Marcia Sietstra:  Pastor

This past week I needed to take a day to study.  Ever since the Sept. 11 attack, I have felt a pressing need to continue the study I began this summer at the Chautauqua Institution.  They are involved in a program called The Abrahamic Initiative.  It is the study of the 3 great world religions that trace their beginnings to Abraham.  Those of Jewish faith who practice Judaism, those of Christian faith, and Muslims who practice Islam—all trace their beginnings to Abraham.  I felt the study was terribly important before the attack on America by terrorists who identify themselves as fundamentalist Muslims.  Now I am convinced it’s not only important but also absolutely necessary for us to understand other growing religions, particularly because other religions are now part of America.   

I visited an Internet site called The Pluralism Project this week.  It is a project directed by Harvard University’s religion department, primarily by Diana Eck, a scholar of world religions who also happens to be a Methodist.  Pluralism is the condition of having many in relationship.  The pluralism project studies the many, many religions now in America.  It also studies how the multireligious reality affects public life.  If you visit www.pluralism.org, you will see that they also track violence against religious groups, and in the last 2 weeks, dozens and dozens of cases of violence have been added to their report.  People are afraid, and looking for someone to blame.  Whoever is unfamiliar makes an easy target.  

We in the Midwest have been slow to realize just how different America’s religious landscape looks today.  Did you know that there are more Muslims in the United States than there are members of the United Church of Christ?  There are more Muslims than Episcopalians.  If you look at the Chicago metropolitan Yellow Pages, you will see dozens of entries under the headings "Churches: Buddhist" or "Churches: Islamic."  There are nearly 70 mosques and Islamic centers in the Chicago metropolitan area.  It is estimated that there are half a million Muslims in the Chicago area.   

In Chicago you would also find two sizable and elaborate Hindu temples and 18 smaller places of Hindu worship.  There are at least 25 Buddhist temples. The new American immigrants have brought their faith with them to this country and are quietly practicing it.  It is happening in New York, Houston, Los Angeles, Oklahoma City, Denver and Portland.  And in thousands of small communities, immigrants gather to maintain for themselves and preserve for their children the traditions of faith that link them together culturally—in living rooms or rented halls, or even in vacated Methodist or Baptist churches!  Many of them are unnoticed by the average American…at least, until the terrorist attack in New York City and Washington D.C. caused us to take a serious look at our neighbors of different faiths.  

We are also getting a good lesson about the plurality of beliefs within religions.  I have often shuddered to think how little the beliefs of Jerry Fallwell and Pat Robertson resemble my beliefs.  Now the whole world is learning that there are different "religions" within Christianity, and different "religions" that call themselves Muslim.  The beliefs of the fundamentalist Taliban are about as different from mainstream Islam, as the beliefs of the Ku Klux Klan (which calls itself Christian) is different from mainstream Protestant Christianity.  So we are looking at a plurality of religions in America and a plurality within those religions!   

This morning I’d like to suggest 2 questions that I think the changing religious context in America raises.  First, do Christians dare to claim that only we have religious truth, in other words that salvation belongs exclusively to us? That’s one question.   The second is, how should we relate to all of these other religions next door and across the street?  

Before I share some perspectives on those 2 questions, I want to share a story written by Dr. WesleyAriarajah, a former World Council of Churches Dialogue Program Director.  When Dr. Ariarajah was very young, he pastored a Methodist church in Sri Lanka for a time.  One day on the train from Jaffa to Colombo, which is an 8-hour ride, he found himself sitting next to an elderly Hindu man.  

They talked for hours about a variety of subjects, and he found that the elderly Hindu man was very scholarly, wise, and deeply religious.  They were having an interesting conversation about their own faith perspectives when several young persons came walking up to them.  They were teenagers doing "train evangelism" which meant they would get into a train and ride to the next stop, giving their personal testimony to passengers on the way and handing out pamphlets.  They would get off the train at the next stop and repeat the performance on the return journey.

One young man sat down with Dr. Ariarajah and the elderly Hindu man and offered to give his testimony.  He told them about how he had been drinking, and leading a bad life of disobedience to his parents.  Then he was introduced to Christ, and his life was transformed.  He knew he was "saved" and now he was making the offer of salvation in Christ to these two learned, deeply devout religious men, not having any idea of their religion.  The teenager was genuine and sincere.  After the teenager left them, Dr. Ariarajah turned to his Hindu fellow-traveller and asked, "How did that come across to you?"   

His Hindu friend was looking out of the train window, pondering, watching the trees, buildings, land, people, and cattle, all fleeting past.  Finally the Hindu man said, "How old do you think this young man is?"  "Well, perhaps sixteen or seventeen," Dr. Ariarajah answered.  There was silence, and then the question, "Now that he has found salvation at the age of seventeen, what is he going to do with the rest of his life?"  

The Hindu man asked this question because for the Hindu, salvation is a life-time pursuit.  In his faith there is a strong sense of the soul’s alienation from God because of the sin of self-centeredness.  God, however, out of love and grace, accompanies the soul through its life and its life-experiences and, if necessary, through many lives, in order to show the soul that it is utterly futile to center one’s life on oneself rather than God.  

What did this teenager have to give this man?   What was the nature of "salvation" the young man was offering to the sixty-some year old person who had been steeped in his scriptures, seen the ups and downs of life, and could perhaps testify to many moments of awareness of standing in the presence of god?   The Hindu man’s faith life is full of songs or psalms that expressed the sense of awe, delight and rapture over the unrelenting love and grace of God.  His God, said Dr. Ariarajah, was a God like my own, one that will not "let go" but patiently accompanies the soul until it realizes where it actually belongs.  For him, all the life-experiences that awaited the seventeen-year-old would teach him about life and its true goal, what is worth pursuing and what is not, what leads to "Life" and what does not.  For the Hindu, the experience that the young man shared would be only a tiny beginning of the life-time process of turning and returning to god.  

Dr. Ariarajah says, "To claim to have had salvation so expeditiously and so early is too much of a claim to make for a 17-year-old who has not met the vicissitudes of life.  The Hindu would agree that a dramatic religious experience can help the teenager mend his ways.  But to talk of this in terms of "sin" and "salvation", even when it was an attempt to turn one’s life to God, is to trivialize both concepts."[1]  I would add, it also trivialized the Hindu man’s life-long relationship with God.  

I know there are verses in the Bible that suggest that if you don’t "believe in" Jesus Christ, your faith is useless.  There are verses that make it sound like anyone who doesn’t believe a specific set of beliefs about Jesus is doomed.  I also know that Jesus himself seemed very little concerned about any set of correct beliefs.  He was far more intent on people behaving in ways that show they love God and their neighbors as themselves  

I am increasingly convinced that if we study primarily what Jesus said about himself and God, he completely deemphasized attention to himself, and he emphasized belief in the God he revealed.  That is, in a God of grace who loves us and expects us to live good, ethical lives.  This is a deemphasis on what Paul wrote in the New Testament (Paul who never met Jesus in person) and an emphasis on Jesus, creating a canon within a canon.  After studying how the bible was formed, I am comfortable giving preference to the gospels.   

 I also recall many Old Testament texts, especially the psalms that suggest that God is known through nature and creation.  These texts were written, of course, long before Jesus Christ lived.  And then there are texts such as this one in John 10 (vs.14-16) that say the saving mystery of Christ may be available to those outside the fold of Christ.  It says:  I am the good shepherd; I know my own and my own know me, as the Father knows me and I know the Father; and I lay down my life for the sheep.  And I have other sheep, that are not of this fold; I must bring them also, and they will heed my voice.  

Just as we have had to do so many other times, we must weigh scripture against scripture, and individual  writers against the overall themes of scripture.  Remember I have talked about how strongly the bible supports slavery, and yet we cannot believe a loving God would want us to enslave other human beings. Here is another instance when the theme of the New Testament ( a loving God) overrides texts that contradict it.  I am one of the growing number of Christians who believe a loving God also would not deny grace to the vast majority of the world’s population because they didn’t have a specific set of beliefs about Jesus Christ.  I keep going back to those words in Romans (8:26) where even Paul says Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how  to pray as we ought, but the Spirit intercedes for us with signs too deep for words.  And he who searches the hearts of men knows what is the mind of the spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.  

The World Council of Churches has a dialogue program that has been discussing religious pluralism in recent years.  Dr. Ariarajah, in his book, Not Without My Neighbors, describes a shared belief of many involved in this dialogue, which is this: to insist that the knowledge of God is available to people only when they have accepted Christ does not do justice to who God is. Dr. Ariarajah explains, "It was inconceivable that the God of love, compassion and grace, whom we have come to know in Jesus Christ, would not have a relationship with people who are God’s own creation."  

The participants at one of their gatherings in Baar, Switzerland wrote a statement that says, in part, "Where there is truth and wisdom in the teachings of a plurality of religious traditions, and love and holiness in their living, this, like any wisdom, insight, knowledge, understanding, love and holiness that is found among us, is the gift of the Holy Spirit."[2]

I find myself recognizing a need to move beyond a theology which confines salvation to the explicit personal commitment to Jesus Christ.  In this view there is no such God as "our God."  God is not ours…we are God’s.  And we cannot set limits to the saving power of God.  

Please don’t misunderstand me.  All religions are not equally able to help us relate to God.  Some beliefs that call themselves Christian, using the example of the Ku Klux Klan again for example, are absolutely abhorrent to me.  I am not suggesting we say all roads lead to god.  What I am suggesting is that perhaps we Christians do not have an exclusive road to god.   

The only way to know, and to learn from each other’s wisdom, is to be in dialog, and this is perhaps one good thing that can come out of the new war on terrorism.  Perhaps this has awakened us to the presence of other religions in a world that is getting smaller.  Many conflicts feed on ignorance and prejudice, and an informed understanding of one’s neighbor’s perspective is an important piece of living in community.  

In Queens, New York a NY Times reporter recently found people from 11 countries on a single floor of an apartment building on Justice Avenue—all living in isolation and fear—each certain that they were the only immigrants there.  Think about how many instances of violence in recent weeks might have been avoided if people knew more about one another.   

I used to be an advocate of tolerance.  Tolerance isn’t enough anymore; we need to be in dialogue and understand each other.  Harvard Professor Diana Eck says, "Tolerance is simply too thin a foundation for a world of religious differences.  It does nothing to remove our ignorance of one another, and leaves in place the stereotype, the half-truth, the fear that underlie old patterns of division and violence. In the world into which we now move, our ignorance of one another will be increasingly costly."[3]  

For too long religious leaders each have taught the superiority of his or her own religion and called for the total allegiance of everyone else.  If we want harmony, then it is time to establish a community of respect.  There is no need to achieve religious agreement; there is a need to achieve understanding.  We will never achieve uniformity, nor would we want to.  But we can achieve relationship. May we be part of that process, beginning with doing what we can to learn about and be in dialogue with good people of other faiths.  Amen.  

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[1] S. Wesley Ariarajah, Not Without My Neighbor:  Issues in Interfaith Relations, WCC Publications, Geneva, Switzerland: 1999, p. 128.

[2] Ibid. p. 116.

[3] Diana Eck, "Neighboring Faiths", The Harvard Magazine, Sept.-Oct. 1996, online at http://www.harvard-magazine.com/issues/so96/faith.4.html.