Kenwood United Methodist Church

Will They Be Saved?

27^th Sunday After Pentecost, Off Lectionary ~ Genesis 21:9-11

Rev. F. Elizabeth Givens

Kenwood UMC ~ November 16, 2008

It was the first day of February, 2003. By then Space Shuttle flights had become routine, something we might notice on the news but not usually a huge deal. Until….until the space shuttle Columbia disentigrated upon reentry over Texas killing all seven crew members aboard. Many of us remember the search for debris, the investigation of why the tragedy happened, the focus on the insulating foam which had peeled off during lift off and punctured a hole in one of Columbia’s wings.

But do you remember the crew? And do you remember that the group of heroes was incredibly religiously diverse? We might be most familiar with the faith of the Baptist, the Roman Catholic, the charismatic Christian, and the Episcopalian who died on that tragic day. But did you know about Ilan Ramon, the son of a Jewish Holocaust survivor who was an Israeli astronaut on the mission, and now a hero in Judaism? Or Kalpana Chawla, an Indian-American who grew up in a household with Sikh and Hindu influences, and attended Hindu temples in the San Francisco area. Or Laurel Clark, a practicing Unitarian Universalist, who wrote in an e-mail to her mother on that shuttle flight “Whenever I do get to look out, it is glorious. Even the stars have a special brightness.”[1]

All seven faithful people died on that ill-fated day. All were hailed as heroes, scientists and astronauts who had followed their dreams and all done great things for the advancement of humankind. And their story brings home what can be a sticky question for us as Christians. Were they all saved? Or to put it another way, are they in heaven?

I often have people come to me asking that question on a more personal level, as they have a close friend or family member of another faith whom they care about deeply, but wonder whether they will be in heaven or be saved. It is a very personal question and one which can be very troubling for us as Christians.

I want to begin by talking about what it means to be saved. Salvation, for us as Christians, is what Jesus has done for us by covering our sins and dying on the cross. What we are offered in salvation is a right relationship with God—no matter how badly we’ve messed up, we can have our relationship with God restored. That is the offer of salvation. But in order to receive it, we have to do something. We have to have faith.

So, for us as Christians, salvation is the gift made possible by the death and resurrection of Jesus, which we receive through faith. But does that mean that someone who does not know Christ and who does not have faith in him cannot have salvation and receive the gift of eternal life in heaven with God?

There are three common answers to that question. The first answer is, no, someone who does not know Jesus cannot be saved. That is a view called exclusivism.

Another opposite view is a universalist view, which says that God will love and save everyone, no matter what.

For me, and what I understand about God, both of these views are somehow incomplete and not helpful. I am grateful to my colleague Adam Hamilton, pastor of The United Methodist Church of the Resurrection in Leawood, Kansas for some of the writing he has done on this subject over the last few years for helping me clarify what I think about this.

I have to start with what I know about God. The Bible teaches us that God is love. That’s the most important way we understand and explain God. And characteristics of God which are a close second to love are justice and mercy. And it seems to me that a God of love and mercy would not exclude good, faithful people from salvation. It also seems to me that a God of justice would not extend salvation to a completely unrepentant sinner—for example, Hitler.

So I believe when we wrestle with this question, we have to look at these charasteristics of God—love, justice and mercy. And then we have to ask ourselves—is there any place in Scripture where it seems that God reaches beyond those who believe in Jesus to extend love and mercy and justice?

And the answer is yes. This story from the Old Testament which we shared today is one of the most powerful of those instances. God has promised Abraham that all of the nations of the earth shall be blessed through him. All the nations of the earth.

And then Abraham and his wife Sarah have trouble conceiving, and his first child is Ishmael, born to Hagar, one of the couple’s slaves. A few years later, Abraham and Sarah miraculously conceive, and have Isaac. Isaac and Ishmael play together as brothers….until Sarah has a fit of jealously and insists that Abraham send them out into the wilderness to fend for themselves. This scripture reports that Abraham struggles with the decision, but does as Sarah asks only after being reassured by God that Hagar and her son will be cared for by him. And as they go into the wilderness, there is a remarkable story of God saving them from starvation, and promising Hagar that he would make a great nation of her son. This would ultimately be the nation of Islam.

Here we get the clear message that God’s love is for all nations and all people. Not just the descendants of Isaac, but also the descendents of Ishmael. That message is reinforced in the New Testament when Jesus extends his message beyond the Jewish people to include non-Jews, or Gentiles. The clear and consistent message is, God loves those who are faithful—not just Jews, not just Abraham’s children through Ishmael, but ALL who are faithful.

And I think that brings us to a place of understanding. Salvation, as we understand it, comes through Christ. But salvation can also come to those who are faithful believers in other traditions. There are Muslims who have a much better prayer life than I do, and Hindus who are more faithful in serving the poor. And they have never had a chance or opportunity or persuasive means to receive Christ as their savior. But I believe that our God, the God of Abraham, and the God of Jesus Christ, is big enough for that to happen. In the words of Billy Graham in a Newsweek interview, “It would be foolish for me to speculate on who will be there and who will not….The love of God is absolute. He said he gave his son for the whole world, and I think he loves the whole world no matter what label they have.”[2]

Our hymn of response is about how we have received out salvation—following Jesus. Our prayer is that however salvation comes, those who are faithful will never turn back from a way of life which is holy.

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[1]“Seven-Heroes,Seven- Faiths,” http://www.beliefnet.com/News/2003/02/Seven-Heroes-Seven-Faiths.aspx?p=1

[2] Adam Hamilton, “Will There Be Hindus in Heaven?” in Seeing Gray in a World of Black and White, Nashville, Abingdon, 2008; p.111.

Exploring Other Faiths: Why Are There Multiple Faiths?

26^th Sunday After Pentecost, Off Lectionary ~ Matthew 2:1-2, 5b-12

November 9, 2008 ~ Kenwood UMC

Rev. F. Elizabeth Givens

The next few weeks we are going to be tackling a very sensitive set of questions, questions about why there are other faiths, what that means for salvation, and how we relate to people of other faiths. I think it is important to begin by noting that this is not a series explaining what other faiths believe—there will be touches of that, but not a comprehensive look. If you are interested in that, let me know and I will be glad to set up a small group study of that topic. It is also important for us to begin by confessing that we all carry a certain amount of prejudice toward people of other faiths, prejudice usually not born of hatred but of lack of understanding. Most of us have lived in a Christian culture and a Christian context all of our lives, even if we have not always practiced our faith. And so, when it comes to exploring other faiths, that is as much an exploration of cultures different from our own as it is anything. And we need to acknowledge that this is an area which is unfamiliar—and even risky for us.

But we must address this question, now more than ever, because we live in an increasingly diverse religious world. I did not know people of others faiths when I was growing up as a child. In my elementary school, people were either practicing or non-practicing Christians. That was it. If there were Jewish or Muslim or Hindus in my community I sure wasn’t aware of it.

And then in 1984, a Muslim place of worship was built on Buford Road in southside Richmond, the road I traveled 2-3 times a week to get to church. A mosque in the middle of the community that had nurtured me. “Why?” I wondered. The answer was simple—the community was no longer the same one I had grown up in as a child. There was a growing Muslim population in that community, and they wanted a place to worship.

Today, the diversity of the world that my children live in is almost incomprehensible to their grandparents, and surely would be to their great grandparents. Our children live in an America where Protestant faith hovers at just 51.4%, almost a minority.[1] They go to school with people of other faiths—Jewish, Muslim, Hindu and others. And those children will become our children’s friends, they will come to sleepovers at our homes, they will play soccer together and in 30 years they will lead our country together. Religious diversity is simply the reality of our community today, and so we need to learn about it!

So, why are there so many faiths and how do we fit that reality into our Christian understanding? To answer that question we have to take off the hat of faith and put on the hat of a sociologist. Sociologists study the dynamics of society and culture in the world. And what we learn from sociologists is that religion has been a very cultural thing. Until people began to move more easily around the globe in the last hundred years or so, religion was very dependent on the culture you grew up in. Islam was practiced in the Middle East, Christianity in Europe and the West, the Jewish faith in Israel, Hinduism in India and so forth. The faith which you might practice was often very connected to the culture into which you were born.

Now that we are a more mobile society, those cultures are beginning to blend and interact, which makes us ask these questions more urgently. And I think the place we need to begin when we ask ourselves why there are other faiths is with our understanding of God as creator.

As Christians we believe that God created the world—and not just the world, but the universe in it’s entirity. And that means that God created all people, not just Christian people. I am a part of a Disciple Bible Study class which meets on Thursday evenings, and we have been studying the books of Genesis and Exodus so far this fall. It has become clear to us in these earliest stories that God created everyone. And that means that from our perspective God created not only those who practice Christianity, but those who practice other religions. And so then the question becomes, how does God value those other religions in scripture? Does God exclude or include them?

And that at long last brings us to our scripture from this morning, the story of the wise men arriving at the birthplace of the Christ Child. As this scripture was read this morning, you may have felt that I was just as bad as Target and Home Depot at pushing the Christmas season! But we read this scripture because it has some central information for us about how God treats other faiths.

In this central story of the Christian faith, the incarnation, when God comes among us, he is worshipped not only by his own culture in Bethlehem, but also by people from the East—wise men from afar.

Now there is nothing in scholarships which suggests that these wise men were of some Jewish sect that had gone east. They were from aother culture, and practiced another religion. They followed stars—this was also not a practice of the Jews of Jesus’ day. Clearly these are people from another culture, people who do not necessarily believe in the God of Israel, but who nonetheless come and worship.

I believe this part of the Christmas story begins to suggest to us that our God might be bigger than the story, greater that our human constraints and constructions. Our God, the same God who created us, the same God who sent us Jesus, is beyond our understanding and comprehension. And as I read our Holy Scriptures I find that this God who I do not and cannot understand seems to include in his story people who are different from me. And that suggests to me that God’s mercy and grace are not the exclusive property of us Christians—but that they might indeed extend to the whole world.

Why are there multiple faiths? Because we live in a multicultural world which only recently has communicated on a global level. These faiths developed largely in isolation from each other, not in competition with each other. What do we do about the fact that there are multiple faiths? It seems to me that the model of the baby at whose cradle the whole world came to worship is that we need to embrace those multiple faiths, listen to one another, and look for ways to love and serve one another as faithful disciples within our different traditions.

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[1] Source: The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, 2007. www.religions.pewforum.org/reports.