January 30, 2011 - Sermon for Faith Shared Interfaith Sunday

“Faith Shared”, A Homily preached by the Rev. Canon Dr. C. Denise Yarbrough on Sunday, January 30, 2011 at Church of the Ascension, Rochester, New York

What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God? (Micah 6:8)

Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy…Blessed are the peacemakers, for they are the children of God. (Matt. 5:7,9)

And do good unto your parents, and near of kin, and unto orphans, and the needy, and the neighbour from among your own people, and the neighbor who is a stranger, and the friend by your side, and the wayfarer, and those whom you rightfully possess. God does not love any of those who, full of self-conceit, act in a boastful manner. (Qur’an 4:36)

On this fourth Sunday of Epiphany we are privileged to worship God here at the Episcopal Church of the Ascension with our Christian liturgy enriched by the presence of guests from our Abrahamic faith cousins, Judaism and Islam. Our liturgy of the Word is expanded today to include the word of God as that word is proclaimed not only in the Christian Testament and the Hebrew Scriptures from which we read every week, but also with the wisdom of the Holy Qur’an, read beautifully for us in Arabic by Dr. Rauf Bawany. We began our service with the Call to Prayer from the Muslim tradition, having already done the Christian version of the same when we rang the church bells. We are making real in our worship this morning the truth that we Christians live out our Christian faith in a city and country where we share the religious landscape with people of many different religious traditions. Contrary to what the media often would have the world believe, people of religious faith in this city and country are capable of much more than mere tolerance for one another’s religious faith. We are capable of and we embody a commitment to genuine respect for the wisdom that each of our traditions contains about God, and we are able to develop relationships of mutual trust and respect across our religious traditions. We are able to learn from one another, to find those places where our traditions agree and work together for the common good as global citizens.

The Interfaith Alliance, a national interfaith organization headquartered in Washington DC that works on various political and social policy issues, and Human Rights First, a not for profit human rights organization, established this Faith Shared event, which will take place in cities across the nation, to act as a visible witness to the reality that people of different religious traditions are living together in this country peacefully and working with one another for justice and peace both here and abroad. Contrary to the inflammatory images that the media so often chooses to lift up, such as the threatened Qur’an burning this past September, and the controversy over the Muslim Cultural Center and Mosque that is to be built near Ground Zero, many Christians, Muslims and Jews are living together in cities and villages across this nation, respecting one another’s faith traditions and bridging differences while working for the common good. Today’s observance is a way to showcase these ongoing interfaith dialogues and relationships in the context of religious worship in the hopes of dispelling misconceptions about the attitudes of Christians in America towards our Muslim brothers and sisters. Our hope is that news of this event will be disseminated in the media in this country and also in predominantly Muslim countries as evidence that there are many Christians and Jews of faith in America who do not treat their Muslim brothers and sisters with contempt or disrespect.

It is fitting for us Christians to engage in this observance on this Sunday when we hear once again the beatitudes from the gospel of Matthew. In those famous wisdom sayings that are the core of Jesus Sermon on the Mount, Jesus reminds us of the attitudes and behaviors that are the hallmarks of those who follow God’s commands, whether through faithfulness to the Torah, or through Christian discipleship or observance of the Five Pillars of Islam. You will notice that all three readings this morning call God’s people to be about justice, to be compassionate to strangers, to wayfarers, to neighbors near and far. We are called by the prophet Micah to walk humbly with our God while Jesus reminds us that those who are “blessed” (which can also be translated as “happy”) are those who are meek, who seek after righteousness, who are peacemakers. Mahatma Gandhi, who studied Christian scriptures very closely says, “The message of Jesus as I see it is contained in the Sermon on the Mount, unadulterated and taken as a whole… I came to see that the Sermon on the Mount was the whole of Christianity for him who wanted to live a Christian life. It is that sermon that has endeared Jesus to me."

I am honored to be able to share our Christian worship with our Jewish and Muslim guests this morning. As a Christian I am all too aware of the extent to which my religious tradition has fallen short of the teachings of Jesus in our long history of conflict with Jews and Muslims at different times in history. I am passionate about interfaith dialogue and interfaith relationships because I believe that interfaith encounter and dialogue strengthens my Christian formation and brings me to a greater depth of maturity as a Christian. I learn from my Jewish and Muslim friends and gain insight about God in ways not available through my own tradition alone. I am a better Christian for my time spent in the company of my Jewish and Muslim dialogue partners and when I study the critique of my tradition by great thinkers like Gandhi, who was able to look in from the outside and compare what our tradition teaches and how we Christians actually behave in the world. And I believe that in our multi-religious society and the global village in which we now live, people of faith from all traditions must be beacons of hope and agents of peace and reconciliation in a violent world. I am delighted to welcome Rauf and Neil to our worship this morning, and hope that they will leave this church with some sense of the joy that we know in our tradition and the meaning we find in our celebration of the sacred mystery of the Eucharist enriched as it is this week by the insights and wisdom of our Abrahamic siblings.

At this time I would invite Neil and Rauf to comment briefly on the readings that they each offered from their tradition, and to speak to why it is they are committed to the work of interfaith dialogue and engagement. So Neil and Rauf – please share with us something about how your faith tradition interprets the readings you shared this morning and your reasons for being active participants in interfaith dialogue. Why did you find it important to be part of this Faith Shared event?