V Easter – May 22, 2011 – Year A (RCL)
A year or two ago, when I was more active in the science & religion dialogue that the DePauw Spiritual Life Center sponsors on campus than I was this year, I found myself having to answer a challenging question.
It was put to me rather suddenly by one of the young skeptics in the group, someone who clearly had rejected long ago whatever brand of the Christian faith he had grown up with, after I had pointed out that many Christians have no trouble whatsoever reconciling rigorous scientific inquiry with having a strong faith in God (I think I may have trotted out that old favorite about Episcopalians not being asked to check their brains at the church door).
“So,” was his response, “then how do you see your—how do you see your…call as a minister of the Church?”
A fair question.
I hesitated a bit, thinking of how I could best phrase it (after all, it wasn’t as if I were being examined for ordination), then I said: “I guess I feel that it’s my job, wherever I’m sent, to do everything I can to protect my people from their religion.”
I think my answer kind of surprised him.
Actually, it surprised me a bit, too.
“Now, where did that come from?” I may have thought, before I plunged on ahead, knowing I could hardly leave it at that: “People can so easily allow their religion to interfere with their spiritual growth, and they can also so easily use their religion to limit the spiritual growth of others,” I said. “If I can help someone avoid that pitfall or recover from its effects, then I’ve done a little more to make the world a better place and a little more to further the spread of God’s kingdom on this earth.”
Looking back at that statement, however brash it may sound, I think I’m going to stand by it.
We’re coming up on—it’s hard to believe—the tenth anniversary of September 11th, and I remember, after several Greencastle clergy led a small group of concerned citizens to Plainfield to demonstrate our solidarity with our Muslim brothers and sisters at the mosque three days later, the controversial exchange that threatened to erupt in the pages of the Banner Graphic, when a letter to the editor criticized us for claiming that Muslims and Christians (and Jews) pray to the same God.
(I say “threatened to erupt” because I wrote a reply, but I didn’t send it to the newspaper; I put it in the next issue of our parish newsletter, since what I wanted was some clarity, not more controversy.)
I’m sure our critic meant well, but I doubt that I would ever have been able to persuade him of the absurdity of his position anyway: the notion that the efficacy of prayer, let alone the existence of God, depends in any way on my idea or anyone else’s idea of who God is or isn’t.
Thank heaven there’s a lot more to God than that which resides in the confines of the human imagination!
After all, those confines can get pretty narrow.
Quite a bit of newsprint and a goodly amount of media space has been expended once again on the latest impassioned prediction of the Rapture and the end of the world, scheduled this time for sometime last night, depending on what time-zone you were in.
Cooler heads than Harold Camping, the self-styled “prophet” who came up with the time-table, including my retired colleague, Fr. Harold Smith, offered some intelligent words in yesterday’s Indianapolis Star, and I’m sure that there were similar pieces printed all across the country, but the one-liner by a United Methodist pastor is the point I want to focus on: “People are fascinated with the end times because there’s a lot of mystery about it, and people enjoy and are fascinated by the mysterious,” wrote the Rev. Chris Roberts. “I don’t know if it serves any other purpose.”
Well, undue fascination with the end times may not serve any other purpose, but it certainly has its consequences, intended and unintended.
“I find it a shame,” Pastor Roberts posted on his church’s website on Friday, “how many jokes will be made about Christians in the next 24 to 48 hours because of this fringe group….”
Actually, I enjoyed following “Doonesbury” in the comic pages this past week, where Zonker asks to borrow his neighbor’s rake, only to have the neighbor tell him to keep the rake and take his weed whacker, too, and even his Mercedes, if he’d like.
“What’s going on here?” Zonker asks. “I’m being raptured on Saturday,” his neighbor answers. “Come May 21, I’ll be sitting in heaven. Sadly, you won’t.” “Pretty close,” Zonker replies. “I’ll be sitting in my new Mercedes.”
True, his neighbor counters by suggesting that a Mercedes will be hard to handle in a lava flow, but Zonker wins the exchange hands down in my book.
Christianity can hold its own, maybe even benefit from having that kind of nimble wit thrown at it.
It’s the premise that lurks behind the morbid fascination with the end times that makes for the kind of religion people need to be protected from: the almost gleeful claim, personified so perfectly by Chester, Zonker’s neighbor, that I’m going to heaven, but you aren’t, not to mention the absolute perversion of generosity that results from my giving you all my possessions because I won’t need them (but you won’t be able to use them either!).
Sadly, that twisted feeling may be the part of being raptured that those who assume they are going to be raptured most enjoy.
Such narrowness of mind and spirit not only displays disdain, if not hate, for one’s fellow human beings, if they happen not to share one’s beliefs; it also stifles any possible chance of spiritual growth on one’s own part; it dumps one hopelessly in an abyss of pure ignorance.
It is the kind of religion that people need to be protected from.
Which brings me to that line in this week’s Gospel lesson from John that I have always had the most trouble with: You know, the one where Jesus says, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”
It happens to be the one that that letter-writer some ten years ago tried to use as a proof-text to bolster his argument about Jews, Muslims, and Christians not praying to the same God, an argument which I maintained earlier suggests that God’s identity is under our control, not God’s control.
I’m indebted to Quinn Caldwell, a United Church of Christ pastor, writing in the latest issue of The Christian Century, for suggesting that Jesus may not be saying “My way or the highway!”, when he tells Thomas, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.”
Pastor Caldwell alludes to the Syro-Phoenician woman whom Jesus first rebuffed, calling her a dog, when she begged him to heal her daughter, then relented, when the woman persisted, reminding him that even dogs deserve the leftovers from the table.
“Didn’t what started out as misunderstanding, anger, judgment, maybe even fear,” Caldwell asks, “—didn’t that end up with the Savior of the world learning a thing or two from a foreign woman of a different faith?”
When I hear him say to Thomas, “I am the way,” I fall to wondering with Caldwell, whether Jesus was once more patiently inviting his disciples to walk a different path, to take a better way—a way that he himself had discovered by listening prayerfully to his Father and listening prayerfully to anyone who sensed in him God’s presence.
“In other words,” Caldwell suggests, “[Jesus] is saying: ‘Learn what I’ve learned.… Believe what I’ve come to believe: grace is for everybody….’”
“…even the ones.” I would venture to add, “who don’t believe in…God [the same way] you [or I] do.”
Is that what Jesus meant, when he said to Thomas: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”—that following Jesus’ way would lead them to places in their spiritual pilgrimage where they had never ever been before?
Or is that what I wish he meant?
We have evidence elsewhere in the Gospel according to John that Jesus was aware of the fact that he had “other sheep that did not belong to this fold”.
Is that an indication or at least a hint that he hoped that his disciples could learn to be spiritually open to a way that was more inclusive and less exclusive in its approach, “seek[ing] and serv[ing] Christ in all persons”, as we promise to do in the Baptismal Covenant, “loving [their] neighbor as [themselves]”?
Or am I reading too much into a few words that we only have because someone in the early Church thought to write them down?
Either way I have come to value the opportunities I have been given to work and worship with people of other faiths, and, like Quinn Caldwell, “have come to believe that the future will be made of such [blessed] moments.”
I’m also glad that the end of the world was delayed yet again so that I had time to finish this sermon!
Thanks be to God!
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