Sunday, November 9, 2014 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

The Things We Pass Down

Joyce Shin
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 78:1–7
Joshua 24:1–3a, 14–25

The twenty-first century will be religious, or it will not be.

André Malraux

“Choose this day whom you will serve.” Every first and second generation of religious immigrants, sooner or later, faces this injunction. In the midst of the day-to-day scramble of trying to start a new life in a new land, of putting their children on a path that will make their lives easier, more comfortable, and more stable, they cannot escape a nagging concern that they are succumbing too much to their surroundings, to the practices, values, and beliefs of people, cultures, and religions different from their own. If such an injunction weren’t to arise from their own consciences, it would most certainly arise from others in their immigrant religious communities.

The generation of ancient Israelites led by Joshua was no exception. It is not surprising that just as they were about to become permanent residents in a new land, they grappled with this injunction. As their leader, Joshua anticipated that, if the Israelites weren’t intentional, it would only be a matter of time before they would either lose their religiosity altogether or would assimilate to the religiosity of their neighbors. If they were going to preserve their own religiosity, they would need to renew their commitment. So here Joshua posed the religious choice to be made, and the people renewed their covenant with God.

There is a debate going on nowadays about whether religiosity is waxing or waning. Depending on the groups being studied and how religiosity is being defined, the trends differ. In some parts of the world and among some groups of people, religiosity seems to be on the rise, while for other groups of people it seems to be in decline. A lot is at stake in whether religiosity is growing or declining—a lot more than just whether or not churches and other religious institutions will survive. At stake is the kind of society we are building, the kind of future we are creating, for the generations that will follow us.

In his book entitled The God That Did Not Fail: How Religion Built and Sustains the West, Robert Royal takes the position that many of our country’s founders also held: that religion, when it plays an appropriate public role, is indispensable to the social order. While it is true that democracy in the United States has deep historical roots in Christianity, today other major religions too are trying to contribute to the stability of our democratic social fabric. In this generation, each and every day we are witnessing in particular Muslim Americans struggling to articulate for themselves and for us in the larger public the contribution that Islam can make to our social fabric.

Some of you may have read or heard back in October the news that 120 Muslim scholars from around the world endorsed an open letter to the followers of the so-called Islamic State. Leaning on the weight of the Qur’an, drawing on classical Islamic texts, and spelling out the most sacred ideas and ideals of Islam, these scholars denounced the followers of the Islamic State and their claims as “un-Islamic in the most Islamic of terms” (Christian Century, 29 October 2014, p. 17). This open letter was an ambitious effort to reclaim their sacred religion from those who have usurped and perverted it for self-serving ends.

When I participate in interreligious conversations with Islamic leaders here in Chicago and nationwide, I walk away with a clear sense that Muslim American leaders are acting collectively and concertedly to rescue and reclaim their religion in the public sphere. Last September, at a dinner cohosted by the Presbytery of Chicago and the Council of Islamic Organizations of Greater Chicago, the Chairman of the Islamic Council, Dr. Mohammed Kaiseruddin, spoke honestly about the need for the Muslim community to speak out in public not only against the terrible violence being committed in the name of their religion, but also about the violence being committed against their religion. To this interreligious audience, Dr. Kaiseruddin spoke vulnerably about what was at stake: he fears that the younger generation of Muslim Americans, Muslim teenagers and young adults, are beginning to reject Islam because of the way that their own religion is being perverted and portrayed in the public sphere.

What the younger generation of Muslim Americans is experiencing is what writer Moustafa Bayoumi calls a “double consciousness” (How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? p. 12). In his book How Does It Feel To Be a Problem?, which won the American Book Award, he explains what double consciousness means. Trying to put us in their shoes, he writes, “On the one hand, the older generation looks hopefully to you with the belief that you will produce a better world for yourself, for your family and community, and for your nation. On the other, the culture at large increasingly spies on you with mounting levels of fear, aversion, and occasionally outright hostility” (p. 6). On the one hand, your elders teach you that your faith is precious and indispensable to living a good life. On the other hand, many people in the world look at your faith as though it “poses an existential threat to Western civilization” (p. 7).

As burdensome as this double consciousness may be, what if it were not all bad? What if it were the kind of consciousness that all of us need? To live in a society in which we are surrounded by people, cultures, and religions different from our own, what if we all developed the kind of consciousness that comprehends the gap between how you see yourself and how you are seen by society at large? What if, as society becomes increasingly diverse, we were all to share that burden?

If we were to put ourselves in the shoes of Joshua and the ancient Israelites, I think we would discover that this was precisely the kind of consciousness that Joshua not only anticipated the Israelites would develop as they newly settled into a foreign land, but also that the Israelites were reminded to keep forevermore. No matter how much time would pass, even generations later, the Israelites were commanded to keep the mindset, the double consciousness, of the newcomers, of even the resident aliens, they themselves used to be.

Just as it was a challenge for the ancient Israelites to preserve this mindset, it is a challenge for religious people anywhere and anytime they feel at home. Whenever we enjoy such comfort, we can easily forget to ask ourselves how others might perceive us, because we no longer have to carry the daily burden of reconciling the gap between how we see ourselves and how we are being seen.

This is perhaps one of the greatest challenges facing the church in the West today. At a time when more people from different cultures and religions are living together than ever before, Christians need to expand their consciousness. More than ever we need to exercise a double consciousness, moreover a public consciousness.

In a democracy as ours that separates religion and state, religious people have to figure out what role, if any, their religion will play in the public realm. And they don’t always agree. Some people argue that while it is fine for religious people to practice their religion in private, they should not do so in public. Most religious people, even if they themselves are not comfortable expressing their religious views in public, would nevertheless argue that they have rights and responsibilities to do so.

As a religious person who thinks that religious people have the right and responsibility to express their religious views in public, I am disappointed when I observe people using religion as a refuge to say in public whatever it is that serves their immediate interests. When a religious view is used to take a side that is based on self-interest, it is no different from any other self-interested view. Just because it is expressed in public does not make it public-minded. Religion plays a public role when instead it helps us to put aside or overcome our private preferences and personal interests. Only then does religion play a truly public role.

With the midterm elections just past, with a political climate characterized by people trying to get their own way, we need our religions to play a truly public role. In a state that ranks nationwide as one of the least likely to provide civics curriculum in its public schools, we need our religious communities to pass onto the next generation a truly public consciousness.

A truly public consciousness begins, I suspect, with a double consciousness. It begins with the burden that becomes a gift. I saw this burden become a gift this past Friday. On Friday, Professor Amy-Jill Levine spoke upstairs in the Buchanan Chapel at the annual workshop of the Christian Century magazine. Amy-Jill Levine is a Jewish scholar of the New Testament. To a large group of Christian clergy, Professor Levine gave a lecture on how we can stop teaching and preaching in ways that are anti-Jewish. Having grown up Jewish in the United States, having trained at Duke, a Methodist divinity school, and having taught the New Testament to mostly Christian seminarians during her whole career, Professor Levine, you can imagine, has a highly developed double consciousness. It is clear that she is quite comfortable traversing the gap between how Jews see themselves and how American society at large sees them. In her career of teaching in interreligious contexts, she has made it her mission to help Christians develop a double consciousness too. Awakening Christian seminarians and clergy to how Jews hear their preaching and teaching, she helps us not only to stop bearing false witness against people of other religions, but also to become more public-minded. Religious people become more public-minded when they ask themselves, “How will the religious things I am about to say be heard by the larger public?”

Did you know that for the past several years, one Sunday a year a group of fourth graders from Chicago Sinai attends a morning worship service here? Did you know that this past Palm Sunday several Fourth Church members hosted Muslims who wanted to experience a Presbyterian worship service for the first time? This past year, I happened to preach on those two Sundays. I knew beforehand that these guests would be here among us, and as I prepared my sermon for those Sundays, indeed I found myself more conscious of how I was interpreting scripture and what I was going to say. Did I feel the need to dilute the message that I was going to preach or the religious conviction with which I preached it? No. I found instead that I could preach with more conviction because I was only going to say things that I could, in all good conscience, say to a larger public. Surely these are not the only times when we have had among us persons of other religions. I know that some of you have brought your Jewish neighbor or Hindu fiancé to church with you. You have brought your Buddhist son-in-law or your atheist child. We are a church on Michigan Avenue. We are not only open to the public so that anyone can hear what we have to say, but we also strive to be a public church.

What does it mean to be a public church? Does it mean that we have to dilute our message so that we won’t offend anyone who may disagree? Does it mean that we have to be anything less than authentic? No. It means that we take care in what we say because we care about all the people who hear us. It means that we proclaim a gospel that is good news for all people, not just for some. It means that even though we have private preferences and personal interests, we are willing to put them aside because of our deeper religious convictions. Our children grow up knowing quite well the things we prefer and the things that interest us. They even know how we support our interests in their well-being with their religious upbringing. But do they know just as well the religious convictions that may run deeper, the convictions for the sake of which we would even give up our personal preferences and private interests? In a world where everybody seems to want his own way, these are the things we need to make sure our children know. They need to know that because of our religious beliefs we are even willing to overcome what is good for us for the good of all.