“A Reformation of Faith”

October 31, 2010

Romans 11:33-36

John 14:1-7

Today we celebrate Reformation Sunday—marking the day of Martin Luther’s public protest that came to symbolize the beginning of the Protestant Reformation. We sang a hymn attributed to the great French Reformer, John Calvin. And, of course, for me and for many—even those of us with no Lutheran background—the required hymn of the day is our final hymn, Luther’s own “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.” This took on a renewed significance in the last century when it became the anthem of the Confessing Church in Germany in their work and protest against the evil of Nazi regime.

But Reformation Sunday is not a time for looking backwards and worshipping our history or enshrining the very human men and women who were our ancestors in faith.

It is a time to open ourselves to the ways in which the Spirit of God continues to renew and reform the church in our own time. This day is as much about our present and our future as it is about our past.

Looking backwards, we have used Reformation Sunday as an opportunity to consider the relationship between Protestant Christians and Roman Catholics, usually emphasizing our differences.

But if we think about our present circumstances and the future toward which we are moving, we might better use this day to think about our relationships with people of other faiths.

When our Congregational ancestors in faith carved out settlements in the wilderness of New England, or when two centuries later they established new communities in the wilderness of Iowa, Congregationalism was often the only game in town. Each community had its Congregational church and that was it. They didn’t have to think about relationships with the Methodists, let alone Romans Catholics or those who weren’t Christian.

Much has changed.

Today our neighbors are Buddhists and our classmates are Hindus. The colleagues we work with are Muslim. Spouses and in-laws at family gatherings are Jewish.

How do we as members of the United Church of Christ relate to other religions and people of other faiths?

In one sense this is not a new issue.

Early Christians had to work out their relationships with the Judaism from which they came. And Paul was clear in his letter to the Romans that God has by no means rejected the Jewish people, with whom God made an everlasting covenant.

Christians also had to deal with the wide variety of other religions prevalent in the ancient Roman Empire. They borrowed and transformed customs from other traditions. One of the more notable examples of this was taking the date of the pagan celebration of the “birth of the invincible sun,” which was December 25 and making it the day on which Christians would celebrate the birth of Jesus. One of the answers to the question of how to deal with other faiths was, “Appropriate them for ourselves.”

Over the centuries, to our shame, Christians have not always shown mercy toward people of other faiths. There have been forced conversions, crusades, and the ongoing persecutions of Jewish people. Many Christians today would decry what they see as the violent nature of Islam, all the while ignoring our own blood-stained history.

Yes, we’ve made some progress over time. Hartford Seminary, founded by Congregationalists in Connecticut, has been studying Islam and working on Christian-Muslim relationships since the late 1800’s. And after the Holocaust during WWII, mainline Christians began with humble repentance to develop new understandings of Judaism and new relationships with Jewish people.

And we can be glad that this work is also being carried out by a new generation. D. S. is leading the high school Breakfast Club class this fall as they explore other faiths. Just this morning S. G. from the Iowa City Muslim Public Affairs Council met with the class.

If our relationship to other faiths is not a new issue, it is, however, an issue of greater urgency for us in these days. As the world continues to shrink, we are faced with the challenge of developing constructive relationships with people whose faith is different than our own.

There are two approaches to this that would be easy.

The first is to take the stand that “We’re right and you’re wrong.” This is an absolutist approach, one adopted by some of the more conservative Christians. Do you remember the Rev. Bailey Smith? He’s the Baptist minister who a few years ago said, in all seriousness, that “God does not hear the prayers of the Jew[ish people].” Nonsense, yes. Unbiblical, yes. But this is one approach taken toward other faiths—often with deadly consequences.

The second easy way is the “we’re-all-doing-the-same-thing-really” approach. This attitude suggests that people of different faiths are all ultimately trying to reach the same goal and calls for tolerance and understanding. It’s more appealing to me than the first option, but it runs the risk of lopping off the highs and the lows of other faiths—as well as our own. When we take this approach we start to say things like “Well, Buddhists and Christians are really all alike,” even though they aren’t. We miss the creative tension that comes from differences. We simplify the faith of other people and our own faith as we try to make them compatible.

As is often the case, the easy ways don’t work.

So we turn to scripture, which always seems to take our easy answers and call them into question.

The Gospel of John gives us a unique picture of the final meal that Jesus shared with his disciples before his arrest and crucifixion. In those crucial hours Jesus eats with the disciples and washes their feet. He teaches them and prays for them. He speaks of his relationship with his followers that will continue after his death. And he tells them: “Do no let your hearts be troubled…where I am, you may be also.”

His words cause more confusion than comfort for Thomas, who blurts out: “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?”

To clear things up, Jesus says: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.” In doing so he uses images that not only draw from his own Jewish culture but also could be found in a number of other religions in the ancient Mediterranean world.

Jesus tells his followers that he is the way, that is, he gives access to life with God. And at the same time he is the truth and the life, that is, he is the very embodiment of the type of relationship with God that we seek even today.

And then, according to John, Jesus adds: “No one comes to the Father but through me.”

It’s those words that send us reeling. Is Jesus no different than Bailey Smith?

One New Testament scholar says: “At this point the Christian faith comes under challenge. Images of bumper stickers arise in which a single index finger is held aloft. “One Way,” they proclaim, defiantly eliminating all who think otherwise about the gospel and all Jews and Muslims; necessarily, too, eliminating the peoples of black Africa, and India, and of China, Japan, and Korea, who have some good ideas about the Tao or “way” but distinctly [different] ideas about God. Are all other approaches to God or to ultimacy in the universe eliminated by this Gospel on the principle of ‘Jesus said…’?”

If we are to get some help from the words of Jesus we need to engage in what my Divinity School classmate, Gail O’Day, calls an “act of theological imagination.” That is, we must approach these words of Jesus in the Gospel of John as we do all words of scripture—not just looking literally at their face value but exploring what the author was claiming in his time before we can say what they might mean for us.

To read the Gospel of John is to enter into the world of one small group of Christians in the late first century. Most likely they did not know the other three gospels that we have. They didn’t know the birth stories found in Matthew and Luke that are so familiar to us. They didn’t know the fast-paced stories of Jesus found in Mark. The unknown author of this gospel probably was a follower of John, the disciple of Jesus. He (or she) took what he had learned and interpreted the life and teachings of Jesus for his community.

The small community who first knew this gospel was made up of people whose lives had been seized by the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. They believed that God was known to them because of the incarnation—simply put, in knowing Jesus, they knew God. What distinguished them as Christians from people of other faiths is the conviction that they had access to God through Jesus Christ.

As a result of this faith, they became increasingly at odds with the Jewish religious community to which they belonged. So as we read through the Gospel of John we hear again and again of conflicts that Jesus had with the religious authorities. And when Jesus says “no one comes to the Father except through me,” he means “none of you disciples,” defining God for the disciples in the same way that John does for the members of his community.

These words are not the sweeping absolute claim of a major world religion. They are, instead, the developing conviction of a tiny group of a minority religion in the ancient world. And these words are the joyous, world-changing affirmation of those very people.

These words are not exclusionary, but particular. In them, one early Christian community announces, “This is who we are, people who believe in the God who has been revealed to us decisively in Jesus Christ.”

It is a distortion to use these words in a battle over the merits of the world’s religions. They are not concerned with the fate of Hindus, Buddhists, or Muslims, nor with the inferiority or superiority of modern Judaism and Christianity.

Rather than settling the issue of how we as Christians relate to people of other faiths, scripture sends us back to listen and to talk with those whose faith is different from our own. We engage in that dialogue best when we are clear about what we believe. In that way we might better understand the faith of other men and women.

In our time, such conversation takes on a great urgency.

Andrew Sullivan recently asked: “How can Israel negotiate with people who are certain their instructions come from heaven and so decree that Israel must not exist in Muslim lands? Equally, of course, how can one negotiate with fundamentalist Jews who claim the West Bank is theirs forever by biblical mandate? Or with Fundamentalist Christians who believe that Israel’s expansion is a biblical necessity rather than a strategic judgment?

“There is a way out,” he suggests. “And it will come from the only place it can come from—the minds and souls of people of faith. It will come from the much derided moderate Muslims, tolerant Jews, and humble Christians. The alternative to the secular-fundamentalist death spiral is something called spiritual humility and sincere religious doubt. Fundamentalism is not the only valid form of faith, and to say it is, is the great lie of our time.”

Our world and our time require a humble faith, one that is at home among other faiths, comfortable in asserting our own beliefs and comfortable in living along side those with different affirmations. This is the reformation for which we should pray and toward which we should act.

The gift of the United Church of Christ is a form of Christianity uniquely suited to help us negotiate our way in a world where faith matters and in which religions are many. We begin and we end our spiritual journey in the majesty and mystery and wonder that is God.

In a sense this is what Paul was getting at in his letter to the Romans. After exploring the complex relationship of Jews and Christians, after looking logically and historically at the issues, after concluding that God’s eternal covenant with the Jewish people would not be broken even as gentile Christians came into a new covenant with the living God, Paul finally comes to the mystery that is beyond all faith:

“O the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are God’s judgments and how inscrutable God’s ways! ‘For who has known the mind of God?’ From God and through God and to God are all things. To God be the glory forever.”

To which we can only respond, as Paul did: Amen.