EMBRACING THE CONTRADICTION
Isaiah 40:12-17,27-28, John 14:1-7
Scott D. Anderson
January 6, 2002
Claremont Presbyterian Church
Scott Anderson is the Executive
Director of the California Council of Churches
[posted here on 2-25-02]
Last June I traveled to Bossey, Switzerland, just
outside of Geneva, to the World Council of Churches Retreat Center for a
week-long seminar on "Ecumenical Leadership in the 21st
Century."
Twenty-six of us from 18 nations gathered to explore
the challenges we face in the global Christian community and our
response to those challenges as executives working for Councils of
Churches around the world.
While there were a number of issues we all shared in
common, the most compelling and perplexing that emerged during our
retreat focused on the relationship of Christianity to other faiths.
In Nepal and Indonesia, where Christians comprise a
tiny minority and where proselytizing is illegal, the church struggles
for identity and purpose in a hostile political and religious
environment. In Africa, the conflict takes shape between the
"missionary-funded churches," (the MFCs), started by the
missionary movements of the 19th century, and the "African
instituted churches" (the AICs) which have sprung up in the last
three decades and are a blending of Christian teaching and indigenous
African spirituality.
The Director of the Malawi Council of Churches, Dr.
Augustine Musopole, joked at the lunch table one day that the
Presbyterian Church of Malawi, an MFC, is today more Scottish than the
Church of Scotland, and this presents an enormous challenge when
confronted with the phenomenal growth and appeal of the AICs.
In the US, the majority Christian culture has always
looked with suspicion at our religiously pluralistic landscape, whether
it is Native American shamanism, New Age spirituality, the Church of
Scientology, or the Mormons.
Sept. 11 has put the Islamic faith up on our national
radar screen. Given the 350 hate crimes in California perpetrated
against Muslims and Sikhs (who are mistaken as Muslims), Sept. 11 once
again reminds us of our own ignorance and misunderstanding about
religious traditions outside our own and our uneasy co-existence.
How do we relate to people of other faiths? How do we
build into our own sense of ourselves as Christians a positive response
to those who are religiously different, so that, when we do relate to
them and engage with them, we don't feel that we are giving up anything
of who we are, but in fact we are doing this because we are Christians?
"I am the way, the truth and the life. Nobody comes to the Father,
expect through me." These words of Jesus in the gospel of John are
often cited as the greatest stumbling block to our interfaith
engagement.
But Jesus is not concerned in these words with the
fate of Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists, or with the superiority or
inferiority of Christianity in relation to the world religions. He is
speaking directly to his twelve disciples. Disciples who are worried,
frightened, and confused about the swirl of events which marked the last
days of their master's life.
What the disciples needed was reassurance and
reaffirmation in the One they had come to know as the Way, Truth and
Life. And Jesus gives it with such simple clarity in their time of
greatest need; "None of you, my disciples, comes to the Father
except through me. If you know me, you will know my Father also."
This is the core claim of Christian identity, a
reminder to disciples then and now of what distinguishes us from people
of other faiths: through Jesus Christ we have access to God. And in
making that claim, the gospel writer John seems less interested in what
makes Christianity exclusive and more interested in what makes
Christianity concrete and distinctive..
The prophet Isaiah is facing the exact opposite
situation. It wasn't that the ancient Israelites were afraid and
confused; they had become too self-assured that they had found the
divine presence in graven images and corrupt rulers. Now exiled to
Babylon for the error of their ways, Isaiah reminds them that God is
much larger and more mysterious than they conceive:
"Who has measured the waters in the hallow of his
hand?" Isaiah asks rhetorically. "Who has marked off the
heavens with a span, enclosed the dust of the earth in a measure, and
weighed the mountains in scales and the hills in a balance? Who has
directed the spirit of the Lord, or as his counselor has instructed him?
All the nations are as nothing before him……Have you not known, have
you not heard, the Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends
of the earth. He does not faint or grow weary, his understanding is
unsearchable……"
In contrast to the twelve disciples, what the ancient
Israelites needed to hear was that God was something more than they
knew: the almighty, all-powerful sovereign Ruler of heaven and earth,
unlimited by anything or anyone, absolutely free to do whatever the
divine will pleases...
Which portrait of God prevails in our Christian faith?
The God who is fully known, or the God who is not fully known? The One
who is concretely and distinctively the Way the Truth and the Life, or
the One whose understanding is unsearchable, whose ways are larger than
anything we can fathom? Which is it? The Bible is unapologetic in its
answer: It's both, and our ability to relate to people of other faiths
is dependent on our ability to embrace this contradiction, this paradox
about God. When we don't embrace it, danger lurks.
If we lose sight of the fact that God is more than we
can know, "I am the way, the truth and life, nobody comes to the
Father except by me," can lead to a stark, black and white view of
the world which is filled with two kinds of people: the good kinds of
folks who believe like us, and the evil kinds of folks who believe like
them, the righteous ones who are going to heaven, and the unrighteous
who deserve their fate. If this kind of rhetoric sounds all too familiar
in the speeches of Islamic fundamentalist Osama bin Laden, we need to
look no farther than our own faith tradition for fundamentalist
atrocities committed in the name of God.
Andrew Sullivan in the New York Times pointed
out this fall that for most of its history, the record of Christianity
is just as bad, if not worse, than Islam's. From the Crusades to the
Inquisition to the bloody religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries
to the Salem witch trials of Colonial America, our forebears have been
all too eager to play judge, jury and executioner.
To the fundamentalist of whatever stripe, the world is
truly a terrifying place. If you believe that women should be consigned
to polygamous, concealed servitude, as bin Laden does, then Manhattan
must appear like Gomorrah. If you believe that homosexuality is a crime
punishable by death, as both fundamentalist Islam and a literal reading
of the Old Testament dictate, then the world of same-sex marriage is
surely Sodom.
And so it is not a big step to argue such centers of
evil should be destroyed or undermined, as bin Laden does, or to believe
that their destruction is somehow a consequence of their sin, as Jerry
Falwell argued. Hear again Falwell's infamous words in the wake of Sept
11: "I really believe that the pagans, the abortionists, and the
feminists, along with the gays and lesbians … and the ACLU … all of
them who tried to secularize America -- I point the finger in their face
and say, "You helped make this happen."
When we fail to embrace the contradiction, to live
within the paradox of God's identity, we forgo the humility and genuine
openness that comes when we confess that God is more than we know.
The opposite is true for the Isaiah text. When we lose
sight of God as concretely and distinctively revealed in Jesus Christ,
God becomes so impersonal and mysterious as to blur the differences of
the world's religions. We end up embracing a sort of "melting
pot" God that gets reduced to the most primitive kind of common
denominators.
The fastest growing congregation in midtown
Sacramento, where I work, is the Spiritual life Center, now numbering
some 800 families. The Spiritual Life Center embraces all the major
religious traditions. If you were to attend worship there last November,
my guess is that you would be celebrating Ramadan. The following week
would mark the start of Advent, then later in December Hanukkah, then
Christmas, and then you would finish the year with Kwanzaa.
We need to acknowledge that this is a very appealing
alternative for many post-modern Americans.. I suspect that most of the
members of the Spiritual Life Center are refugees from our own faith
tradition, who have grown disenchanted with the excesses of Christian
fundamentalism and are searching for a more tolerant, open spirituality.
The dilemma here is that when we fail to embrace the
contradiction, to live within the paradox, we forgo the centeredness -
the grounding - that comes when we confess that God is fully revealed in
Jesus Christ. God becomes so big and blurry that the Christian gospel
gets stripped of its redemptive power and concreteness.
On my way home from Switzerland in June I took a
two-week detour through the Scottish highlands, and spent three days on
the Isle of Iona, off the West Coast of Scotland. Iona is a very small
island with a very big history: the birthplace of Christianity in
Scotland, and the burial ground for dozens of Scottish kings.
What gives Iona its special quality is probably a
mixture of this sense of history, of a humanly and spiritually
significant place in the landscape, with the striking effect of the
wildness of the elements and the natural beauty. The late George
MacLeod, founder the modern Iona Community and rebuilder of the ancient
abbey church on the island, describes Iona as "a thin place,"
a place where the membrane between the material world and the spiritual
world is particularly thin. That certainly was my experience.
In the middle of the 6th century, an Irish monk named
Columba sailed from Ireland to Iona to establish a monastery there.
Columba grew up in a pagan household which practiced the religion of the
Druids. His father and mother were both of royal lineages; most scholars
now believe that if Columba had not become a monk, he would have become
an Irish king. While we don't know where Columba first encountered the
Christian faith, we do know his evangelical zeal led him to set sail for
Iona.
As Columba and his small band of monks traveled from
Iona through the highlands of Scotland to plant monasteries … they
encountered people imbued with the same religious sensitivities of
Columba's boyhood, that of the Druids. Druidic paganism was not unlike
the spirituality of Native Americans, people who saw no separation
between the material and spiritual world -- it was all sacred -- and who
spoke of God as both father and mother.
As Columba interacts with this indigenous druidic
religion, something remarkable and unprecedented begins to happen in
this process of interfaith engagement. Instead of wiping out the
indigenous faith and replacing it with a purely Roman Catholicism, as
many others would do who followed later, Columba went about setting up
parishes and centers of learning that were distinctively Celtic and
utterly unique in the Christian world of his day.
The burgeoning Celtic Christian movement of Columba
established egalitarian monasteries where both men and women shared in
leadership and where there was little priestly hierarchy, and absolutely
unheard of development that drove Rome crazy.
And in their teaching, worship, and missionary work,
these Celtic Christians practiced an earthy spirituality that affirmed
that all creation is blessed. Columba came to believe that this was, in
fact, the uncompromising teaching of Holy Scripture. He saw the task of
humankind as steward, priest and custodian of the created order of which
we are an integral part.
While Columba was written off as a "pagan
Christian" during the Reformation, in the modern era the church has
rediscovered his Celtic Christian teachings: Not as a derivation of the
Christian faith but as a more authentic Christian faith. One that has
provided, among other things, the theological underpinnings of the
modern environmental justice movement.
You see, when we engage people of others faiths, with
our feet firmly grounded in the One who is the Way, the Truth, and Life,
and with our arms outstretched in humility and openness to the One whose
understanding is unsearchable, we don't lose our Christian faith, we
rediscover it . We end up asking a new set of questions, and looking at
what we believe through a new pair of lenses. This is what happened to
St. Columba. And this is what can happen for each of us.
Dr. Diana Eck, a leading comparative religion scholar
and a United Methodist, wrote recently, "If you know only one
religion, you know no religion."
Give us the courage to know more than one religion,
O God, so that we may more fully know our own.
Amen.
Ken
Boyer offers a comment on this sermon. [3-6-02]
