ChI Ordination Sermon Spring 2008
I was raised a Southern Baptist, and as those of you who have heard me
preach before know, there’s still a lot about this tradition that
I love and embody—like an appreciation for scripture, and my
tendency to pound the pulpit! But another cherished part of my
tradition of origin is the giving of testimonies, and I intend to give
my testimony today.
I was raised in a world where almost anything could be forgiven. You
could be a child-beater, a thief, even an ax-murderer, and God would
welcome you with open arms so long as you were repentant. There was
only one unforgivable sin: BELIEVING THE WRONG THING.
And, of course, we Baptists—specifically SOUTHERN
Baptists—knew we had it locked down. We were suspicious of other
kinds of Christians. We weren’t too sure about American
Baptists—they seemed like traitors to us. And Methodists? Highly
dubious whether they were going to heaven—they sprinkle their
babies, after all, and how wimpy was that? And Catholics? As one
evangelical humorist put it, we thought that when Catholics died they
just put them in a chute in the basement and sent them straight off to
Hell—do not pass go, do not collect $200 (thank you, Mike
Warnke). So when it comes to Jews or Buddhists or Hindus? Forget about
it. We didn’t think for a minute that God actually heard the
prayers of the Jews, and those other guys worshipped idols.
And I BELIEVED that. Heck, I preached it—at the ripe old age of
16, up on top of the table at the roller rink with my big red bible in
my hand telling everyone they were going to Hell. Ah, those were the
days.
Then something unexpected happened. I broke out of the insulated
Southern Baptist world, and made friends with people who had different
ideas about God, and was really freaked out when it hit me, “They
weren’t EVIL.” (Because, you know, I always thought they
WERE.) But the big shift happened one day when I asked my friend Bob
what God was.
Now Bob had been raised by Hippies, which to me at the time, was not
very far removed from having been raised in the outback by wild
dingoes. Nevertheless, what he said changed me forever. He spun a
vision of the universe as a vast, seemingly chaotic, but ultimately
intricate and ordered Dance. All the creatures knew the steps—the
animals, the planets, the stars, the angels, the demons—they all
knew the words and had all the moves to this cosmic hokey
pokey—and its complexity and beauty was a glorious thing.
The only beings who did not know the dance steps were—you guessed
it—human beings. And our religious traditions were heartfelt and
yearning attempts to get back into step with the Cosmic Dance.
Of all the theologies I had ever heard from the pulpit, none spoke to
me as powerfully as this one. I cried for three days after hearing it.
Because the moment I heard this vision, my world came to an end. I was,
quite literally, born again. In that moment, I became an interfaith
person.
I would guess that many of our ordinands have conversion stories of
their own. We all started out somewhere, and none of us would have
guessed that we would end up HERE. What, are you crazy? Yet, despite
our best efforts otherwise, THIS is where we have been led.
A lot of people we meet are confused by this interfaith path. For some,
it simply means holding out the possibility that other kinds of
Christians might still be saved—a major stretch for those of us
who grew up in conservative Christian homes. But
“interfaith” is bigger than that. Some people are afraid it
is a cult, a new belief system that just kind of puts all religions in
a meat grinder with a vaguely New Age Hindu-ish kind of religion coming
out the other side. But that’s not right, either. The interfaith
movement professes no beliefs of its own. Although some of us have
eclectic approaches to spirituality, those approaches often look
nothing alike, and many of us continue to be committed Christians,
Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, or Taoists.
So just what does it mean to be interfaith? It means that we have
discovered that the world is bigger than we once thought it was. It
means that we hold our faith in a larger context than we used
to—a context large enough to acknowledge the validity and
efficacy other people’s metaphors and images and mythologies,
without for a moment forsaking our own.
In order to embrace such a perspective, however, we have to give up a
lot: We have to relinquish the spiritual arrogance that says,
“I’m right, and everyone else is wrong.” It means we
have to give up the notion that the Divine plays favorites, accepting
some people and rejecting others. It means we have to set aside the
notion that we have all the answers, that we have it all figured out,
and be humble enough to kneel in silence before a Mystery larger than
any answer we could ever know, or any belief we could ever hold.
For only when we are ready to admit that we don’t know it all are
we teachable. And ChI students are nothing if not teachable. They have
come to this school because they are so very aware that they do not
know it all, and are eager to learn. And a full year of study
later—they STILL don’t know it all. And they are STILL
eager to learn. And I hope that they always will be. Because the Divine
mystery is so great, so vast, that human beings will never—in our
current configuration—comprehend it. There will always be more to
learn, more to discover, more to unpack, more weirdness to glory in. It
isn’t about having the answers, it’s about being in love
with the questions that will never be answered.
Likewise, when these students go out into the world to begin their
work, their ministry will not be one of answers or certainty. There is
no answer to the cancer patient who says, “why me?” There
are no answers for the young parents who have lost their child. There
is no explanation for the magic that occurs at a wedding or the birth
of a baby. These are mysteries that cannot be explained, circumscribed,
or quantified. ChI students don’t go into these situations armed
with an armload of dogma, but with the same humble openness of spirit
that led them to study in the first place.
We talk about leadership in our program, but it isn’t the kind of
spiritual leadership that tells people what to think or how to act. For
those of us walking the interfaith path, it is enough to simply invite
people to dance in the Cosmic Dance. Amen.