WORLD RELIGIONS AND US

Copyright, © Thomas D. Wintle, 1999

A sermon delivered by the Rev. Dr. Thomas D. Wintle,
Senior Minister of the First Parish Church in Weston, Massachusetts,
on September 26, 1999. The readings were Acts 5:27-39 and Matthew 21:23-32.

"When he entered the temple, the chief priests and the elders of the people came to him ... and said 'By what authority are you doing these things?' " (Matthew 21:23).

I

We live in a shrinking world, one in which religions that our grandparents would have encountered only on the other side of the world, we can now find down the street.

The president of my Rotary Club here in Weston is a Muslim. There is a mosque right down the Post Road in Wayland. There is a Hindu temple in Hudson and a Buddhist temple in Waltham. When we were in Philadelphia in July, we discovered that our hotel was the site of a national Jain convention (Jainism is an Indian religion, somewhat similar to Buddhism and Hinduism).

We had a wedding here last summer, with a lovely couple both born in India. In welcoming the congregation, I explained that the bride's background was in the Vedic and Zoroastrian traditions, and the groom's family had been Christian from the time of the arrival of the first missionaries in India. Just looking around the room -- the women in their sari's, one of the readers was an African-American -- it looked like a world at peace!

That's really what we want -- a harmonious society and a peaceful world. It's not always that way. The fact of religious persecution in our world was highlighted by the State Department's annual report on religious freedom just two weeks ago [Globe 9/10/99, A8]:  Saudi Arabia persecutes Shi'a Muslims; Iraq persecutes Shiite Muslims; Pakistan allows violence against Christians, Hindus and others (not to mention Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland); and on and on. It's an old story, wrapped-up in national and ethnic and cultural rivalries going back longer than can be remembered, and almost no one is innocent.

In this country, fortunately, with our tradition of religious freedom, things have been somewhat more peaceful. Many Americans (if not all, to-be-sure) have wanted to welcome one another, to celebrate our pluralism, to learn from each another. Our 7th grade church school curriculum may have been one of the first in the country to introduce Sunday School children to other faiths -- working on the assumption that so often prejudice has its roots in ignorance, and we want our children to know about their neighbors.

It is a sign of the times, I think, that a new book was published a couple years ago entitled How To Be a Perfect Stranger, subtitled A Guide to Etiquette in Other People's Religious Ceremonies. What do you wear, for example, if you are invited to a Hindu wedding and what should you expect to see and do? Or what should you do at a Muslim funeral, a Jewish bar mitzvah, a Methodist baptism?

It is a practical, if somewhat simplistic, guide for avoiding oaf-ish behavior. It's a great concept, even if the execution is not perfect.

The reality is that we WANT to be sensitive, and gracious, and welcoming. A shrinking world can afford no less.

II

Now, it would be nice to stop here. The concept of harmony between religions is a wonderful idea, and there is a great energy today about encountering the world religions -- perhaps you have heard it expressed as "let's take the best from ALL the religions." An issue of the Utne Reader had as a subtitle "In a mix-and-match world, why not create your own religion?" That's actually a new form of a very old idea, what is usually called syncretism -- "the attempt to create a common world faith by abstracting and then putting together the universal elements believed to underlie the outward forms of all religions." What is called "New Age" religion seems to me to be a more privatized version -- not to create a new common world faith, but a composite faith for me. Some like the idea of "multiple citizenships" -- belonging to more than one religion at a time.

But, you know, the devil is always in the details. Sometimes this interest in other religions is not handled well, sometimes it is done poorly and without adequate thought. I want to suggest this morning that there are some dangers -- that even with the best intentions, even out of a sincere interest in other religions, we can over-step the bounds of propriety very easily. Religions are precious things, not to be treated lightly; they are not to be treated as jewels for the taking.

What are the dangers? Let me mention just three.

First, there is the danger of APPROPRIATION -- that is, taking another's religion for one's own use, without permission. What do I mean? I mean "exploitation." For example:

In a desire to explore "Native American spirituality" some well-meaning white folk, for example, are offering today, in "wellness clinics" and "spirituality retreats" the spiritual benefit of experiencing "native American sweat lodges." Sweat lodges are a part of many native American traditions -- a ceremonial act in which water is poured over heated stones to create a hot vapor bath, believed to wash away moral and physical impurities, accompanied by prayers and chants. Doesn't it sound like a grand idea? -- "here's something we can learn from our Indian brothers and sisters." But how do you think the Native Americans react?

One reaction, from an Indian reservation newspaper in the midwest, said simply: you robbed us of our land, how can you also steal our religion? Three people wrote these words: "there is a difference between learning about a tradition and learning the tradition. Non-Indians can draw inspiration from Indigenous beliefs, much as we can learn wisdom from the ancient Celts, St. Francis of Assisi ... [and others]. But to actually adopt someone else's religion as your own, and especially to distort it and mix it with other traditions in a hodge-podge, borders on spiritual irresponsibility." You can't "do" Indian spirituality, adds a Pueblo Sioux Indian, without an Indian community.

Another Indian is more blunt: writes Andy Smith in an article entitled "For all those who were Indian in a former life": "On the surface, it may appear that this new craze is based on a respect for Indian spirituality. In fact, the New Age movement is part of a very old story of white racism and genocide against the Indian people. The 'Indian' ways that these white, New Age [people] are practicing have little grounding in Native American reality." Tough words indeed!

Do you see what they are saying? -- "borrowing" from another culture, without becoming part of that culture, is a kind of exploitation, a kind of cultural imperialism, almost like cultural artifacts that are stolen from one culture and then exhibited in another.

Let me give just one more example of how easily this is done, a little closer to home. For years in my previous church, we celebrated what we thought was a wonderful Thanksgiving festival -- we gathered for a meal on the Sunday before Thanksgiving, and read a service called "The Thanksgiving Seder." Developed by a Unitarian professor at Meadville seminary in Chicago, it took the idea and the form of the Passover Seder, the meal in which Jews celebrated their deliverance during the Passover, and "universalized" it to talk about the Pilgrims' journey to America and other stories as akin to the exodus from Egypt: we talked about the various peoples who have escaped from slavery to promise, the different cultures, the struggle of immigrants and women and so on. I told a Jewish friend, a rabbinical student, about this, thinking he would be pleased. And, you know, he was horrified -- without putting it so boldly, he indicated to me: this Passover seder is precious to us, it is about who we are, and yet you would "adapt" it to celebrate your heritage??? He was insulted. I was stunned. I no longer do the Thanksgiving Seder.

Appropriation -- taking part of another's religion for your own use, without their permission, without encountering the whole religion. It is, perhaps, a form of cultural robbery!

The second danger is TRIVIALIZATION. It has to do with that idea that we can "take the best" from all religions and formulate something that is just terrific for us.

Here is the problem: imagine what somebody might think when an outsider presumes to decide just what is best in your religion? Is that not more than a little arrogant? And what if what they think is important doesn't seem all that important to you? This sounds strange, but it happens. I once did a Christian-Jewish wedding where the couple wanted to "do something from each tradition." They decided that a Jewish prayer and the groom stopping on the wedding cup would be appropriately "Jewish." That's great, I said, and what will be Christian? Well, they said, we thought the "unity candle" would be the Christian thing. Do you know what the "unity candle" is? -- two candles that are joined together into one, a fine symbol of marriage. But it is more Hallmark greeting cards than Christian.

It is trivialization of religion when we take what we think is important from somebody's religion and it is not-at-all what they think is important in their religion. If we thought that cultural imperialism was bad, isn't this worse? -- telling somebody what is important in their religion?

The problem of trivialization is that we simplify a religion, a complex thing, down to a superficial level that we think we can understand. I know a Unitarian Universalist who has identified each world religion with a phrase -- primitive religions with "nature," oriental religions with "consciousness," Western religions with "community," and so on.

That leads to the third danger -- and perhaps it is the truly sad problem with trivializing religions. Religion, real religion, is meant to transform our lives. It is not there to "be interesting," or to give us another perspective on life, or to give us some quick comfort -- religion is there to change our lives -- and whenever we pretend that religion, any religion, is there to entertain us or even just to inspire us, I think we miss the point and devalue the religion. Religion, every religion, is risky -- it is there to change the way we approach life, to challenge and transform us, and thereby to transform the world. I am embarrassed, quite frankly, when some well-meaning Unitarian Universalist folk are perceived simply as religious voyeurs.

Do you see my concern? -- there is not just a danger of being insensitive to the religions involved, but there is a danger to us, to the world-religion-traveler as well. Let me put it this way. We should be prepared to be changed, to be overwhelmed by the religion we are encountering. I always remember the words of Worcester Unitarian minister Wallace Robbins about travelling among the world's religions: unless your travel is measured from some point, you are not traveling, you are just lost. The idea is that you need to start from someplace -- you need to know, really know, yourself and your own religious home ... and then you can explore the others. Sometimes it helps you understand "home" better.

III

So there you are: three dangers to avoid while encountering the world's religions: be aware of the insensitivity of appropriation, be aware of the insult of trivialization, be open to the possibility that you may be changed!

It can be done well. Our seventh grade curriculum would pass the concern of that Indian writer, I think -- we want our children to learn about other religions, we do not pretend to teach those religions or adapt them in our own forms.

I guess, my friends, what I really want to say here today is that we, as individuals and as a church, ought to be gracious in our dealings with other religions. What does that mean?

It means respect. We need to respect the integrity of each religion and be careful about picking out our favorite pieces. We need to respect each other, to assume that nobody is pretending to be anything they are not, that nobody is pretending to speak for anybody else's tradition, that each is fully and authentically themselves.

It means knowledge. We need to know what we're talking about. That is, each tradition should speak out of its expertise: for example, as a Christian, I know the Bible, I can read it knowledgeably, I can select from it in responsible and respectful ways that do not take passages out of context in ways that distort. That is why, at our Interfaith Thanksgiving Eve services, the Koran is read by a Muslim Imam, the Torah chanted by a Jewish cantor, the New Testament by a Christian, and so on.

And it means dialog. Harry Hoehler has written extensively about this in a more complete way than is possible for me today [Christian Responses to the World's Religions]. Let it suffice to say that differently-inspired traditions can be instructive to one another, if done properly. We can learn much about our own traditions by considering the perspectives of other traditions.

In the gospel of Matthew, there is the line where the rabbis ask Jesus: "by what authority are you doing this?"

It is an appropriate question. It suggests that we do not speak out of a vacuum, that we are to speak responsibly from our tradition, to speak from what is important to us.

But the rabbis' question and Jesus' answer point, of course, to a higher authority. So did Gamaliel's words to the council: "if this thing is of human origin it will fail," he said, "but if it is of God you will not be able to overthrow them." If a religion is from God, it will survive; if it is not, it will die on its own and we need not persecute it.

There is a wonderful vision offered by Forrest Church of All Souls Church, New York City, who speaks of religions as being like cathedral windows. We cannot see sunlight, God's light, directly. We can only see the light as it is refracted by the glass in those cathedral windows. Each window colors the light, each gives it unique forms of beauty.

Seeing all the windows at once is an awesome sight. But we are most moved when we look long enough at one windowto see the details, to be drawn into the art, to be moved in soul, and perhaps to see God.

That is the difference between being a tourist and being a pilgrim.

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