CHI ORDINATION SERMON SEPTEMBER 2007

Nanak was the name of a ne’er-do-well young man who lived in what is now Pakistan in the  15th century. I say he was a ne’er-do-well, because, well, he wasn’t really good at very much. He was a terrible student. He couldn’t work an abacus to save his life, so business was out. So his father sent him out to tend sheep. Which is not so bad if you’re a teenager—but when you’re in your 20s… In other words, Nanak was the original slacker. He wasn’t very good at religion either. He tried to be a good Hindu, but the rituals left him cold. He even tried to be a Muslim once, but that didn’t really work out, either. Too many rules!

One day Nanak announced to his fellow shepherds that he was off to have a bath in a nearby river, and they waved at him and promised to watch his sheep until he returned. But Nanak didn’t come back. They went to the river, but they couldn’t find Nanak. After three days they decided that he had probably drowned, no doubt figuring that his famous string of ineptitudes extended to swimming as well.

And in a sense, Nanak DID die. The ne’er-do-well shepherd everyone knew certainly died. That guy who didn’t really fit in with any of the local religions drowned in that river. But a new being arose from the water. For, while he was bathing, the Divine dazzled Nanak with glory and granted him a vision. He was commanded to praise the Name, the ineffable Name that is above every name, the Name that cannot be uttered, but which every religion knows and loves and calls by its own unique and limited names.

Nanak was overcome with ecstacy, and as he rose from the water, he uttered words that would change the history of religion forever. He said, “There is no Hindu, there is no Muslim.”

“There is no Hindu, there is no Muslim.” What Nanak had seen in his damp vision was that the Holy One praised by the Hindus was not itself Hindu, and could not be contained by the Hindu faith. The Divine One for which the Muslims have 99 names has a million more names than that—in fact, every religion, every tribe and nation has a name, and they are all right, and they are all partial and incomplete. And from that moment forward, he went forth to sing love songs to God for people of every religion, beginning the interfaith movement known today as Sikhism.

Now, I’d like to personally testify to the inspirational power of bathing. Whenever I get stumped for a sermon, I light a candle and some incense, turn off the lights, put on a little George Winston, and sink into a really hot bath. And wouldn’t you know, I rarely get out without being inspired, and sometimes scribbling my way through the whole sermon! I also have the soggiest library on the planet.

But what happened to Nanak goes far beyond inspiration. What happened to him was REVELATION—the revelation that religions are human attempts to comprehend, describe, and properly serve the Divine.

Too often, people confuse their religions with God. What Nanak saw is that they are not the same thing. God is not a Hindu, and God is not a Muslim. But often people get so attached to their traditions that they can no longer tell the difference.  

Religions are like languages, with proprietary vocabularies used to describe divinity. I remember a Steve Martin routine where he was describing a trip to France. He said, “It’s like those French people have a different word for everything!” In the same way, religions all have different words for the same human experiences and the same divine realities. But the tragedy is that even though people are having the same experiences and are loving the same Divinity, they end up talking past each other because, belonging to different religions, they are speaking different languages.

And that’s where the Chaplaincy Institute comes in. ChI IS A LANGUAGE SCHOOL. Just like that scene in “Airplane” where the honkey stewardess surprises everyone by saying, “Wait a minute, I speak Jive,” ChI students graduate with a similar kind of confidence. No matter who it is they encounter—in a hospital room, in a hospice, or even on the street—they can say, “Wait a minute, I speak Hindu, I speak Muslim, I speak Christian, I speak Judaism…” They are trained to meet people wherever they are, on their own ground, competent in all the world’s traditions, speaking the people’s own religious languages.

The Budddha got it right when he said, “My teachings are like fingers pointing to the moon. But they are NOT the moon.” At ChI, we learn about the fingers, but we do not confuse them with the moon. We teach our students the importance of religious traditions, but we also emphasize the limits of those traditions, and direct our service toward the Divine reality that lies behind and nourishes them all. We teach our students to honor the traditions of the people they serve, but not more than they honor the precious and tender spirits of those people.

Because when we minister to someone, we are not ministering to a Christian or a Jew or a Muslim or a Sikh. We are ministering to the naked and vulnerable spirit of a human being. And when we meet on that level, all traditions drop away. When we meet at that level, our spirit cries with Guru Nanak, “There is no Hindu, there is no Muslim, there is no Christian, there is no Buddhist, there is no Jew, there is no Wiccan, there is no Sikh, there is no Zoroastrian.”

There is only the shining spirit of this person we serve, enveloped and loved by Divinity. There is only the preciousness of the soul we are encountering, and it is the sacredness of that soul that we reverence. We seek to embrace these souls and love them, to serve them and to meet them, to heal them and to teach them, and to speak the word of the Divine to them as the Spirit gives us utterance.


And we will speak this word to them in whatever language they understand. Because that is OUR vision, that is OUR calling, that is OUR mission. And just like Nanak, it is time for these ordinands to get up out of the water, towel off, and start singing to people everywhere the glory of the Holy Names. Amen.