Our world is full of many religions including Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Atheism/Secularism, and many more. Even in Waterloo Region where I live, while Christianity is still the dominant religion, the religious landscape is changing. In 2011, 70% claimed to be Christian, 4 % Muslim, 1% Hindu while 25% fell into the other category, but that was 7 years ago. The urban centre of Kitchener-Waterloo now has the fifth highest per capita immigrant population of all Canadian urban areas. (https://www.cmhc-schl.gc.ca/en/co/buho/seca/ware/ware_001.cfm) I am aware of 4 different established worship centres in Waterloo Region where people from other religions beyond Christianity come together to worship. However, I suspect there are many other faith traditions that worship in our community that rent space or meet in homes rather than own a building. There is much diversity within Waterloo region, and that is just a taste of the diversity of religion in our world. What do we do with all of this diversity? And how is God connected to all this diversity? In the past, in fact, even today, Christians have often not been gracious with all of this diversity. If people were not Christian, they were often seen as outside of God’s will, outside of being God’s people, until they became Christian. But this exclusivism was not just true of Christians. It was also true for adherents of other religious traditions. The history of our world is full of wars and violence based on such exclusivist positions. In today’s world, many of us see such exclusivist religious positions as unhealthy forms of fundamentalism. Each fundamentalist stance is based on a very limited and human understanding of some very core questions. They include the following:
How you or your faith community answers these core questions determines how much diversity you are able to tolerate, but also what type of diversity you are able to tolerate. Your answers determine what you include in the tapestry of God. There is a Biblical story (Acts 10) that wrestles with these core questions. The early Christian community was also a Jewish community. It is well established that Jesus ministered to all sorts of people based on the stories we have in the Bible: Jews and Gentiles, rich and poor, healthy and ill, men and women, etc. Although Jesus was Jewish, the faith he practiced and lived pushed beyond the orthodox Judaism of his time. However, his followers at first still saw the Jesus movement as a Jewish renewal movement. All people who became followers of Jesus in the beginning were expected to become Jewish followers of God. This is the religious backdrop to the Bible story in Acts 10. We read in this story that Apostle Peter, one of Jesus’ closest disciples, is struggling with the vision that he has just received from God. For Peter, it was a shocking vision. Three times, in the vision, an internal voice says to Peter to eat things that the Jewish law saw as unclean things to eat. Each time, Peter responds, “Absolutely not, Lord. I have never eaten anything impure or unclean.” In eating such things, Peter believed that he would become unclean before God. In the end the voice says to him, “Never consider unclean what God has made clean.” While Peter is brooding over the vision, servants of a well respected non-Jewish leader named Cornelius come. They share that God had sent an angel to Cornelius requesting that Peter come and talk to him. Normally, Peter would have refused for Jewish people, in those times, normally stayed away from Gentile people. In fact, when Peter first meets Cornelius, he highlights how unorthodox their meeting is but shares his vision that has allowed this encounter to happen. Peter then invites Cornelius to share his experience so Peter can understand why God has allowed this to happen. After hearing Cornelius share about his faith experience, Peter concludes, “I really am learning that God doesn’t show partiality to one group of people over another. Rather, in every nation, whoever worships God and does what is right is acceptable to God.” Peter then responds with his story of faith around his experiences of being a follower of Jesus, and what he saw and experienced. While Peter was sharing about his faith, suddenly God’s spirit falls upon the Gentiles, the non-Jewish people, and a second Pentecost experience happens. Just like the first Pentecost experience recorded in the Bible (Acts 2), where Jewish believers spoke in foreign languages that others could understand leading to a profound sense of blessing, now Gentiles speak in other foreign languages and people feel blessed by God. I have been often puzzled by the phrase “foreign languages that others present could understand” that caused them to feel blessed. So often, biblical interpreters interpret this phrase as speaking a foreign language like French or Spanish or Arabic or Russian or another language that the speaker does not understand but some listeners do. Personally, I find this interpretation limiting for I have never spoken in tongues in this way. However, personally, I think there are other ways we speak in tongues when we are under the influence of God’s spirit. I have come to realize that when we are under the influence of God’s spirit, we are very aware and present to our experience. If we are with someone or others, we are very aware and present to their experience too. That deep awareness, that ability to be very present to ourselves and others is the very place where God’s holy spirit moves and expresses itself to us and to those we are present to. When we listen and speak from this place, are we not “speaking in the tongues” of God’s Holy Spirit for we are often asking about or sharing thoughts, emotions, sensations, and experiences that most people in the world pay little attention to? And when we ask a question or reflect back understanding, grace, compassion, truth, or any other fruit of God’s spirit from this place, the person receiving it often feels heard, maybe even understood by us. Understood through this interpretive lens, this may be a more helpful way of understanding the words by the amazed listeners at the first Pentecost (Acts 2) when they say, “How can this be. These people are foreigners, and yet they speak in my native language.” They get me. They understand me. We see in this story of Peter and Cornelius a profound shift happening to Peter. Peter shifts from seeing God only present and active in his Jewish faith and Jewish people to seeing God’s spirit active in people beyond the Jewish faith, people like Cornelius who seek to worship God and do what is right and acceptable to God. God is no longer working in one faith tradition but potentially in others. Peter is beginning to see the diversity found within God and how God works in our world. He is beginning to see God’s grand tapestry. Now, in many ways, Cornelius’ faith was very similar to Peter’s. Cornelius was just not following some of the dietary practices and circumcision that were part of the Jewish tradition. However, the implications of the shift Apostle Peter made are profound and go far beyond the relationships between Christians and Jews. Let me return to the Pentecost picture you saw earlier. Imagine that every person in this image represents a nation or religion of the world. This is the shift that Peter is hinting at when he says, “I am really learning that God shows no partiality to one group of people over another. Rather, as this image suggest, God’s holy spirit is influencing every nation or faith tradition, all people who worship God and seek to do what is right and acceptable. What would it mean for Christians (and other faithful followers of other religions) to work within this religious framework when we encounter religious people from different faiths than our own faith? Can we embrace the diversity that we are starting to see in God’s great tapestry? Last fall, my church discovered that a new Shia Muslim temple and community centre was being built in the village of Mannheim outside of Kitchener, just a kilometer from Mannheim Mennonite Church that I pastor. To help my church participants embrace this new faith group in our community, I had the Imam and Executive Director provide the worship message a few weeks ago. Following their input, I designed a community prayer that celebrated both our Muslim and Christian traditions. I used the song “if you believe and I believe” from one of our Mennonite songbooks, and interpreted it in this way (1991 WGRG The Iona Community (Scotland). “If you, as Muslims, believe and we, as Christians, believe, and we together pray, the Holy Spirit must come down and set God’s people free.” In singing this song, we were saying that Muslim people are a people of faith like we are, people who worship God and seek to do what is right and acceptable to God. We were saying that Muslim people are part of God’s grand tapestry of faith. What would it look like if we applied a similar framework to followers of other faith traditions? If you believe and we believe and we together pray…. Would this act of unity be faithful to the truth that Apostle Peter realized that historic day about 2000 years ago? Now I realize that within the Christian, Jewish, and Muslim faith traditions, we all believe in one God. It is easier for us, as Christians, to embrace these faith traditions because of the major similarities that exists between them: sacred books, religious practices, common history, recognition of Jesus/Christ, etc. But what about the Hindu tradition that has many gods and goddesses or the Buddhist tradition that is nontheistic and claims there is no God? How is it possible for Christians to sing these words with these people of faith---“if you believe and we believe, and we together pray?” Do these faith traditions worship the same God as we do, and seek to do what is right and acceptable to God? Yes, the beliefs and the language these religions use sound very different from ours. But I want you to recall the observations I made about ‘spirit-filled’ people and Pentecost. People filled with God’s spirit were able to listen, speak, and be understood by people who spoke in foreign languages. That means that these spirit-filled people were able to bridge from their life and faith experiences and find ways to connect to the life and faith experiences of those who were listening to them. This past week within my Pastoral Counselling training program, I was listening carefully to a Buddhist student share with me about how she helped a Buddhist patient pray to Bodhisattva. I found it quite fascinating. She said that “It is difficult to describe the function of Bodhisattva, but in general, it means that we, as human beings, have to always follow the spirit of Bodhisattva. The character of Bodhisattva does not have judgment, prejudice, like or dislike toward helping others. Rather, Bodhisattva possesses loving-kindness and compassion that liberate human beings from their sufferings. When Buddhists pray to Bodhisattva, they experience the presence of Bodhisattva which gives them not only comfort but also allows them to open up their hearts to the sufferings of others.” (email from student) These images of Bodhisattva are not idols but rather function as an icon, like a statue or picture of Christ that helps people connect with the presence symbolized by the statue or picture. When people pray to a Bodhisattva, they are seeking to experience the presence of a Bodhisattva which is often experienced as a compassionate presence. As I explored this experience further, it occurred to me that my Buddhist student’s experience of Bodhisattva’s compassionate presence was similar to how we, as Christians, would describe experiencing the compassion that God or Christ provides us when we pray. As Christians, we would label this experience of God’s compassion as a spiritual fruit of God’s Holy Spirit. What I want you to notice is that while the Buddhist language and framework are different from our Christian language and framework, the actual human experience is very similar. Could this similarity be an expression of the diversity of God’s spirit manifesting within the Buddhist tradition? Could these experiences in Buddhism be part of God’s grand tapestry? These are the questions I wonder about in today’s world…around Buddhism but also around the many other faith traditions. If we, as Christians, are willing to look beyond the differences in our theologies with the many world religions, which often separate us, and focus more on the many shared human experiences, shared religious practices, and shared values that each religious tradition nurtures, we may conclude what Apostle Peter discovered when he listened closely to the faith and life experiences of the Gentile Cornelius. We may conclude that “God doesn’t show partiality to one group of people over another. Rather, in every nation, in every religion, we see holy, gracious people who worship God, as they understand it, seeking to do what is right and acceptable to God. We may become amazed and grateful for the diversity found within God’s grand tapestry.
Questions to Ponder: 1. What are the different ways you experience God’s spirit within your religious faith? What spiritual practices do you follow to nurture these holy experiences, attitudes, and behaviors? What type of person and world does your religious faith nurture? 2. When have you discovered what Peter did, that “I really am learning that God doesn’t show partiality to one group of people over another. Rather, in every nation, whoever worships God and does what is right is acceptable to God.” What were those experiences like for you? 3. I invite you to befriend someone from a different religious tradition than yours. Practice listening in a deep way with them so that you can begin to notice how God’s spirit may be active within their lives. What do they consider a sacred experience? What religious/spiritual practices do they do that brings life and meaning to them? How does their faith/spirituality make them a better person and make our world a better world?
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