnecessary for us in order to more fully include and welcome our brothers and sisters in Christ.
I’m not suggesting that we all give up drinking, necessarily, but that we be more intentional and aware of the effects drinking can have on others, and of the way we talk about and present our drinking in the church. And it’s not my intention to unfairly pick on alcohol – there are certainly many other topics we could consider from this perspective. Interfaith dialogue is one of them. For some Christians, seeing Christian leaders participate in prayer and worship with people of other faiths can be a stumbling block to their faith, and this is certainly an area where one could call me to be more considerate and careful toward others as I engage in interfaith work in the church. So this sermon is not intended to be a moralistic condemnation of all alcohol consumption, but simply a call for us to be more thoughtful and considerate of the effects of our actions on others in all areas of our lives.
During this season of Epiphany, we are called to consider the ways in which Christ was made known in his day – the historical events and miracles that revealed his identity as the Son of God – and also to consider the ways Christ is made known today through our lives and witness. At the end of the service, we pray in the Epiphany blessing that Christ the Son of God may be manifest in you, that your lives may be a light to the world. During the rest of this season, take time to examine some of your actions and choices in light of how they affect those around you. Ask yourself, “What does this action manifest in my life? Does it make Christ more fully known to those around me?” Even if the behavior is something you think is harmless, consider whether it might make your neighbor stumble in their faith, and if that is a possibility, think twice before you do it.
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). |
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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.
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, September 27, 2011
Thank you, John Macquarrie
"There is validity in the sight of God, and there is validity in the sight of the church. It cannot be assumed that these are always necessarily the same. ... [I]t must be assumed that sometimes what is deemed invalid in the churches is valid in God's sight, especially if there is evidence of holiness of life. Likewise, Christians believe that the sacraments of Christ are 'doors to the sacred' in a very special sense, but they cannot and should not deny that there may be other doors to the sacred, even in non-Christian religions."
- John Macquarrie, A Guide to the Sacraments
- John Macquarrie, A Guide to the Sacraments
Friday, August 19, 2011
Ministry Fellowship Re-Cap
Earlier this week, I attended the "closing retreat" for the 2010 Ministry Fellows. The 19 other people who had the same fellowship as I did came together at a conference center just south of Atlanta to share with each other what we did with our summers.
The projects were wonderfully diverse, addressing issues including modern-day slavery (sex trafficking), treatment of undocumented immigrants on the border in Arizona, acceptance of LBGTQ people in the Black Church, healing "moral injury" among returned combat veterans, farm-church relations in rural Vermont and New Hampshire, developing multi-cultural community in churches, the inclusion of Asian-American or Pacific Islanders among the clergy in different churches, and issues of God's presence during the "dark night of the soul" and healing of mental illness.
Eight of us traveled internationally, with visits to Spain, Hungary, Greece, Albania, Ukraine, Israel and Palestine, Nigeria, South Sudan, South Africa, and China. The fellow who traveled to South Sudan was there when South Sudan was declared an independent country this summer and got to witness "the birth of a nation." The projects that were not specifically issues-focused were mostly centered on addressing personal needs for healing, pilgrimage, prayer and renewal, providing a model for the importance of self-care in pastoral ministry.
Hearing my fellow Fellows' stories and their journeys was inspiring and gave me hope for the future of the church. But the best thing that came out of our conference, in my opinion, was that our group covenanted to continue meeting with each other in the future, maybe bi-annually, as a support system for one another as we go forward into church leadership.
In preparing for my presentation, I wrote the following reflection on the development of my project and the outcomes of it. I spoke on these themes and then shared the book of images and poetry I created with the group, and also posted an "exhibit" of some enlargements of my photographs on the wall in the conference room. I was surprised to find that many people asked if my book or the enlarged images would be available for purchase, so I am working on how to make that possible. I will post information about that on this blog when it is available.
Here's my "re-cap" of my Ministry Fellowship experience and what I presented to the group this week. Thanks to all of you who followed my journey this summer.
Ministry Fellowship Re-Cap
The issue I engaged with in this project had to do with participation in and with people of other religions in religious practice. It started with a story about an interfaith conference I attended where we all participated in worship services from different traditions. Rather than try to plan a generic, “interfaith” worship, they opted to offer many different worship services that were very specific – a Muslim Friday prayer service, a Jewish Sabbath service, Hindu meditation practice, and a Christian Eucharist, which was led by an Episcopal priest. I found that Eucharist very moving because all these people of different faiths were participating in the most sacred ritual of my tradition. I learned later that it is against the official rules of the Episcopal Church to offer communion to non-Christians, so what the priest did that day was in violation of her ordination vows. This all got me thinking about the value of boundaries between traditions as well as the ways in which we can experience God in and through religions and religious services other than our own.
My original idea for the project was to make an interfaith pilgrimage with my friend Valarie Kaur, who is a Sikh and who has been to churches with me and has received communion in the Episcopal Church. The idea was for us to visit each other’s holy lands – for me to go to India with her and for her to come to Israel with me. She was not able to travel with me, however, so I ultimately chose to make the pilgrimage alone, and to travel just to Israel instead of India – because I could not afford to travel to both places and from what I could gather, it would be safer and more manageable for me to travel alone in Israel than in India.
I still planned to make an “interfaith” pilgrimage by visiting sacred sites from different traditions – Jewish, Christian, Muslim, and Baha’i – and by meeting and talking with people involved in interfaith work in the Holy Land. The “dissemination piece” of the project was to chronicle my journey on my blog and to document the trip artistically through photography and to create an exhibit of my photos for display at my seminary and my home parish once I returned.
Although I did visit sites from different religious traditions, there were often restrictions against non-Muslims or non-Jews or non-Baha’is visiting except during certain hours or under certain circumstances, and I found that I spent most of my time visiting and meditating on Christian sites. I found myself more shy or hesitant about just walking in to a mosque or a synagogue (the ones that WERE more open and less restricted). I did visit the White Mosque in Nazareth, which was open to the public, but no one was there except one man praying in the corner and I felt very out of place and feared it would be obvious I wasn’t a Muslim and people someone would wonder why I was there if they came in and saw me. I walked through the Jewish Quarter in Jerusalem but did not enter any of the historic synagogues I came across, even though they were likely open. I simply did not feel comfortable just walking in to a religious place of another tradition like I did walking into any of the churches I visited. On a visceral level, I felt that I did not belong there, that it wasn’t my holy place.
This was strange for someone who usually feels very comfortable visiting places of worship of many different traditions and has spent a good bit of my adult life working in interfaith work. I realized, however, that I had not often visited other religions’ places of worship entirely on my own. I was either going to do research and had an appointment to speak with someone, or I went with friends who were followers of that faith, to accompany them to a service or event. I had visited mosques and synagogues in Turkey and Greece and Italy on my foreign study trip in college, but I was with a large class and a guide every time I entered the places. Although I know some people draw from many different traditions in their own personal spirituality, for me as someone deeply grounded in one particular faith, I came to the somewhat obvious but still very insightful observation that I can’t be “interfaith” by myself – that a crucial element of “interfaith” is actually engaging with a PERSON of a different faith and encountering that faith through that other human – and that without that personal engagement, my encounter with sites from different religious was less meaningful and even intimidating.
This pilgrimage raised awareness for me about the importance of developing interfaith friendships and relationships, and how that really has to come through person-to-person engagement, not just through learning about other religions in a book or visiting other places of worship. While I think it’s great that some churches participate in interfaith “tours” of their cities or towns, where a group from the church will visit the local synagogue or mosque, I think these trips are largely in vain if they are not also accompanied by very real opportunities for the people from those two congregations to develop relationships with each other – which doesn’t happen naturally when they’re both serving in an “ambassador” or “host” role for their house of worship and their tradition. Programming social and outreach events with other religious communities where Christians can interact in more “normal” settings with Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Sikhs, Baha’is, and others is crucial for the future of interfaith leadership in the church, in my opinion.
My encounter with Palestinians in the West Bank through a one-day trip I took to Bethlehem also opened my eyes to the very real dangers of “exceptionalist” theology that asserts that we are God’s chosen and either implicitly or explicitly justifies degradation and violence toward other groups. I wrestle with how to preach certain passages from the Old Testament about Israel as God’s chosen people and God giving the land to the Jews in light of the ways that theology has caused the suffering and subjugation of the Palestinian people.
My encounter with the injustice in the West Bank made me question the significance of my original plan to produce an exhibit of photos as the "outcome" of this trip. Who cares about my "pretty pictures" when there are people suffering in the world? I wondered. I felt like my presentation and the outcome of my trip should be entirely about Palestinian advocacy -- to focus solely on an artistic response seemed not important and serious enough.
A poetry reading in Sewanee this summer after I returned helped to change that response. Nick Flynn's integration of his experiences traveling to Turkey to meet with Iraqi people who had been imprisoned at Abu Ghraib into his poetry made me realize that art can be used for advocacy, and the two need not be mutually exclusive. (I know I had known this before, but that poetry reading was a helpful reminder and example of the ways in which advocacy can be done through art.) This helped me to move forward with my plans to create an exhibit and I even decided, at the suggestion of my husband, to try my hand at some poetry myself to accompany the images.
Re-engaging with my creative side through this project also reminded me of the importance of nurturing the creative arts among the clergy. Seminaries are very good about teaching students book knowledge and even hands-on knowledge of ministry experience, but overall are not so good about teaching the creative arts, at least not from what I’ve seen. Since the Bible itself is largely poetry and literature, and many essential religious truths cannot be expressed in rational prose but are communicated best through art, I think clergy have an obligation to nurture their own creative sides and think about how to use art to preach the Gospel. My exhibit of photographs and my book of images and poetry that came out of this project is one small step towards doing that in my own ministry.
The projects were wonderfully diverse, addressing issues including modern-day slavery (sex trafficking), treatment of undocumented immigrants on the border in Arizona, acceptance of LBGTQ people in the Black Church, healing "moral injury" among returned combat veterans, farm-church relations in rural Vermont and New Hampshire, developing multi-cultural community in churches, the inclusion of Asian-American or Pacific Islanders among the clergy in different churches, and issues of God's presence during the "dark night of the soul" and healing of mental illness.
Eight of us traveled internationally, with visits to Spain, Hungary, Greece, Albania, Ukraine, Israel and Palestine, Nigeria, South Sudan, South Africa, and China. The fellow who traveled to South Sudan was there when South Sudan was declared an independent country this summer and got to witness "the birth of a nation." The projects that were not specifically issues-focused were mostly centered on addressing personal needs for healing, pilgrimage, prayer and renewal, providing a model for the importance of self-care in pastoral ministry.
Hearing my fellow Fellows' stories and their journeys was inspiring and gave me hope for the future of the church. But the best thing that came out of our conference, in my opinion, was that our group covenanted to continue meeting with each other in the future, maybe bi-annually, as a support system for one another as we go forward into church leadership.
In preparing for my presentation, I wrote the following reflection on the development of my project and the outcomes of it. I spoke on these themes and then shared the book of images and poetry I created with the group, and also posted an "exhibit" of some enlargements of my photographs on the wall in the conference room. I was surprised to find that many people asked if my book or the enlarged images would be available for purchase, so I am working on how to make that possible. I will post information about that on this blog when it is available.
Here's my "re-cap" of my Ministry Fellowship experience and what I presented to the group this week. Thanks to all of you who followed my journey this summer.
Ministry Fellowship Re-Cap
The issue I engaged with in this project had to do with participation in and with people of other religions in religious practice. It started with a story about an interfaith conference I attended where we all participated in worship services from different traditions. Rather than try to plan a generic, “interfaith” worship, they opted to offer many different worship services that were very specific – a Muslim Friday prayer service, a Jewish Sabbath service, Hindu meditation practice, and a Christian Eucharist, which was led by an Episcopal priest. I found that Eucharist very moving because all these people of different faiths were participating in the most sacred ritual of my tradition. I learned later that it is against the official rules of the Episcopal Church to offer communion to non-Christians, so what the priest did that day was in violation of her ordination vows. This all got me thinking about the value of boundaries between traditions as well as the ways in which we can experience God in and through religions and religious services other than our own.
My original idea for the project was to make an interfaith pilgrimage with my friend Valarie Kaur, who is a Sikh and who has been to churches with me and has received communion in the Episcopal Church. The idea was for us to visit each other’s holy lands – for me to go to India with her and for her to come to Israel with me. She was not able to travel with me, however, so I ultimately chose to make the pilgrimage alone, and to travel just to Israel instead of India – because I could not afford to travel to both places and from what I could gather, it would be safer and more manageable for me to travel alone in Israel than in India.
I still planned to make an “interfaith” pilgrimage by visiting sacred sites from different traditions – Jewish, Christian, Muslim, and Baha’i – and by meeting and talking with people involved in interfaith work in the Holy Land. The “dissemination piece” of the project was to chronicle my journey on my blog and to document the trip artistically through photography and to create an exhibit of my photos for display at my seminary and my home parish once I returned.
Although I did visit sites from different religious traditions, there were often restrictions against non-Muslims or non-Jews or non-Baha’is visiting except during certain hours or under certain circumstances, and I found that I spent most of my time visiting and meditating on Christian sites. I found myself more shy or hesitant about just walking in to a mosque or a synagogue (the ones that WERE more open and less restricted). I did visit the White Mosque in Nazareth, which was open to the public, but no one was there except one man praying in the corner and I felt very out of place and feared it would be obvious I wasn’t a Muslim and people someone would wonder why I was there if they came in and saw me. I walked through the Jewish Quarter in Jerusalem but did not enter any of the historic synagogues I came across, even though they were likely open. I simply did not feel comfortable just walking in to a religious place of another tradition like I did walking into any of the churches I visited. On a visceral level, I felt that I did not belong there, that it wasn’t my holy place.
This was strange for someone who usually feels very comfortable visiting places of worship of many different traditions and has spent a good bit of my adult life working in interfaith work. I realized, however, that I had not often visited other religions’ places of worship entirely on my own. I was either going to do research and had an appointment to speak with someone, or I went with friends who were followers of that faith, to accompany them to a service or event. I had visited mosques and synagogues in Turkey and Greece and Italy on my foreign study trip in college, but I was with a large class and a guide every time I entered the places. Although I know some people draw from many different traditions in their own personal spirituality, for me as someone deeply grounded in one particular faith, I came to the somewhat obvious but still very insightful observation that I can’t be “interfaith” by myself – that a crucial element of “interfaith” is actually engaging with a PERSON of a different faith and encountering that faith through that other human – and that without that personal engagement, my encounter with sites from different religious was less meaningful and even intimidating.
This pilgrimage raised awareness for me about the importance of developing interfaith friendships and relationships, and how that really has to come through person-to-person engagement, not just through learning about other religions in a book or visiting other places of worship. While I think it’s great that some churches participate in interfaith “tours” of their cities or towns, where a group from the church will visit the local synagogue or mosque, I think these trips are largely in vain if they are not also accompanied by very real opportunities for the people from those two congregations to develop relationships with each other – which doesn’t happen naturally when they’re both serving in an “ambassador” or “host” role for their house of worship and their tradition. Programming social and outreach events with other religious communities where Christians can interact in more “normal” settings with Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Sikhs, Baha’is, and others is crucial for the future of interfaith leadership in the church, in my opinion.
My encounter with Palestinians in the West Bank through a one-day trip I took to Bethlehem also opened my eyes to the very real dangers of “exceptionalist” theology that asserts that we are God’s chosen and either implicitly or explicitly justifies degradation and violence toward other groups. I wrestle with how to preach certain passages from the Old Testament about Israel as God’s chosen people and God giving the land to the Jews in light of the ways that theology has caused the suffering and subjugation of the Palestinian people.
My encounter with the injustice in the West Bank made me question the significance of my original plan to produce an exhibit of photos as the "outcome" of this trip. Who cares about my "pretty pictures" when there are people suffering in the world? I wondered. I felt like my presentation and the outcome of my trip should be entirely about Palestinian advocacy -- to focus solely on an artistic response seemed not important and serious enough.
A poetry reading in Sewanee this summer after I returned helped to change that response. Nick Flynn's integration of his experiences traveling to Turkey to meet with Iraqi people who had been imprisoned at Abu Ghraib into his poetry made me realize that art can be used for advocacy, and the two need not be mutually exclusive. (I know I had known this before, but that poetry reading was a helpful reminder and example of the ways in which advocacy can be done through art.) This helped me to move forward with my plans to create an exhibit and I even decided, at the suggestion of my husband, to try my hand at some poetry myself to accompany the images.
Re-engaging with my creative side through this project also reminded me of the importance of nurturing the creative arts among the clergy. Seminaries are very good about teaching students book knowledge and even hands-on knowledge of ministry experience, but overall are not so good about teaching the creative arts, at least not from what I’ve seen. Since the Bible itself is largely poetry and literature, and many essential religious truths cannot be expressed in rational prose but are communicated best through art, I think clergy have an obligation to nurture their own creative sides and think about how to use art to preach the Gospel. My exhibit of photographs and my book of images and poetry that came out of this project is one small step towards doing that in my own ministry.
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.
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