|
|
A Hindu and
a Christian and a Muslim and a Jew
by the Rev. Rich Smith
April 27, 2008
Acts 17:21-31
My sermon title this morning sounds
like the beginning of a potentially bad joke. “A Hindu and a
Christian and a Muslim and a Jew walk into a bar.....” I’ve been
trying to figure out a good punch line for that. The best I could
come up with is: “And the bartender says, ‘The usual, Mr. Gandhi?
Water with a splash of lemon?’”
To fully understand that, here’s a bit of
background. In the first half of the 20th century, Mohandas
Gandhi became the central figure in India's struggle for Independence
from the British Empire. Hindu in his upbringing, he had borrowed his
methods of nonviolent resistance from the teachings of Jesus -- and
they were later to be adopted with great effect by Martin Luther
King. But Gandhi's struggle was not just against a colonial
power, it was with the various religious factions within India
itself. When his own Hindu people protested his alliance with
Moslems, he responded by telling them, "I am a Moslem and a Hindu and a
Christian and a Jew -- and so are all of you!" (I remembered it
in different order.) Gandhi had earlier noted how in his Temple, while
growing up, the priest alternated freely in reading between the Koran
and the Hindu scriptures -- "as if it mattered not which one was being
read." He clearly saw what others did not, and which too many
still do not, that we have far more in common in our humanity and in
our spirituality than we have that which separates us. And he saw
what we need to see now more than ever: that our survival upon this
planet depends upon our realizing and embracing this.
Gandhi was a visionary, and he didn't need what I
needed to come to this realization -- namely a website known as
"beliefnet.com." I’ve mentioned this a few times over the years,
and the online quiz known as the "belief-o-matic". (How many of
you have taken this?) By answering twenty multiple-choice
questions, you can find out how much your religious outlook has in
common with twenty-seven major world religions. If I were to
paraphrase Gandhi using what this quiz revealed to me, I would have to
say, "I am a liberal Quaker, and a Neo-Pagan, and a Unitarian
Universalist and a Baha'i." To be sure, I'm also a Liberal
Protestant and a Reform Jew and even a Muslim and a Buddhist, though
not always as strongly -- at least according to this particular
measuring stick. When Westmorelanders, and our Confirmation
classes have taken this quiz, we find that we are very diverse,
although there are usually five of the twenty-seven that seem to
consistently show up with high ratings – Liberal Quaker, Neo-pagan,
Liberal Protestant, Reform Judaism and Unitarian Universalist.
And everyone seems to have at least something in common with every
faith.
Missing from the list was one of my favorites –
Frisbeeterianism. It’s the belief that when you die your soul
goes up on the roof and no one can get it down!
Have you seen the bumper sticker that says, "God is
too big for one religion"? Unfortunately, it seems, a lot of
folks are still awfully tribalistic, whose bumper stickers would read
"My God can beat up your God!" Religion, which has the power to
be a great unifying force for humankind, too often turns out to be
divisive, and thereby creates many a skeptic, agnostic and
atheist. How many wars are fought over essentially religious
differences, from Northern Ireland to the Middle East to India and
Pakistan to the Cold War to Shiites and Sunnis blowing each other up in
Iraq? I still think Hans Kung was right, who said, "There can be
no peace in the world until there is peace among the world's religions."
For most of us, I suspect, that is not a terribly
radical statement. We know that God is still speaking and not
only to us. We've had friends who follow other faiths and we know
them to be good people, made in God’s image as well.
Several of my good friends are Jewish. I would never think of
trying to convert them. I respect their path, and the integrity
of their faith.
Nearly a decade ago at my thirty-year high school
reunion, I was asked to offer the invocation before the dinner. I
was pleased to be asked, because I saw it as a chance to avenge, or at
least make up for, the invocation that had been given ten years earlier
at the twenty-year reunion, which was one of those "Lord Jesus, we
would just ask you, Lord Jesus....in Jesus' name, Amen" sort of
things. I remember being profoundly embarrassed since I was
sitting with my Jewish friends! So when the committee asked me to
give the prayer, I decided it HAD to be inclusive of as many faiths as
possible, and so I began by praying, "Loving and Eternal God, Father,
Mother, Allah, Adonai, Great Spirit, Higher Power...." -- and I'm
sure I could have added a few more. Now it might have been that
there was an open bar for an hour before dinner, but when the prayer
was over, my old classmates broke into applause. I'd like to
think that they appreciated my attempts at sensitivity and inclusivity,
but who knows?
The point is, there is a diversity of approaches to
faith, even in my high school graduating class of 1969, one that was
pretty homogenous in most ways. We were the “Washington Rams” but could
easily have been known as the “Wasps!” And how can we live in the
real world, which is becoming so much smaller all the time, without
enlarging our perspectives, and understanding that there is more than
one path, or gateway, or window into God's realm? In many ways,
that is the crucial question of the 21st century.
As I said, I don't think many of us would have much
of a problem with that. We might not find that other paths work
for us, or we may not find some expressions of faith to be our cup of
tea, but we admit that it is more a matter of taste than it is
validity. Even though my beliefs have much in common with
Neo-pagans and Baha'is, I might not be comfortable with their forms of
worship. And yet, there are a lot of Christians who do have
a problem with this. They read John's Gospel quite literally, for
example where Jesus says, "I am the way, the truth and the life.
No one comes to God except by me." If you believe that Jesus is
the only way to salvation or to God, how could you allow a
non-Christian to remain without Jesus? How could you respect any
other faith or approach?
What we need to understand, is that John's
Gospel was written towards the end of the first century, to a small
group of Christians who were struggling for survival in a hostile world
in which they were a persecuted minority. The temptation they
faced was to abandon their faith, and turn to something more
acceptable, or to the ways of the world around them. And it is
only fair to ask, how many of us are not also tempted to seek salvation
(or fulfillment, or happiness) in the things that the world offers -- a
fancier car, a faster and tinier computer, a sleeker body, a more
exciting lifestyle -- all of which can be ours with the flashing of our
Visa or American Express? Are these the way, the truth, the life?
I don't think Jesus' words in John's Gospel really
have anything to do with condemning other religions. At the time
they were written Christianity was not yet a major world-class
faith. Rather they encouraged those early Christians to stick to
THEIR path, to follow Jesus as THEIR way, THEIR truth, THEIR
life. But since the fourth century, and the advent of
"Christendom", these words and others from the Gospels have been used
as a source of power and control by the church and the state, quite the
opposite of what was intended.
That's why I find myself uneasy with things like
crusades, and prayer breakfasts, and marches for Jesus. Did you
see the article in yesterday’s Washington Post, headlined “Prayer Day
Hijacked by Evangelicals, Critics Say.” It described the
application process to become a sponsor in this week’s National Dat of
Prayer: “Applicants must indicate whether their lives reflect a belief
statement that begins: ‘I believe that the Holy Bible is the inerrant
word of the Living God. I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of
God and the only way by which I can obtain salvation and have an
ongoing relationship with God.’ The...form also asks coordinators
to pledge that activities they help lead ‘will be conducted solely by
Christians while those with differing beliefs are welcome to
attend.” So you see, I am uneasy with these sort of things,
because they often promote an exclusivistic attitude, one that results
in control over others, and marginalization, and dehumanization.
My God is better than your God. Believe in mine or burn in
hell. And that's the way wars begin.
I also found myself uneasy with a phrase from our
Westmoreland Statement of Purpose -- until I researched its
origin. Whenever we welcome new members, we all repeat the line
that goes, "Believing that other foundation can no one lay than that
which is laid, which is Jesus Christ..." Sounds like it was
written for a church full of lawyers. But again, it sounds
somewhat exclusivistic -- Jesus is the ONLY foundation, the only way,
and that seems to go against the very spirit of this community of
faith. However, a little Bible study reveals that this phrase is
right out of Paul's first letter to the Corinthians, and he's
addressing the problems they are encountering in being the
church. They were tempted to build their church not on
Christ, but in personalities: the church's founding pastor, or maybe
its current one, or one of the other great charismatic leaders in their
midst. But Paul is telling them: the only foundation for a CHURCH
is Jesus Christ. It's not Jesus versus Mohammed or Buddha, it's
Christ versus Paul or Peter or.... Twenty centuries later, we
declare our purpose by affirming that our foundation as a church is not
Loring or Gordon or Bob or Rich...it's Jesus!
That doesn't prevent us from affirming the validity
of other faiths, nor does it keep us from enjoying the benefits and
insights of those faiths ourselves. The fact is, in America today
there is a wide spread and quite eclectic approach to faith. Even
people who identify themselves primarily as Christian tend to pick and
choose, almost cafeteria-style from the tenets of the world's great
faiths. How many of us have referred, even if jokingly, to what
we may have been in a "past life", or expressed the hope that we don't
come back as a bug or something? More seriously, have a lot of us
not used the Hindu term "karma" in a comfortable or matter-of-fact
way? Or adopted Native American attitudes about death ("it wasn't
his time") or our relationship to the environment? How many of us
have not found our spiritual lives enriched by poetry and prayers from
non-Christian sources? How many come here on Saturday morning and
practice Yoga? Most of us are already learning from other faiths
-- even if we believe that Jesus is our path to God, he is not the
exclusive path, not even for all of us.
And that should not be all that surprising.
For you can find versions of the Golden Rule in every major
faith. And as Gregory Riley points out in a recent book, THE
RIVER OF GOD, Christianity has always borrowed from the religious
heritage of the places it has taken root, as much Greek as it is
Jewish. Christmas and Easter grew out of “pagan” festivals. What
purists may condemn as syncretism, others of a more open spirit have
celebrated as pluralism.
Of course, we may want to ask, just how far do we
want to go, how tolerant are we? Obviously any faith can be
perverted and become violent and we reject those expressions.
But, how many faiths do we include in what we find acceptable? Are
there some limits? I mean, if a group wanted to rent our church
for a worship gathering, and they practiced child sacrifice and
cannibalism, and cuts the heads off chickens, would we let them
in? Come to think of it, someone looking from the outside at our
faith, and taking our texts literally, might think that's what WE do --
worshiping a God whose son's death was described as a sacrifice for our
sins, who said just before his death, "Take, eat, this is my
body." We know that's not literally true, of course, but it just
goes to show how carefully and humbly we need to discern what others
are about. It seems to me that if something is done in what turns
out to be the SPIRIT of Jesus, that is, with love at its heart, then
it's valid. And as for the chickens, it may have something to do
with potlucks, for as a colleague of mine once observed, "Whenever
Presbyterians gather, a chicken in sacrificed."
I have never been one to condemn a person of another
faith simply because they do not believe as I believe. I have
come to see that even those who do not worship the name of Jesus or
accept him as Lord may still behave in a very "Christ-like" way, and
many a religion's tenets are Christian in spirit if not in name.
I take my cue from Paul, who in the book of Acts speaks to the people
of Athens, not yet Christian, saying, "God made all that is, and gives
all people life and breath and everything. God made from one
blood every nation of persons to live on the face of the earth...that
all should seek God and feel after God and find God...."
Paul found faith alive in Athens. He did not condemn it because
it was not Christian faith. He showed how it could become
Christ-like faith.
Jesus himself taught that it was not the content of
a person's belief that finally mattered, but the content of their
lives. What do they do with what they believe? "By your
fruits you are known," and he spoke of "other sheep, not of this fold",
who would be equally loved by God. And in his most famous
parable, the hero is a Samaritan, someone outside the faith!
As I said at the beginning, I don't know of anyone
who was able to see this more clearly, and to live it out, than
Mohandas Gandhi. In his own nation of India the conflict was
between Hindu and Muslim. And yet Gandhi was able to see to the
heart of all faith, and said, "I am a Muslim and a Hindu and a
Christian and a Jew." He was able to transcend parochial
differences, and to embrace all people as children of the one God,
whichever path of approach they chose.
And when the world adopts his vision, maybe a Hindu
and a Christian and a Muslim and Jew can walk into a bar together (or
sit down to dinner, or at the peace table) and it won’t be a joke, or
the start of a fight, but an expression of true human community, in all
the beauty and diversity that God intends.
.
Last updated Wednesday, Februrary 29, 2008
1
Westmoreland Circle
Bethesda, MD 20816
301-229-7766
Email the church office: churchinfo@westmorelanducc.org
www.westmorelanducc.org
An
Open and Affirming Congregation
|
