Pierre Teilhard De Chardin wrote, “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human experience.”  Let’s talk a bit about that human experience, one spiritual being to another.

 

Two weeks from today is Easter Sunday.  A week from tomorrow night, is Passover.  Two hugely important holidays, holy days, from two of our many spiritual traditions.  What are we to make of them…as an Interfaith community?

 

We’ve heard the readings.  A question or two come to mind.  What really happened on Easter Sunday?  What are the “facts.”  Did the angel actually push aside that huge stone that blocked the entrance to Jesus’ tomb?  Was Jesus the Son of God, resurrected from death?   What really happened on Passover?  Did the Angel of Death actually kill the first-born of Egypt–sparing only the children of Israel?  Was there actually an Exodus from Egypt? 

 

When I was in college that last question intrigued me.  I spent 10 weeks researching what was then known about the possibility of an historical Exodus.  I wrote a sixty page term paper!  I was … obsessive in those days.  Did the Exodus actually happen?  My conclusion, after sixty pages: maybe yes, maybe no.  You can’t really tell from history.  If you already believe in an Exodus, there are signs, in history, that point to it.  But if you don’t believe, there is nothing in history that would make you go “Aha.  There must have been an Exodus.”  In the end, you either believe…or you don’t.  I think the same is true of Easter.  I doubt history will ever prove or disprove it.  You either believe or you don’t.

 

These questions come to mind this morning because of the proximity of Passover and Easter.  But we could ask similar questions of every faith.  With likely the same result.  You believe it, or you don’t.

 

But to conclude that the answers to these questions are unimportant is, to me, to miss the whole point of Interfaith.  It is NOT that we deem the answers to these faith questions unimportant, they are important.  But rather, regardless of the faith that we individually may embrace, that we grant supremacy to no single faith’s answer.  This is an important distinction.  Let us think on it a moment.

 

For me, Passover is one of the two great pillars that bind me to my Jewish heritage, and makes me a Jewish Unitarian Universalist.  I celebrate Passover every year, as Jews have done, every year, for the past three thousand.   I personally don’t believe that Jesus was the Son of God.  I don’t believe that he was resurrected on Easter Sunday two thousand years ago.  But two of my closest friends on this planet do believe it.  And I have long since reconciled myself to the fact that they are every bit as intelligent as I am, every bit as logical, every bit as spiritual.  I not only love them, deeply and without reservation, but respect them and their beliefs just as deeply.

 

More to the point for today, the few times I’ve been able to celebrate Easter with them, they live in California, so it hasn’t been often, I have loved it…and learned from it…and my soul has been nourished by it.

 

When I was choir director at the United Methodist Church, I was asked on occasion how I could enter into the music and the words of the anthems, especially those about Easter, with such enthusiasm and spiritual integrity.  When I stopped blushing, I would answer: these are important beliefs.  The only way that I can do them justice is, at least for the time that I’m directing the choir, to share in them, to learn from them, for that moment to make them my own.  It doesn’t mean I converted.  I was always Jewish, never Methodist.  But there was and is much profundity there.  As there is in the Catholic Church, and amongst the First Peoples, and in Islam, and Buddhism and every other faith.

 

If we will live Interfaith, this is one of the things we gain: the richness of so many differing ways of seeing spirit … of perceiving spirit.  And the humility, sometimes not easy for us humans, the humility of realizing that our own individual spiritual path is not the only way.  Interfaith has much to teach us, and the world, about how to do unto others: with grace, with respect, and with humility.

 

This goes back to what we spoke of last month.  That there has been a wall between our differing ways of perceiving spirit.  The foundation stone of that wall is a paradigm that much of humanity has lived by for thousands of years: the paradigm of “Right Belief” – the paradigm that says there must be one and only one right answer to the question of God.

 

We spoke also of the great gift of abandoning that paradigm of “Right Belief” and instead worshiping together.  NOT to convert.  Not to convince.  But out of love, and respect and the desire truly to know one another.  We used, just as a metaphor, a new paradigm of a cosmic diamond, with infinite facets: each facet with its own reflection of the light of God, or Spirit, or Love.  Judaism, Buddhism, Atheism: all facets.  We spoke of Interfaith as a spiritual practice, an Interfaith that embraces and respects these differing facets of that cosmic diamond.

 

But it is hard to change a paradigm.  We do ourselves no favors if we pretend the difficulties do not exist.  I think of the paradigm of patriarchy as an example.  It has been eighty-seven years  since women have had had the right to vote in the United States.  Roughly three generations.  And it is only this year that we have had our first woman Speaker of the House.  It’s on its way out, but does anyone seriously think that the paradigm of patriarchy is truly behind us and no longer an issue?

 

So, can we do it?  Can we worship together, not simply appreciating but indeed being sustained, being open to and fed by the truth of a spiritual path that is not our own? 

 

Walter Cronkite, after a lifetime of reporting the news, stated, “It seems to rise again when the crisis times come, and this is a time of most severe crisis, as we all know, not just for the history of the United States and the survival indeed of our democracy, but for the future peace of the world.  And never before probably has the need for interfaith commitment been nearly as great as it is at this very moment.”

 

So how committed are we?

 

Can we who are not Christian celebrate Easter?  I’m not talking about bunnies and Easter eggs.  Can we, as non-Christians, celebrate the resurrection and what it means?  Can we celebrate that perspective of God’s infinite love?  The mystery of it.  Can we celebrate this together: those of us who are Christian and those of us who are not?  I hope so.  That, as I see it, is what we are doing here.  Imperfectly, to be sure.  But we blaze the trail.

 

There is wonder…and power in the story of the angel rolling the stone away.  Of the discovery of an empty tomb.  Of the Son of God, on the cross, suffering a moment of despair just as we all will suffer moments of darkness and despair.  The knowledge that we can be forgiven.  That the love of God is infinite.  That even on the cross, there is hope.  I love what Jamal spoke of, when we were honoring Christmas last December, about finding the Jesus in all of us.  And what that can mean.

 

Can we who are not Jewish celebrate Passover?  Can we celebrate the story of an ancient people who cried out in their misery and were answered by God?  There is wonder… and power as well, in the story of a God who so loves freedom that a people enslaved will be led to a new land, a free land, by a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night.  That the Red Sea would part for them, the path from bondage to freedom. 

 

These stories have something to teach us, whether we are of that faith or not. 

 

African Americans understood this when they adopted, not Judaism, but the power of a God of Freedom, and sang many a spiritual about that freedom including “When Israel Was in Egypt.”  Did slaves sings these spirituals wishing to be Jewish?  I don’t think so.  But their spirit was nourished by that tradition.  “Let my people go.”  Let my people go is as potent an idea now as it was three thousand years ago. 

 

But what if a person doesn’t believe in God?  Not a God of freedom or forgiveness.  Then still, can we not drink of the story that tells us that slavery is evil and all people should be free?  Can we not drink of the story that illuminates for us that forgiveness must be a part of who we are as human beings if we are to be complete, and that love is indeed the paramount value.  Should we not honor the religions that teach this, regardless of our own faith?

 

That, again, is the essence of Interfaith.  It is the gift of Interfaith to each of us.

 

This place, here, the Interfaith Community Church, is special.  Not perfect: but special.  For we have started on that path.  And we may lead along that path.  But just as it has in changing the paradigm of patriarchy, it will take not only effort, but time.  A lifetime.  Or two.  Or three.  Which brings us to the First Peoples value that we seek to internalize and make a part of ourselves this month of March.  Patience.

 

What does patience mean?  Is the person “patient” who sits disengaged from the world and does nothing, expecting that eventually it will all work out?  More to the point, if we here understand the meaning of Interfaith and yet are content to wait for the rest of the world through some miracle to catch up with us, is that patience?  

 

I would like to examine one aspect of patience, not the entirety, but an aspect.  And that aspect is active patience.  With a world in hurt, patience for me is not sitting by and watching.  Patience is rolling up our sleeves and becoming involved – yet realizing that things won’t change overnight.  Patience is not being discouraged when there isn’t immediate gratification.  Patience is realizing that if your faith is different from my faith we may not understand each other the first time we talk.  Or the second time.  Or perhaps even the third time.  But we are resolved not to lose patience.

 

I think that hand in hand with patience, if we are alert, if we are open, comes understanding.  Patience without understanding is like tolerance instead of respect.  As we grow, as we become evermore an actively Interfaith Community, let us indeed be patient with each other.  Sometimes, you know, we don’t speak the same language, even though we’re all speaking English.

 

But let it be an active patience, an engaged patience.  Next month we will be talking about moving outside these walls and actively spreading the word of Interfaith.  We will want to do so patiently, with understanding.  And respect.  …     

 

May we pray silently, and meditate a bit.