Sermon, April 28, 2002
5 Easter, Year A
The Rev. Lowell E. Grisham
St. Paul's Episcopal Church
Fayetteville, Arkansas
Sermon, April 28, 2002
5 Easter, Year A
The Rev. Lowell E. Grisham
St. Paul's Episcopal Church
Fayetteville, Arkansas
Gospel – John 14:1-14 No one comes to the Father except through me
Just the other day a student association at the University sponsored a forum for religious understanding. Representatives from four of the world’s major religions offered a window into each tradition.
The Hindu representative told how intensely personal her religion is. "We feel that nonviolence is the supreme form of courage... Peace of mind is the ultimate fruit of our endeavors." The Jewish representative said, "We show our beliefs by acting on them. ...Religion is just a tool, it can be used to build or to destroy." The Islamic representative said, "The term Islam means surrender. A Muslim is by definition a person who submits to God. ...Only in reverence to God will our hearts find peace."
I found myself nodding with understanding and agreement. I could feel bridges being built between peoples who have too often anathematized one another for their religious beliefs. But then the Christian spokesperson made it clear that those other religions were, according to him, all false paths. "The only way to the Father," he said, "is through Jesus. Sin separates man from God, but Jesus reunites them." (the account above is from the Northwest Arkansas Times, April 19, 2002) His message: you cannot know God unless you are a Christian. You cannot be saved or forgiven unless you are a Christian. Only Christianity is true, therefore all other religions are false. That makes me cringe. If I didn’t know any more about Christianity than what that young man presented, I would run away from it as fast as I could. Many of you have come to the Episcopal Church as a way of escaping that kind of militant, intolerant Christianity.
Maybe you remember having earnest conversations during your adolescence about whether or not someone who lived on a desert island and had never heard of Jesus would go to hell. Many of us felt a disconnection from the messages we received from conventional Christianity. We know intuitively that there is something unjust about a God who would eternally condemn someone just because he didn’t grow up like us, in a place where we were expected to know about Jesus and to follow him. Our adolescent hearts were right.
To say that the only way to God is through Jesus insults the depth of humanity. We all know good and holy people who follow another window to the divine. Gandhi, the Dalai Lama, the Moslem poet Rumi, Abraham Heschel; not to mention the good people each of us have met in our lives – teachers and mothers and friends – people of other faiths who do not deserve condemnation.
But more than that, to say the only way to God is through Jesus insults God. If God is God only of the Christians, then God is merely tribal. And if God condemns all of those other religious people to eternal separation and the punishments of hell, as some Christians will tell us, then God is a monster indeed.
To say the only way to God is through Jesus insults Jesus. Jesus refused to accept the conventional religious teaching of his culture that told him that people of other religions were unclean and were not inheritors of the divine promises. Jesus stepped across religious boundaries and healed the daughter of a Canaanite woman, raised the child of a Roman soldier, freed a mentally ill man in Gerasa and made a Samaritan the hero of his most famous story.
So what are we to do with this statement from John’s gospel, "I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me." I believe that there is a way of hearing htese words as a gracious Christian affirmation. It rests on the Christian experience of God as Trinity. We speak of God the Father, the Creator who continually creates, pouring the divine life into all that is. Wherever that work and presence of God is experienced or recognized, it is the active Word of God, the Second Person of the Trinity revealing God’s grace in the world. All of that activity is energized by the Spirit of God, uniting everything in a dance of creative love. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
We who are Christians have seen God most fully revealed in the human life of Jesus, the Word incarnate, the human face of God. And so we name the Second Person of the Trinity, Jesus. Wherever and whenever God is revealed, we Christians recognized the presence of Jesus.
So, when the Dalai Lama speaks peaceful words of compassion, we recognize the Spirit of Jesus in the same holy words that the Dalai Lama uses as he describes what he calls the Buddha-nature. When a Hindu woman speaks of the courage of nonviolence, we recognize in her words the Spirit of Jesus whose brave cross soaks up human violence unto death. When a Muslim teacher witnesses to his surrender to God we hear in his willingness the Spirit of Jesus’ obedience to the Father. When a Jewish rabbi teaches about the ethics of right living we honor the way of practical discipleship as we hear the voice of the rabbi Jesus calling us to a holy life.
Whenever and wherever there is the revelation of anything that is good, anything that is true, anything that is beautiful, we who are Christians rejoice for we recognize the Spirit of Jesus manifest. And we can honor and respect the traditions through which that goodness, truth and beauty is offered.
Jesus is our window to the divine – the way and the truth and the life. We walk hand in hand with Gandhi and Heschel and Rumi and the Dalai Lama as they follow their own windows into the way and the truth and the life. We can recognize among us a parallel way, a complementary truth, and a unified life. Indeed God has many dwelling places.
That is not to say that all religion is the same. We have profound differences. And some religious expressions walk closer to the divine life than others. There are dangerous and damaging forms of religion. But there is no reason why we who are Christians may not honor what we call the Spirit of Jesus present and graceful as it is revealed in the lives and teachings of those who do not call themselves Christians. And there is no reason why we may not learn from them, for God shines God’s divine light on all humanity.
To that well-intentioned young man the other night, who believed he needed to make God the exclusive property of Christians, I say, "Your God is too small. Your Jesus is too small." When we let God be God rather than our particular religious expression of God be God, we find the divine present in wonderfully surprising places and people. We find not only that God has many dwelling places, but that God’s Spirit indeed fills the whole world.