Sunday, October 13, 2019 | 8:00 a.m.

Our Interfaith Partners

Part of the sermon series:
“Remembering Our Past, Inspiring Our Future”

Rocky Supinger
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 66:1–12
John 14:1–7

Heaven is as wide as the heart of God, and there is room for all.

William Barclay

On Wednesday morning this sanctuary was full, but not with Christians. There was a worship service, but there was no doxology, no reading from the Gospels as we’ve just had. Because it was a Jewish service of worship.

As it has for many, many years, our sanctuary hosted Yom Kippur services for the Chicago Sinai Congregation. Hosting our Jewish neighbors’ High Holy Days worship gatherings has become such a habit here that we hardly think anything of it, but this year felt different. There have been at least three violent attacks against Jewish houses of worship since last year’s Yom Kippur service. There was one being reported in Germany even as people were arriving for service.

I was away during the morning services, but when I arrived in the early afternoon I came upon my colleague, the Reverend Nanette Sawyer, who was dressed in her suit and collar, like you would find her attired for Sunday worship. She explained that, given the violence earlier in the day, she wanted to be visible to Yom Kippur worshipers as a welcoming, pastoral presence.

Nanette is a good pastor. She expresses something vital about this church, our commitment to supportive relationships with our neighbors of other faiths, especially our Jewish and Muslim neighbors.

Today is the third installment in our fall worship series, “Remembering Our Past, Inspiring Our Future,” and today we are focusing on our interfaith relationships. This part of the Gospel story we’re engaging with to focus on interreligious relationships is unique among the Gospels, just seven short verses, but they contain one that is cited perhaps more than any other piece of scripture by Christians when talking about interreligious relationships; seven verses that are part of a much longer unit in John’s Gospel known as the farewell discourse, which narrates Jesus’ final Passover supper with his disciples. It’s a five-chapters-long string of content mostly missing from the other three Gospels, and it contains all kinds of troubling things for the disciples.

The reading begins with Jesus’ admonition to the disciples to not let their hearts be troubled. Is it any wonder they’re troubled? In the part of the farewell discourse just before this Jesus washed all their feet. It’s an odd and troubling thing to do. Peter, at least, tried to stop him from doing it.

Then Jesus has told them, with their feet still damp, “One of you is going to betray me.” And with an eerie sense of purpose, Judas left them. But Jesus kept talking. “I am with you only a little longer,” and “where I am going you cannot come.”

Like he did with the foot washing, Peter throws himself on the gears of these pronouncements. “Lord,” he said, “why can I not follow you now? I will lay down my life for you.”

And you know what that got him? Jesus’ straight-faced prediction that Peter would actually deny him three times before the morning.

So when Jesus tells his disciples to not let their hearts be troubled in verse 1 of chapter 14, it’s because he’s really been killing their Passover vibe. He is saying and doing things in these moments that are deeply troubling. He’s leaving them, right before their eyes, and no intensity of devotion, no purity of faith is going to stop that. The disciples are losing Jesus.

Sometimes following Jesus feels like losing Jesus. When we follow Jesus out of cozy upper rooms we know, outfitted with a table and a meal we recognize, into worship spaces equipped with other tables, with prayers and songs we don’t recognize, it can feel like we’re losing Jesus.

That’s how some people in the Methodist church felt in 2010 about the Claremont School of Theology’s proposal to transform itself into an interreligious university that trained Jewish, Muslim, and Christian leaders on the same campus. The school is historically Methodist, and the idea was that Christian, Jewish, and Muslim students would pursue their respective courses of study on the same campus. Some of their coursework would be separate, specific to their religious tradition, but a lot of the coursework would be shared.

I lived in Claremont at the time, and I got to hear the school’s president champion the idea. He asked, “How are the world’s religions ever going to grow in mutual respect and understanding if the leaders of those religions are trained in isolation from one another?

A lot of people were energized by the idea. But many others were not. To them it felt like losing Jesus.

Interfaith dialogue is hard. It can feel like losing Jesus.

So why do it? We could avoid it. Not that we avoid people of other faiths; you can hardly do that in the religiously diverse world—and city—we all live in. But we could avoid making faith a part of our conversations and interactions with people who are not Christian.

A lot of us do that.

Some of you know that I am doing work on a Doctor of Ministry degree, and last spring I administered a survey to many of the youth here and their parents as part of my coursework. Answers to two survey questions in particular really jumped out at me. One asked whether respondents thought it was “not important,” “somewhat important,” “important,” or “very important” to “build relationships with people who are not Christian.”

[Just for curiosity’s sake, let’s do a version of this survey here; nobody is going to judge you. The question is “How important is it build relationships with people who are not Christian?” Raise your hand if you think that is very important. Important? Somewhat important? Not important. OK, you can put your hands down.]

Fifty-two percent of youth said that is very important. Only 2 percent said it was not important.

But there was another question: “How important is it to discuss religion and spirituality with people who are not Christian?”

[So let’s do this survey again. Raise your hand if you think that’s very important. Somewhat important? Important? Not important?]

Zero percent of youth called that very important. Twenty-nine percent said it was simply not important.

Fifty-two percent of youth thought it very important to build relationships with people who are not Christian, and yet none of them said it is very important to discuss religion with those people. Interfaith relationships are good, it seems, so long as we never talk about faith.

It is hard, no doubt. Speaking personally, I often feel nervous around expressions of religion I don’t share or understand, because I’m afraid I’m going to say or do something offensive. I guarantee you Jews or Muslims feel that same way when they come in here.

It’s hard, generally, because the religious pluralism we live with is still relatively new. For all of our talk in the United States about ethnic, racial, and religious diversity, we are still at the baby-steps stage of forming a truly equitable, multi-religious society. We’re still learning. And when you’re learning you mess up. None of us like to mess up.

So it seems that although we value relationships with people of other faiths, we don’t really have a way of sharing faith with them in a truly interfaith encounter. We’re like Thomas in this story, when he interrupts Jesus to say, “Lord, we don’t know where you’re going. How can we know the way?”

Of course, we have a way.

This is the way for followers of Jesus to be in interfaith relationships. Here’s a story from the Gospel of Mark about one of Jesus’ interfaith encounters:

[Jesus went] to the region of Tyre. He entered a house and did not want anyone to know he was there. Yet he could not escape notice, but a woman whose little daughter had an unclean spirit immediately heard about him, and she came and bowed down at his feet. Now the woman was a Gentile, of Syrophoenician origin. She begged him to cast the demon out of her daughter. He said to her, “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” But she answered him, “Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” Then he said to her, “For saying that, you may go—the demon has left your daughter.” So she went home, found the child lying on the bed, and the demon gone.

This is the way: Jesus knows who he is and whose he is. He’s Jewish, and his ministry is first and foremost among Jewish people. When he goes to places like Tyre, predominantly Gentile regions where not many Jews live, and he meets people like this Syrophoenician woman, he does not cease to be who he is. It actually sounds quite harsh. Dogs? Really?

Yet stick with Jesus and he shows a better way. Because when this Gentile gives the insult back to Jesus, he completely changes. He stays in the conversation, giving up nothing of his religious identity and inheritance yet open to be shown truth and faith where he hadn’t expected to find it.

That’s Jesus’ way. Jesus is himself the way, and the words he uses to convey that in our reading are now infamous: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”

That sounds pretty harsh, too, doesn’t it?

Perhaps we shouldn’t explain all the harshness of it away. Spend all your devotion explaining away all the things Jesus says that you don’t like and you won’t be left with much, at least not much worth your devotion. Jesus says lots of harsh things—about wealth, about the leaders of his own religious community, about his closest friends, even. It’s part of who Jesus is.

But let’s understand Jesus’ harshness well, too, so as to not cause offense where none is needed.

“No one comes to the Father except through me” is directed at Jesus’ disciples and not at the adherents of other religions. This is not a claim to religious superiority. It’s a promise to those who would seek an intimate connection with God, like that of a trusting child to a doting parent, that Jesus’ way is the way to that connection. It’s a promise not of enlightenment nor of righteousness. It is an open hand extended to usher you into the accepting, loving heart of God, where Jesus lives.

“No one comes to the Father except through me” is a promise to troubled hearts that there is a way where once there was none, not a boast of being the best of all possible ways.

So when we stand alongside our neighbors of differing faith traditions, we do so in this way, the way of Jesus, the way that is Jesus, the way that searches out truth and embraces life, wherever—and among whomever—truth and life are to be found.

Like an Iftar dinner during Ramadan. We host these in partnership with the Niagara Foundation. People from different religious and cultural communities gather for a program of dialogue and learning, some friendly table conversation, and then to engage together in the custom of breaking the Ramadan fast with an Iftar dinner.

Hosting these Iftar dinners, like hosting Jewish High Holy Days services, is just one way we are exploring here of growing as Christian disciples in the way of Jesus, grounded in our story and our identity, open to the truth and the life our neighbors wish to share with us.

You might even say that we have discerned as a church that we can’t become the Christians God wants us to become apart from these relationships with Jews and Muslims, with all our interfaith neighbors. This is the way we are following.

The word way in this context means less a method or a technique and more a path, a journey.

This way leads somewhere.

It leads to a house with many dwelling places, where places have been prepared and there is plenty of room. It leads to a place where, in the phrase of Rabbi Seth Limmer form Chicago Sinai, heaven and earth meet.

He said that on Rosh Hashanah, again here in this sanctuary, and our organist, John Sherer, reported to the entire church staff the following week. Standing up here on these chancel steps, Rabbi Limmer interpreted the blowing of the shofar, the ram’s horn, during the service as reminiscent of creation, the Garden of Eden, where earth and heaven met.

Then he invited the entire sanctuary of Rosh Hashanah worshipers to look around the worship space. That several hundred Jews could gather for worship in a Christian worship space, he pointed out, is not something that has often occurred in the history of Judaism and Christianity, including present history. He suggested that its occurrence here, in this space, on that day, was a sign of earth meeting heaven.

Thanks be to God that we are invited to witness those moments. May God give us all wisdom and grace as we follow Jesus’ way of inhabiting those moments with our Muslim and Jewish neighbors, indeed with all of God’s children. Amen.