Scripture - John 14:1-7

Today is the third Sunday in October and so it is the third Sunday of our “Why?” series of sermons.  We began the month with a premise that asking the question “Why?” is a faithful, biblical thing to do.  True, asking “Why?” is often associated with doubt, but that’s ok—doubt is not the opposite of faith; the opposite of faith is indifference; doubt is a part of faith—a part of our questioning and wondering and sometimes wrestling with the substance of our faith.

 Week two was last week, and we dove in and asked the question, “Why do we suffer?”  Why do horrible things happen in this world?  Why doesn’t God stop the pain and misery that many of us go through in this life? 

 A number of you have been asking for copies of these sermons, and I’m happy to print them out for you, though they are available online as well.  They’re on my blog, which you can go to directly or access through our church’s website, www.firstpresracine.org.  This information is in your bulletin.  A word, though, about reading printed copies of sermons.  What happens here on Sunday morning in the context of a sermon, which is in the context of worship, is that my words and your thoughts mingle with the presence of a holy and gracious God, who is beyond our words and thoughts.  Thus, this time of worship is always about more than what we say and think and the problem is that this does not always translate well on paper.  Something gets lost when we try to print out something of how the Holy Spirit has lived among our words and thoughts.  But yes, the sermons are online, and yes, you can get yourself a copy.

 Today in worship and later on in our adult Sunday school class, we’re addressing the question, “Why does religion divide us?”  Though I must confess that I struggled with the phrasing of today’s question somewhat.  Dozens of questions swirl around the subject of faith in a religiously pluralistic world, and many of them are not technically “why questions.” 

• Why do so many religions exist to begin with?
• Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism…  Are they all “right”? 
• If we say that one religion is “right,” does that mean that the others are somehow wrong?
• How can there be so many competing claims on religious truth?

 Depending on your theology, the questions strike you differently and with varying degrees of intensity.  You might wonder…

• If all religious traditions are equally valid, then why would I share the gospel with anyone?
• If it doesn’t matter what you believe, then why would I care to believe anything?

Before I go on, let me say that I am committed this month to saying “I don’t know” at least once a Sunday.  In the sermon, in the children’s sermon, in our discussion after worship, I am going to upfront with my not knowing.  And this is not simply about a lack of information on my part, or the result of me not having read enough books or combed through the Bible as thoroughly as I could have.  It’s true that sometimes saying “I don’t know” is admitting a certain lack of knowledge that others may or may not have.  But in the case of these massive questions that we are raising this month, our “I don’t know” is a humility and a holy reverence for the mysteries of life that will outlive us all.

We might catch ourselves thinking that it sure would be nice to find some simple answers to all these complicated questions, and in the Christian church at least, a good many pastors and authors have done quite well for themselves, dangling out the promise that such a thing is possible. 

An image, though, that often occurs to me when we wrestle with these “why questions” of faith is of us all swimming and splashing around in the shallows of a lake that is much deeper than any of us can possibly begin to fathom.  This is why we should never stop asking “Why?”  Never stop wondering; never stop pushing our minds and hearts beyond a faith that is comfortably known and managed; never stop considering the mysteries of being and belief that, despite all our asking, will stubbornly remain mysteries.  God, the sacred source of the universe, is beyond our very best thinking, and we don’t ask “Why?” so that we can finally “figure God out,” but rather so that we can engage more deeply and openly the mystery of God’s presence.  And in the beautiful face of that mystery, saying “I don’t know” is sometimes the most honest and holy thing we can say.

The sentence “I don’t know” ought to exist as a helpful beginning for interfaith dialog.  Think about how many productive conversations we could have with people who are different from us if we just began them with the words, “I don’t know.”

• “I don’t know very much about Islam,” we could say to a Muslim coworker.  “Could you teach me?”  
• “I don’t know that I could have an intelligent conversation about Hinduism.  Maybe you could help me?”
• “I don’t know if current political battles around the subject of Mormonism are particularly helpful.  Could you please say something about what you believe?”

Why does religion divide us?  I don’t know, but maybe there aren’t enough of us out there willing to begin conversations and relationships with some real honesty about what we don’t yet understand. 

Back in Texas, I once co-officiated an interfaith wedding.  The bride was Christian, a Presbyterian, and the groom was Jewish.  The couple got married in the fall at this beautiful spot in the hill country—sprawling perennial gardens and an old farmhouse that had been converted into a reception hall.  In the lawn someone had put up a structure and covered it with flowers.  For many in attendance it was a simple wedding arch, but for the groom’s Jewish family it was a fine chuppah, and we gathered under it, the bride, the groom, the rabbi, and I. 

The night before the wedding, though, just before the rehearsal dinner, the mother of the bride approached me.  “We need to have a little talk,” she said.  That’s not a good thing to hear from the mother of the bride on the night before her daughter’s wedding.  “We need to have a little talk.”  “Ok,” I said, but I thought, “Oh, dear.  What could this be?  Is there trouble?  Is the wedding being called off…?”

We stepped away from the wedding party and she said to me quietly, discretely, but with some tension in her voice, “Look, I want you to know something,” she said.  “Tomorrow afternoon, you have my permission to put Jesus Christ into this wedding.” 

I’m not sure what she expected me to say.  I was sort of stunned that this woman felt that she needed to give me, a Presbyterian pastor, permission to bring Jesus to the wedding.  I wondered for a moment, too, what she thought Jesus would be doing with himself if I somehow failed to bring him.  Clearly she was waiting for me to respond, but I honestly wasn’t sure what to say, so I asked her to say more.  “You know,” she said.  “You can say Jesus’ name at my daughter’s wedding.”

It was sort of sad, really.  Maybe she’d always imagined that her daughter would grow up and marry a nice Christian boy and that they’d get married and nothing would ever be complicated.  To this day I’m not sure if there was anything I could have said in that moment to help her dismiss that illusion.  “One thing I know,” I told her.  “Jesus is going to be here tomorrow whether you and I say his name or not.”  That seemed to both satisfy and confuse her at the same time, so we talked some more.

The next day the wedding was gorgeous.  It was a typical wedding—happy couple, cute kids, lots of fun and laugher.  When it was over, the rabbi and I went into the barn to get some food.  There were no assigned seats and the place was packed, so he and I wandered outside and found a bench to sit on next to the garden.  We were just sitting there, chatting about ministry and weddings we’d done in the past, when the strangest thing happened.  People started taking pictures of us, eating!  First it was just this one guy snapping a few photos, but then more came out, taking pictures of a pastor and rabbi eating baked chicken and potato salad—like we were some kind of natural wonder.  One woman even exclaimed, “Why can’t the world be more like this?”  The rabbi and I just looked at each other, each probably hoping that we didn’t have food in our teeth.

But we know it when we see it, even if we can’t always explain it—different faiths coexisting peacefully and cooperatively.  A rabbi and a pastor eating together.  A Christian and a Jew entering the covenant of marriage.  A Muslim and a Buddhist and a Hindu and a Presbyterian working side-by-side.  Often the image says more than our words can.  In fact, sometimes our words trip us up: “You have my permission to bring Jesus to this wedding!”

Of course, we know where some of that comes from.  Sometimes we may want to affirm an inclusive religious perspective, but our own Scripture prevents us from doing so.  In our passage from John’s gospel this morning, Jesus says to Thomas, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.  No one comes to the Father except through me.”  Well, that pretty much settles it, doesn’t it?  Can’t do much about that, can we?  “Believe what you want,” we might say to others, and to ourselves, “but at the end of every day the Bible is pretty clear:  ‘I am the way, and the truth, and the life.  No one comes to the Father except through me.’”  How many Christians—how many of us—have abandoned a belief that Hindus and Buddhists can be “right” because of these words? 

A piece of Scripture like this can corner you into one of two possibilities.  Either you believe that the only way to Heaven or God is through Jesus Christ and therefore Christianity or you have to resign yourself to not taking the Bible seriously anymore.  Right?  Either you accept the exclusive claims of Jesus Christ or you water Scripture down to the point of irrelevance.  “I can’t believe that,” you may say to yourself.  “I can’t believe that 1.4 billion Muslims, a billion Hindus and 500 million Buddhists are all wrong, so therefore I must not really believe in what the Bible says.”  And you’re stuck leaning toward an inclusive religious world view and away from what you thought was a faithful reading of Scripture.

Well, I’m here today to make it all simple again and to erase all your worries.  Just kidding.  But I will offer this up for consideration.  Let’s take a look at the 14^th chapter of John’s gospel.  Jesus is talking with the disciples.  They’ve just shared their final meal together and Jesus has washed their feet.  Judas has left on a little errand and now the disciples are sitting with Jesus, talking.   It’s the last time they’ll be together like this before Jesus’ death, and so Jesus is using it to impart to them some wisdom and understanding about God and about himself. 

The disciples, like us, are full of questions:  Lord, where are you going?  Why can’t we follow you?  Where is the Father?  And Thomas asks, “How can we know the way?”

Let’s talk about “the Way” for a moment.  The Hebrew word for “the way” was “Halacha,” and literally it meant “the path” or “the way of walking.”  But it meant more than that.  The ancient Jewish understanding of “Halacha,” “The Way,” had to do with the entire collected body of Jewish law.  The 10 Commandments, yes, but there was more.  The book of Leviticus, the ancient laws about ritual sacrifice and purification codes—rules about what kind of clothes could be worn, of how food should be prepared, and the length of men’s hair.  In total there were more than 600 laws to obey. 

It was difficult if not impossible to follow them all, but that’s not to say that folks in Jesus’ day weren’t trying.  The Pharisees in particular—the religious elite at the time—lorded their holiness over others and punished those who failed to meet the expectations of “Halacha”—The Way. 

So, friends, what happened when Jesus said “I am The Way”?   One way of thinking about it is that he took an exclusive way of understanding faith and blew it wide open!  For anyone who was confined to this extremely narrow, way to salvation—this impossible-to-follow adherence to the law, Jesus offered a new and expansive possibility. 

Jesus said to the fishermen and peasant farmers gathered in the upper room that day, “You don’t need to be a Pharisee—you don’t need to be a part of the religious elite to have access to God.  Their narrow path has led them to a narrow understanding of God.  I am the Way—I am Halacha!”  This is, by the way, why they killed Jesus—because he tried to make “the Way” more inclusive than anyone was comfortable with.

The crazy irony of it all is that we’ve taken these words of Jesus, which conveyed such a wide, expansive understanding of what it means to be in relationship with God, and we’ve made them like this again.  Narrow.  Confining.  One way, or the highway.  And so the sentence, “I am the way and the truth and the life—no one comes to the Father except through me” drops into an interfaith conversation like religious napalm, and where do we go from there?

It’s important to begin with Jesus, and to remember that time and time again, Jesus turned religion on its head.  The question before us is not, “How can we maintain the boundaries Jesus established for the Christian faith?” but rather, “How can we keep up with and celebrate Jesus’ bold and inclusive vision for our relationships with God?”  This past week during our noon Bible study on Wednesday, someone in the group said, simply, “God is not confused.”  I think that’s right.  Granted, we get confused, but God doesn’t.  We might get caught up, attempting to determine who is part of “The Way” and who isn’t, but God is not confused.  Religion may divide us, but it does not divide God and God’s heart for us.  Thanks be to God!