One Way

I Kings 16:29-33, Luke 10:25-37

July 11, 2010

Rochelle A. Stackhouse

There’s an old joke about a Jewish woman who dies and goes to heaven. She’s met at the gate by an angel who tells her he will now escort her to her eternal home. As they travel, they pass a Buddhist temple with beautiful chants and sweet smelling incense. Then they pass a mosque covered in the most amazing Arabic calligraphy. Then the angel stops her and tells her to tiptoe and be very quiet. When she asks why, he explains that they are about to pass a Christian church and she needs to be quiet, he explains, “because they think they’re the only ones here.”

There was a scripture I did not choose to be read today. It comes from the gospel of John where Jesus says, “I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except by me.” (John 14:6). That one verse, not present in any of the other gospels, has caused more trouble between Christians and other faiths than any other part of the Bible. It has been used as a justification for the most horrific religious violence, stuff that puts current Islamic terrorism in perspective. The Inquisition with its mass killings and forced “conversions” of Jews and Muslims. Crusades to the Holy Land. Witch hunts in Europe and New England. Whenever a religious group decides that it and it alone has the truth and all others are not only false, but evil, inevitably great suffering will follow.

Now one would like to think that in 21^st century America, Christians could not be led down the path of thinking their way was the only right way and therefore justified the persecution of others. But fear and prejudice do funny things to people. In several places around the country right now, a growing population of American Muslims is trying to get permission to build mosques so that they might worship. According to Fox News, in locations as diverse as Tennessee and Wisconsin, Christians are coming together to shout about safety and terrorism, and to commit acts of vandalism and make death threats. One proposed Mosque in downtown Manhattan in the neighborhood of the World Trade Center site has particularly drawn protest. The worry, apparently, is that these places of worship will train terrorists and spread the Muslim faith in our nation. In his usual biting style, John Stewart on Wed. night’s Daily Show noted that Christian scriptures make pretty clear that the job of Christians is also to spread the faith and to make all the world into Christians. He also noted that one of the fears of a growing Muslim population is that the desire to impose Sharia law might spread, but of course many Christian legislators in this country seek to enforce Christian values in our laws (he said, in reference to a Midwestern legislator, “Can I buy liquor in your town on Sunday and take it to Adam and Steve’s wedding?”)

If we believe only Christianity is right and true and the way that all people should worship and believe, then this sort of thing can easily follow. Of course, Christians still can’t agree with each other on what kind of Christianity is the true Christianity. The Pope declares that all non-Catholic churches are not actually churches. The UCC is labeled as “apostate” and “heretical” by many evangelical churches. In Jerusalem the keys to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre have to be held by Muslims so the Christian groups don’t fight over them.

How God must laugh at us; the alternative being to throw up hands and weep.

So let’s cut to the chase on this conversation about the relationship of Christianity to other faiths.

For me, Jesus is the way, the truth and the life. I have found God through him and find great joy, comfort, assurance and energy in that relationship. I want other people who may not be in relationship with God to know about what I have found and have the opportunity to learn of Jesus and explore faith themselves. But it is very much not my job to say who is saved and who is not.

There are other faith traditions with beliefs and practices I question, and I feel the need to challenge them when they are destructive to the law of love (the Golden rule which exists in some version in the vast majority of human religious traditions). When people make fact statements about other faiths to condemn them, I feel the need to seek out the truth so as not to “bear false witness.” For example, nowhere in the Koran are believers urged to become suicide bombers. Again, it is very much not my job to condemn people to hell or claim that they do not know God because they are Jewish or Muslim or anything else.

When the lawyer in the gospel story asked Jesus to define “neighbor,” the one whom the law says we are to love as much as we love ourselves, Jesus did not say “Jews from Israel are your neighbors.” He told a story in which “neighbor” is defined, as John Calvin says, as “anyone at all we may help,” or who could help us. In fact Jesus pointedly made the “neighbor” in our story someone who was not a Jew, but

a Samaritan, someone with a different religious identity from the person asking him the question. This story proclaims that the relationship we are to have to neighbors is one with mercy at the center, not debate about doctrine.

Every religious tradition, including our own, tends to breed an exclusivism which seeks to demonize others. Sadly. As a progressive Christian, I do not think it is my role to contribute to that practice or encourage it in others. It is my role to try very hard to love my neighbor as myself. I live in a neighborhood, on a street with only 9 houses, in which there are Mormon, Baptist, Jewish, Catholic and agnostic neighbors. That’s America; a test for loving neighbor who is not like you as you love yourself.

The 20^th century German theologian Jurgen Moltmann wrote: “I don’t know whether all religious people believe in the same god, but I am certain that the same God believes in all human beings, whether they are religious or not, because they are the beings [God] has created on [this] beloved earth.” (Sun of Righteousness Arise)

So are other faiths true? I don’t know. Will Jews and Muslims and Buddhists be in heaven? No clue. What I do know is that they are my neighbors, and the one I know as the way, the truth and the life has asked me to love them. Amen.