Exploring Other Faiths: Why Are There Multiple Faiths?
26th 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.
[1] Source: The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, 2007. www.religions.pewforum.org/reports.
