Diversity – Peculiar Faith

The Gift of Confusion

No one wants to be confused, and I would certainly not want to create confusing situations. I do mostly think of confusion itself as a bad thing, a problem to resolve or some kind of trouble to fix—but sometimes confusion might show up as a gift that leads us toward new life.

That’s what I started to realize from working with a wonderful doctoral student back in Berkeley. Erika Katske identifies as a “queer Jew, married to a transgender rabbi,” and her work as a community organizer and advocate for economic justice is informed by her religious faith (including but not limited to Judaism). That work framed her longstanding fascination with the ancient and iconic story from Genesis about the Tower of Babel (Gen. 1:1-11).

“The Tower of Babel,” Abigail Lee Goldberger

The lectionary assigns that story as an optional reading for the Day of Pentecost, this coming Sunday, and for an obvious reason: God interrupts the construction of the Tower of Babel by “confusing” the speech of those constructing it. Rather than a single language spoken by all, people could no longer understand what others were saying. Contrast that moment of confusion with the story from the Acts of the Apostles (2:1-21), where the sudden outpouring of the Holy Spirit enables people to comprehend different languages. Pentecost, in other words, “heals” Babel—or that what I used to think until reading Erika’s work.

I certainly won’t try to summarize a whole dissertation on this topic of nearly 300 pages, but here’s what caught my attention about Erika’s re-reading of the Babel story: the “confusion of languages” and the “scattering” of the people throughout the earth was not punishment from an angry God; to the contrary, it was a divine gift offered from love.

I was astonished when Erika and I first met to discuss her project and she pointed out that nothing in the Hebrew text of that ancient story suggests that God was “angry” about the Tower. To the contrary, God seems instead concerned about the singular focus of the people, the devotion of all their time and resources to just one project, and the dense concentration of their dwellings in just one valley. None of this would help those humans thrive—staying on that course would actually prevent their flourishing.

God’s response was the gift of confused languages and the scattering of their habitations in a much wider region. The effort required after that to cooperate generated new forms of community and social bonds, exactly what was needed for their thriving. (The point of Erika’s dissertation was to extend that analysis of the biblical story into the dynamics of global capitalism, which exhibits all of the problems of that ancient story but now on a planetary scale.)

Combining what I learned from Erika about Babel with the work I’ve done for many years on the disparate forms of human sexuality, gender expression, and family configurations inspired me to think in some fresh ways about Pentecost. The gift of the Holy Spirit on that day was not the return to a single language for everyone; the gift of the Holy Spirit was instead the capacity to understand multiple languages and, by extension, all the other kinds of multiplicity that accompany a “language”—various points of view, diverse cultures, different ethnicities, strange customs, odd ways to dress, unusual patterns of affection, and so on.

“I will Pour Out My Spirit,” Sieger Koder

Clearly, this kind of community-building takes hard work, even though it is prompted by the gift of the Holy Spirit. In fact, in the portion from John’s account of the Gospel assigned for Sunday, the Spirit is referred to by a Greek word that resists easy translation (ironically, as Andrew McGowan helpfully points out, for a day devoted to understanding strange languages). That word is “paraclete,” and was often used to describe a lawyer who accompanies someone facing judicial scrutiny (thus the typical English translation as “advocate”). But the more direct meaning of that term is “one-who-stands-with,” especially in the midst of struggle.

Standing with others these days—whether in congregations, cities, or as a nation—certainly involves serious struggle and not a little confusion. I often wish for something “easier” or “simpler,” but both Babel and Pentecost seem to invite us instead to engage the harder and thus more rewarding work of wrestling with our differences for the sake not only of the “common” good but the greater good. As John’s Jesus suggests, we will inevitably struggle with what it means to speak the truth, how to live with love, and ways to celebrate difference rather than merely to cluster in affinity groups for a sense of safety.

Even in the parish I am privileged to serve here in Michigan, we gather as a community of people who are very much alike in many respects yet still find ourselves struggling with speaking truth, living love, and embracing difference. Extending those efforts outward into communities with much greater diversity, the struggle only multiplies. This might well be the point of gathering every week around the Eucharistic Table, a religious sanctuary that offers a “rehearsal space” or “testing ground” for the kind of love God calls us to offer to the wider world.

Thankfully, we don’t even try to do this work alone. God gives the Holy Spirit as divine companion, comforter, counselor, and advocate. The one standing with us in the struggle is God’s gift, and the struggle itself is reason for gratitude.

Peculiar Strangers as Divine Gifts

Strangers from the East presented extravagant gifts to the child Jesus (Matthew 2:1-12). This became known as “The Epiphany,” but I’m realizing these days that those strangers, the “Magi,” are the gifts to us—and not a moment too soon in a xenophobic world of rampant white supremacy.

Reading the Magi as themselves gifts is thanks of course to the Gospel writer known as Matthew, who is the only one of the four canonical gospelers to include the story. It’s worth pondering why that story mattered so much to Matthew, or more significantly, to Matthew’s community, and now also to us—on this very day when many Christians celebrate the Epiphany, just as my parish did yesterday in worship.

We might recall, first, that each of the four accounts of the Gospel emerged from its own particular community of faith, each with its own demographic profile, colorful characters, and distinctive perspectives on God and Jesus. These communities had access to a variety of stories and traditions about Jesus, and eventually someone in each of these communities—or perhaps a small group—decided to write it all down and create a “gospel.” These writers adapted and revised those stories to meet the needs of their respective communities, and this helps to explain the variations among the four canonical accounts.

Scholars generally agree, for example, that Matthew’s community consisted mostly of Jewish followers of Jesus. A classic indication of this is the “Sermon on the Mount”—just as Moses brought the covenant to the people on Mount Sinai, so Matthew’s Jesus preaches about the “new covenant” on a mountain. Luke’s Jesus does this instead on a level place, a “plain.”

By noticing how these gospel writers connected traditions about Jesus to the particular issues facing their own communities, we can do the same work today—and not just theologians, pastors, or preachers, but the whole community. The Church is a “community of interpretation” where all of the members prayerfully discern how to read our sacred texts for the shared ministry to which God is calling us today.

How, then, might we read the iconic story from Matthew about the so-called “wise men” from the East, the ones who followed a star to Bethlehem and presented gifts to the child Jesus?

The divine presence in Jesus is shown to these gift-bearing strangers who were probably something like astrologers or perhaps those who practiced what we might call today an “earth-based religion.” The Greek word for these “wise men” in Matthew is magoi and it’s related to a Persian word for “powerful” (it’s also at the root of our word “magic” and “magician”). Some have suggested that this might have been a title given to Zoroastrian priests, an ancient monotheistic religious tradition that emerged from present-day Iran and Iraq. That tradition was devoted to connecting cosmic powers to earthly affairs—thus the appearance of an unusual star in the sky would have caught their attention.

Matthew’s story is often interpreted as a depiction of the global significance of Jesus—the meaning of his humble birth extends beyond Judea, and will have influence beyond the people of Israel, and reaches beyond standard borders to the East, to outsiders and foreigners. That sounds rather benign, but recalling that this is Matthew’s story, and that Matthew was likely embedded in a Jewish-Christian community, this story of the Epiphany would have been startling and should be read as both encouraging and scandalous at the very same time.

To live as inheritors of ancient Israel’s traditions and as followers of Jesus, as Matthew’s community apparently attempted, was often a complex religious undertaking. It was not always clear to which kind of religious or social category one belonged, or where one should belong. In many ways, those first-century Jewish Christians were boundary crossers—just like the Magi.

Those foreign astrologers traveled a long way, probably crossing a number of geopolitical borders. They were not Judeans, not even Israelites, so they were crossing a religious boundary as well. And these religious outsiders are among the very first to encounter Jesus—and by doing so because of the appearance of an unusual star, perhaps Matthew is suggesting that God deliberately called foreigners as witnesses to this profound moment.

Outsiders with privileged access to God’s own self-revelation: that’s a scandal that turns out to be a comfort.

Imagine Matthew’s community of Jewish Christians hearing this story: If God can lead peculiar border-crossers to God’s own presence in the flesh, then perhaps our own shifting and jumbled religious borders can be a source of insight for us as well.

Matthew’s approach to the quandaries faced by his own community seems to me quite compelling for every human community. The story about the Magi encourages us to look for epiphanies in unlikely places and among unexpected people, maybe even other species. But Matthew takes that encouraging scandal even further.

The gifts these Magi present to Jesus are not just random but function as symbols for the way Matthew wants to tell the rest of the story: myrrh was an embalming oil, prefiguring the death of Jesus; frankincense—an aromatic incense derived from medicinal plants—evoking the priestly prayers Jesus offers for our healing and thriving; and gold, representing the sovereignty of the risen Jesus, who appears on a mountain once again at the end of Matthew’s account of the Gospel, where he claims “all authority in heaven and on earth.” That mountaintop moment uniting the skies above and the ground beneath is precisely the moment those Zoroastrian Magi had dared to hope for.

Set aside those particular symbols for a moment and notice Matthew’s story-telling strategy for his community of Jesus-following Judeans: foreigners can help us navigate our own and often disorienting history.

Right there, in that strategy, is where Matthew’s Magi become gifts to us. This is the insight they embody: we need strangers and outsiders to help us interpret our own story.

Matthew’s strategy is not easy to embrace, of course, and it challenges the all-too common human tendency to gather only with those who are just like us. This is actually a cautionary tale from Matthew, warning us about borders: the walls we build for “self-protection” can instead prevent the insights of strangers from reaching us for our thriving.

The journey of the Magi offers a wonderful image for embarking on a journey into 2025, and for at least two reasons. First, the Magi were brave, setting out with only the light of a star to guide them to an unknown destination. We cannot know what’s ahead in the coming weeks and months, but the Magi themselves would encourage us with the courage of companions, and to make the journey together, trusting in divine guidance.

The second reason fortifies the first: the journey of the Magi led them to a place, Matthew says, of overwhelming joy. Whatever the coming year might hold for us, it will certainly require from us some hard work, careful discernment, and courage. Yes, and the journey itself will lead us toward joy.

Perhaps now more than ever, we need the divine gift of peculiar strangers to inspire trust on a journey toward joy. I know how trite that sounds, and this even more so: Matthew’s story can guide us along this path, like a bright star in the night sky—trite perhaps, but also vital for what it means to be “church” in an age of anxiety. Our shared faith and our brave companionship is the starry light we need.

A Collective Mending Session

Not unlike the United States of America, first-century Palestine was marked by distinct regions—each with various languages and accents, some with bustling urban centers while others mostly dotted with livestock herds or farms, all of them a mix of different religious sensibilities and a variety of political affiliations.

These regional features can sometimes contribute directly to the theological substance of a given story. Many Christians heard from Mark’s account of the Gospel yesterday, a passage the lectionary compilers stitched together in some peculiar ways. Overall, the passage portrays Jesus and the disciples crisscrossing the Sea of Galilee (Mark 6:30-34, 53-56).

Depending on which shore they land, they could be in a town shaped by Greco-Roman culture, or one still firmly rooted in Judean traditions, or a peculiar blend of ethnic customs from many different parts of that ancient Mediterranean basin, from Egypt to Gaul.

Mark seems to fancy here some geographical depictions of how the Gospel crosses all these lines of difference, not to erase them but to weave them together into something new. The image of the boat, the singular inland sea—these stand as symbols of hope for a new world, not a world of scattered fragments but of a beautifully woven tapestry.

Mark is likewise sure to note something about the crowds Jesus encounters on these shorelines: they were like “sheep without a shepherd”—aimless, perhaps, or without a clearly defined purpose, or maybe in search of some sense of home, the safety of the corral, as it were. The growing diversity of that Galilee region, an occupied province of the Roman Empire, probably felt unsettling; the long-standing familiar had become very strange.

More pointedly, those crowds were like sheep without a good shepherd. This was Jeremiah’s complaint, which some chose to read from the lectionary yesterday as well. Ancient Israel had plenty of so-called “shepherds,” religious and political leaders of all kinds. But they were hardly “good”—they divided the herd and scattered the sheep, destroying the flock itself.

“Woe to you shepherds,” Jeremiah imagines God saying, “woe to you who have not tended carefully to my people.”

That’s another way our country today resembles ancient Palestine. By some accounts, we are more fragmented than we have ever been. Media commentators have been expressing deep concern about the recent gun violence at a presidential campaign rally coming at a time when our country is “already deeply polarized.”

Writing in the New York Times, Peter Baker noted that American society has “split, it often seems, into two countries, even two realities” if not more. The divisions have grown so stark that 47 percent of Americans now believe a second civil war is likely or very likely in their lifetimes—forty-seven percent.

That sobering statistic might shed some light on another detail from Mark’s storytelling: the particular location where Jesus offers a healing touch. The crowds were bringing all those who were sick, Mark says, and laying them out in the marketplace of each town.

Markets are of course places for buying and selling, but they also stand for much more. In western Michigan, where I live, and in many other parts of the country, too, farmers markets pop up regularly as gathering places, locations for vendors and artisans of all kinds, as well as shoppers and visitors of all kinds.

Both ancient and modern markets are often crossroads, places where travelers and visitors and residents all mingle together. You can get swept away by the energy of a mob, take delight in the peculiar mix of people, or maybe feel a bit lost in a sea of strangers, perhaps unsure of where you really fit and belong, if anywhere at all.

The crowds—the ones who were like “sheep without a shepherd”—they bring the sick, and probably the lonely, and surely the despairing, always the alienated and unwell into the marketplace. Right there, Jesus heals them—sometimes only because they were able simply to touch just a corner of his tunic, a gesture of reaching out to connect, to reunite, to come home.

Mark doesn’t say what kind of healing took place, but this was no private consultation with a physician. This seems to me like a moment of social healing, of mending the fabric of a torn community, these crowds who were like “sheep without a shepherd” coming together in the marketplace for healing.

For all the advances of modern western medicine, many of us have likely forgotten an ancient insight, captured Mark’s story: healing is mostly a communal endeavor, the mending of relationships, a restoration of community—is this even imaginable any more in the United States?

“Collective Mending,” Catherine Reinhart

In doing an image search for this past week’s liturgy leaflet, I stumbled upon a gorgeous photograph, which we used on the leaflet’s cover. It’s a photograph of a mended quilt. The textile artist, Catherine Reinhart, brings people together to mend worn-out, tattered, and torn fabrics.

The photograph of that process which accompanied the mended quilt shows the gathered community in a circle engaged in shared mending. Reinhart calls this a “collective mending session,” and I cannot help but hear the Gospel in those words, and to see in that circle of careful menders a vision of mending a torn world—one square, one village, one region at a time.

A collective mending session facilitated by Catherine Reinhart

This particular mending resulted in creating something like a blood-red cross—yet another nexus point with the lectionary yesterday. Paul’s letter to the Ephesians includes a declaration of divine peace-making, with Jesus breaking down the dividing wall of hostility with the blood of his cross (Eph. 2:11-22).

All of Paul’s writings are rooted in his own experience of having been a violent persecutor of the early Jesus movement. Encountering the forgiveness and reconciliation of God in Christ—which, by the way, began with the healing of his vision—that encounter dramatically changed his life.

Whatever else salvation means, it certainly includes the healing of our divisions. For Paul, this meant the nearly unthinkable communion between Jews and Gentiles; the circumcised and uncircumcised; the religiously righteous and the ritually unclean. The Gospel creates, we might say, an ongoing collective mending session called “church.”

Whenever I despair over the state of American society—the vitriol, the hatred, the violent divisions—I try to imagine what in the world the Church can offer to such intractable problems. Catherine Reinhart has given me a new way of envisioning a solution: bearing witness to the God who heals and mends, offering a model of community not rooted in “sameness” but stitched and woven together with the threads of difference.

Surely this is why it matters for Christians to gather around the Eucharistic Table week by week, a Table to which God calls us not by merit but from grace, and only and always for love.

By such grace and love we might yet offer a collective mending session to a world in pain, and for the world’s healing.

A Joyful “Vision of Heaven” in a “Freak Imitation of Pentecost”

In the beginning, a wind from God swept over the chaos bringing forth the wonders of creation (Gen. 1:1). Creator God then breathed into the nostrils of a creature made from mud, bringing it to life (Gen. 2:7).

The psalmist reminds us that everyone dies without God’s breath, and likewise that God’s Spirit renews the very face of the earth (104:30-31).

John’s Jesus told Nicodemus that God’s Spirit is just like the wind—it blows wherever it wants to, untamable and uncontrollable (John 3:8). John later tells us that the risen Jesus breathed on his closest friends, inviting them to receive “Holy Spirit” for the work of forgiveness and to find peace.

These and other biblical writers relished making at least this one pun: in both Hebrew and Greek, the word usually translated as “spirit” can also mean “breath” or “wind.”

The Latin word anima is usually translated into English as “soul” but it can also mean “breath” and “vitality”; it comes from an ancient Indo-European verb meaning “to breathe.” In that sense, every single creature of God with the breath of life has a soul—humans, dogs, cats, birds, cattle, pigs, elephants (the list goes on).

The English word “inspiration” comes from a Latin verb that means “to breathe into.” When we are inspired, we are being filled with God’s own breath, the Holy Spirit.

Yesterday’s celebration of Pentecost marked a notably dramatic instance of that inspiration; as we most always do on Pentecost, we heard that story from the Acts of the Apostles (2:1-21). Fifty days after the resurrection of Jesus, a group of his followers heard the sound of rushing wind and what seemed like tongues of flame danced on all of their heads.

“Descent of the Holy Spirit,” Joseph Matar

I think we should be really clear about this: “all” of their heads does not mean just twelve men, even though that’s how this scene is often depicted, with a grand total of twelve men receiving the Spirit.

At the risk of putting too fine a point on this, depicting Pentecost in that way actually serves an institutional purpose—to restrict the gift of the Holy Spirit to the first twelve male “apostles” defines who can become “bishops.”

But there’s another way to read this story. The evangelist Luke, who also wrote Acts, notes that there weren’t just twelve people gathered on that day; there were at least 120, and not all of them men.

That’s probably why Peter feels compelled to quote from the ancient Hebrew prophet Joel for that occasion, who wrote about the Spirit being poured out on all flesh—not just twelve people, not only men, and probably not just human beings, but all flesh.

When “all” really does mean all, communities become seriously diverse. And I confess: I sometimes find such diversity uncomfortably messy. I can’t be the only one who still thinks it would have been much more efficient and orderly if all those foreign visitors to Jerusalem on that day had suddenly understood a single language, but that’s not what happened.

Luke tells us that each of those visitors understood the Gospel in their own native language, in their own cultural idioms, and with their own ethnic sensibilities in place.

The indigenous translation we used at my parish yesterday morning makes very clear that many of the places from which those visitors came were considered “outsider nations,” at the very least treated with suspicion by Jerusalem’s “insiders.”

The Spirit breaks down those barriers between groups, not by making everyone the same, but by forging a much stronger unity than mere sameness ever could—forged from previously unnamed shared hopes, the drafting of common dreams, discovering a surprising confluence of desires and yearnings.

For some years now on Pentecost, I reflect on a wonderful story about what can actually happen when a community embraces this broader Pentecostal vision of being church together. Here’s just a brief version:

Back in the early 1900s, African American preacher William J. Seymour and his wife Jennie opened a small mission in an abandoned stable in what was known as the “Black ghetto” of Los Angeles.

As the story goes, God poured out the Spirit there on Azusa Street, drawing dozens of people to Seymour’s preaching and Jennie’s teaching. Soon hundreds were coming, not only for the preaching and teaching but for the ecstatic trances, the speaking in tongues, and the miraculous healings.

The Azusa Street Revival began in 1906 and lasted, quite remarkably, until roughly 1915. This astonishing moment in a rickety building on a neglected street corner launched the world-wide Pentecostal movement, still the fastest growing branch of Christianity.

At the time, it was also the most scandalous. Erupting in the midst of Jim Crow segregation, this revival attracted white, Black, Latino, and Asian converts, all of them “intermingling,” as one commentator complained at the time.

Even more: fourteen years before women could even vote in the United States, the Apostolic Faith Mission on Azusa Street encouraged women in positions of leadership. This alone caused some to dismiss that revival as “outrageous” and even “blasphemous.” One local minister called it “a freak imitation of Pentecost,” and a “horrible, awful shame.” (See Jack Hayford and David Moore’s account of this in their book The Charismatic Century:)

Breaking down racial barriers and rejecting gendered privilege enraged both secular and religious observers alike. Azusa’s participants, by contrast, called those social disruptions nothing less than a vision of heaven, and a taste of salvation.

Maybe because I still draw from the insights of my Evangelical past, and love my Pentecostal colleagues, and have been shaped by Catholic traditions in my weirdly EvanPenteCatholian life, but I think it’s high time for Azusa Street moment today. I mean something like a revival worthy of today’s challenges, for a renewal of Pentecost in the twenty-first century, for an outrageous and scandalous vision of what Gospel transformation looks like in a broken and fragmented world.

We cannot, of course, manufacture such moments ourselves but they can happen when we cultivate a joyful spirituality.

I’ve been thinking about this recently, reminded that the vestry of the parish I now serve identified “joyful spirituality” as one of the aspirational values we seek to embrace as a parish, and it needs much more attention. Joy, after all, is one of the gifts of the Holy Spirit.

I don’t mean happiness, which is almost always associated with how we happen to feel, with our material possessions, with our social and economic status. Joy has nothing to do with any of those things.

Joy, it seems to me, is resilient gladness, completely independent of one’s circumstances—in times of scarcity and abundance, in times of suffering and hope, in times of consternation and confusion, the Spirit’s gift of joy remains.

A community gifted by the Holy Spirit with such resilient gladness will not merely grow—it will deepen its diversity, it will find healing in hospitality, it will, as the prophet Joel declared, see visions and dream dreams never before imagined.

We’re overdue. The need is real. The time is now.

Come, Holy Spirit, come.

God with All of Us

“Apache Virgin and Child,” John Giuliani

Mary, Joseph, and Jesus were not white. This is ridiculously obvious, but I didn’t really appreciate that fact until I was a young adult.

As part of a college program in the Holy Land, I had the opportunity to visit the Basilica of the Annunciation in Nazareth, Israel. A shrine or church has stood on that site for a very long time, since at least the fourth century.

“Mother of God of Africa,” Liesbeth Smulders

The latest iteration was built in the 1960s, and part of the design included inviting mosaics or paintings of Mary and Jesus from around the world, each depicting those figures in ways that were ethnically appropriate to each country or region. The result is a visual feast as visitors to the upper level of the basilica are greeted by dozens of diverse images of “Madonna and Child.”

Gazing on those images, I realized how narrow my own visual imagination had been—by default, I had always simply imagined the Holy Family to look like me. It was also important to realize that the images were not all Middle Eastern or Semitic, either.

The wide range of particularities and peculiarities in those beautiful portrayals carried a truly rich theological insight: God is with us, is with all of us—with Palestinians and Italians and Kenyans and Chinese and Indians and Irish and…the list is as long as every possible version of humanity we can think of. And I would also add to that list every possible version of God’s creatures, human and other-than-human alike.

God is with Us. That is the wonderful and always good news of Christmas. And as I realized many years ago in Nazareth, the Good News is made even richer with the glorious diversity of God’s creation. Merry Christmas!

Many Beautiful Names in an Idolatrous Nation

Do Christians and Muslims worship the same God?

Quite honestly, I often wonder if I worship the same God as some of my fellow Christians.

In some respects, the answer is quite obviously yes, Muslims and Christians do worship the same God. Allah is, after all, just the Arabic word for “God” (which many Arabic speaking Christians use), like Dios in Spanish or Theos in Greek. The one God is known by many exquisitely beautiful names – at least ninety-nine of them, as Muslims would say.

allah_99_names — The Ninety-Nine Beautiful Names of Allah

But there’s more at stake here than theological precision for its own sake. Theology always makes a difference beyond its own confines. Theological ideas wriggle their way into cultural customs, social policies, and lynch mobs. Those ideas can also shape, I constantly trust, communities of radical hospitality and social justice.

For more centuries than anyone can count, religion has provided the tempo for the drumbeat of war and the music of peacemaking alike. There are so very few “innocent” or “agenda-free” religious questions. And those questions can show up in unexpected places.

Consider the recent imbroglio over a “hazing” incident at Wheaton College, my alma mater, which included occasional references to what happened there to Prof. Larycia Hawkins. A tenured professor, a woman of color, and a Christian, she was dismissed from the college in 2016 after standing in solidarity with Muslims. The official reason for her dismissal was her supposed violation of Wheaton’s statement of faith, her insistence that Christians and Muslims “worship the same God.”

The “hazing” of a student by some of his football teammates happened just one month after Prof. Hawkins left the college. The details are fuzzy and contested, but some reports of the “hazing” indicated that “Islamic music” was played during the incident and Islamic slurs were used to taunt the student. Whether or not any of this is true, it has re-ignited a social media conversation about Christianity and Islam in America.

So, do Christians and Muslims worship the same God? It matters to think about that question carefully and to respond with more than a “yes” or “no,” especially in today’s American cultural climate and the wider global realities where so much depends on how we humans live with religious difference – or whether we can.

I’d like to offer some observations about that question in two steps. First, I would propose a distinction worth making between prayer and worship. They certainly overlap, but worship always remains vulnerable to idolatry, to which the United States has recently fallen prey in particularly virulent ways.

Second, there is nearly as much religious diversity among Christians today as there is between “other” religions. It behooves us to ponder how we manage (embrace?) our own diversity before trying to address a religious tradition not our own. In doing so, I’m convinced, we find fresh ways to learn from and admire religious “others.”

But first, a brief preface.

I offer these reflections as a Christian priest and theologian. As such, I live with some convictions about God, and why my love of Jesus matters in those convictions (a love, by the way, that many Muslims also share, but differently). The longer I study Christian traditions, however, my list of certainties about God grows shorter.

Whenever I crave just a tad more certainty, I try to remember fourth and fifth century cautions. Like this one from Augustine: “If you understand something, it’s not God.” Or this, from Gregory of Nyssa: “Concepts create idols; only wonder understands anything.”

I do love the many texts of theology, both ancient and contemporary. I love them, not because they sharpen my conceptual acuity but because they invite me and then lead me (if I let them) ever deeper into the fathomless mystery of deathless Love.

So, the question at hand, it seems to me, is not about God but about us and our varying conceptions of the one God (at least in the Abrahamic traditions of Jews, Christians, and Muslims). How might we think about this? Here are my initial two steps:

Prayer and Worship: A Venn Diagram
Grant for the moment that there is but one God. When we’re fervently praying for healing, rescue, discernment, courage, love, or countless other things, I don’t think she cares whether we get her name right – there are at least ninety-nine of them, after all.

Pray with all your might to the Source of All, Deathless Love, Wonder-Beyond-Words – just pray. In due time, *God* may well reveal a divine name just for you.

Worship, on the other hand, carries some risk. The word itself comes from Old English and means, simply, “acknowledging worth.” My own list of people and places and things deserving such acknowledgement is endless. I’m still moved (often to tears) when hearing the phrase from the marriage rite of an older version of the Book of Common Prayer. The vows taken by the couple include this: “With my body I thee worship.” What a glorious declaration of God’s wonderful creation!

Here’s the risk: assigning worth to something that is dangerous, harmful, or violent. Biblical writers were, to put it mildly, preoccupied with this risk. They called it “idolatry.”

Rather than pondering whether Christians and Muslims worship the same God, more than a few Americans might want to ponder whether they are assigning worth to the modern nation-state – the kind of worth that belongs only to *God*.

This has been a constant danger in American history (“In God We Trust” stamped on our money), but it now appears unashamedly around every corner – fetishizing the flag, covering one’s heart to swear allegiance to that flag, making “America first.”

Whom (or what), one must ask, do Americans worship?

Diversity Starts at Home
The canon of Scripture used by most Christians includes many more names and images and symbols for God than appear regularly in Sunday morning worship. More of us might engage in respectful encounter with religious difference if we engaged with our own religious diversity more honestly, as Christians.

Drawing on ancient Hebrew texts for a Christian insight about this, consider Leviticus and Isaiah.

The writer of Leviticus portrays a warrior God who demands absolute covenantal purity and strict distinctions between Israel and all other nations. The writer(s) of Isaiah, on the other hand, portray an amorous God of social justice and peace-making who invites all the nations to the holy mountain for a banquet.

isaiah_abigail_sarah_bagraim — The Holy Mountain of Feasting in Isaiah (Abigail Sarah Bagraim)

I believe these various biblical writers are writing about the same God, but their perceptions and understandings could not be more different; and the implications of the difference are actually quite profound. (If a space alien landed and was given only those two biblical texts, that alien would likely conclude that they refer to two different “gods.”)

The gospel writers portray Jesus as deeply rooted in the faith of his Israelite ancestors. But in which ancestral understanding of God was he rooted? Luke gives an unambiguous answer: In the fourth chapter of his gospel account, he has Jesus quote from Isaiah to launch his ministry.

If at least Luke rooted his perceptions of Jesus drawn from Isaiah’s perceptions of God, then it seems to me that Christian mission ought to focus on inviting all the nations, all the religions, all the races, and creeds, and ethnicities to the holy Mountain of God to feast at a banquet. And this, I am convinced, would actually change the world.

jesus_isaiah — Jesus reading from Isaiah to inaugurate his ministry (Luke 4)

The change will come by focusing less on whether African-American football players obey their white owners and stand for the national anthem, and more on where anyone’s true allegiance ought rightly to belong.

The change will come when American Christians think differently about refugees from Islamic countries, about Muslims building mosques in “our” cities, and how to stand in solidarity with our Jewish siblings when their synagogues are defaced. The change would come from seeing all of them and us trying to pray to and worship the same God.

The change will come when we extend our vision beyond Abrahamic traditions and realize a common quest shared by all humans (and likely other animals, too): to find our place in a universe utterly beyond anyone’s understanding and to make meaning from our lives together, in a world where only wonder understands anything.

Are we worshiping the same God? It doesn’t matter to whom the word “we” refers. The only way anyone will know the answer is when everyone lives a world of justice, bathed with peace, and where all creatures thrive and flourish.

peaceable_kindgom_swanson