Rev. Paul Tellstrom

Irvine United Congregational Church                                                        

“Who Do We Say We Are—Part Two”                                                   

September 24, 2006

Hebrew Testament: Genesis 9:1, 6-17

Gospel Reading: John 14:1-7                                                           word count: 2,072

            The bible begins with the creation of all.  The story of Adam and Eve is the story of the first Christians, the first Jews, the first Muslims, the first of everything, and God created it.  To some, he created it as a masculine, bearded figure in a cloud, presiding over a world of some three hundred square miles, as was the view of the writers of scripture.  Others imagine God as the source of creative energy that blew the universe into being in a cosmic big-bang; where our earth totters precariously around a dying star in a field of such magnitude as can never be understood.  Still others look somewhere in-between.

            However, the opening acts of creation according to our scriptures, bring a world into being for humankind.  In later chapters of Genesis, we find that God has become angry at humanity and causes a flood to cover the earth.  God repents of this action, and we hear:

            “And God said, ‘This is the sign of the covenant, which I make between me and you

and every living creature that is with you, for all future generations: I set my rainbow

in the cloud, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth.  When I

bring clouds over the earth and the rainbow is seen in the clouds, I will remember my covenant, which is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh. When the a

rainbow is in the clouds, I will look upon it and remember the everlasting covenant

between God and every living creature of all flesh that is upon the earth.’”

Do you hear an echo of how the ancients recorded God?  In the clouds up there, God sits close enough so that the rainbow will remind him and us of his covenant.  This is a quixotic image of God, which will change in people’s perceptions to a God of perfection later on. 

But the point I wish to make is that the covenant with Noah is to all creation, not some of it.  Just as in the creation story, God has made a covenant with all and not with some.

We have different ways of looking at our faith, and at salvation.  Last week I outlined three ways; the exclusive, the inclusive, and the pluralistic.  I also talked about how we see Jesus through these understandings—Jesus as an instrument of salvation, and Jesus as revelation.  So, here is where I am going to stop and ask some questions, and I’d just like to see a show of hands.

How many of you come from a non-Christian or non-faith background? (roughly 5%)

How many of you come from this denomination?  (roughly 20%)  Keep your hands up—let’s add something.  How many of you come from mainline Protestant backgrounds?  Methodist, Presbyterian, Episcopal, Evangelical Lutheran, Disciples of Christ, and American Baptist? (a little more than half)

Now, how many of you come from a Catholic background?  (about 10%)

How many of you came from a conservative Protestant background, such as Evangelical, Pentecostal, Southern Baptist, Missouri Synod Lutheran?  (maybe 25%)

Finally, did anyone come from a church that called itself fundamentalist? (no-one)

Added to the list: five-seven people identified as Mormon.  Others called out names such as “Nazarene, Religious Science, Unitarian, and Jehovah’s Witnesses.  Some chose not to raise their hands.

Look at where the hands went up and how many there were as I went through the list.

In this room, we find that we are a collection of people who understand our faith in very different ways depending on how you grew up.  The Evangelical, the Pentecostal, and the Southern Baptist come here having learned that there is salvation only through Jesus Christ.  The Catholic comes with an inclusive understanding of God, yet where Christianity is at the center.  Some Mainliners come here with an inclusive or even a pluralistic understanding of God, where we are all walking up the same mountain but on different paths.

For some of you, you grew up hearing that Jesus is the instrument of salvation.  For others, Jesus was the teacher, healer and guide who reveals the pathway to the Divine.

Last week, the Los Angeles Times revealed a study that demonstrated how people say God differently depending on where they lived.  The Bible-belt south sees God as an authoritarian figure.  In the northeast, people envision a critical God.  In the Midwest, God is seen as benevolent, and in the west, God is thought of as distant.  More differences! 

Let’s add something else—do we think of God as being transcendent or immanent?  Look at your own hymnal!  If you open to hymn #1, you sing, “Immortal, Invisible, God only wise; by light inaccessible, hid from our eyes.”  God—out there, huge, immense…unknowable.  Then, move ahead to hymn # 475.  “Why should I feel discouraged…God’s eye is on the sparrow, and I know he watches me.”  Or that other great chestnut, “And He walks with me, and he talks with me, and he tells me I am his own…”  God—close by and personal, watching and knowing our every thoughts. 

There were different ears in this room when we heard this passage in John.

            “Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the

Father, but by me.”

It seems straightforward.  Here is some background.  The community of John was in dialogue, perhaps “argument” is the better word, with the community of Thomas over the same issues that we are discussing—Jesus as the physical instrument of salvation (John) versus Jesus as the revelation—showing us the way to live our lives working to assist the realm of God (Thomas).  In this passage, the writer of the Gospel of John has Jesus telling Thomas flat out what’s what.  It’s the instrument, Stupid.  You are wrong, we are right.  Not unlike arguments between Christians today, and it is still the same argument. 

But, beyond interpreting this passage from the historical critical viewpoint, I could make this observation: 

Jesus tells Thomas that no one can come to the Father except through him.  Jesus also talks about eternal life in yet another setting.  He tells a young man that for a person to have eternal life, he must sell everything he has and give it to the poor.

In the first case, Jesus is talking to a disciple as part of a conversation, and we want to make a theology out of it.

In the second case, Jesus comes right out and tells us what to do, and I don’t know anyone with the exception of Gandhi, who was not a Christian, who has done it.

In the first case, Gandhi did not overhear the conversation between Jesus and Doubting Thomas, and did not come through Jesus to the Father.  He is “unsaved.” 

In the second case, Gandhi did exactly what Jesus directly told us to do in order to have eternal life.  No Christians that I know of have sold everything they have in order to give it to the poor.  Is Gandhi saved and are we lost?

Dr. Wesley Ariarjah is a professor of religion at Drew University and a keynote speaker at a conference I attended through the Center for Progressive Christianity in Illinois. 

He has spent much time visiting other faith traditions and being a Christian worshipper in a non-Christian house of worship.  I shared with him that I have done this in Jewish temples, and we both agree that visiting other faith traditions and worship services often helps to strengthen our own faith in a God that encompasses all of humanity.  It helps us to feel the presence of the Divine in seeing the Divine at work in other traditions.

Ariarjah says that all religious traditions draw from sources that are divine and also demonic.  Not all traditions exhibit much of the divine love that passes all understanding.  Some are demonic in how their worldview treats people.  I can think of expressions of Christianity that are demonic—the Christian Identity movement, for example, as well as others who have reduced the Bible to an instrument of hate, focusing on the same two issues over and over (gays and abortion).

            What is faith then?  Anyone who has a belief in God that they can nurture is a person of faith.  There is a Christian faith, a Jewish faith, a Muslim faith, etc.  At the heart of each of these however, is faith itself.  The example I used last week gets to the heart of the matter. 

            When we see the light that comes through the stained glass window in this room, it is light that reflects the light of God shining in a multiplicity of colors and patterns, assisting worshipers to come to their Christian faith.

But when we see light that comes through stained glass windows, we have to remember that the window is not the light.  The light is the light—coming through our particular windows.  We don’t own the light because of how it filters down to us.  Any truth that comes to us is not coming to us from our tradition.  It is simply the truth.  We interpret it through our own particular windows of understanding.

There are three aspects of religion that we recognize:

The institutional—our structures, physical and non-physical, of being a gathered church,

The intellectual—the ways in which we grasp and then respond to our faith, and,

The mystical—how we internally feel God’s presence acting within our lives.

A simple faith with simple answers would be so much easier to have.  How do we who recognize the perplexities claim the truth inherent in our faith while acknowledging that God may be at work in many ways unknown to us through people in all times and places, and in faith traditions other than our own?

Someone might say, “Why bother?  Why be a Christian if others can reach God’s ear and grace?  If salvation is open to an “Anonymous Christian,” (Catholic theologian Karl Rahner’s name for one who lives a Christian life without knowing or pro-claiming Christianity) then what is it that we are professing?  Who is saved and who is not?”

Or, as the bumper sticker I saw recently seemed to query with as much urgency, “What if the Hokey-Pokey is what it’s all about?”

The answer for me is that we’ve been given a world full of all kinds of people, living with open hearts and minds, and our gospel has called us to reach out to and discover in them where Jesus is, whenever we can open the circle to include more and exclude less.

The complexity with which we look at faith opens us up to criticisms of relativism and of straying from the scriptures, but what is important is to see that the gospel is on the side of an all-embracing love.  It is those who look at faith narrowly who must defend it.

If you start with an exclusive understanding of faith, you will find that the exclusive texts will be the ones that jump out.  If you have an inclusive understanding of faith, you will find new dimensions of God, and texts will jump out to assist you.

We talk so glibly about knowing God these days, as if God were in our own particular pocket instead of being the great mystery that God is.  There are some things that we simply will never know and it must be all right to live with that tension.  It’s called, “living the questions.”

Jesus does say this, however, and his words will end mine here today.  “You shall know them by their fruits.”

If a religion makes you judgmental and narrow, then what does that say about how you come to know a God we define by the word “love”?

If a religion makes you more open and more loving, then what are the fruits of that particular interpretation?

I hope that your faith is an unenclosed one.  Unlike Mary McCarthy’s famous quote, “Religion makes good people a little better and bad people a little worse,” let faith make you open and more loving, more accepting of others, willing to accept that your God is bigger than you ever imagined, and grateful to know that the Divine is at work right now through the many voices who proclaim one God. 

Sermon Resource:

            My research is based largely on notes and readings from Dr. Wesley Ariarjah’s keynote speech, and our subsequent conversations.  From “Many Voices, One God,” a three day seminar on religious pluralism sponsored by The Center for Progressive Christianity, held in Champaign, Illinois, June 8-10, 2001.  Dr. Ariarjah is a professor or religion at Drew University.

Scripture for Sunday, September 24, 2001

“Many Voices, One God—Part Two”

Genesis 9:1, 6-17

And God blessed Noah and his sons, and said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth.

          Then God said to Noah and to his sons with him,  "Behold, I establish my covenant with you and your descendants after you, and with every living creature that is with you, the birds, the cattle, and every beast of the earth with you, as many as came out of the ark.  I establish my covenant with you, that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth."

And God said, "This is the sign of the covenant, which I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you, for all future generations: I set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth.  When I bring clouds over the earth and the bow is seen in the clouds, I will remember my covenant, which is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh; and the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all flesh. When the bow is in the clouds, I will look upon it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is upon the earth."

God said to Noah, "This is the sign of the covenant which I have established between me and all flesh that is upon the earth."

John 14:1-7

"Let not your hearts be troubled; believe in God, believe also in me.  In my Father's house are many rooms; if it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you?  And when I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also.  And you know the way where I am going."

Thomas said to him, "Lord, we do not know where you are going; how can we know the way?"

Jesus said to him, "I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father, but by me. If you had known me, you would have known my Father also; henceforth you know him and have seen him."