Da Vinci and the Jesus I Never Knew

Hebrews 4:14-5:10 [NRSV]
Since, then, we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God, let us hold fast to our confession. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who in every respect has been tested as we are, yet without sin. Let us therefore approach the throne of grace with boldness, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.
Every high priest chosen from among mortals is put in charge of things pertaining to God on their behalf, to offer gifts and sacrifices for sins. He is able to deal gently with the ignorant and wayward, since he himself is subject to weakness; and because of this he must offer sacrifice for his own sins as well as for those of the people. And one does not presume to take this honor, but takes it only when called by God, just as Aaron was.
So also Christ did not glorify himself in becoming a high priest, but was appointed by the one who said to him, "You are my Son, today I have begotten you"; as he says also in another place, "You are a priest forever, according to the order of Melchizedek."
In the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to the one who was able to save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverent submission. Although he was a Son, he learned obedience through what he suffered; and having been made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him, having been designated by God a high priest according to the order of Melchizedek.

I’m walking into a trap this morning and I just want to acknowledge that from the outset. When I decided to go off the lectionary for a few weeks and address topics that were submitted to me I knew there would be some challenges and today I’m walking into one of them. There is no way to talk about The Da Vinci Code and how Christians ought to respond to it without stepping on some dangerous stones. But here I go. I’ll try to be nuanced, balanced and fair. I’ll try to speak in elevated terms that respect the kind of discourse we want to have about this book and movie. And here’s what I want to say: This book is bad.

It’s not just bad, it’s downright awful. It’s not just awful; I was embarrassed to be seen with it. When I took it out in public I wanted a brown paper bag to carry it in. I groaned out loud when I read it. There were two occasions when I threw the book across the room in sheer frustration. The characters were paper-thin and unrealistic. The tone of the book was condescending and ludicrous. The references to Christian history were ridiculous and wrong. And the plot was more like a mathematical puzzle constructed by conspiracy theorists than anything resembling real life. I’ve read phone books with better writing. But other than that, I liked it.

O.K., I walked right into the trap there. I admit that I’m in the minority on this. I’ve been conducting an informal poll with everyone I’ve met over the last few weeks and I’m about the only one I know who feels like this. I must be a snob. I’m right about this, but I’ll admit to being a snob. Most folks, including Suzanne, have enjoyed the book. “Lighten up,” they say to me. “It’s just a mindless piece of beach fiction. It’s a page-turner. It has suspense and drama and action. It reads like a movie. Sure the theology is bad, but it’s fiction. Just enjoy it for what it is, Alex. And by the way, speaking of mindless entertainment, didn’t I see you watching American Idol the other night?” And to that I say, “That is beside the point and Taylor Hicks IS going to win that thing.”

The point is that The Da Vinci Code is not something we can ignore. I don’t think it’s worth a boycott and it’s certainly not something that threatens the faith. But it raises questions that tell us something about where we are as a culture and the kinds of questions we are asking about the Christian faith. It is a book about deep suspicions and even though Dan Brown, the author, goes way off track in identifying the source of those suspicions, despite himself he hits on some strong themes that resonate with us as contemporary people.

So what is The Da Vinci Code? It is a book, and now a movie, which is built around the notion that there is a dark secret that the Catholic Church does not want you to know about. That secret is that Jesus was not crucified, but that instead he survived and married Mary Magdalene, one of the women who followed him. Not only that, but they had children and the line of their descendents survived in France. The book suggests that this was pretty common knowledge and that no one considered Jesus to be divine until the 4th century when Constantine, the Roman Emperor of the day, called a Council of Christian bishops at Nicaea to declare that Jesus was not only human but divine also. This solidified a patriarchal understanding of Christianity that denied the ancient notion of the “sacred feminine” and from then on the church systematically subjugated the dangerous knowledge of Jesus’ humanity and the role of women.

A secret society called the Priory of Sion was formed in the Middle Ages when documents substantiating Jesus’ marriage were found during the Crusades in Jerusalem. Members of the Priory included the Renaissance painter Leonardo da Vinci who painted clues into his most famous works, including the Last Supper which supposedly includes a figure who looks like a woman. I don’t know who played that character in the play here last year but it might have changed how you approached the role.

The Church hierarchy lived in fear that the Priory would eventually reveal the truth and was willing to resort to murder using its most loyal order, the Opus Dei, and an albino monk, to carry out the murders. I could go on, but it’s really not worth it. The point is summed up by one of the smug, self-satisfied scholars who star in the book who proclaims that “almost everything our fathers taught us about Christ is false” [p. 255] and the way the story is told now serves the interests of the powerful.

I could walk deeper into the trap this morning and begin to address the many, many liberties and outright fabrications Dan Brown draws on to construct his book, but I don’t want to do that. I’ve given you some book references in the bulletin if you want to follow up on that. Suffice it to say that Dan Brown’s mode of operation is to take a lot of pieces of real things that you have only half-heard of and to string them together into a creative, alternate, totally fictional history of the Church. As the columnist Mark Steyn says, “it rhythmically supports the impression that this is not a work of fiction, but a documentary unlocking of a two-millennia-old secret.”[1] But to take it on as a documentary would be to take you too far from the gospel this morning, and that is what I am charged to do in this place – to preach the gospel, which is not anything like the pseudo-gospel of Dan Brown.

The problem with Dan Brown’s book is not that it’s outrageously unbelievable. The truth of the matter is that his version of events is really very believable. Robin Griffith-Jones, who is the master of the Temple Church in London, one of the sites featured prominently in the book, was asked recently about how he responds to tourists who come asking about the claims of the book. He answered, “The novel’s characters say that Jesus was a married man and a father. We say he was born of a virgin, walked on water, raised people from the dead and came out of his own grave. Which of these accounts, to a neutral observer, seems more fantastical? I think it’s time we admit that our claims are bizarre—and then people will respect us when we explain why we think these claims should be believed.”[2]

C.S. Lewis was one who felt that the surprising things about Christianity, the unbelievable things, were the things that spoke most powerfully for it. He said, "Reality, in fact, is always something you couldn't have guessed. That's one of the reasons I believe Christianity. It's a religion you couldn't have guessed."[3] Books like The Da Vinci Code, which present us with a Jesus who does only what we might expect a man to do, actually give us a much less interesting Jesus, one who conforms more to our expectations when what we really need is a savior who upsets our expectations and sets us free from them for God’s new thing.

Has the Church, in the past and into the present, been guilty of downgrading the role and inherent dignity of women, of treating them as second-class citizens and acting as if the stories of men were more important? Absolutely. But creating a Jesus who looks like a 21st century feminist with a liberated woman by his side doesn’t liberate us because it is one more example of how we create Jesus in our own image.

Has the Church, in the past and into the present, been guilty of favoring the interests of the powerful over the needs of the powerless? You know that it has been. But a solely human Jesus who tells us that we should beware the addiction of power and to take care of the poor is far less effective an agent than a divine Jesus who emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, and being found in human likeness, humbled himself and became obedient unto death – even death on a cross [Phi. 2:6-8]. The Church is always in danger of corrupting the message and acting in ways that deny the good news, but that is why it is so important that our founder is not just “a good guy”, a “great and powerful man” with “substantial influence and importance”, as The Da Vinci Code puts it [p. 254]. Unless we are inviting people into an encounter with the Living Jesus who has overcome death and who is offering us that same resurrection victory, how can we hope to be anything but the corrupt human institution some suspect us to be?

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, says that it should not be surprising that the contemporary world is attracted to stories that promise a new revelation about Jesus. He points not only to Dan Brown’s book but also to the attention given to the recently released “Gospel of Judas,” a text, much younger than the New Testament, which presents a new image of Judas and Jesus. Williams says we treat our biblical texts these days “as if they were unconvincing press releases from some official source, whose intention is to conceal the real story; and that real story waits for the intrepid investigator to uncover it and share it with the waiting world. Anything that looks like the official version is automatically suspect. Someone is trying to stop you finding out what really happened, because what really happened could upset or challenge the power of officialdom.”[4]

“We don’t trust power,” Williams says, and we long for stories that will tell us “what really happened.” We long for stories that will tell us the answers to the great mysteries of life. When those stories come attached to power structures that downgrade the role and status of women, we suspect they may not be holy. That’s one of the reasons we question the impact of Islam on the treatment of women in some societies. When those stories that would tell us about the holy advocate violence and killing, when they speak only of judgment and not of grace, when they favor one race or one people over another, when they discourage continuing inquiry and study rather than fostering continued growth and understanding…then we suspect there is something we are not being told.

But the Bible keeps taking us back to the Jesus we still don’t know. The Bible, to quote Williams again, “is not the authorized code of a society managed by priests and preachers for their private purposes, but the set of human words through which the call of God is still uniquely immediate to human beings today, human words with divine energy behind them.”[5] The Jesus we meet in the Bible is not inviting us to “step up” into a society of the elite, but to “step in” to the reign of heaven. In doing this we don’t go to meet a Jesus we can get our minds around and comprehend – we go to be transformed by a Jesus who has what we need to be saved. And Jesus only has what we need if he is more than human…much more human. He was fully human, flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone. But he was also the Word, God, made flesh.

When the writer of Hebrews got around to describing who Jesus was, the language he had available (and who knows, the writer could have been a she. Perhaps it’s a great cover-up!)…the language available to the writer was the language of the Temple. In the Temple in Jerusalem, the high priests would intercede before God, asking that God accept the sacrifices offered for the forgiveness of sins. In Jesus we have the great high priest, the one who can intercede for us because he knew what it meant to be human. He knew our weaknesses.

But he also knew the glory of the heavens because he was God’s own Son…he was God. And that changed everything. Now we have no reason to fear to go before God. We go with our brother Jesus, who took the road to the cross, to the tomb, and to the glory of the empty tomb. We can be bold in God’s presence because God has come boldly into our presence.

At the end of the day, no human story can change the world, not even one that has attracted as much attention as The Da Vinci Code. And whether you read it or not, whether you see the movie or not, whether you share my snobbish opinion about its quality and merit or not, really does not affect the fate of your soul or the possibility of your salvation. There shouldn’t be any prohibition from setting our minds to wonder about the mysteries of the universe, the power of religious symbols, and the intricacies of human understanding.

But I hope that you will not neglect the story that really does make a difference and on which the universe itself hangs…the story of a fiercely, loving God who loved the world so much that it became God’s home…the story of a fiercely, loving God who loves you so much that God will not let you go and will not leave you alone until you accept that love as yours. It takes more than Dan Brown’s Jesus to tell that story. That’s a story you meet in a place like this, among people like those very human people sitting next to you this morning. That’s a story that is as real and authentic as it gets. Christ is alive. Thanks be to God.

[1] “The Da Vinci Code: bad writing for Biblical Illiterates,” 5/10/06, www.macleans.ca.
[2] “Teaching Moment: Temple Church and The Da Vinci Code,” 5/15/06, Christian Century
[3] The Case for Christianity
[4] “Sermon for Easter Day,” Canterbury Cathedral, 4/16/06
[5] Ibid.

To Love Like God Loves Us

1 John 4:7-21 (NRSV)
Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love.
God's love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins.
Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us. By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit. And we have seen and do testify that the Father has sent his Son as the Savior of the world. God abides in those who confess that Jesus is the Son of God, and they abide in God.
So we have known and believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them. Love has been perfected among us in this: that we may have boldness on the day of judgment, because as he is, so are we in this world. There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love.
We love because he first loved us. Those who say, "I love God," and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen. The commandment we have from him is this: those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also.

This week I found unconditional love. Some of you hear that and you think…I knew it. I knew that Emmaus weekend was going to turn him into a love-addled fool. But that’s not where I found unconditional love. It wasn’t at a weekend retreat or at a clergy meeting in Parksley…Lord, help us. We didn’t get a puppy and my mama didn’t come to visit. I found unconditional love…online.

I need to tell you about this because the California Astrology Association is offering The Unconditional Love Spell online. I was doing research for this sermon and I ran across this advertisement:

Receive the love you’ve always yearned for!...Do you want the love of your life to have a strong desire to make you happy, desire you, take care of you? Do you want them to be deliriously happy and want to be with you night and day – forever?
You deserve to have the love of your life feel that you are the best thing to ever happen to them. You deserve to be happy, to feel wanted, cherished, adored.
You are not asking too much to want to see a spark in their eyes whenever they look at you. To be crazy about you. To give you their friendship, their lust, their love. And you want it unconditionally! No strings attached. No hesitation, no remorse, no doubts about you whatsoever.

So all you have to do is to send off for this love spell from the CAA and the best news is that it’s only $19.95. Who says money can’t buy love? And my favorite part about this deal? The spell comes with an unconditional guarantee…for one year. After that…some conditions may apply to your unconditional love. Act now and they can throw in a voodoo doll, too, in case the love thing doesn’t work out.

I’m struck by this advertisement because I know how many people want desperately to believe in it. There will be people who will send in their money because they want to believe what it says…that someone could love me enough to be “deliriously happy” whenever I walk through the door…that I deserve “to be happy, to feel wanted, cherished and adored…that all of this could be mine with nothing asked of me, unconditionally.

It is a wonderful dream because we know that love too often comes with conditions. Children hear messages from their parents, either spoken or unspoken, that tell them they are only loved as long as they conform to an ideal they find hard to meet. Husbands and wives vow impossible things to one another and fall short and the marriage is challenged by how they deal with the expectations that were unspoken. Church members hear messages of love from the Bible and the pulpit and the liturgy that say, as 1 John says in our passage today, that God is love and so we also love one another. We Christians loooove each other. But how often do our actions match our fond professions? Churches are measured, perhaps in this way more than any other, by how well they live up to the commandment to love.

But we are so often disappointed. Love, that almost ecstatic experience of feeling accepted just as we are…with no strings attached. That wave of emotion we associate with teenage summer romances and bad Danielle Steele novels…that mountaintop experience that we have at a church camp as a youth or at an Emmaus event as an adult…that sort of love is so fleeting, so ephemeral, so hard to hold on to, and so much to be desired. So much to be desired that we might be tempted to send $20 to California for some magic words that might restore it to us.

But I hope you know that there is no spell, at any price, that can create the kind of love our needy, searching, achey-breakey hearts desire. Having said that, though, I have a hard job this morning because what I have to say instead is something so common-place, something that has been said so often, something that we see on bumper stickers so much that we may not be able to really hear it. All I have to say today is what 1 John says: “God is love.” And because God loves us we also ought to love one another.

That’s it. And I realize that it’s a tough thing I have to do today because a preacher telling you to love ought to be about the most stereotypical thing we preachers do. I know we usually get your attention when we say things you don’t expect us to say like, “God wants you to floss.” Or when we say things that seem to ask a lot from you like, “The model for God’s giving is a tenth of your income.” But when I say something like, “God is love and we ought to love each other”…well, of course, preacher. Of course we’re supposed to love. But how’s the world going to change if we do that?

That’s the rub, isn’t it? Love is patient, love is kind. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. But love doesn’t change anything. Where is the power in love? The heart that has grown hardened to a world without love wonders these things and the preacher who talks about love has his work cut out for him. But a heart that is broken knows that there is no power on earth greater than a love that can enter my despair and my deepest longings and my secret desires. Who am I talking to today?

Thomas Merton was a 20th century Trappist monk who lived in Kentucky. He was a prophet in many ways, challenging the way that the world and Christians talk about God. In a book called The Spring of Contemplation, written in 1968, he wrote, “People don't want to hear any more words. In our mechanical age, all words have become alike.... To say `God is Love' is like saying, `Eat Wheaties.’” Eat Wheaties. It’s a good thing to do, but why should we? Because an advertiser tells us to? We should love because the good book says we should?

If we’re going to talk this way, suggesting that people love because God loves us, we had better make it clear that we’re talking about something more than just a healthy, lifestyle choice. We had better make it clear that love is more than just the easy acceptance of everything that comes along because ‘it’s all good.’ We had better make it clear that the love we receive from God is not only about welcoming us in, but also about transformation. And the love we show each other should be about the same thing. We had better make it clear that love is what God does and it’s not only a warm, fuzzy but a universe-altering total makeover.

Jennell Mahoney, a California pastor, writes about some findings from a sociologist named Robert Bellah. “Bellah did some research in the 1980’s about why people go to church, and found that the number one reason was to feel good about themselves. He found church members often spoke of their need for self-preservation, self-aggrandizement, self-gratification, and self-love—not God’s love at all.” In other words, people were coming to church for felt personal needs. We sometimes feed this notion by talking about marketing the church as a place where you can be a better person.

The message of the gospel is much deeper. Jesus didn’t call the disciples away from their nets so that they could be better people. He said, “Follow me. Leave yourself behind. The one who would be the greatest must be the least. Take up your cross. Lose your life and you will find it.” These messages are counter-intuitive to our culture. Who’s going to respond to that?

But they were no less strange in Jesus’ world. By the time the early Church was a few decades old, they were already struggling to understand what Jesus was trying to say to them. What did it mean to love as Jesus loved? For some it meant self-aggrandizement. For some it meant becoming the best person in the group. For some it meant loving Jesus better than anybody else and being recognized for that.

John says something different in this passage. He is trying to set his community straight and he tells them that love looks different than they have been expressing it. Love is not a competition or a series of acts designed to earn the love of God…it is a response to what God has done for us. Love is lived out in the relationships of people who have had their lives turned upside-down by what God had done for them in Jesus Christ. God is love. But we don’t know this because God sent us a Hallmark card on our birthday and told us so. We know this because love was revealed in a human body. Love was a baby in a borrowed shed. Love walked among us by a Galilean lakeshore. Love was stretched out on a criminal’s cross. Love was rejected by a world that could not stand what it meant. But love rose again. Jesus rose again. We know love because God loved us in Jesus…loved us enough to take upon God’s own self the sins of the world.

There is a new life in those words, “God is love.” There is death, but there is life and the word for us is so much more than “Eat Wheaties.” For those who have had their lives transformed by an encounter with this living Christ, ‘God is love’ is not a nice bumper sticker but a launching pad for a whole new life. When you’ve experienced that love, love doesn’t mean what it used to mean.

When we live in Christ, love takes on an entirely different character. There is a lot of anxiety in love the way we usually talk about it. If we go to church because we want to feel better about ourselves (and that is true of most of us)…if we crave romantic relationships and deep connections with a ‘soul mate’ because we want to know the thrill of being cherished (and that is true of most of us)…if we seek our parents’ approval because we want to prove that we’re worthy of affection (and that is true of many of us)…if we do these things, we know the anxiety of love because we are anxious about who we are if we fail in these things.

The love offered to us in Christ is not the same thing as this anxious love. Christ doesn’t offer us salvation because we deserve it somehow, because we have made ourselves ‘loveable.’ You look pretty great to me, but God’s love came to us, not when we looked our Sunday best, but when we looked our worst, when we were still sinners. God’s love doesn’t set conditions for what we look like when the invitation is sent out. God expects us to be at our worst.

But God also doesn’t expect us to remain unchanged. There is a tradition in Christian theology that talks about salvation as if God only sees us in Jesus and that somehow all of our flaws are hidden behind the merits of Christ. Don’t settle for a Jesus like that. As Methodists we believe that God loves us too much to leave like that…hidden and unchanged. God gives us a grace that gets into our lives and reworks us. For those who claim the love of Christ, who invite Jesus to continue the work of grace in us that began on the cross, there is a lot to be done. When we allow God in unconditionally and begin to love God, the work of sanctifying grace takes hold…making us more holy.

Part of that love is the love we show each other. God is love and so we should love each other. We should love like God loves us. Loving one another even though we know there are things that we don’t like about each other. Loving one another even when we know there are things in our brothers and sisters that don’t deserve loving. Loving one another because we know that God loves our neighbors and that gives us hope that we may be loved, too. And this love will transform the world.

Nobody said that unconditional love is easy. No, I take that back. The California Astrology Association said that love is easy but they are wrong. Love comes at a far dearer price than $19.95. It comes at the cost of the cross. But when we love as God loved us on that cross, oh, the things that will change!

I know we have a mixed bag of experiences with our mothers. We’re celebrating them today knowing that they are human and subject to all the flaws and failures that all of us are subject to. Even so, mothers are a sign to us of God’s love because when they are being what God called them to be they show us love in human form. That’s incarnational love of the best sort.

We could compare stories of who has the best mother or grandmother. But that’s really not called for. I had the best one in my grandma.

My Grandma was not one for words. She was very quiet. But she had a heart as big as Texas. She was always interested in what I did and always let me know how much she cared for me and the other grandchildren who loved her. If every person in this earth knew how much they were loved and lived like loved people, no one would ever send $19.95 to California again. But people will keep sending money and looking for love in all the wrong places until they know that God is love and that God’s people love each other like God loves them. That’s the work of grace we have been given. Who’ve you got to tell? Thanks be to God.

Children of Abraham: Christianity and Islam

Genesis 21:8-21 NRSV
The child grew, and was weaned; and Abraham made a great feast on the day that Isaac was weaned. But Sarah saw the son of Hagar the Egyptian, whom she had borne to Abraham, playing with her son Isaac. So she said to Abraham, "Cast out this slave woman with her son; for the son of this slave woman shall not inherit along with my son Isaac."

The matter was very distressing to Abraham on account of his son. But God said to Abraham, "Do not be distressed because of the boy and because of your slave woman; whatever Sarah says to you, do as she tells you, for it is through Isaac that offspring shall be named for you. As for the son of the slave woman, I will make a nation of him also, because he is your offspring."

So Abraham rose early in the morning, and took bread and a skin of water, and gave it to Hagar, putting it on her shoulder, along with the child, and sent her away. And she departed, and wandered about in the wilderness of Beer-sheba. When the water in the skin was gone, she cast the child under one of the bushes. Then she went and sat down opposite him a good way off, about the distance of a bowshot; for she said, "Do not let me look on the death of the child." And as she sat opposite him, she lifted up her voice and wept.

And God heard the voice of the boy; and the angel of God called to Hagar from heaven, and said to her, "What troubles you, Hagar? Do not be afraid; for God has heard the voice of the boy where he is. Come, lift up the boy and hold him fast with your hand, for I will make a great nation of him." Then God opened her eyes and she saw a well of water. She went, and filled the skin with water, and gave the boy a drink.

God was with the boy, and he grew up; he lived in the wilderness, and became an expert with the bow. He lived in the wilderness of Paran; and his mother got a wife for him from the land of Egypt.

The story begins, as many stories do, with the birth of a child. The story of the relationship between Christianity and Islam begins this way. Like many children, this child was born into a troubled family. Abraham’s family was a strange mixture of disappointments, great upheavals, and conflicts. But it was also a family of promises and blessings.

Abraham, or Abram as he was originally known, and his wife, Sarah, had been sent on a journey by God. God called them from their home in the land that is now Iraq and said, “I’m choosing you. Of all the people in all the earth, I am choosing you to make a nation. You will be a blessing to all the peoples of the world. By you shall they will be blessed.”

They seemed an unlikely choice. They were getting on in years. Abram was 75, Sarah only ten years younger. And they had no children. How do you make a nation with descendents as numerous as the grains of sand by the sea with geriatric parents? But God’s ways are not our ways nor are God’s thoughts our thoughts. So the good book says [Isa. 55:8]. And God led them to a new land and began something new with a traveling couple who thought their traveling days were done. That’s a warning for everyone who thinks retirement is the end of the road.

But there was still no child and Abraham and Sarah knew that for this promise of God to be fulfilled there had to be a child. In desperation Sarah gave her maidservant, Hagar, to Abraham. This would not be an acceptable practice to us in our day, but evidently it was not so uncommon in Abraham’s day. And it worked…in a way. Hagar became pregnant, but even before her child was born conflicts arose between her and Sarah. Surrogate parenthood is always a difficult business. But a son was born and they named him Ishmael.

That’s not what God intended, though. And soon another child was on the way. The most unexpected one of all. Sarah became pregnant and gave birth to another son, Isaac. And when Isaac was born they sent Hagar and Ishmael away. Hagar thought that she had been forgotten and rejected. She thought she and the child Ishmael would die in the desert. But just as she had run out of water and laid the child beneath a bush and walked away so that she would not have to watch him die, an angel from God came and said to her, “Hagar, go back to your child. God has not forgotten you or forsaken you. This child, too, will be the head of a great nation. There is a promise for him, too.” Hagar looked up and there in front of her was a well of water she had not seen before. She filled up her skin and took it back to the child and kept on walking.

The story of the relationship between Christianity and Islam begins with a child and with that story because it is to Abraham that both of these faiths look. Ron May led a group of us through a course on a book called Abraham earlier this year and it was entitled that for a very good reason. Abraham may have died thousands of years ago now, but his legacy is still very much alive in the conflicts in the Middle East. Jews and Christians trace their heritage through Isaac and Islam believes that the lines of their faith go back through Ishmael.

The way the story of Abraham and Ishmael is told is different in Islam. Hagar is a wife to Abraham in their story, not a slave. It is Ishmael that Abraham binds to an altar to sacrifice, not Isaac. And it is Ishmael who accompanies Abraham to rebuild the mosque in Mecca, which became one of Islam’s holiest sites. Ishmael becomes the first prophet to write and preach of the one true God and the father of all the Arabs.

When we talk about how Christians ought to respond to Islam and to the people who are faithful followers of Islam, Muslims, we need to start here – with the awareness that we are talking about a troubled family. It is easy, when we look at radical Muslim fundamentalists, and terrorist acts inspired by Islamic beliefs, and societies across the Arab world that look so different from our own…it is easy to believe that Islam represents something totally foreign, totally different and totally divorced from what we believe as Christians. But there are things that we share, too.

When I was in campus ministry at the University of Virginia I had the opportunity to be associated with a program called the Children of Abraham Project. The idea of this group was simple. Rather than exploring Judaism, Christianity and Islam through lectures and theories about how they compare and contrast, the Children of Abraham group would get together and study texts in pairs. Practicing Jews, Christians, and Muslims would bring texts that were important to them and they would read them together, not to find the commonalities between us, but to hear how people of other faiths would hear them and to go back to our own faiths with some new insights into what God might be telling us.

Though it was started by academics, we didn’t meet in a classroom and there was no teacher. We met in each others homes and we ate together and we got to know one another as people who had deeply held religious beliefs. We didn’t try to downplay who we were. I was there as a Christian who believes that Jesus Christ is the way, the truth and the life. The whole universe and salvation for me turns on knowing Jesus as God’s revelation. But I was with Jews and Muslims who shared stories with me. They also knew Adam and Noah and David. We were all “people of the book,” as Muslims say. And we were all children of Abraham.

So when September 11 came five years ago, and we knew by nightfall that we were entering a new era of relationships between our faiths, we held a candlelight vigil on the Lawn of the University. I spoke as a Christian. Vanessa Ochs, a Jewish professor of English, spoke as a Jew. Professor Sachedina, in the Religious Studies Department, spoke as a Muslim. We knew each other from the Children of Abraham project. And the most powerful moment of the night was when Professor Ochs and Professor Sachedina saw each other on the platform. They didn’t say a word but they embraced, knowing that there would be many in weeks and months ahead who would try to pull them apart.

Now we talk about our nation as being a very diverse nation. It is true that people from all over the world come to the United States and they bring their faiths with them. But we are not nearly as challenged by religious diversity as other areas of the world are. There are 1.3 billion Muslims in the world – 20 % of the world’s population. But they constitute only one-half of one percent of the U.S. population. The numbers are growing, but the U.S. remains a country of Christians, at least in name. Almost 80% of Americans claim Christianity as their religion.

It is important for us to know something of Islam, though, because in other places in the world, Muslims are not a small minority that can be tolerated because they do not threaten the way of life of the majority. We pride ourselves as a nation on our tolerance and we should. People are free to worship in whatever way they please here. But how would we respond if we lived in Nigeria, where the population is split almost down the middle between Christians and Muslims and where the Muslim areas of the country are trying to establish Islamic law and customs? How would we respond if we lived in Europe where there could be a Muslim majority population by 2050 and where many of those Muslim immigrants are resisting the openness or Western culture and retaining their customs? How would we respond if we lived in Pakistan where only 2% of the population is Christians and where Christian worship is officially tolerated but where people go to church not knowing if this will be the Sunday when radicals will decide to bomb the church or shoot up the sanctuary?

The question of how Christians and Muslims should relate to one another is not just a nice theological question. There are real bodies facing real conflicts around the world because of what we say and do to each other. And in many areas, Christians are just as guilty as Muslims of intolerance and violence. We only need to look at the massacres in Bosnia in the last decade to see that playing out. Philip Jenkins, in his book, The Next Christendom, says, “It is conceivable that within a few decades the two faiths will have agreed on amicable terms of coexistence, but looking at matters as they stand at the start of the 21st century, that happy consummation seems highly unlikely” [p. 190]. Jenkins and others fear that unless we develop a new way of relating to each other, we could return to the 13th century when wars of religion were the norm.
Islam is a faith, like Christianity, that believes that fidelity to God is the highest obligation of a human being. There are many names for God but the greatest name is Allah. Muslims would say that this is the God that Jews, Christians, and Muslims all worship. There is no different God for the Muslims. The first pillar of Islam is belief in this God. The confession a Muslim makes is, “I bear witness to this truth: There is no God but Allah and Mohammed is his prophet.”

Mohammed, for Muslims, is not a Messiah figure, though he is revered as the greatest of God’s prophets. Mohammed lived from 570 to 632 A.D. in what is now Saudi Arabia. In his brief life he received a series of visions from the Angel Gabriel that he recited to believers he had gathered around himself. These visions were written down in Arabic in a holy book called the Koran. The Koran occupies a place in Islam even higher than Mohammed. It is considered the direct revelation from God and it is so holy as written that it cannot be translated from Arabic and still be holy. If there is something in Islam comparable to what we believe as Christians about Jesus, it is the Koran. The Koran is to Islam what Jesus is to Christianity – the direct revelation of God.

As I said, you will find some familiar names in the Koran, even Jesus appears as a great prophet. But it is not the Jesus we worship here. Jesus is only a man and not God for Muslims. The idea of God as a Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit is foreign.

The other four pillars of Islam are all things that we, as Christians, can admire. 1) Prayer is required five times a day and observant Muslims will stop at these times and bow toward Mecca, Islam’s holiest site. 2) Muslims fast during the month of Ramadan. Each day during this month, from sunup to sundown, they will not take any food or drink, including water. 3) Charity to the poor is required. Typically a devout Muslim will devote 2.5% of his or her earnings to help others. 4) And finally all Muslims who are able will make the hajj, a pilgrimage to Mecca at least once in their lifetime. In all of these we can seen a reflection of what Jesus and the prophets asked of the people of God through the years – devotion to God, physical acts that work to prepare our souls to hear God, and service on behalf of the poor.

But these things are not what trouble us. We also have heard the word jihad bandied about over the last few decades and suspect that there is something sinister about it. Because of how it has been used by different groups we think that it only means a holy war against those who are not Muslim. The word itself means struggle or striving with all that you have. In that sense, Muslims are commanded to give their whole lives and all their strength to struggling on behalf of God. Didn’t Jesus tell us to do the same – to serve and love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength [Mk 12:30]?

In the same way the Koran says to “strive in God’s cause and you ought to strive” [22:78]. It also says “not to listen to the unbelievers, but to strive with them strenuously” with the Holy Book [22:52]. We can think of similar passages in the Bible that urge believers to do the same thing.

There are also passages in the Koran that allow for the possibility of war and armed struggle. “Fight for the sake of God those that fight against you, but do not be aggressive” says another passage [2:190]. Throughout the centuries Muslim warriors have used passages like this to justify attacks of others. Mohammed himself led a band of followers to fight for Mecca and to set up a Muslim state. For centuries following there was conflict and bloodshed. Christians and Jews know we have our sacred texts that seem to justify holy war and Christians especially have been guilty of listening to these texts in some horrible ways through the centuries, from the Crusades to what is happening with the so-called Lord’s Army in Uganda right now.

But there does seem to be a greater tolerance for such language and interpretations in Arab countries today. We are told that Islam is a religion of peace and there are passages in the Koran that do talk about peace. The Koran, just as much as Jesus and the Bible, talks about the suffering violence and war do to us and the blessing those who work for peace bring. One passage of the Koran says, "[I]f anyone slew a person—unless it be for murder or spreading mischief in the land—it would be as if he slew the whole people. And if anyone saved a life, it would be as if he saved the life of the whole people" [5:32]. But we don’t hear the words of peace and we see the suffering of violence and war and too little of the blessings of the peacemakers. The people of the Koran are struggling to reclaim a message from God that leads to life and not death.

That is why it is so important that we as Christians approach this question as Christians. We are not called to be hostile to people of other faiths, including Islam. We are also not called to be tolerant. Hostility and tolerance are not part of the language of our faith. Tolerance is a civic virtue that we have adopted as a nation and it allows us to live in proximity with one another without violence. As Americans we should celebrate that and respect that. But it is not a Christian virtue.

Christians are called to be faithful. We, too, are people who proclaim one God – the God of Abraham, Israel and Jesus Christ. We are not at our best and we are not who we are supposed to be when we are trying to water down our faith in an effort to make it palatable to others. We also don’t respect people of different beliefs by saying, “Oh, our differences don’t really matter. The main thing is that we are serving the same God.” Our differences DO matter! Either Jesus is the clear revelation of God in human form and his death and resurrection offer us salvation, either he is the one promised Israel from of old, or we have nothing left to offer the world. We don’t say this to disparage Mohammed or to deny our Jewish heritage or the Jewish people, but if we do not confess this, who are we? And what self-respecting Muslim wants to believe that the unique revelation they have from Muhammad is really not all that important?

So the first thing I would say, as we wonder what it is that we are called to do when confronted with the challenges of Islam, is that what we are called to do is to be better Christians – remembering who we are, grounding ourselves in the scriptures and the sacred stories of our faith, and attending to our own practices that draw us closer to God. Worship, prayer, fasting, reading the Bible, serving the poor, fellowshipping with other Christians, tithing – all of these are means of God’s grace that have been given to us.

As we become more fully the people God calls us to be we will also discover a second thing that I see as important in thinking about how we relate to Islam. We will discover the Christian practice of hospitality. Christians are known, in part, by who they eat with. Jesus was accosted by the religious leaders of his day because he would eat with those considered unworthy and outside the faith. But Jesus knew that one of the ways God shows love for us is by preparing a table and inviting others to a meal and sharing the story of how God’s love is faithful even when we are not. At this table we hear how God offers us salvation. At this table all are welcome and strangers become friends. Hostility and tolerance are not Christian words. Faithfulness and hospitality are and these are the things we are called to, even when we are facing religious messages that can seem demonic. Perhaps especially when we are facing the demons, whether they are plaguing the house of Mohammed or our own house. It’s what the children of Abraham are called to do. And perhaps, as others see that we are not shaken from our faithfulness to Jesus and that we are not shaken from a love that is open to all of humanity, the light of Christ will shine in new hearts and faces.

The story begins with a baby; I want to end this sermon with a baby, too. Four years ago I was asked to do a wedding for two UVA students, one a Christian who was very active in our Wesley Foundation group and her fiancé, a Muslim from Turkey. We talked a lot about what this wedding would mean, not only for them, but for their families and for their future children. I struggled with what to say at their wedding but it was a great celebration of two people who took their love seriously but who also took their faith seriously.

This week I got an e-mail from them. Molly had just gone to the doctor for her first sonogram and she sent me a picture of their new child on the way. They are so excited. And in that amazing, grainy picture of life growing inside a nurturing mother, there is the story of peoples from different worlds being drawn together. A Christian mother and a Muslim father. How will they raise this child? But God’s promises do not fail and I believe that this new baby will be better for having parents who, in their own ways, strive with all their strength, to be what God intends. Blessed be the one true God – the God of Abraham, Sarah, Hagar, Ishmael and Isaac. Thanks be to God.