Faithful and Expansive View of God

Three quick announcements, then on with the show.

1. If you want to attend our Thanksgiving dinner, Thanksgiving Day at 4:00, please sign up today. Right now, even! Send a note to stmark@stmarkpresbyterian.org.

2. If you were not in worship last Sunday, you may want to go to the St. Mark web site and listen to last week’s sermon. It was “Hagar’s Story, part 1” and this week we will hear “part 2.” 

3. The Alternative Christmas Market is Sunday! This Sunday! Two days from now! If you’re working the market and have to miss worship, then come on Saturday and follow the crowd to Muldoon’s. 

And now … 

A funny thing happens when we leave our customary spaces and enter other spaces as a guest. Last Saturday, following worship, I was a guest speaker at the Islamic Education Center as part of their celebration of their prophet’s birthday. Our Muslim brothers and sisters know that many Americans view them primarily through the lens of news clips of violence, movie depictions of terrorists, or theories about their sinister intentions. They cringe whenever a mass shooting takes place, praying that it will not turn out to be a Muslim who is doing the violence or Muslims who were the victims. Many Muslims live with a constant shroud of fear that some random person will try to execute a kind of vigilante justice by harassing them or harming them. In truth, they are doctors, police officers, business persons, school teachers, and next-door neighbors, who follow Islam. 

When I was at the Islamic Education Center, the Imam Sayed Moustafa al-Qazwini condemned religious violence in the strongest terms possible. He argued that Muslims who terrorize, take innocent lives, or go to war in the name of Islam are misrepresenting Islam and misreading the Koran. He named names and argued that groups like the Islamic State were wrong. He argued that the best way to honor the prophet Muhammad is to live peaceably and helpfully with all of our neighbors. He honored Jesus Christ - not in the same way that I do, but with reverence and respect. He honored Moses and welcomed the Jewish persons who were in attendance. It was a meaningful experience and always is. 

The same is true whenever I visit the Shinnyo-en Japanese Buddhist Temple in Yorba Linda, the Temple Bat Yam, the Jewish Collaborative of Orange County, or any number of worship spaces where persons of other faiths gather. When the Newport Mesa Irvine Interfaith Council or Orange County Interfaith Network meet, they are respectful gatherings with progressive Christians, lots of Mormons, Jews of many kinds, Muslims, Sikhs, Zoroastrians, and Universalist Unitarians. What is curious to me is that the most underrepresented group – at least from the Christian denominations – are Evangelical churches. 

The primary reason evangelicals are underrepresented is fairly clear. Theologically, if one is convinced that professing Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior is the only true way to salvation, then there is a problem with interfaith work. It would seem like one is validating a lie. I spoke with an evangelical pastor recently, who is a great guy who pours himself out in service to folks that many others would simply ignore. He said that whenever he tries to convince himself that other religions are siblings and perhaps have their own pathway toward God, he gets hung up on the stories of the Old Testament, where God demanded absolute intolerance of other religions and exclusivist claims that are in the New Testament on occasion. I disagree with his reading of these texts and -more importantly - with the presumptions through which he reads biblical texts generally. I do not doubt his sincerity, but I mourn his conclusions because of what they do not allow him to do. He is not able to enter the Islamic Education Center with an open heart, free of thinking that he is somehow compromising his faith by being there. He cannot enter a synagogue or temple without feeling that the people there are blind to the real truth of their own religion. I am not judging him. I am only speaking from my own experience, having been raised in a way of Christianity that could not encounter other religious expressions with openness. I still struggle against ingrained tendencies of religious intolerance. 

When I was invited to the Islamic Education Center for the prophet’s birthday, I was asked to speak about interfaith relations. I raised the question of why some Christians read the New Testament exclusively and others expansively; why some Jews read the Torah exclusively and other expansively; why some Muslims read the Koran exclusively and other expansively. The only sorts of answers that I could offer were roughly this: The lens through which we read Scripture is shaped by our theological predispositions. My journey has led me to have a large view of God, to where God is free, able, and willing to act in ways that lie outside of my own way of faith; and a small view of humanity, where each claim I/we make about God is proximate at best. For me, “truth” about God is less about the proposition that we formulate, and more about the hunger that drives us to search, hope, and believe. 

Or something like that. 

Mark of St. Mark