Calling

Jim Goodmann

Regional Director, Calling Congregations

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September 10, 2010

Of Mosques and a New Creation

As we approach the ninth anniversary of 9/11 our attitude toward those who do not share our faith perspective or nationality might lead us back to the lawyer’s question to Jesus in the Gospel of Luke, “…And who is my neighbor?" That story from the Gospels always makes me wonder about our capacity to appreciate this presence of God in the stranger, in the one who is not like us and in language foreign to our vocabularies of belief. The advent of a mosque in Lower Manhattan has stirred both local and national anxiety but the validity of the Gospel question persists. The fact that a Greek Orthodox congregation has been attempting to rebuild in the same neighborhood without success might also help us see that there are religion communities that we may fear and then there are also those we just ignore.

For Christians, this is no small matter since, according to the Gospel and the Torah, the love of God and the love – yes, love – of one’s neighbor are co-extensive. There aren’t any conditions placed upon those commandments – or, if there are, those are our footnotes to the text and not God’s.

Instead of asking – as we have been prone to in the last decade – “what would Jesus do?” it might be better to begin adapting our appropriation of Jesus to the signs of the times. If, as St Paul claimed, “…we have the mind of Christ,” then having the mind of Christ would suggest having a mind of compassion, even of insight, into our world that recognizes that religious communities, of whatever origin, have a great stake in creating a world where violence is less legitimate, where fear is not an automatic response to cultural and religious differences. Thomas Keating suggests (The Human Condition: Contemplation and Transformation) that the climate of this century may call for an approach that is less oriented toward religious traditions each gaining more followers for their “side” and more characterized by a search for values and practices that religions and spiritual traditions hold in common – like feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, housing the homeless. At stake in that move is a quality of leadership to inspire and accompany that change. Among those applying for and receiving fellowships at FTE, there is already a considerable equity of practice in caring for the world in just these ways – which bodes hopefully for their future as leaders that renew the church and change the world.

This movement would call for a renewed piety that sees one’s neighbor as C. S. Lewis describes, “next to the Sacrament of the Altar, the holiest object that presents itself to your senses.” Having this mind would also be our stake in a certain bold confidence in God to knit the strands of the human family together – whatever differences there are in worship or ideology – with the same skill with which God has woven the immense complexity of the galaxies and the bio-systems of this planet. We can continue to be beneficiaries of the Grace of God in ways that may take us beyond our provincialisms, our “mythic membership consciousness” about our religious affiliations, into a place where we begin to see the reality of “that which is of God in everyone.” Again, it takes leaders who can help us to access this insight and make the appropriate shifts in the direction of God’s vision for humanity. It also calls for faith communities to exercise leadership and respond in ways that are hospitable and open to discovering the nuances of what it is to see everyone as their “neighbor,” and not simply leave that to the next generation of leaders.

We might also wish to spread abroad a truth much-obscured since September 11, 2001: that more than Americans died in the Twin Towers, that many faiths and nations and ethnicities were represented among those who died (really) on behalf of the whole human family1 - not unlike that great throng that appears before the throne of God in the Book of Revelation (Rev. 7:9).

For us, the living, as we grapple with questions of good and evil and the means for healing the world, perhaps these words from J.R.R. Tolkien might have some resonance. Writing to his son at war in 1944 he says, “No one can estimate what it really happening at present…All we do know, and that to a large extent by personal experience, is that evil labors with vast power and perpetual success – in vain: preparing always the soil for unexpected good to sprout in” (Letters, p. 72). I would posit that a piece of that “unexpected good” is the emergence of leaders that present themselves for our nurture and support, always a miracle that we never can take for granted. Perhaps part of their giftedness is their relative detachment from the passions that so rule current public discourse about friends, enemies, and who may be for and who may be against us.

Not all of the wisdom of our Christian tradition can be circumscribed in the pages of the Bible. Sometimes you have to be Christ before you find the theological justification. Sometimes God leaves us to our imagination and the intrusive voice of our conscience, even trusts that we can be taken to places that extend our learning and understanding. Coming from the One who has “…given [us] rule over the works of [God’s} hands, and put all things at [our] feet,” (Ps. 8:7), should we expect anything less? And think of the unexpected company we might find on the way!