John 12:44-50
44 Jesus shouted, “Whoever believes in me doesn’t believe in me but in the one who sent me.45 Whoever sees me sees the one who sent me. 46 I have come as a light into the world so that everyone who believes in me won’t live in darkness. 47 If people hear my words and don’t keep them, I don’t judge them. I didn’t come to judge the world but to save it. 48 Whoever rejects me and doesn’t receive my words will be judged at the last day by the word I have spoken. 49 I don’t speak on my own, but the Father who sent me commanded me regarding what I should speak and say. 50 I know that his commandment is eternal life. Therefore, whatever I say is just as the Father has said to me.” (CEB)
“They
Like Jesus, But Not the Church: Insights from Emerging Generations,” Week
Three: They Think the Church Arrogantly Claims All Other Religions Are Wrong
The wizened, venerable
religious leader looked straight into the television cameras after day after
day of riots and mob violence, and began his thought-out message to try to
quell the strife and discord that had taken root in the streets once more. As CNN.com describes what he said:
"These cartoons spread hatred, and we call for
peace," he said, adding that (they) "fear the spread of hatred"
against their religion and oppose "the mocking" of any religion.
And
perhaps the most reassuring aspect of this entire interview was the fact that
the subject of the interview was none other than Ali Gomaa, the Grand Mufti of
Egypt—the leader of the Sunni Muslims in Egypt.
At least for a fleeting glimpse in time, cooler heads were beginning to
prevail amidst the religiously-oriented death and destruction that has emerged
once more in the Middle East, and the cooler heads were coming from a religion
with an awful reputation for the violence of its extremists. Yet, as is true in most cases, it is the
extremists who make the headlines.
This
is a sermon series for us to begin the fall season here in the life of the
church, and it is a sermon series that, as it takes us through September and
into October, I imagine will likely challenge and maybe even distress us a bit…which
I promise you is a good thing, even in the comfort zone of church. In fact, church has become such a comfort
zone for us, and for many Christians, that an increasing number of folks feel
shut off from us because they worry that they do not speak our language, or understand
our thoughts, or follow our precepts.
And that separation has not been easy on us, as church memberships
decline and the average age of remaining church members increases. In the midst of these sociological trends, a
California pastor named Dan Kimball wrote a book entitled, “They Like Jesus,
But Not the Church,” in which he documents—qualitatively, rather than
quantitatively—the stereotypes that people who live outside the church hold of
us. And none of those stereotypes are
good. Each week over the next six weeks,
we will hear—through Dan—from a member of my generation about how they see the
church, and we’ll do so while also exploring what the Bible has to say about
it. And so we began the series with a message
with the theme of, “They think the church has a political agenda.” Last week, the message’s theme was, “They
think the church is judgmental and negative,” and now this week, we turn to the
theme of, “They think the church arrogantly claims all other religions are
wrong.”
As
Dan Kimball describes him, Duggan is the manager of a coffeehouse who “went to
a Catholic church sometimes as a child, since his family was Irish.” As a teenager, Duggan received from his
father a potpourri of religious texts, including a Bible, a Qur’an, and
Buddhist and Confucian writings. Duggan read them all, and years and years
later, shared with Dan, saying this:
“All I hear from Christians is that all
other world religions are wrong and going to hell. I have tried to have an intelligent
conversation with them about this and discuss the beauty in other expressions
of spirituality, but they go into this religious rhetoric and avoid the hard
questions. It seems they have programmed
dogmatic answers that someone has told them, and they can’t even hold any type
of normal back and forth conversation about any other spiritual beliefs.”
He
continues:
“I once tried talking to two Christians
about Buddha and the Dao. They looked at
me like they were going to freak out and didn’t know what to say. They could
only talk to me about their beliefs and wouldn’t even talk to me about any
other beliefs. It makes me think that
Christians are like horses with blinders—they have an isolated and inflexible
view. They are so fixated only on what
they believe, they aren’t able to take in their surroundings and see other
elements in the world around them.”
Like
most—if not all of you—I have been watching the recent violence in the Middle
East—at least in part a response to the highly-charged “Innocence of Muslims”
film making the rounds on the internet—with a mix of worry and horror.
If
you haven’t seen any of the film in question—and you shouldn’t—it is a
grotesque piece of propaganda, worthy only of our disgust. Imagine if a film depicted Jesus Christ as a
leering womanizer, a pedophile, an unscrupulous thief, and a violent
brute. That’s about the size of it.
So
Muslims have, I think, every right to be offended by this film. But at the same time, Christians didn’t form
mobs to kill people when Dan Brown came out with The Da Vinci Code. Salman Rushdie, made famous for the fatwa
issued against his own life, even quipped, “Dan Brown must live. Preferably not write, but at least live.”
Religion
cannot be in the business of destroying lives, it can only be in the business
of lifting lives up, of building and rebuilding them.
And
so we as Christians are right to condemn our own extremists where they appear. And there are many Muslims, including Grand
Mufti Ali, who are condemning their own extremists.
But
what a degrading, humiliating burden that is to bear—to have to apologize to
the world for fanatics who dare to claim your faith.
It
is a burden we share with Jesus—think of His response to Peter wounding the
servant during the arrest at Gethsemane.
Jesus not only heals the servant, but He rebukes Peter for his violence.
Jesus
has spent an entire ministry trying to prove His divinity as a means of proving
the truth of His message, and there is no way He would want that compromised by
the violence of His followers, because, He longed to produce in us great
faith. After all, as one person wrote, Jesus
“would heal the blind and the leper with
(God’s) leave, and…raise the dead, and when (God) held off the Children of
Israel (ie, the leaders -E.A.) from Jesus, when Jesus brought them manifest proofs,
whereat the faithless among them said, ‘This is nothing but plain magic,’ I
inspired the Disciples, saying, “Have faith in Me and My apostle,” and they
said, ‘We have faith.’”
It’s
a great testimony to God’s relationship with Jesus Christ. It also comes from the Qur’an.
I’m
a Christian for a reason—because I believe in Jesus Christ as the Messiah, the
Son of the Living God, as my Lord and Savior.
But that doesn’t mean every other religion disrespects Jesus. Islamic tradition reveres Jesus, even though
they don’t think He was divine. At its
core, Islam is not anti-Jesus. But many
churches will say it is, and Heaven only knows why.
But
here, in John’s twelfth chapter, Jesus is about to be arrested. Just before this passage, he says the time
has come for Him to die and be glorified.
So He knows the game is up. If
ever there is a time for His faith to waver, this is it—again, His agonizing
prayer at Gethsemane. But John’s account
of Jesus is remarkable—it is a Messiah so secure in His message of love and
salvation that He doesn’t feel the need to judge the doubters.
It
is Zen-like—being so at peace with what you know to be true, that you do not
judge, you simply save, at peace even with the doubters who say that your miracles
are nothing but plain magic.
Peace
versus violence. Love versus anger. Salvation versus
judgment. In each, one is far easier to
use than the other. One is something we
reach for far faster than the other. And
it is wrong for us to do so.
It
is wrong because to follow God is a way of surrender. Just as Jesus surrenders His capacity to
judge to the divine Word, the Logos, He does something equally remarkable—He surrenders
the chance to render immediate judgment—judgment comes ‘at the last day,” in
His words.
It
is not just that we are called not to judge—though Jesus made that abundantly
clear last week in Luke 6—but that we are called away from a rush to judgment,
to pre-judge, to be prejudiced.
Religion,
with its moral authority, can and must condemn such violence as a moral evil. But it is another thing entirely to judge an
entire people or religion as violent based on the attention-grabbing crimes of
but a fanatical few, to write off an entire religion as anti-Jesus rather than
actually share in a dialogue where you can testify and witness in love to another
person.
Jesus
did not want His ministry defined by Peter’s violence against an innocent
servant. We as Christians do not want
our Way defined by the legacy of violence the church’s history has left. And I dare say that Islam itself, at its
heart, does not want to be defined by terrorism. So let us surrender, as Jesus did, that need
to entertain our worst prejudices in favor of the far greater task of building
the Kingdom of God. Let us surrender our
arrogance if it means replacing it with love, for that is a far more apt tool
to make disciples out of one another.
May it be so. Amen.
Rev.
Eric Atcheson
Longview,
Washington
September
23, 2012
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