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June 24, 2007
The Rev. John Auer
Scripture: Psalm
42, 1 Kings 19:1-15a, Galatians 3:28-29
“The Sound of
Sheer Silence: The Urgent Need to Question Ourselves”
We are so grateful to Imam Abdul and his wife
Kim Barghouti of the Northern Nevada Muslim Community for joining us in at least
a beginning of “Islamic Awareness” among us today. We were showing the PBS
video “Muhammad: Legacy of a Prophet” in adult class this month and asked if a
representative of the mosque might join us in class one Sunday. When Imam
Barghouti offered to come and to spend time in each worship service as well, we
sent out a notice to the Gazette-Journal. That coincided with a report they
planned on faith and practice in the local Islamic community. So suddenly this
event became “newsworthy” – which may say something about how far our interfaith
relations have to go. We are grateful for this and every opportunity. We know
interfaith relations are two-way streets! It will be our turn next to reach out
and to visit.
When Julie and I arrived Tuesday for Annual
Conference, we picked up a copy of the Sacramento News & Review featuring a
front-page story called “The American Face of Islam.” It was a very positive
profile of Imam Mohamed Abdul-Azeez of the Sacramento Area league of Associated
Muslims. Thursday Julie and I attended the annual luncheon of the Commission on
Christian Unity and Interreligious Concerns. Lo and behold, Imam Azeez was the
featured speaker on “The Heart of Islam!”
He observed the underlying issue in interfaith,
intercultural relations is “rejection of the other” just because they are
other. Why do we seem most comfortable with “clones of ourselves?” Moreover,
stereotyping Muslims as Arabs works against the very security stereotyping tries
to give us.. Huge numbers of Muslims come from China and Indonesia, from Africa
and some six million from the United States. Muslims were brought here among
those sold into slavery. Organized Muslim practice has been a part of our
national life at least since the Civil War!
Imam Azeez said Muslims thirst for and thrive
on the religious diversity and freedom available to them here. Their model is
the ancient city of Medina. All faiths lived and practiced together. The only
“advantage” to any faith comes from right relations with God. Muslim
congregations are accustomed to being made up of multiple colors and
nationalities and even sects of Islam. I recall that Malcolm X learned such
diversity and inclusivity from his hajj to Mecca.
Then on Friday the Bishop Talbert Award for
work against racism was given to Rev. John Oda of Pine UMC San Francisco. After
9/11 and the vandalizing of the mosque of the Muslim Society of San Francisco,
his largely Japanese-American congregation took an offering to help with repairs
and invited the Muslim congregation to a meal. In time, they became “sister
congregations.”
I believe Islam is the fastest-growing faith in
our nation and in the world. It seems to appeal specially to those who feel
undervalued and unheard in all other ways. It screams out for our creative and
constructive attention.
I believe we of the dominant faith and culture
in the United States desperately need the kind of “time-out” the prophet Elijah
takes here. As Elijah’s life and work were careening from crisis to crisis, so
are ours. Elijah tries fighting and finds himself no better than his
ancestors! Pride in fighting bespeaks our heritage Then Elijah tries fleeing
and finds himself no better off. We, too, see “fight or flight” as the only
ways to deal with real and imagined “enemies.” When fighting does not work for
us, we flee. We fail to do the hard work of “friendship” which is the only real
third course and way of the Holy Spirit– fight, flight, or friendship. Those
are the choices always before us. Which is of God?
It will take us this kind of wilderness journey
deep into our own souls and into our shared sources of baptism and communion,
initiation and practice with one another. Like Elijah, we need to be stripped
to the essence of who we are both in life and in faith. We need to give up all
the defenses, all the protections, the trappings of security and success
surrounding us in isolation and cutting us off from so many others and from so
much of the world. We need to see ourselves being as vulnerable and available
as if almost dead – as if with nothing to lose.
Like the psalmist, we need learn to thirst
again for the living God – to “come and behold the face of God” – to start over
again with the open trusting and risking faith of the converted. We need not
take God and our relationship for granted but let ourselves ask and be asked
tough questions: “Where is our God?” Why is our soul “cast down” and
“disquieted” within us? We need event to ask “Why have you forgotten us?”
“Why do we mourn . . .?” It takes Elijah a forty-day journey alone and
dependent on angel-meals. Finally, God finds him and gently calls him out. We
should hope for such a moment, personally and nationally.
God wants our attention by so many ways we
never attended to God before. Those ways very much include our direct contact
and fellowship with peoples of our cultures, nations, languages, and especially
faith traditions! Other scriptures and other practices – as well as all our
shared concerns and commitments to make a better, safer world for the children
of us all. That’s why we acknowledge in the congregational “Progressive Church”
prayer we update periodically – “Jesus is always and only for us a beginning
point with God. God goes by other faces, other names, other faiths, other
works. God calls us to be as family with all others – to be lovers of diversity
with respect for every identity, to be lovers of complexity with respect for
every integrity.” We need to be tested like Elijah.
God puts Elijah to a much different kind of
test than that of a prophet-warrior. God takes him back to basics – Where is
God? How do we know God is there? How does God address us? What are the signs
of God’s presence and power? How are we called to interpret, to discern and to
respond? Who is God to us? No longer the great and sensational worker of
“shock and awe.” No longer in wind, or earthquake, or fire – where we always
assume God will be – in whatever the form of might we think makes us right. No
longer will God be detached from us, self-evident by God’s extreme otherness,
completely independent of us.
Rather, God will be in the sound of sheer
silence. No wonder God creates us with twice as many ears as mouths! God will
be in the very absence of all our right answers – beyond every and any arrogance
of assurance that God is “looking out for #1,” and that must be us! God will be
in all the questions we let ourselves ask and be asked –especially by those
whose very existence much less right to be human and equal we never even had to
acknowledge before. Suddenly all the rest of the world is at hand and checking
us out, asking us just who we think we are and what we think we are doing,
denying our one humanity?
To be “in Christ” as we say in Christian
tradition -- or “in the Presence of God,” as Howard Thurman puts, or “in Human
Family,” human community, as we put it in our version of Galatians 3:28-29 today
-- surely has an equivalent image and affirmation in every other tradition.
“Islam” itself means life in “submission” to God. For every tradition affirms
the oneness and shared origin out of which or of whom we come. We are sisters
and brothers to one common set of parents. We are infinite “human resources”
reflecting the image of the one Source of all.
We are all on a journey, an adventure, an
exploration and discovery of all that it means to be human! With Elijah we
never know for sure where God is leading, only that we are “submitted” to
following. God keeps us unsettled, unstuck, but moving – toward one another in
love. Staying on the journey with God means unlearning and leaving a lot of
baggage behind us as we go. It means, as we say in our “Progressive Church”
prayer, loving “whom we call ‘God’ by loving neighbors we meet on the
life-and-faith journey.” It means “doing justice, loving kindness, walking
humbly, no matter what life-in-faith, love-in-faith may cost us.” Amen.
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