The Rev. Keri T. Aubert    March 22,2009

Numbers 21:4-9

Psalm 107:1-3, 17-22

Ephesians 2:1-10

John 3:14-21

Fourth Sunday in Lent, Year B, RCL 

If you were here last week, you got a hint of how different it is, religion-wise, to live in the Southeast. Today I’ll expand on that a bit by telling a story. The place I grew up, Baton Rouge, is on the line that separates south Louisiana from north Louisiana. In south Louisiana, the population is heavily Roman Catholic of French descent. In north Louisiana, the population is heavily Protestant of English descent. You might call it the Cajun/Redneck divide. Along the line, the two groups collide, and it’s a bit like living on a continental fault line. When I was younger, the Roman Catholic Church was the dominant voice on the religious landscape, but that has changed over time, with help from folks like televangelist Jimmy Swaggart, whose headquarters is in Baton Rouge.

When I was in the ninth grade, it seemed that all my friends were being born again. I was a practicing enough Roman Catholic to be unmoved. My best friend at the time was pressuring me incessantly to her to join her Southern Baptist church. I’m sure she believed she was doing me a favor, but I was annoyed by her recruiting tactics. For example, she would stop by my front door on her way to weeknight revival meetings and beg me to come along. She would stay there until I basically shut the door in her face. However, because I was feeling disconnected from my childhood Roman Catholicism and jealous of the fellowship my friends shared, I began entertaining the prospect of trying it out.

That lasted until the day we were in line in the school cafeteria, when she told me that everyone who doesn’t accept Jesus as their personal savior is doomed to hell. “What about Jews?” I asked.

“They’re all going to hell,” she replied.

I didn’t agree with her then, and I don’t agree with her now. But many Christians do, even today. That type of belief may be more problematic than ever, because we live in an increasingly post-Christian and religiously pluralistic society. Even Burlington is changing. Many of our new neighbors are Muslims or Hindus or Buddhists from Africa or Asia. As I mentioned last week, Vermont is the least religious state in the nation, so we can assume that many of our old neighbors are atheist or agnostic. Are we willing to condemn our non-Christian brothers and sisters to a fiery eternity? Many members of this congregation follow Christ yet stray from traditional orthodoxy in many and varied ways. Are we willing to condemn them to a fiery eternity? I suspect not. Unfortunately, if we are inclined to push back, the gospels aren’t always helpful. And so perhaps many of us are struggling with today’s reading from John, and with its language about unbelief and condemnation.

The Gospel of John states what all the gospels seem to agree on: that the path to salvation passes only through Christ, and that Jesus’ fellow Jews were responsible for his death. From a historical perspective, the gospels include rhetoric targeted at the original audience that was intended to define the young Christian communities over and apart from the Jewish communities of which they were both a subset and a competitor. Messages that were relatively harmless as long as Christians were the persecuted minority became dangerous after Constantine institutionalized Christianity in the fourth century. From then on, the anti-Semitism implicit in the gospels contributed to anti-Semitism explicit in action.[i] It is a long and shameful history, and some of the writings of the Church fathers about Jews are repulsive to our ears. For example, Martin Luther, father of the Reformation, writing in the sixteenth century, offers this:

Perhaps, one of the merciful Saints among us Christians may think I am behaving too crude and disdainfully against the poor, miserable Jews in that I deal with them so sarcastically and insultingly. But, good God, I am much too mild in insulting such devils; I would like to do it but they are much too superior in sarcasm, and even have a God who is a master at sarcasm and is called the actual devil and evil spirit.”[ii]

The essay is horrifying from start to finish. In one of the most shocking parts, Luther speaks approvingly of a carving at his church in Wittenberg that depicts Jews suckling from a sow and a rabbi looking at a copy of the Hebrew Scriptures that is located under the sow’s buttocks.[iii] 

This kind of rhetoric is hard to hear, but we are not served by ignoring its place in our collective past. It is perhaps more important than ever to remember Christianity’s violent history, because issues surrounding inter-religious conflict remain with us today. Around the world, anti-Semitism is alive, and other types of religion-justified violence continues. Such violence doesn’t originate only with Muslim extremists. A recent article in The Atlantic, written by the daughter of former presiding bishop Frank Griswold, reports on a 2004 incident in a mixed Christian-Muslim village named Yelwa in Nigeria. After Muslims killed 78 Christians, Christians retaliated by killing 660 Muslims. According to the article, “At the time of the massacre, [Anglican] Archbishop Peter Akinola was the president of the Christian Association of Nigeria, whose membership was implicated in the killings.”[iv] The article continues:

When asked if those wearing name tags that read “Christian Association of Nigeria” had been sent to the Muslim part of Yelwa, the archbishop grinned. “No comment,” he said. “No Christian would pray for violence, but it would be utterly naive to sweep this issue of Islam under the carpet.” He went on, “I’m not out to combat anybody. I’m only doing what the Holy Spirit tells me to do. I’m living my faith, practicing and preaching that Jesus Christ is the one and only way to God, and they respect me for it. They know where we stand. I’ve said before: let no Muslim think they have the monopoly on violence.”[v]

It’s important to recognize that Akinola lives in a context very different from our own, and even so, his words seem extreme. Akinola is perhaps best known for his vocal leadership of those opposing the full inclusion of gay and lesbian persons in the church. Turning his rhetoric of violence against other Christians, he uses language similar to what I heard from opponents of same-sex marriage testifying Wednesday night at the statehouse.

In this season of repentance, and especially as we approach Good Friday, I hope we will remember that words can be wielded as weapons, and that they can incite people to wield weapons. I hope that we will remember that the passion narratives which describe unimaginable violence have themselves been used to incite unimaginable violence. I hope that we will remember how Christianity has sponsored violence both physical and spiritual, both individual and collective, and that sometimes it still does.

True repentance means finding another way. If you attended the Burlington Interfaith Thanksgiving service last November, you heard me talk about noted religious scholar Karen Armstrong and her leadership to solicit input from around the world to create what she calls the Charter for Compassion. According to its website, “The Charter for Compassion is a collaborative effort to build a peaceful and harmonious global community. Bringing together the voices of people from all religions, the Charter seeks to remind the world that while all faiths are not the same, they all share the core principle of compassion and the Golden Rule.”[vi] 

Armstrong herself says this about it:

“… across the board, in every single one of the major world faiths, compassion, the ability to feel with the other… is not only the test of any true religiosity, it is also what will bring us into the presence of what Jews, Christians, and Muslims and call God or the Divine. It is compassion, says the Buddha, which brings you to Nirvana. Why? Because in compassion, when we feel with the other, we dethrone ourselves from the center of our world and we put another person there. And once we get rid of ego, then we’re ready to see the divine. . . . every single one of the major world’s religions has highlighted and has put at the core of their tradition what has become known as the Golden Rule, first propounded by Confucius five centuries before Christ, ‘Do not do to others what you would not like them to do to you.’”[vii] 

"My religion is kindness," says the Dalai Lama; faith that moves mountains is worthless without charity, said St Paul; the Golden Rule was the essence of Torah, said Rabbi Hillel: everything else was “only commentary.” The bedrock message of the Qur'an is not a doctrine but a summons to build a just and decent society where there is a fair distribution of wealth and vulnerable people are treated with absolute respect.[viii] 

As we continue to struggle with today’s gospel reading, I can’t offer the perfect solution. But I can offer this: the way of Christ is the way of love, and, at least to some degree, we live in the heaven or the hell of our own choosing. To use Armstrong’s language, as we choose lives of compassion—both individually and collectively—we draw near to the Divine. To use the language of the Gospel of John, as we choose lives of light—both individually and collectively—we are saved.