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Rev. Paul TellstromIrvine United Congregational Church“Who Do We Say We Are—Part Four” October 8, 2006 The Koran Three Selections Gospel Reading Luke 6:43-45 word count: 2,292
There is a story about an evil man, living in an evil place, who sets about finding out how he might change. He visits the three major western religions. He first goes to a rabbi at the synagogue and asks him how he might change from being an evil man to a good one. The rabbi tells him, but he does not like the answer, so he kills him. Next he goes to a priest at a church, who likewise delivers an answer that he does not like. He kills the priest. Finally, he visits an Imam at a mosque. He confesses that he is an evil man who wishes to change, and the Imam tells him what to do. Again, he does not like the answer and he kills the holy man. At his home after these three killings, he prays to Allah for help. Allah tells him that he must move from the evil city to the good city. By doing this he will lose the influence of evil around him and his pilgrimage will be one that demonstrates the desire to change from bad to good. On his way to the good city, the man falls down dead. The angels come and report this to Allah, along with the news that they must go take the man down to hell. Allah tells the angels that yes, the man was evil, but his intent was to change his ways. The angels say, “Yes, that may be true, but that is not what you have said and what is therefore recorded in your laws. The man must go to hell.” Allah’s answer is this: “If the man fell one step closer to the good city, then he shall be saved. If he died one step closer to the evil city, then he shall go to hell.” And with this answer, he sends the angels down to the road to check. But Allah, in the ways known only to Him, goes ahead of them, and finding the dead man on the road, picks him up in his arms and lays him down one step closer to the good city. This is what Christians would call, “the grace of God.” As I wind down this series, I am thinking about this story in terms of the presence of God outside of the many-windowed rooms called temple, mosque, church, or whatever name is given to a place where faithful people gather. In these places and through these traditions, people express praise, bring thanksgiving, or even come questioning to the Creative Force behind the universe that they call by various names meaning “God.” When people decide to return to these places (places like this) most who decide to bring their understanding of faith to a religious institution will say that they felt that God was at work in their lives before they became a part of a faith tradition. So God went ahead of the angels once again. Did God go ahead of the missionaries as well, creating a world of beauty for Native Americans to live in self-sufficient harmony with; praising God by calling the Creative Force by many spirit names, thus understanding and declaring their one-ness with nature and God? We have the written record, along with fragments of older written records, of religious traditions dating back four or five millennia. They are full of legalisms by which people are judged by religious authorities. People within the religion are judged, and people outside the particular religion are certainly judged, in fact, are even at times killed as infidels. Does God also go ahead of the religious authorities who interpret the law, in order to grant grace to the outcast individual regardless of the name by which that person calls God? I think it is important to recognize that God’s prime concern for creation is for individuals and not religious structures. The individual seeks happiness and understanding. Many people say that before they came to a church, they already felt God at work in their lives. So, religious structures exist as a conduit for a communal approach to the Divine. These structures are not called upon to pass judgment on those whose praise and prayers show a different understanding of God by the use of a different name for the Divine. They are not called upon by God to coerce or abuse mis-acquired powers. Does God even go ahead of humanity to reach out and move the individual closer to the City of God? Some of the first examples of spirituality do not even come from the human race. In the 50,000 year old uncovered graves of Neanderthals, there is evidence of belief in an afterlife. The bodies are bent into the fetal position that they started life in. Their graves are strewn with flowers, and filled with tools and materials for making fire. Why? We have learned that this species does not share our genetic material. They were not human beings, but a human-like species complementary to our own that somehow mysteriously phased out of being some 40,000 years ago. “So God created humankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” (Genesis 1:27) So, God also created another species of humankind who recognized the Creator and hoped for union. For untold millennia, then, God has been addressed in many names by many different voices. Questions arise. How can any religious institution build walls around God and suggest that the light that filters through their religious symbols in stained glass is the only way of perceiving truth? These institutions may own the beautiful windows, but the light itself from beyond bears the Truth, not the windows of a particular faith that intercepts and interprets it. Jesus brought us a message of freedom—freedom from legalism, freedom from religious authority, and the freedom to know that we are all connected to God with or without a religious tradition, through love of God and love of each other. He said, “The kingdom of God is within you.” We choose to come together in order to strengthen faith, understand faith, talk about faith, and act on our faith, and we do it as Christians, recognizing the authority in Jesus Christ in a place we call “church.” We hear religious authorities of all kinds today setting us apart from others. We have heard about the exclusivists, who believe there is no dialogue with anyone who has not been saved, as they understand it. We have heard about the inclusivists, who believe that theirs is the One True Faith, and yet God may go before his angels to bring a worthy non-believer closer to the City of God. We have learned about the pluralists, who believe that all roads of faith lead up the same mountain. There are also the reductionists, who boil faith down to common truths. And the relativists, who say that we cannot know Truth with a capital “T’ but only many truths with a small “t.” Then there are the syncretists, who say that every religion is a mixture of country and influences. There are humanists, who point to the individual only for spiritual sustenance. There are also particularists, who say that we are all coming from our own ways and can only see through our own lens. Next, the following faiths will find integrity in their faith above all others because: Jews know they are the chosen people. Christians say they follow the incarnation of God through whom comes salvation. Muslims say they are the only people of “The Book.” Zoroastrians will say they were the first monotheists. Bahais will say they were the last monotheists. Hindus will say that other traditions knew when their scriptures were written, but they don’t, meaning theirs are the only ones that are eternal. Does one faith have the whole corner on faith? Is it necessary to claim to hold God and the Absolute under your roof? Will the roof, and therefore the institution collapse if you see a beauty and integrity in another tradition? Jewish author and scholar, Rodger Kamenetz, writes: “In the past, dialogue between religions often meant disputation; the purpose of the dialogue, however polite on the surface, was to prove one religion superior to another. The mindset was: to the extent that my religion is right, yours must be wrong. In the dialogue between Judaism and Tibetan Buddhism, as embodied in the encounter between His Holiness the Dalai Lama and a group of rabbis and Jewish scholars that took place in 1990, there was a different spirit and a different challenge. As one of the participants, Rabbi Irving Greenberg, put it, ‘Can I hold myself open to the beauty of another tradition while yet affirming my own?’” “My own witness to this encounter led me to ask, what does my tradition say about the cultivation of loving kindness? Not simply as an attitude but as a living practice. Each tradition has something to teach us about loving kindness and the method of practicing it; each tradition has its areas of strong development and none has an exclusive monopoly on wisdom.”1 Interfaith dialogue is alive in Orange County. A few nights ago, I attended a dinner at the Hilton Hotel, sponsored by Global Cultural Connections, a non-profit led by Turkish pluralist Muslims. Our topic was, “Respecting the Sacred,” and we heard from a 7th Day Adventist, a rabbi, the Bishop of Orange, a Muslim, and Rev. Peggy Price from the Church of Religious Science. She closed out our evening with the words of the 13th century mystic, Rumi: “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about. Ideas, language, even the phrase “each other” Doesn’t make any sense.”
The Koran says, “To God belongs the East and West; whichever way you turn, the face of God is there.” As the Koran also says, “Had Allah pleased, He could have made you one nation: but it is His wish to prove you by that which He has bestowed upon you. Vie with each other in good works, for to Allah you shall return and He will declare to you what you have disagreed about.” Vie with each other, Christians, Muslims, Jews. Vie with each other, all faiths on earth—vie with each other in good works. In this day and age, it will be disastrous to vie in the building of power structures, for religious supremacy, or in claims to hold the One True God and all Truth therein. But vie with each other to live out the message that your faith brings you to believe above all other things. Who do we say we are as the people of this faith community today? As Christians, we spend too much time trying to be right about the legalistic methods of salvation and not enough time on salvific living. If we ask, “What does salvific living look like?” the answer is Jesus Christ. What is the truth that you know as a Christian that is worth staking your life on? The liberating message of Jesus Christ was to love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind; and to love your neighbor as yourself. Live the message that Christ gave us. It frees us from all legalisms and any walls that separate us from our neighbors of any faith as well as our neighbors of no faith. As we have heard today, the Koran and the Gospel of Luke share a similar message, one that I brought up two weeks ago. “You shall know them by their fruits.” If your religion makes you judgmental and narrow, what does that say about how you come to know a God we define by the word love? What does it say about the church in America today? Would a carpenter and devout Jew named Jesus who preached a gospel of the radically inclusive love of God recognize it as being created in his name and bearing his message? If your faith makes you more open and more loving, then what are the fruits of that particular interpretation of faith? Here is a story of salvific living. There was a missionary who was sent to India at the end of World War II to preach the gospel. He was given money to return for a Christmas vacation. When he reached the docks where his ship was that would take him home, he found some of the boatloads of Jewish refugees who were at all of the ports of India at this time. He greeted the Jews by saying, “Merry Christmas.” They responded by telling him that they were without justice, homes, family, or possessions, and to forgive them for not wishing him a Merry Christmas. The missionary asked them what Christmas present he could get for them, given where they were right now. The consensus among them was that they were hungry—hungry for the warm baked goods that they had missed since even before getting aboard the boat that would take them to safety. And so the missionary went and spent every penny he had for his passage home on warm pastries for all of the Jewish refugees at the docks. When he was done, he wired back home to ask for more money. The Missionary Society asked him why—and he told them what he had done. They said to him, “Why did you do that with mission money—they don’t even believe in Christ!” And he said, “Yes, but I do.” And so do I.
Sermon Resources: Today’s sermon is based largely on Rev. Dirk Ficca’s keynote address at “Many Voices, One God,” a three day seminar on religious pluralism sponsored by the Center for Progressive Christianity, and held in Champaign, Illinois, June 8-10, 2001. Rev. Dirk Ficca, Executive Director of the Council for a Parliament of the World's Religions, a nonprofit, nonsectarian organization fostering inter-religious encounter, dialogue, and cooperative common action in metropolitan Chicago and throughout the world.
1) Jewish Teachings on Loving Kindness, by Rodger Kamenetz Readings for Sunday, October 8, 2006 “Who Do We Say We Are—Part Four”
Readings from the Koran
Worship Leader:
“Had Allah been pleased, He could have made you one nation: but it is His wish to prove you by that which He has bestowed upon you. Vie with each other in good works, for to Allah you shall return and He will declare to you what you have disagreed about.”
“To God belong the East and West; whichever way you turn, the face of God is there.”
A Reading from the Koran, and Luke 6: 43-45
Worship Leader: Koran
“Do you not see how Allah compares a good word to a good tree? Its root is firm and its branches reach the sky; it yields its fruit in every season by Allah’s leave. But an evil word is like an evil tree torn out of the earth and shorn of all its roots.”
Paul: Luke 6:43-45
43 “No good tree bears bad fruit, nor again does a bad tree bear good fruit; 44 for each tree is known by its own fruit. Figs are not gathered from thorns, nor are grapes picked from a bramble bush. 45 The good person out of the good treasure of the heart produces good, and the evil person out of evil treasure produces evil; for it is out of the abundance of the heart that the mouth speaks.”
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