“Show Us the Way” (John 14:1-9)
April 20, 2008 – Fifth Sunday of Easter
Rev. Carol McVetty
On Tuesday I will participate in an interfaith dialog, a conversation among people sometimes identified as “Abraham’s Children” because Jews, Christians, and Muslims all view Abraham as their spiritual father. I hope many of you will participate as well. For me, it is a conversation not with strangers, but with friends. Jamal Hussein of the Ismaili Center, Paul Koch at Ebenezer Lutheran, Michael Zedek, the rabbi at Congregation Emanuel, and Father Dominic Grassi at St. Gertrude’s are colleagues of mine here in the Edgewater neighborhood. We sit around a table for lunch every month. Over the years I have grown to respect and trust and value them both as friends and as men of faith.
You folks may also find it to be a conversation with friends, neighbors, or acquaintances. This is a local Edgewater event. That is part of the reason we are doing this. We believe that locally, within a neighborhood, is the place these conversations must begin. It is the place they are the most fruitful.
As I began to gather my thoughts for Tuesday, I was also preparing this morning’s sermon. The Gospel text assigned for today, the Fifth Sunday of Easter, is found in the Gospel of John and includes these words: “Jesus said to him, ‘I am the way, the truth and the life. No ones comes to the Father except through me.’” Now what do I do with that? This is a treasured text for me. It is one of my favorite parts of John’s gospel, along with the other “I am” statements: “I am the light of the world.” “I am the good shepherd.” “I am the vine.” “I am the way, the truth, the life….” To these words my soul clings, as to a life raft in a raging storm. But how do I carry them with me into interfaith dialogue? Must I leave them at door? Do they apply?
Years ago I was asked to pray at the annual community commemoration of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. It was a big deal in our city, an inner ring suburb of Detroit. Southfield was primarily African American and Jewish. Those groups would make up the majority of those in attendance at the event. My clergy colleagues advised me to give a generic sort of interfaith prayer. They said that in those kinds of settings Jewish people feel betrayed, tricked into blasphemy even, if they are invited to pray and then the prayer concludes “in Jesus’ name”. Use images for God that all can ascribe to, that will give offense to no one, I was told. That is the only appropriate thing to do, they said, especially at a city sponsored event. But in conversation with members of my church, some African-Americans who were on the event’s planning committee, I was told, “If you do that, we will feel betrayed! Dr. King was a Christian, a Baptist even. His faith was the rich soil from which his work grew. Even at this city-wide event we must celebrate his faith or we are being dishonest about his legacy. You must pray an explicitly Christian prayer.” Who would have imagined a prayer….just a prayer….could be fraught with so much danger! It is no simple thing to engage one another across faith differences.
When we step into the public sphere with our faith, I see two main approaches. One is the equivalent of “Nyah, nyah, nyah, nah, nah.” It says “We’ve got the truth. Jesus is the only way.” Theologians call that triumphalism. The notion that only Christians are acceptable to God has fueled much that is good. It is the energy behind evangelism and much of our missionary enterprise. It says, “we’ve got Good News!” But we can see the disastrous results of this conviction as well; the Crusades, the Holocaust, religious conflicts down through the centuries. With horror I read this week that Rod Parsley, pastor of Ohio’s most mega megachurch, the 12,000 member World Harvest Church in Columbus, is calling for the destruction of Islam. His book “Silent No More” is selling well. He also broadcasts to huge audiences, proclaiming that America can only “fulfill its divine purpose” by seeing to it that Islam “this false religion, is destroyed.” It is not just the extremists who claim Allah wants to destroy Christian civilization that he is out to eliminate. No, even the kind, moderate Muslims down the street, “mainstream believers in America drink from the same poisoned well” and must be eliminated.
We recoil in horror from such hatred. We rightly recognize it as the opposite of the way of Jesus, utterly un-Christian. When someone like Parsley tosses out “Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me”, it is like a grenade and we run for cover. But the shelter we find is all too often in a non-committal stance: “Oh, there are many ways to God” …”all religious ideas are the same,” “it doesn’t matter what you believe.”
So we careen from “nyah, nyah” to a mamby-pamby, wishy-washy position that denies the core of our faith. If our only choices are triumphalism or indifference, I find myself praying “Lord Jesus, show us the way!” Because there must be another!
Look again at the story in John’s Gospel. It took place in the Upper Room on the night when Jesus was betrayed. Jesus had gathered around him his dearest friends….
the ones who had trailed after him through the countryside
the ones who had watched him heal and heard him preach
the ones with whom he had talked late into the night, praying and speaking of Holy things, of God
the ones who were there when the authorities turned from jealous to hostile….as things grew tense and dangerous.
It was this group of intimate friends to whom Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” It was not to the whole world that Jesus spoke that night, but to this little band of followers.
And John wrote his gospel for a small, struggling church, in a world that was a cacophony of competing religious claims. It was a little group trying to separate itself out from the synagogue, trying to establish their identity in the midst of pagan cults. It was for this little band of early Christians that John recounted this story. The heart of John’s gospel is that Jesus is the Word become flesh. Remember how it begins? “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God….And the Word became flesh and lived among us.” In Jesus, the incarnate Word, we can see and know God in a way never possible before. In the coming of Jesus the relationship between God and humanity is forever changed. That’s John’s testimony. That’s John’s message. Jesus is so intimate with God that he calls him Father. No one had done that before! When we see Jesus we see God. They are in an embrace that cannot be severed.
So when John writes the story of that last night in the Upper Room, when he recounts the words of Jesus “I am the way…” essentially it means “The way to enter this intimacy that I share with God is by drawing close to me. That’s the way to do it.” Jesus is making a defining statement for this community, for his followers. The statement does draw a boundary. But it is not a boundary around God, for God is without limit. It draws a boundary around the Christian community. It says, “this is who we are. We are the people who believe in the God who has been revealed to us decisively in Jesus. To be in the circle of Jesus’ own, you must recognize Jesus for who he is: the Way, the Truth, the Life.” To be Christian is not to say “Oh, well, believe whatever.” To be Christian is to say “I have found the Way in Jesus.” This is what it means to be Christian. This passage does not answer the question “who gets to heaven?” It answers the question “who is a Christian?….
who is part of this community?….
and how does this community find God?”
We find God through Jesus.
How, then, do I take this testimony of Scripture into interfaith dialogue? I carry it as a badge, not a club. I fully, completely and proudly own who I am….a follower of Jesus. And I meet others who come fully, completely, proudly as Jews or Muslims. We come as distinct voices in a spirit of mutual respect and care. Otherwise there is no point in coming at all.
Finally, do we dare ask the question “who gets to heaven?…Who is accepted by God?” Yes, we can ask it. But we dare not presume to answer it. I am deeply grateful that that decision is not up to me. Tony Campolo says “Yes, Jesus said ‘No one comes to the Father except through me.’ But how can we presume to know who Jesus will bring to the Father?” We cannot. Only God himself knows that.
But I do know this:
That the God I meet in Jesus is a God of unstoppable love.
That the God I meet in Jesus is a God of unending mercy.
That the God I meet in Jesus is a God of grace beyond our imagining.
That the God I meet in Jesus surely knows a way to embrace all our neighbors.
The point of our dialogue on Tuesday is most definitely not deciding who gets into heaven. The point is to build relationships of trust. We build relationships of trust so we can live together as neighbors, and stand together in the face of the crucial tests of our day. I attended a missions conference this week at Lutheran School of Theology, Chicago. One of the speakers, a Catholic theologian, recounted how, as Serbia was descending into a bloodbath, that the leaders of each religious group spoke out against the violence. The Catholic bishop spoke to the Croates, the Orthodox patriarch spoke to the Serbs, and the Muslim leaders spoke to the Bosnians. But it didn’t make enough of a difference. They slaughtered each other anyway. But now, in the aftermath of that horrendous war, those leaders meet together. They are building with each other relationships of trust so that now, when they speak for peace and understanding, they speak together, with one voice. Now they are showing their people how living as neighbors is done. And now, whenever tensions rise again, they will be heard differently.
Here in Edgewater our purpose is the same. It is to show that we can be vibrantly, passionately, faithfully Protestant or Catholic or Muslim or Jew and still trust and love each other. It is to show that we can even admire what is beautiful in the other’s faith. And it is to lay the groundwork for speaking together on the crucial challenges that face us all. Even now we are making plans for a weekend next fall of joint interfaith action through all of Edgewater to address the scourge of gun violence.
Jesus said to his disciples, his dearest friends, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. If you would come to the Father, it must be through me.” This message is not for others. It is for us. For we cannot come to the Father by ourselves. On our own we are hopelessly lost. We need Jesus to show us the way.
Amen.
