Treasuring the treasure: an interfaith journey.

Vogelaar, Harold

I want to begin (1) with a story, "Whose Treasures? Whose Voices?" written by Catherine Sepko, about growing up in Appalachia and then leaving as an older adult. "I was taught," she wrote after she had left Appalachia, "that I should rid myself of my Appalachian dialect and accent in order to succeed in the real world.... [In doing so] I apparently lost a part of my own cultural identity--an identity that I am not certain, as a young Appalachian, I even knew I had." (2) Sepko writes about her search and the joy of rediscovering her Appalachian identity. She refers to the poetry of Robert Morgan, a professor of English at Cornell University, who grew up in the Blue Ridge Mountains near Zirconia, North Carolina:

The reader often finds in Morgan's poetry the image of water struggling
to burst into the light from the dark, bubbling to the surface from the
place where it had been forced to run underground. When the conditions
are right, it bubbles up, much like freshwater issued from a newly
cleaned artesian spring.... Having cleaned out a spring on my family's
property for numerous years, I knew the imagery. Suddenly, I wanted to
go home to drink anew from my own spring, now long since neglected, its
cool, refreshing water replaced by the modern tap water, which often
tasted artificial and chemically cleansed. Before I knew it, the water
of creative emotion was bubbling through me.

With this image in mind, I begin the conversation about my own journey by raising three preliminary questions: What is the treasure we claim, and is it authentic? Whose is it? To whose voices do we listen?

What is the treasure we claim, and is it authentic?

Sometimes on my interfaith journey, dialogue partners have asked whether the gospel we are sharing is indeed the gospel intended by Jesus. I have always wanted to answer Yes, of course it is!--but I have to acknowledge that it is a legitimate question. When St. Paul said we have this "treasure" in earthen vessels (2 Cor 4:7), what exactly did he mean? What was that treasure, and is it indeed the same treasure we now claim to possess?

In a fascinating article, "Christian Response to Religious Pluralism," (3) Lars Thunberg argues convincingly that from very early times Christians felt a need to legitimate the claims of Christianity in relation to both its Jewish background and its appearance as a distinct religion containing a revelation of truth relevant under all circumstances, so that the church as it moved forward and outward could feel confident that the gospel it was proclaiming was authentically consistent with the authorized past--that it had roots deeply embedded in the Hebrew tradition and scriptures and so was genuine.

There were many ways of doing this. One example is that of Eusebius, who, Thunberg claims, presents "a static view of Christianity.... His reading of history authenticates Christianity as basically age-old and unchangeable. This took on a doctrinal meaning in Christianity for a very long time." Orthodoxy was considered to be something static, while innovation was heresy.

Few of us, I presume, would any longer want to say that authentic Christianity is static and that all innovation is heresy, as though Christianity were a package neatly wrapped that just needs to be handed down. I think we have moved beyond that. But there is, I suspect, a genuine

desire to believe that the treasure we claim to have, the gospel we want to share, is legitimate and authentic, at least not totally other than the treasure of which Paul was speaking.

So I propose that we ponder this question as we think about our witness in the garden: What is the treasure we want to share, and how authentic is it, how biblical, how true to the Christ event? In our attempt to become "relevant," to "succeed in the real world," has the church compromised or even lost its identity? Has the gospel been hijacked to serve one or another particular ideology? Is there, anymore, what we used to call a "normative gospel"? If so, what is it, and is such a gospel still desirable? Have hybrids become the rule rather than the exception? Have divergence, diversity, and crossbreeding now become the norm--and rightly so?

In answering it is well to keep in mind Paul's warning that hawking or taming or tailoring the gospel has a long history (cf. Gal 1:6, 7). We need to keep in mind as well the warning of Jesus to his own religious leaders, to the hypocrites of his day: "you cross sea and land to make a single convert, and you make the new convert twice as much a child of hell as yourselves" (Matt 23:15). These are strong words but important admonitions as we think about what the gospel is for the times in which we live.

Whose treasure is it?

This question is frequently raised in dialogue with people of other faiths. Does God's gift of Jesus belong only to you who are Christians? I've been tempted to say no but then quickly add, yes, this is our gift, because we've laid claim to it, we defend it, we proclaim and protect it; Jesus is our life.

But it is a legitimate question. As I though about it, I turned again to Paul's comments in 2 Cor 4:7: "We have this treasure in earthen vessels...." Without doubt, "we" here refers to the church, the disciples of Jesus, us. So, yes, as Christians we can claim this treasure. But then Paul says that we have this treasure in "earthen vessels," or, as some translations have it, clay pots. I confess that I used to read this in what now appears to me a distorted way. I always associated the words breakable, fragile, and vulnerable not with the pots but with the treasure! And because in my thinking the treasure was so fragile, so delicate, so easily broken, the pots needed to be almost indestructible in order to protect the precarious content.

Looking back, I think this is how my religious teachers and instructors really intended it to be. The idea was that if we as Christians would remain strong and firm, even impervious to outside influences, the gospel would be perfectly preserved; the fragile treasure would remain safe. If we kept the church "pure," they argued, the precious, fragile treasure called the gospel would be safe.

I can understand that mentality but now think it was misguided. It's not the gospel that is so fragile but we, the vessels--and it's ok for us to be fragile, to be weak and sinful, to be utterly human. "We have this treasure in earthen vessels to show that the transcendent power belongs to God and not to us," Paul writes. Then he goes on in these moving words: "We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed." In other words, the gospel treasure has the power to keep us, the earthen vessels, from falling into defeat, despair, and hopelessness. The strength is in the treasure, not in us; the extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us. This kind of vessel vulnerability is something we will want to ponder as we work in the garden.

This still leaves us with the question of whose treasure it is, a question that has surfaced significantly on the mission field. D. T. Niles from Sri Lanka said years ago that the Christianity brought by Western missionaries was like a potted plant, and for that plant to grow in other soil the pot needed to be broken so that the plant could send down roots in new soil and produce its own fruit, which may have a look and a taste different from that in the West. For many of us this was painful to hear, because we were quite certain that the church as we knew it was identical with the treasure. Without the one, we said, you will not have the other. So we did our best to keep the potted plant intact, even in its outward forms. Churches needed chairs, at least; you couldn't sit on the floor, because that would look too much like a mosque. And churches needed towers or steeples and bells. Or so we thought.

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To whom does the treasure belong? This is worth pondering. If it is ours alone, what then of the understanding of Jesus by others? What of Jesus' own vision that the house of God be a "house of prayer for all nations" (Mk 11:18)? Are we as vessels one with the treasure and so indispensable to it? Or are we simply its bearers--feeble, weak, even breakable, and at times necessarily so? The Christian faith, after all, is full of paradox, as Bishop Mark Hanson keeps reminding us. To learn to live with it is a wonderful Lutheran virtue.

To whose voices do we listen?

David Rhoads' book The Challenge of Diversity: The Witness of Paul and the Gospels (4) is a wonderful testimony to the rich diversity of voices found already in the canonical New Testament. In the area of Christian witness, there have been and are many voices, some very much at odds with others. We can, if we want, look at the exclusionary passages in Deuteronomy 13 and people like Ezra and Nehemiah who speak a language very different from Ruth and Jonah and Jesus. We all have our own favorite biblical passages that support the position we hold. In the Christian tradition there are voices that speak a variety of opinions, some broadly open to the working of God far and wide, others wondering what Athens has to do with Jerusalem.

In the Protestant tradition, some of the words of Martin Luther and John Calvin can sound harsh and foreboding, at least to my ears. Luther, for example, "as he looked into the future ... asked whether Mahomet and his followers were the final Antichrist ... he answered No. Islam was too gross and irrational for this mighty role...." (5) And Calvin wrote, "When the Turks [Muslims] ... do not recognize that God is manifested in the flesh, which is one of the principal articles of our faith, then they are guilty of perversities and are leading so many people astray that they deserve to be put to death." (6)

This ominous portent has been picked up in recent times by people such as Tim LaHaye and others from the religious right who have been hurling invectives at Muslims. Islam, they say, is an intolerant religion, and it is clear whose side we should be on in the Middle East; Allah and Jehovah are not the same God; Islam is a Satanic religion; America should "Wake up!" For them a terrible, final war in the Middle East is inevitable. Some of us have family members and know of individuals in our churches who actually think this way. So I do not take these words lightly or dismiss them out of hand.

As a teenager I was fortunate to live next door to a retired missionary who had spent 35 years in Iraq. He helped me to understand the Arab people and taught me to appreciate the Arabic language and the writings of al-Ghazali, an eleventh-century Muslim theologian, poet, and mystic. It was his gentle voice that challenged me to spend many years in the Middle East as a missionary. I met Bishop Kenneth Cragg, a prolific writer and astute student of things biblical and Qur'anic. He used to say that there are many Christian reasons why Muslims ought to take Jesus seriously. But never forget, he would say, there are also many Qur'anic, Islamic reasons for them to do so. To discover these, of course, requires a sound knowledge and deep appreciation of the Qur'an and its teachings, and I believe Bishop Cragg has done this to a degree and in a manner unequaled.

The voices to which we choose to listen and the ones we ignore determine the approach we take toward people of other faiths. A student recently told me that a friend in middle school had asked his pastor whether people other than Christians could go to heaven. He was told they could not, because heaven was reserved only for Christians. The student said that this so impressed his friend that he continues to resent his pastor's answer. He himself had a similar but exactly opposite experience. When he asked the same question, his pastor told him that only God knows, and because God is love it is best to leave it to God. Two very different answers that made indelible impressions on young minds.

The good thing is that there is room for a wide spectrum of honest opinions. The vessels that carry the treasure do not all need to speak with one voice. As a colleague said recently, when Paul writes in Rom 12:5 that we, "though many," are all one in Christ, this could and perhaps should be translated: that we, "being many" or "because we are many," are all one in Christ. It is in the richness of the many, in the diversity of community, the multiplicity of cultures, that we find the real meaning of the treasure we actually have and would like to share.

Having raised these questions about the nature of the treasure and its authenticity, whose it is and to whose voices we listen, I want to shift gears and weave these themes into insights gained from my own journey into interfaith relations. I do so by using the Apostles Creed. Long ago I came to appreciate the structure, if not always the content, of this Creed as a wonderful, faithful guide for interfaith conversation. I say "not always the content" because Jewish friends remind me that an awful lot happened between creation and Christ, and in the creed the whole life of Jesus gets reduced to a comma. Still, it begins ...

The First Article

"I believe in God the Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth." With others in the Lutheran tradition, I believe that this brief statement of faith is what makes interfaith dialogue possible. I see it as setting the stage upon which I can not only affirm but welcome what God has been doing in all of creation; it enables me to receive the gifts God has lavished on all creatures, whoever and wherever they are.

Bishop Lesslie Newbigin encouraged us not to begrudge this generosity of God. I remember listening to him use the story of the prodigal son to make his point. It was the elder son, he said, who just could not accept the generosity and graciousness of his father in welcoming back a lost and wayward brother. This begrudging spirit, warned Newbigin, often takes over when we encounter persons whose faith tradition seems out of sync with what we consider to be faithful discipleship, so we see them and their gifts as a threat rather than as evidence of God's abundant goodness. I remember D. T. Niles saying that he never took Jesus anywhere but rather always looked to see what Jesus was already doing in people's lives.

These simple truths have altered my vision, and, as you know, the eye altered alters all. I can now honestly welcome and affirm, actually seek out, what I believe we have in common. This is especially true in areas of human need, but more and more it is also true in things of the heart and the spirit. Eardley Mendis recently commented, "The train on which my wife and daughter were riding in Sri Lanka, and on which my wife died [when the tsunami hit], was filled with Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims, Christians, Tamils, and Singhalese. All of them died together. If we can all be together in death, is it not possible in life to live together in peace?" His good question begs an honest answer.

I think it is possible, but only if we are willing to see that all of us have been gifted by God. In a course titled "Religion in Dialogue," for example, many of our students and I have learned from our Buddhist colleague to appreciate the discipline of being still, of staying focused, of seeing the interconnectedness of all things, and of being committed to nonviolence. I especially appreciate and want to appropriate some words of wisdom from the Buddha, who said that one should win (overcome) anger through kindness, wickedness through goodness, selfishness through charity, and falsehood through truthfulness. This teaching of nonviolence among Buddhists is legendary. Some years ago in Phoenix, Arizona, two thieves entered a Buddhist temple and, in the process of stealing a few gilded statues, ruthlessly shot to death six monks. The community of Phoenix was stunned when the Buddhists refused to seek vengeance.

From Muslim friends I have learned to value the discipline of daily prayer and the restraint of fasting during the month of Ramadan. In my marriage to a Muslim woman, we struggle to learn what it means not just to come together for prayer but actually to pray together. That would be difficult if we did not deeply believe that we are worshipping and standing in the presence of the same God who created us all. Does that mean we always comprehend God in the same way? No, but we share enough understanding to make common prayer possible and meaningful.

In a marvelous little book, Alive to God: Muslim and Christian Prayer, (7) Bishop Cragg has compiled a number of Muslim and Christian prayers under the themes of Praise, Penitence, and Petition. This little collection allows us to use material devotionally even when we do not always agree on the meaning of the words. It is not unlike our use of the Hebrew scripture where our interpretation is quite different from that of Jewish friends. Cragg's thesis is that since as humans we have such power in our hands, they need to be uplifted hands, and if uplifted, he argues, why not sometimes joined? Not always, of course; there are times when we simply have to say no.

You have your own stories of discovering the lavishness of God's mercy in the gifts given to people whose faith differs from your own. And in your own way you have learned how to welcome and affirm and even appreciate them. LSTC President James Kenneth Echols has a sign that says: "Truth is freedom; tell your story," Indeed, if you have had good experiences with people of another faith, tell your story. Do not keep it to yourself. These kinds of stories need to multiply.

The Second Article

Our belief in Jesus Christ as God's Son, our Lord, who was crucified, died and was buried, who returned from the dead, ascended into heaven and will come again, is surely the distinguishing mark of the Christian community. If the First Article makes dialogue possible, the Second makes it significant. Our belief about who Jesus is and what God was doing in Christ makes our contribution distinct. As far as I know, no other religious community, no matter how much they may honor Jesus, as many of them do, is willing to tell the story of Jesus or to understand Jesus the Christ as Christians do. This is our task, this is our duty, and no matter how foolishly or wisely we do it, it must be done by us. If we do not keep the story alive, and make it real through our living, no one else will--though God, of course, is able to raise up witnesses even from the stones.

I have frequently been asked why, after studying Islam for so long, and knowing it as well as I do, I do not become a Muslim. Having seen the light, why do I not embrace it? I have learned to reply that if this is a serious query, if you really want to know, let us sit down, sip a cup of hot, sweet tea, and I will tell you why.

Of course, I then have to be able to say why--or, as St. Peter puts it, to give a reason for the hope that is within me. For a lot of Christians this is the difficult part. In many of our circles we assume that everyone knows the story, and there is no real reason to articulate why we are Christian. Some of us grew up in a Christian home; we were baptized and confirmed and have gone to church all our lives; of course we are Christian. Probably we have never considered any other alternative, or even had one for that matter. Now that the garden in which we live is transformed, has become multicultural and interfaith, all of that changes. When I first went to Egypt I saw many Christians with a tattoo of the cross on the inside of their wrists. When I asked why, they said, "It is there to keep us Christian." When alternatives are real, sometimes attractive or even compelling, it becomes necessary to know why we are Christian and want to remain so, and be able to articulate that.

How we do this--how we understand and present Christ and how we treasure this part of the treasure--will differ depending on the church to which we belong and our own personal experience. We know that there are many different Christologies. Not all of us view Christ in the same way or even in the same way we did some years ago. We are all on a journey.

I grew up in a church where liturgy was a bad word and preaching and personal faith in Christ were everything. I am saved, they said, when I accept Jesus Christ as my personal savior. For them the horizontal dimension of faith was not nearly as important as the vertical dimension of God's transcendence. While participating in the worship and activities of the church was encouraged, it was not essential to salvation. Similarly, acting a particular way in the world was not essential to salvation. Salvation centered on the sincerity of my decision in that moment of accepting Jesus as Savior.

I then moved away and worked with Christians who honestly believed that if the gospel we present does not have a strong horizontal component where issues of justice, peace, hunger, health care, the environment, gender and sexual equality, and openness to people of other cultures and faiths are taken seriously, then it is a truncated gospel.

I now have friends who are deeply troubled by the status question: Are you saved? For them the status gained is not so much one of possession ("I have salvation") as one of identity ("I am a part of the family"), so participation in the life of the church, thought of as the ongoing presence of Christ in the world, is essential. In this understanding, we grow and are nurtured in the faith throughout this life by the sacraments, by service, and by fellowship, until eventually we attain (although do not earn) salvation.

We Christians have many ways of telling the story. With some we might agree, with others disagree. People sometimes wonder what it is that binds us all together, we seem to be so diverse, so fragmented. The story of a friend who some years ago attended Easter Vigil in the thousand-year-old cathedral of Mainz, Germany, offers a clue. Writing of that experience, he said:

I had gone to the service with two of the other fellows from the
institute [in which we were studying]--Chris, a Methodist from Boston,
and Piotr, a Russian Orthodox from Tashkent, Uzbekistan....
 The Easter Vigil liturgy begins where Tenebrae services traditionally
end, in almost total darkness. The light from a single candle,
symbolizing the risen Christ, was a bare pinprick in the vast Romanesque
expanse of the cathedral. But as the flame from that Christ candle
passed from person to person until each of us had a lighted candle--
there must have been two thousand of us or more--that pinprick grew into
a glow so rich and warm and golden that it felt almost anticlimactic
when the electric lights eventually came up.
 So there we stood, Chris and Piotr and I, a tiny Orthodox and
Protestant archipelago in a sea of German Catholics, with incense
billowing above the altar and Gregorian chant echoing off the stone
walls ... and as we passed the peace to each other and those around us I
remember thinking to myself, "This is how it really is: choirs of
angels, nothing empty except a tomb, and a cloud of witnesses from every
nation and tongue. I am a part of this: this feels like home." The stub
of that Vigil candle traveled back across the Atlantic with me, and I
kept it on my dresser for years. (8)

Yes, the vessels are quite different; we are of various cultures, languages, colors, and races. What binds us together finally is the light that shines in the life of Jesus. Not just the four days leading up to the resurrection but thirty years, three of them lived in the company of women and children, the sick, the poor, the despised, the outcast, in the frailty of a human body, but all of them lived in intimate relationship with God whom he called Abba, Father. He offered this intimacy to all who would take up their own cross and follow him. That small flame from the Christ candle, when handed on from person to person, from generation to generation, illumines the darkness and eventually illuminates the landscape of the entire world. Someone passed that flame on to us; we now need to pass it on to others.

The Third Article

The Third Article of the creed begins with a confession of our belief in the Holy Spirit. If the First Article makes dialogue possible and the Second makes it significant, it is the Third Article, this belief in and dependence on the Holy Spirit, that helps us grow in our dialogue journey, keeps it on track, and eventually makes what we do fruitful.

It has rightly been said that in the area of interfaith dialogue there are not many road signs, no clear indications of what to do or how to do it. People often ask: without signs, how do we know where we are going? It may be good to welcome and affirm the gifts others have received, but what does that mean? How far ought we to go? Are there boundaries we should not cross? I am sure there are, but if we had clear answers to all of these questions, we would not need the Holy Spirit. In my interfaith journey I have developed a healthy suspicion of people who have a ready answer to every question and who feel uncomfortable when they do not. I've learned to appreciate the blessing of ambiguity.

In his book The Go-between God: The Holy Spirit and the Christian Mission (9) John V. Taylor gives an amazing description of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit blows where it will, "uncontainable, endlessly surprising, refreshing, creative, never reading the rubrics," "divine energy infusing every living thing." As far as Taylor is concerned, nothing and no one is cut off from this life-giving Spirit, from what he calls this "Beyond in the midst." The Spirit is the relational dimension of God, the "Go-between God." Listen to his description of the chapel in London that he designed:

The honest, unpretentious use of raw materials, the expanse of windows
looking out to the world, will, I hope, say something. At the heart of
our activity the chapel will be a pool of silence, as far as the
architect can make it. Visually it is not cut off from the rest of the
building, and from most points one can look right into it. It is
important also that from inside the chapel one can look right out of it,
not only back into the corridors and committee rooms, but, more
importantly, down into the ceaseless traffic of the Waterloo Road.
"Glory to God in the High Street!"

When I look around at this [LSTC] chapel I believe it symbolizes what Taylor must have had in mind. In fact, his description could have been written for this chapel. Visually we in this space are not cut off from the rest of our buildings. From nearly every point one can look right into the chapel. Also from inside we can look right out of it, not only back to the classrooms, the library, and across the courtyard to McCormick Seminary but also onto the ceaseless traffic of 55th Street. We too can say: Glory to God in our own High Street!

But is it enough just to look out the windows of our chapels onto the ceaseless traffic all around us? I remember as a youth that missionaries would come and show us pictures of faraway places and people who looked and dressed differently. Many seemed to be poor, mostly in need of things we thought we had and should provide. So we supported our missionaries generously. But in our own hometown we feared people who were different and did not welcome them into our community. Looking at pictures of other people was fine, but opening our hearts and community to them, that was different.

After Jesus' crucifixion his disciples gathered in an upper room, with the doors locked. They were afraid. The familiar sight of Jesus walking with them was no longer there. Things had changed. No longer did they have a human Jesus providing guidance. The mantle of leadership had passed on to them. As we look out at our busy streets, through the windows of our chapels and churches, things have also changed. Familiar sights, familiar people are no longer present. Sometimes, like the disciples, we allow fear to keep us locked in and others locked out. We do not know what to do when neighborhoods change, when events like 9/11 happen, or when the tethers that moored us to our dock seem to have been cut.

The good news is that Jesus came to those first disciples, through locked doors, and confronted their fears--not with words of anger and rebuke, which they might have expected, but with something quite different. "Peace be with you," he said, and they were relieved and glad to see him. Then he repeated his words of peace and added, "As the Father has sent me, so I send you." He breathed on them and said, "Receive the Holy Spirit." It is interesting that after receiving Christ's peace they were sent on a mission and given the Holy Spirit.

Those disciples needed to get out from behind locked doors! They needed to do more than simply look out through windows onto busy streets, onto unsafe neighborhoods. They needed to get out in order to tell the story. Having been with Jesus, having now seen the risen Christ, they had something to share, and because they did we now have a worldwide Christian church. The church began to grow, fear dissipated, people spread into the neighborhoods, they went back to the temple, and eventually, though not without pain and suffering, they met the challenge of implementing Jesus' vision of a house of prayer for all the nations. It was a message that changed the world.

So that is the first thing we can say: The Holy Spirit enables us to get out from behind closed windows and locked doors and go out into the world, a world that may be different, strange, even hostile. But we never go alone. The Spirit goes with us.

Second, I believe that the Holy Spirit works best when there is this kind of outward movement, conversation, meeting of minds and hearts, walking, listening, learning, and sharing with the people who live around us, person to person. Students have said to me on numerous occasions that when they actually sat down to talk with their Muslim colleagues (by which they mean the seven Muslim students currently enrolled in the seminary), they learned many interesting facts, and wonderful things happened. Attitudes changed or at least were challenged. The Holy Spirit is that go-between, the link enabling us to meet others, to love even those we might think of as enemies or even those who are enemies.

Third, Jesus promised that when the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide us into all the truth. I have come to see this as meaning that there is a cutting edge to the work of the Holy Spirit. Gently the Spirit nudges us to enlarge our boundaries, even to cross them in order to learn more about the truth that will eventually set us free, the truth of God the Creator, of God in Christ, the truth of others and the truth about ourselves. There is so much we do not know, especially when it comes to interfaith relations. Fears dominate, stereotypes abound. We break the eighth commandment all the time, saying things about others that simply are not true.

My wife and I have conducted scores of workshops over the past years, often just sharing basic, foundational information. There is a hunger among many people in our congregations to know more about Islam and Muslims, to move beyond headlines into the heartlines. When this actually happens, people discover--often to their delight, but not always--that others too have treasure, that no one tradition can claim the exclusive right to speak for God or to have all the divine riches. The discovery of this truth, when it happens, can be life changing, and it is the work of the Holy Spirit.

Let me add another activity I have come to attribute to the Holy Spirit. It has to do with the difference between doing things right and doing the right thing. Sometimes, as we sail together on today's stormy seas of change, it seems terribly important that we do things just right, which gets interpreted to mean the way they were done in the past. It somehow seems safer to remain tethered to what has been than to venture forth into waters unknown. This seems especially true for interfaith endeavors. In such activities, it is argued: Is it not better to stay believers by a tether of authority than try to get our bearing by the compass of our faith? Why take the risk of getting confused, even lost?

The argument is understandable even if untenable. As people of different faiths get to know each other well, they discover, again and again, that doing the right thing makes much more sense than doing things right. For example, when I am invited into the life of a Muslim friend who is dying, it seems that the right thing to do is to affirm, on bended knee, our mutual faith in the oneness of God, and to let God be all in all. In moments such as these, I've come to believe, there is for the Christian a taste of new wine, and to put that new wine into old skins just doesn't seem right. In our move forward we need to learn how to transfer the core of our beliefs and values into new wineskins, seeking always to preserve the best of our heritage while looking humbly to the future. In this endeavor, the urge to do things right, to cling to traditional patterns, may sometimes need to give way to doing the right thing. And when it's done through the guidance of the Holy Spirit, as surely it must, it could just be a small step toward the fulfillment of Christ's promise.

Finally, it has been my experience that what is needed most in interfaith relations are the fruits of the Spirit. According to Paul, these are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, and faithfulness (Gal 5:22). I would begin with the last one first. We need to have unshakable faith in the goodness and mercy of God, but unless we have the fruit of faithfulness, which means being faithful to God the Creator, to God's gracious work in Christ, to the truths as we have come to know them through the life and teachings of Jesus, and to the community to which we belong, our dialogue will soon not make sense, it will lose its way.

That said, we need the other fruits as well. There have been attitudes of superiority, arrogance, sometimes unbridled vindictiveness hurled at others, even crusades. Recently we were reminded at a seminary chapel service that "God has no favorites." The preacher in her homily on that text began with these words: "I know God loves all of you, but I am God's favorite!" Then throughout her sermon she repeated the phrase "God has no favorites." She was simply paraphrasing Peter's exclamation from Acts 10 that "God shows no partiality." It reminds me of when I was a kid at the breakfast table reading on the Post Toasties box, "Just a little bit better." In my context that meant the Christian Reformed always thinking they were just a little bit better than the Reformed. If this is our goal, to see ourselves as always "just a little bit better" than others, as God's favorite, we will not need the help of the Holy Spirit. There are many spirits out there who will rush to our aid. But if we see ourselves as engaged in the work of reconciliation, of being and sharing the peace of God in a broken and disjointed world, the gifts and fruits of the Holy Spirit will be indispensable. Where love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, and generosity abound, there is very little room for, or need of, pride and arrogance.

People often ask where we are heading with this kind of interfaith dialogue. Is there any real benefit to the church and the work of the kingdom? If they mean by this, Will it increase our numbers? the answer is that we do not know, but it might. Dialogue, however, is not and should not be seen as proclamation or preaching. Each has its own proper place. The purpose of dialogue, as I have been defining it, is not to win converts to Christianity, though honest dialogue is always open to that possibility. Conversion, after all, is the work of God. Dialogue allows for and encourages faithful and personal witness. Within the bounds of friendship and respect I have never found it difficult to bear witness to my Christian faith. I have done my best to talk about the love of God incarnate in Christ sitting in Muslim circles, even in al-Azhar. Witness, of course, will always be mutual where dialogue is sincere.

But perhaps the greatest fruit of honest and faithful dialogue, of genuine engagement with other people in the presence of the Spirit, is that it keeps all of us from being satisfied with tasteless tap water, to use the image we began with. I would argue that it can keep us from surface religion. People of other faiths will always be challenging us to think more deeply, to pray more fervently, to say more clearly what we mean, and then to demonstrate more truly that we mean what we say.

Story of dove and sword

I close with an illustration that I have used often in the past, so you may have heard it before. For me it epitomizes how just a few hours of conversation can impact our lives and constrain us to think more deeply about the gospel and our walk with Christ.

It happened, when we were living in Egypt, that a student of my wife invited us to visit his home in the Nile Delta. We gladly accepted his gracious invitation. Once there he showed us his amazing potato field and then welcomed us into his modest home. In one corner of a room were some rolled-up papers, and when we asked what they were he said, "Just some drawings, a few sketches I have made." We asked if he would show us, so he picked one up. It was the picture of a young man, dressed in his galabiyya, kufiyya and aqqal, like a typical Bedouin Arab. In one hand stretching forward was a dove, and in the other, raised high above, was a long sword, barely visible but still there. Stereotypical images of duplicity, swords and violence came to mind. When we asked what he intended to convey by the drawing he said, "As Muslims we must always offer peace first, but if that's rejected, we need the sword to defend ourselves." I couldn't help but think that this sounded almost American.

We then asked Muhammad (this was his actual name) whether he could paint the picture without a sword and with the dove in both hands. He thought for a moment, then replied: "I could, but in that case it would have to be a picture of Jesus the Son of Mary. Do you know why? If you or I tried it, very soon someone would steal the dove, then they would take everything we have, and finally [gesturing with his hand to his neck] they would take our lives. We would certainly lose everything here. But we would gain everything up there [pointing toward heaven]. On the other hand, if we held the sword in both hands now, we might gain everything here, but we would lose everything up there [again gesturing toward heaven]. So it is better to hold the dove in one hand and the sword in the other; that way we will have the best of both worlds. There will be a balance."

It was an interesting solution to the vexing question of how to achieve peace with justice. The issues he raised are clear: security is of major concern; he has tremendous respect for the person and teachings of Jesus; he also has profound skepticism as to whether the teachings of Jesus will work in our kind of world. Yes, Jesus could do it, but not us!

In many ways that conversation transformed my life. How can I preach the teachings of Jesus and the way of the cross unless I endeavor to live them myself? Some Muslims have written that if Jesus could have raised a militia and defeated his enemies with physical force, he would have done so, but because the Romans were so powerful he could not. That's why he went the way of the cross and why God rescued him from his enemies. I want to say, No, Jesus went the way of the cross because that is God's way of ultimately overcoming evil. In bearing evil redemptively, Jesus bore it away. But to preach that and then to live as if it were not true sends a very mixed signal to people who are not Christian. As a rabbi once said, "Two thousand years of Christian love is about all the Jews can stand."

I am heartened to hear Walter Wink saying that "love of enemies has, for our time, become the litmus test of authentic Christian faith," or John Stoner, "There is ... no other way to God for our time but through [loving] the enemy." (10) For me that comes pretty close to the essence of the gospel. It sounds not only authentic but life-giving. I know that it is difficult, it always has been, and without the Holy Spirit we do not stand a chance. Good news: you and I have been promised nothing less than the presence and power of the Holy Spirit, that fresh, life-forming and life-giving Spirit of God from whom nothing and no one is cut off.

Harold Vogelaar

Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago

1. A version of this essay was first presented in April at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago Leadership Conference "Treasure in a Garden: Christian Witness in a Multi-Faith Land."

2. Catherine Sepko teaches at North Greenville College, Tigerville, South Carolina. See http://south-carolina-jobs.com/edu/k12/cet9798/sepko.html.

3. Lars Thunberg, "Christian Response to Religious Pluralism," Microcosm and Mediator: The Theological Anthropology of Maximus the Confessor (Chicago and La Salle: Open Court, 1995).

4. David Rhoads, The Challenge of Diversity: The Witness of Paul and the Gospels (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996).

5. R. W. Southern, Western Views of Islam in the Middle Ages (Harvard University Press, 1962), 105-6.

6. J. Slomp, "Calvin and the Turks," in Christian-Muslim Encounters, ed. Y. Y. Haddad and W. Z. Haddad (University Press of Florida, 1995), 135.

7. Cragg, Alive to God: Muslim and Christian Prayer (London: Oxford University Press, 1970).

8. David J. Diephouse, "Seeing in the Dark," Perspectives: A Journal of Reformed Thought (Holland, MI: Reformed Church Press) 20:3 (March 2005), 13.

9. John V. Taylor, The Go-Between God: The Holy Spirit and the Christian Mission (London: SCM Press, 1972).

10. See http://www.thinkingpeace.com/Lib/lib080.html.