Celebrant
There is one Body and one Spirit;
People
There is one hope in God’s call to us;
Celebrant
One Lord, one Faith, one Baptism;
People
One God and Father of all.
Perhaps I was better at thinking metaphorically then. Or perhaps I had the Episcopal faith in mind when I said, “one Faith.” Even I had been baptized more than once. But I was not vetting the words as I went. I just loved the sound of them, the way they made me feel. As Christians have long proclaimed, I coasted on the assurance that our unity was real in heaven even when it was nowhere to be found on earth.
Once I began teaching Christianity in a college classroom instead of a Sunday school room, the tension between heaven and earth became more fraught. The Great Schism between the Eastern and Western churches in the eleventh century struck me as a very big deal, especially since it goes on dividing Christians to this day. So does the bloody divorce between Catholic and Protestant Christians in the sixteenth century. In class I softened these ruptures by teaching the students what I had been taught: these historical divisions explain how the three branches of the Christian Church came to be. The one Church includes Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant Christians, who are united by one Lord, one faith, one baptism.
Imagine my surprise, then, when I discovered that the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches both reject the “branch theory” of the Church, which they view as an invention by the Church of England. This helped me understand why I believed it, since the Episcopal Church descended from the Church of England. But I could not have been more surprised to learn that I was not part of the one true Church, which both the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches claim to represent. I do not bring this up now in order to foment more dissent. It just seems helpful to admit that Christianity is as complicated and conflicted as any other religion, with groups of followers who can believe in the unity of their faith even as they refuse Communion to one another. Poor Jesus. How does the body survive when there is no circulation in the feet?
The historical record became personal for me when I attended my ninety-one-year-old uncle’s funeral in Texas, knowing full well there would be limits on my participation since I am not Catholic. This happened after I had been teaching for fifteen years, which means I was fully aware of the reasons why Christians of good faith might not take Communion together or recognize the validity of each other’s ordinations. I did not wear a clergy collar to the funeral. I declined the invitation to say a few words at the end. I had been an Episcopal priest for thirty years by then. The Catholic priest who led the service had been ordained a little more than three.
I met his eyes when he reminded the congregation that only Catholics took Communion in the Catholic Church, which was easy to do since he was looking straight at me. He asked those of us who were not Catholic to please respect their tradition, and I did. I really did. I even believed I was theologically prepared for what was coming next, but as I watched people who had known my uncle for less than a year going up to the altar rail for bread and wine while I sat in my pew with my hands folded in my lap, I felt the full sting of my exclusion. By the time I followed the coffin out of the church, I no longer believed in the unity of the church. Christians are as divided from one another as we are from people of different faiths.
By the next day I could own this as a liberating insight, especially since I did not write it off to human sinfulness. Well, some of it I did. But I did not view my uncle’s church as sinful, any more than I viewed my own church as sinful for insisting that only baptized Christians may take part in Communion. Every church I can think of has some way of distinguishing “us” from “them,” even if it is only asking the ushers to keep an eye on people who come in wearing leather motorcycle jackets with metal studs. Unless I want to separate myself from everyone who does not see things the way I do—which my faith urges me not to do—then I have to admit that there are mutually exclusive views of what it means to be Christian and that God alone is smart enough to decide which is best. This frees me to be with Christians who are not like me as well as those who are.
Students always want to know what Jews believe about this or Buddhists believe about that. When we get to the unit on Christianity, I turn the question around on them:
What do Christians believe happens in the Lord’s Supper?
At what age do Christians believe people should be baptized?
Do Christians believe in evolution?
Do Christians support stem-cell research?
What is the Christian position on carrying arms in church?
What do Christians believe about the bishop of Rome, the gifts of the Holy Spirit, the celibacy of clergy, or the leadership of women?
The only sensible answer to any of these questions begins with another question: “Which Christians?” There are a lot of waves in the Christian ocean. When you have met one Christian, you have met exactly one.
I stopped capitalizing “the church” after my uncle’s funeral—not from cynicism or revenge, but from the wish to be accurate. There are very many Christian churches, with very many different teachings about what it means to be Christian. Accepting those differences seems the least that a teacher of world religions can do. The key noun is plural, not singular. I do not capitalize “the religion” either.
The second major thing that shifted for me in the classroom was my view of Christian evangelism. I had never warmed to the evangelists in my life, but I accepted the sincerity of their efforts. They believed it was their duty, based on a verse at the very end of Matthew’s Gospel: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” Biblical scholars raise reasonable questions about the authenticity of that verse as well as its translation into English, but since I knew that would be of limited interest to those with eyes on the prize of my soul, I learned to deflect their spiritual advances the same way I dealt with telephone solicitors. I told them I knew they had a job to do, that I already had enough of what they were selling, and to please take me off their call lists.
It was not until I began meeting people of other faiths in their most sacred spaces that I learned how bruised some of them were by Christian evangelism. Worshippers at the Hindu Temple returned to the parking lot after one of their major festivals to find Christians by their cars with pamphlets demeaning their holiday. Muslims were used to Christians saying malicious things about the Qur’an. Native Americans were tired of being asked what God they prayed to. The shared consensus is that Christian evangelists are not very good listeners. They assume they are speaking to people with no knowledge of God themselves. They are disrespectful of other people’s faith.
Once, on a trip to Central America, I stood at the airport waiting to collect my luggage with a local guide named Gustavo. While we stood watching the carousel go around and around, I heard him groan as if someone had just pulled the wheel of a big suitcase over his foot.
“What’s the matter?” I asked, following his line of sight to the crowd of teenagers who had just come through the arrivals door. They were wearing matching T-shirts that had the name of their church on the front and “Bringing the World to Christ” on the back.
“Nothing,” he said.
“No, really,” I said. “What’s the matter?”
“I just wish they would go home,” he said. “If they really want to help, they should come two by two, like the Bible says, with nothing but the shoes on their feet. When they come into a village, they should go ask the elders if there is anything for them to do. If the elders cannot think of anything, they should leave. Otherwise we are just characters in their play.”
Pearl Buck, the Nobel Prize–winning daughter of Protestant missionaries, said almost the same thing in a book she wrote near the end of her life. Thinking back on people like her parents, she said that even as a child she knew intuitively t
hey were not in China because they loved the Chinese.
No, they were there, these missionaries, to fulfill some spiritual need of their own. It was a noble need, its purposes unselfish, partaking doubtless of that divine need through which God so loved the world that He sent His only begotten Son for its salvation. But somewhere I had learned from Thoreau, who doubtless learned it from Confucius, that if a man comes to do his own good for you, then must you flee that man and save yourself.1
Thinking of Pearl growing up in China made me remember a large map of the world I had seen on the wall at a Presbyterian seminary. The age of the frame suggested a date in the last century. So did the names of some of the countries, but it was the coloration of the map that caught my attention. There were bright spots of color in Europe and North Africa. The east coast of North America was a pretty shade of blue and large parts of South America were painted red, but most of the rest of the world was one big expanse of mud brown.
At first I thought it was an unfinished map, begun by someone who had then lost interest—or worse yet, who had dropped dead before he finished adding all the colors. Then I stepped closer and saw “Heathen” written across all the brown parts. Trying to make sense of that, I searched for the legend of the map and found it lower down in the middle under the map title, “The Protestant Missionary Map of the World, 1846.” According to the legend, the six colors on the map indicated the dominant religion of each region: blue for Protestant, red for Roman Catholic, pink for Greek, and yellow for Muslim. That last was a surprise, since Judaism did not rate a color at all. Some tiny green spots marked areas of “Decayed Christian Churches.” Everything else was brown. “Heathen” was sufficient to describe the ancient wisdom of the Hindu Vedas, the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism, the Torah and Talmud of the Jews, the Tao of the Chinese, and the teachings of Confucius.
I know it is not fair to judge that map by today’s standards. There was no radio in 1846, no telephone, no television, no World Wide Web. There was not even a state of Israel. Today we have all those things—we are a global society—yet I still know people who regard half the world as mud brown. Some of their maps only have two colors on them: theirs and everyone else’s. When I talk to the “everyone else” on school field trips, I learn that Christian evangelism has done more to dim their view of Christianity than anything else they know about it.
“Let us think of the bulk of your people who preach the gospel,” Gandhi once said to an Indian missionary. “Do they spread the perfume of their lives? That is to me the sole criterion. All I want them to do is to live Christian lives, not to annotate them.”2
As a convert myself, I get that. I endured torrents of words, landslides of words, ambulances and fire trucks full of words from earnest Christians eager to save me in high school and college. Some of them came after me like safari hunters after big game, others like census takers eager to make sure everyone was counted. All in all, their pursuit of me did not seem to have much to do with me. They were fulfilling a spiritual need of their own, as Pearl Buck said. The moment after I accepted Jesus as my Savior, they were gone.
In retrospect, the deeper problem was that they did not spread the perfume of their lives. There was nothing about them that made me want to be like them, at least not for very long. The people who eventually drew me to Christ never said a word about it—like my Methodist college adviser, whose unsentimental commitment to the welfare of his students lit my path to graduate school, or the Catholic priest who invited me into his kitchen to help cook spaghetti for the hungry hippies who would drop by later, or the Episcopal professor of New Testament who showed me what it looked like to love God with his whole heart and his considerable mind. None of them ever spoke to me about becoming Christian. I made that decision on my own, once I had been attracted by the fragrance of their faith.
Gandhi had a lot to say about Indian missionaries, who not only annotated a kind of life they did not live, but who also dangled medicine, education, and financial aid from their gospel sticks. If the lower-caste people to whom the missionaries reached out wanted any part of what was being offered to them, they had to take it all, including the Western cultural values that held the carrot in place. When Gandhi got his own chance to evangelize, he was quite brief.
“What would be your message to a Christian like me and my fellows?” an interviewer asked him once, to which Gandhi replied, “Become worthy of the message that is imbedded in the Sermon on the Mount, and join the spinning brigade.”3
This goes on the long string of pearls given to me by people of other faiths, who can sometimes see mine more clearly than those of us on the inside can. In a single sentence, Gandhi has given me a new way to live with the verse at the end of Matthew’s Gospel, which Christians sometimes call the Great Commission. The way to make a disciple is to be one. If your life does not speak, your footnotes will have limited impact. Become worthy of the message, and join the spinning brigade. Why isn’t that the Great Commission?
There are many other ways that teaching Christianity has changed my practice of Christianity, but the one that has taken me farthest from the center of my tribe is the conviction that Christians do not have sole custody of the only way to God. I am willing to accept that Jesus is the only way for Christians. I am unwilling to accept that Christians get to decide he is the only way for everyone else too. According to the King James Version of the Bible, Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father but by me” (John 14:6). As Huston Smith once said, everything hinges on what you think he meant when he said “I.”
He was sitting around the Last Supper table when he said it, and I am pretty sure the subject was not interfaith relations. The subject was Jesus’s imminent arrest, his almost certain death, and the real possibility that the people sitting around the table with him would be the next to die, because they had chosen his way, his truth, and his life. To my ear, at least, he is reassuring them that they have made the right choice. He is the only way for them. His truth is the one they have bet their lives on, and he wants them to know that it leads straight to the Father. There is no other way for them now. This is the only way of life.
Even if this interpretation does not move you, perhaps we can agree that Jesus’s saying puts him in charge of deciding who is on his way and who is not. If there is no other way to God, there is no other gatekeeper. Jesus alone is the arbiter of salvation in his name.
The New Testament scholar Amy-Jill Levine has told a particular story so often that I can hardly get it wrong, but you need to know that she is Jewish in order to appreciate it. Here is how it goes. When someone asks her for her interpretation of John 14:6, she says that she imagines herself at the pearly gates after a long and happy life. While she is waiting in line with everyone else to see whether St. Peter will let her into heaven, she makes a list of everything she wanted to ask him while she was still in the classroom. “Can you speak Greek? Where did you go when you wandered off in the middle of Acts? What happened to your wife?”4
When it is finally her turn to talk to Peter, she starts pelting him with so many questions that he just waves her through. This concerns the next person in line, who has heard of Dr. Levine and knows she is a Jew. “Excuse me,” the guy says to St. Peter, “but I don’t think she’s supposed to be here.” That is when Jesus sticks his head through the gates and says, “It’s fine, Peter. I know her, and she’s okay by me.” Get it? “No one comes to the Father but by me, and she’s okay by me.” Levine’s point is that no one enters the presence of God except by God’s grace. No church, no church doctrine, no individual gets to referee that. Where the Way of Jesus is concerned, he is the Decider.
None of this comes up in class. These are my bones to chew, not my students’. I do wonder how many of them are doing the same thing I am—trying to reconcile the Christian teachings they have received with their lives in a changing world. It is hard to hold your Christian identity in one hand and your complex sense of belonging in the
other. As I said earlier, this is one of the reasons why more and more young people identify as spiritual but not religious. It is easier than trying to bridge the gap.
According to a recent poll by the Pew Research Center, the fastest growing religious group in the United States is the “nones”—the people who mark “none” on the survey question that asks for their religious affiliation. In 2014, there were almost 56 million of them, roughly 23 percent of the adult population. Ask me why, and I will tell you to go talk to your favorite person under thirty—but only if you are prepared to listen more than you talk. When I ask my favorite teenager to tell me about the chapel services at her Christian school, the conversation goes something like this:
“What do you call that thing when the person stands up and talks?” she asks me.
“A sermon?” I say.
“Yes,” she says. “Someone told me you are good at it, but I don’t know how it could possibly be good. There are two women who do it at my school, but no matter what they say they always end up with, ‘And that’s why you should believe in God.’ It is so boring. There’s a man too, but he’s always talking about weddings. I feel like he has family issues or something.”
“Have you ever heard anyone who wasn’t boring?”
“There’s one chaplain who doesn’t get to do it much, but she’s not boring. She tells stories about things that have really happened to her. She also has this thing she calls the wisdom stick. Sometimes she picks people out of the audience and taps them on the shoulder with it, like King Arthur with the knights. Then she asks them questions, and she always finds something good about their answers.”
Holy Envy Page 14