By TheOOZEtv:

Let’s step over the threshold of “stalemate” and create new stories, says Samir Selmanovic, in an interview with ThinkFWD host, Spencer Burke. Selmanovic’s book, It’s really all about God, was born out his faith journey that began with childhood in a Muslim family where belief in God was considered a crutch, although the traditional religious holy days and celebrations were observed. When he became a Christian, he was expelled from his home and spent two years sleeping on the couches of church members who took him in. He confesses he spent many years stridently arguing for the “rightness” of his particular religious beliefs—“My beliefs are true; yours are not.”

Today, Samir encourages us to rethink our faith and move from “It’s all about me.” to “It’s all about God.” Muslim, atheist, Jew –these are adjectives to the name “Christian,” he says. Samir is part of a gathering called Faith House which invites the community to share a common space (a living room) and experience their neighbor’s faith. All of our different faiths, and the different “mysteries” that each of us are, affect each other. Learning about my neighbor’s faith and experience, allows me to see new beauty, and poses questions that help me deepen and broaden my faith.

We need to encounter brothers, neighbors, even strangers of different faiths. We need a perspective that says, “There must be more about you, about others, than just to serve MY story.” Samir says, “I cannot argue for the absence of grace and say that YOUR story must be a lie for mine to be true. We are called to judge things by their fruit. Take a close look at our theology and if it sounds reprehensible, then we need to admit that.”

For Samir, humility and hospitality IS the doctrine, the dogma, and to practice it is to go deeper, not to water down, our faith. Christianity exists to serve the Kingdom of God, not the other way around. Look around you, says Samir. The Kingdom of God is here—enter it!

For Personal Reflections and Small Group Questions click HERE.

“Experiencing Your Neighbor’s Faith” is a tagline of Faith House Manhattan. We really do this!  If you would like to help us, click HERE.

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On a hot Sunday, three days ago, I took my younger daughter Leta downtown to observe with me the protest held by those who oppose the Muslim Community Center. I told her that this is part of history, that in US there is always current “other” that people are taught to fear. Current position of “other” in the United States has been assigned to Muslim community. I told her that supporting them in their endeavor is an issue of human rights, and therefore our issue too, as Christians. Plus I bought her her favorite ice-cream.  We sat on a bench in a shade then took some pictures of about 300 protesters. Here is what we saw.

About 300 protesters, mostly from outside of New York, with many signs, American flags, and a line up of dozens of speakers speaking fear and asking for action.

All I need to know about Christianity I learned from KKK?

This sign does not need a comment. The Bible says, "a righteouss person does not assemble with mockers."

Dispersed among the words of fear and hate were some legitimate hurts and concerns expressed. Knowing many Muslims through my work in the city and nationally, I am utterly confident American Muslims will rise to this moment of history and make the United States an even better country than it is today.

My daughter and I stood with Jesus there. We stood shoulder to shoulder with true Muslims. And we shall not be moved.

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This article was written last summer and published in the Winter 2010 issue of the Anglican Theological Review.  It captures my thoughts about Faith House’s first year and this community’s larger contribution.  Although it was written for an Episcopal (Christian) audience, it makes central use of a text from the Qur’an and would be of interest to anyone in the Faith House and interfaith community.
* Download formatted PDF of published article, with footnotes

Anglican Theological Review
Winter 2010 • Pages 175-181
Volume 92 • Number 1

“Has the story reached thee, of the honored guests of Abraham?”

Bowie Snodgrass

Has the story reached thee, of the honored guests of Abraham? Behold, they entered his presence, and said: “Peace!” He said, “Peace!” (and thought, “These seem) unusual people.” Then he turned quickly to his household, brought out a fatted calf, And placed it before them . . . he said, “Will ye not eat?” (When they did not eat), He conceived a fear of them. They said, “Fear not,” and they gave him glad tidings of a son endowed with knowledge. But his wife came forward (laughing) aloud: she smote her forehead and said: “A barren old woman!” They said, “Even so has thy Lord spoken: and He is full of Wisdom and Knowledge.”

Being a guest in the home or religious space of the “other” can be awkward. The story of the visit of the honored guests to Abraham’s tent (Gen. 18:1–15) reminds us of the awkwardness that can also accompany being a host. In Genesis, Abraham has to hurry about after offering food to the strangers, asking Sarah to make bread and the servant to hurriedly prepare a tender calf. In Surah 51 of the Qur’an, Abraham becomes fearful when the guests do not eat the slain calf. In both stories, the hostess, Sarah, laughs aloud when the guests foretell that she will bear a son.

In interfaith relations, whether we are present as guest, host, or on neutral ground, there is at first a degree of awkwardness. At Faith House Manhattan, “an experiential inter-religious community that comes together to deepen our personal and communal journeys, share ritual life and devotional space, and foster a commitment to social justice and healing the world,” we embrace the gift of encountering God in the other as “holy awkwardness” and an indispensable spiritual discipline of the twenty-first century.

TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE, CLICK HERE.

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There are many examples of unhealthy religion obsessed with some or other vision of the future. Living solely for the future can lead us on an exhausting trek of predicting or to a state of indifference toward the present.

But to abandon our vision of the future is no way to live well in the present. The way we live this life—that we can see and touch—is determined by what we believe about the mystery behind all of life, about the future, beyond our place and time. Whether one is brutal, cynical, apathetic, or gentle, constructive and alive, depends on one’s view of the future. Is our world and human experience a spark of light in the vast meaningless darkness that has come with a bang and will go away with a whimper? Or is our world and human experience a part of a great mystery of light, goodness, and meaning that will last?  Whether religious or not, our beliefs—or even mere hunches—about the future matter.

Discussion of the future in the Bible has been centered around prophets, often misunderstood personalities of the ancient world. They were mystical and earthy, gracious and angry. And we can hear the voice of the prophets three ways.

First, we hear prophets as predictors, people God sent to help us see the supernatural origin of religion. Like fortune tellers, we hear prophets giving us insider knowledge to help us survive in the difficult times we fear are coming or to help us identify the correct way to go.  This way of hearing the prophets can help in time of suffering have confidence that the ultimate reality of justice, goodness, and meaning will prevail in the future.  But it does little in helping us change the present.

Second, we hear prophets as social protesters. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel describes prophets as those who, instead of taking us to the elegant mansions of God’s mind, take us to the slums. Their impatience with injustice may strike us as hysteria, but this is because prophets feel fiercely. A prophet sees and hears what God sees and hears at all times: cries of pain, tears of oppression, the agony of injustice. While, as Heschel says, the rest of us have grown scales on our eyes, calmed our nerves and silenced our conscience, the prophets still feel what God feels. And for the prophets, the greatest cause of oppression is when injustice is organized and systematized, and then legitimized in social, political, economic, religious or educational systems. To the patriots, prophets were committing treason; to the pious they were blasphemous; and to those in power they were saboteours. But regarding the prophets merely as social protesters is still an incomplete way of hearing their message.

The third way to hear prophets is as those God has sent to help us imagine and work on what the world can become. They not only protest our actions; they help us dream. They not only talk about “what is not” but “what can and must be.” Behind their austere and stinging words is compassion for mankind. The prophet Isaiah was sent to “strengthen the weak hands and make firm the feeble knees” (Isaiah 35:5).

The ultimate object of the prophet’s life is the “dream of God” for our world and that’s why their sayings are imbued with some of the most beautiful poetry in the ancient world. Far more radical than social protesting, their struggle was for us to change the ways we see each other, God, the world and everything in it. To them, we appear blind and deaf and their job is to wake us up to God’s dream among us, to help us re-imagine.

Today, compassion has become strictly an individual virtue, not a socio-political affair that drove the prophets of old and Jesus Christ to be the revolutionaries they were. Instead of merely helping the victims, they insisted that compassion without justice meant quietly giving in to a system that creates ever more victims. Rather than “practicing random acts of kindness,” these prophets practice the systematic dismantling of injustice.

The task of tackling injustice in the world seems so daunting that most of us retreat from it. To survive, we become numb, imagining that since suffering is not visible to us, it is not our responsibility. But we are interdependent with our human family, wherever they are. While we think injustice in the world is hurting those others but not us, we are oppressed by our own success, by consumerism that leaves us feeling inadequate, by broken relationships sacrificed for that same success, by isolation and loneliness that results, living in fear for our jobs, for our future, for our planet.

Something needs to be dismantled. That’s why grief is necessary. Through the prophets, God grieves—and we should grieve too. There is no dream of the future without grieving the losses of the past. We have to learn to grieve as a society, because without grieving we cannot leave the past ways and hope again. Abandoning our dreams of money, sex and power as an ultimate fulfillment for human life will take some grieving, but without grief, no new vision can emerge.

Each of us is called by God to make a choice. As the prominent thinker and activist Jim Wallis tells us, the real choice of our time is between cynicism and hope. Cynics are not irrational or naïve. They see what’s wrong and might have tried to change things, but they got hurt, disappointed and weary. Now they find refuge in cynicism, finally free to look after themselves.

Prophets too begin with criticizing, but they always end in hope. To view the world realistically you have to be a cynic or a prophet. So what do you want to be? If you see the dream of God, you will be restless for the rest of your life. That’s why the trumpet is the symbol of the dream of God, all throughout the Bible a sound of awakening, a noise of grief, and the music of hope. God said to Isaiah: “Cry aloud, spare not, lift up your voice like a trumpet!” (Isaiah 58:1).

To change this world, we need God’s dream of justice, a vision of what comes after the end of the present order of things. And as we await that future, we learn to live by its ways today. If God is going to restore the earth, we work to restore the earth; if God is going to bring peace, we are peacemakers today; if God is going to destroy poverty, we live now in a way that dismantles and replaces the structures that produce poverty.

In the life and teachings of Jesus, many of us have found a large window to look into this dream of God, even a door to walk through. And we expect God to open these doors again and set the world right. We call that event the second coming of Christ.

That’s why our view of the future is outrageously hopeful. Our hope is confidence in the goodness of the universe that once was and is, and is to come. God dreams for us, and this expectancy of justice, peace, love and oneness that is coming to us from the future has become the agenda of our lives today.

:: What do you think? I would appreciate your comments.::

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Here is a good version of my recent stump speech surrounding the topic of my book.  This is wonderful Crosswalk Church (www.CrosssWalkVillage.com) where I served for four years before returning to New York City.  The sermon date: Feb 20, 2010.  I hope you enjoy it.  Please leave a comment and let me know what you think.

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Pondering the greatness of God does not always fill me with awe. God made a choice to create this universe in which He is above us and we are under Him. But do I really want to live in a two-tiered universe where one part exists to reign, and the other to serve?

Many Christians take this cosmic arrangement for granted, never questioning the character of God, and many people, looking at the Christian worldview, rightly wonder about a God who seemingly created such a universe. Can it be that God is on an ego trip?

Sometimes, perplexed with my impressions of God and His ways, I quietly recite the poem of Teresa of Avila as my prayer:

“Oh God, I don’t love you,
I don’t even want to love you,
but I want to want to love you!”

Sometimes, that’s all I’m left with.

At such times I turn to the Bible, seeking the passages that make me want to love God again. One such passage from the life of Jesus is introduced by a statement far more significant than it seems at first sight: “He [Jesus] now showed them [His disciples] the full extent of his love” (John 13:1). What can possibly demonstrate “the full extent” of God’s love, tell us who God is in His core?

Jesus got up from the table, took off His robe, wrapped a towel around His waist, and poured water into a basin. Then He began to wash the disciple’s feet and to wipe them with the towel. A servant or slave usually provided for such occasion was not available, so Jesus took the task on Himself.

We Christians believe Jesus was divine, that He revealed the character of God through His life. If so, this passage can legitimately be re-read as follows: “God decided to show His creatures who God is in His core. God took off His robe, took a towel and poured water into a basin. Then God began to wash human feet and wipe them with the towel.”

In order to do this, Jesus had to kneel. This is quite unlike any other god conceived in human history. Gods usually come in forms of power, enlightenment, beauty or presence, something that places them above everything human. But this God is different. He is a kneeling God. The full extent of His glory is embodied in His submission to us. I imagine when this cosmic Servant created the universe He thought to Himself: “I am creating in order to serve. That will be my joy. To love it through serving it, to submit everything to its wellbeing—even My own life. I will raise the creation above myself.” We will never understand the God of the Bible until we see Him kneeling before His creation.

From a strange God came strange people. Among Christians there are groups, like in my own Seventh-day Adventist tradition, who regularly re-enact this event, gathering and washing the feet of one another. With this basin, water and a towel, we are faced with God’s ways. Washing the feet of another person feels strange; it’s supposed to.

Jesus often struggled to explain how this paradoxical way of the Kingdom of God works within this world. He would wonder aloud, “How can I describe the Kingdom of God? What story should I use to illustrate it?” Full of counter-intuitive insights, this stories of the Kingdom were taught by Jesus in order to disrupt the value systems of His listeners, capture their imagination, and set them on the journey of transformation.

On one occasion, He likened the Kingdom of God to a mustard seed, the smallest seeds familiar to his audience, but a seed that grows into a tree that is quite stunning compared to its small beginning (see Mark 4:30-34). As the seed laying in our palm appears small, insubstantial, almost absent, so the Kingdom of God is present but hidden, real but invisible, easy to miss but impossible to stop.

In our culture, “small” has become a bad word. We are driven to increase our property, expand our education, enhance our looks, or extend our influence. By contrast, the seed is not driven at all—but it is alive, more alive than anything grand that does not have the life of God in it. There is a mysterious, unstoppable force hidden within this world and humility is one its fiercest expressions.

Jesus comes to us disguised as a babe in the manger, withdrawn into the anonymity of a carpenter’s shop for 30 years, in a town at the edge of a small country subdued by an empire. And when He comes into more public life He tells His followers to hide His identity and miracles. Instead of taking over the empire, He is dragged onto a cross. And those who followed Him found a similar fate.

But the followers who signed up with His conspiracy of overcoming evil with good and changing the world through serving, spread throughout the world. They lived in hiding, ridiculed for their non-violence, persecuted for their refusal to fall in line with the powers of the day, embracing the slaves, the sick, the female, the weak, serving them at the expense of their own lives, fully aware of the “the weakness and foolishness” of the whole Kingdom of God enterprise (see 1 Corinthians 1:18-31).

Humility was never just a nice virtue of the Scripture. It was a practical approach to change, a way the Kingdom of God really works in this world. That’s how God gets things done; how God changes the world. In the Kingdom of God, the force of power is simply too weak an approach. Thousands of people have tried smallness and got things done in the world. Over and over again people underestimate the sheer might of subversion that comes through humility.

After washing their feet, Jesus said to them: “I no longer call you servants . . . I have called you friends” (John 15:15). Once you see God kneeling, you begin to understand God, you begin to want to love Him, and you become God’s friend. And to be God’s friend is to become His partner in changing the world through humility.

Christians often talk about the hope we have in God, seeking to comfort ourselves with the faith that is in us. But seeing God kneeling before us changes all this. Looking at the life of Christ, we see God placing His hope in us. God has faith. God believes in us.

Why is God not more obvious? Why don’t we see God appearing in power and glory before our eyes? Maybe He is obvious, appearing in His power and glory before us all the time. Maybe the sense of God’s absence is actually intended to tell us something, revealing a God who serves more than commands, a God who listens more than speaks, a God who visits us instead of intrudes, supports us instead of dominates.

Most kings worry about their kingship, rather than their kingdom. But the God of the Bible is more interested in His Kingdom becoming a community in which His creatures learn to submit to the wellbeing of one another, the same way this King submitted Himself to us. He wrapped a towel around His waist, poured water into a basin, and knelt before us.

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Over the years I have managed to collect pictures with most of the characters from my book.  Here are two photos of Muhammad and an excerpt from  “It’s Really All About God.” I can convey any comment or a message you might have for him!

- – - book excerpt – - –

Life interrupts us. When we can’t fit our life experience into our religion, something has to give, and life can’t give.

Like a sturdy surgical tool, life cuts back across our religion to save us from it. Just when we figure everything out, when our belief systems, traditions, and practices are beginning to play along nicely like a well-trained and tuned symphony orchestra, we stumble across something—an experience, a fact, a person. And nothing defies our religion so much as finding the sacred in one of “those people.” You meet a Muslim man who resembles the character of Jesus more than anyone you’ve ever met in your church. You find yourself working with a Wiccan woman who is repairing the world better than anyone in your synagogue. You meet an evangelical Christian college student who puts everything on the line to protect the rights of atheists on campus. An atheist wise man or woman comes alongside you and helps you persevere on your path of faith in God. In such encounters, to use the poetry of Yehuda Amichai again, “the moles and plows of love soften the stomped soil of a hard ground where we are right.”

That’s what happened to me.

When I became a Christian, my devastated parents recruited one of Europe’s best psychiatrists and fifty relatives to take their best shot at helping me get over my infatuation with God. Even my former girlfriends were summoned to try to evoke sweet memories and prevail over my heart. My mom was on stress medication, and after a couple of months, her face was scarred by an unending stream of tears. For the first time in my life, I saw my father cry. Everything evaporated; the pride about Christian institutions, the good deeds of my church, and the virtues of the Christian path were all deconstructed by a little army of people zealously researching the private lives of the members of my church. I knew which married Christian man had a woman on the side, who stole tools from the workplace, and who did not pay back a loan to a neighbor. After two months of this agony, my body and my spirit were giving in, and seeing my family suffer so much jolted me like nothing else ever did. I was tired, hanging on solely to the cross of Jesus, the clearest expression of God’s compassion for me.

My parents did not sense my weakness at the time. Like me, they were on the brink of exhaustion, so they resorted to desperate measures and asked a religious person for help. They invited Imam Muhammad, a man respected in the Muslim community of the city, a “holy man,” to attempt to throw my Christian belief system into disarray and stir me toward Islam, which in my parents’ reckoning was the lesser of two evils.

When Muhammad walked into our home, somehow I felt safe in his presence. Besides being learned in the matters of Scripture, he was the most environmentally progressive and socially conscious person I have ever met before—a vegan who walked to our home from a far part of the city, avoiding transportation on principle, to protect the environment. A small gray-haired man with a large smile, Muhammad was emanating peace and playfulness, something my family needed so much at the time.

After being introduced, he kindly asked my parents to leave the room so that he and I could be alone. In spite of his kind manners, I still expected an attack, something I had heard dozens of times before: “The Torah and the New Testament are an incomplete mishmash of texts redacted by humans, whereas the Quran was recited by God and is therefore perfect, correct in all ways, superseding, and conclusive of all revelation! Come to the winner!” Instead, after initial small talk, he let time pass in silence, and I enjoyed this rare moment of rest. When I was ready, I raised my eyes and looked at him, dreading the inevitable argument. He stood up quietly, walked over to me, sat down, and lightly touched my shoulder for a moment.

Then he said calmly, “I am glad you are a believer.” And nothing more.

After sitting in peace for a little longer, we stood up, and he opened his arms to invite an embrace. I opened mine. He smelled like wooden furniture and soap—old but fresh. Hugging him, I thanked God for giving me this break in life.

Neither my parents nor I knew what to do with what had just happened. After he left, my parents nicknamed him “Crazy Muhammad.” My parents fell into a deeper despair, and word of Muhammad’s foolishness spread in the family.

The grace and truth I had first met at the cross were embodied in this man, who was willing to be taken for a fool in order to make me whole.

Would I be a Christian today without Muhammad’s blessing?

Would I have stayed in ministry without Soo the witch’s blessing? (*from Prologue of the book)

If Soo and Muhammad did not speak, God would make stones talk to me, I believe. Largely because of this experience, decades later, I got over my fantasies of Christian supremacy and signed up for the Kingdom of a sovereign God who is Spirit and cannot be controlled and, “like wind, blows wherever it pleases.”

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~ by Leonard Swidler whom I met at the conference in Boston last month. Here is his bio and the video of his address of the recent talk to Scottish Parliament, followed by the transcript of his short talk.  Enjoy.  And please let me know if you have any comments.

Dr. Swidler is Co-Founder with his wife Arlene Swidler in 1964 of the Journal of Ecumenical Studies (and still the Editor), Founder/Director of the Institute for Interreligious, Intercultural Dialogue (1985),and Co-Founder/Director of the Global Dialogue Institute (1995), holds degrees in History, Philosophy, and Theology from Marquette University (MA), University of Wisconsin (Ph.D.) and Tübingen University, Germany (S.T.L.), was Visiting Professor at Graz (Austria), Hamburg and Tübingen (Germany), Nankai University (Tianjin, China), Fudan University (Shanghai), and Temple University Japan (Tokyo), University of Malaya (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia). He has published more than 180 articles & 60 books, including: Dialogue for Reunion (1962), Jewish-Christian Dialogues (1966), Bloodwitness for Peace and Unity (1977), Jewish-Christian-Muslim Dialogue (1978) From Holocaust to Dialogue: A Jewish-Christian Dialogue between Americans and Germans (1981), Buddhism Made Plain (1984), Religious Liberty and Human Rights (1986), Breaking down the Wall Between Americans & East Germans, Christians and Jews (1987), Catholic-Communist Collaboration in Italy (1988), After the Absolute: The Dialogical Future of Religious Reflection (1990), Death or Dialogue. From the Age of Monologue to the Age of Dialogue (1990), A Bridge to Buddhist-Christian Dialogue (1990), Human Rights: Christians, Marxists, and Others in Dialogue (1991), Muslims in Dialogue. The Evolution of a Dialogue over a Generation (1992), For All Life: Toward a Universal Declaration of a Global Ethic. An Interreligious Dialogue (1998), Theoria ¸ Praxis. How Jews, Christians, Muslims Can Together Move from Theory To Practice (1999), The Study of Religion in the Age of Global Dialogue (2000).

In the dawning Age of Global Dialogue we humans are increasingly aware that we cannot know everything about anything! This is true for the physical sciences: no one would claim that s/he knows everything about biology, physics, or chemistry. Likewise no one would claim that we know everything about the human sciences, sociology, or anthropology, or—good heavens!— economics! And each of these disciplines is endlessly complicated. To repeat: “Nobody knows Everything about Anything!”

However, when it comes to the most comprehensive, the most complicated, discipline of all— theology or religion—billions of us still claim that we know all there is to know, and whoever thinks differently is simply mistaken! But if it is true that we always can only know partially in any limited study of reality, as in the physical or human sciences, surely it is all the more true of religion, which is an “explanation of the ultimate meaning of life, and how to live accordingly, based on some notion of the Transcendent.” We must then be even more modest in our claims of knowing better in this most comprehensive field of knowledge, religion, “the ultimate meaning of life.”

Because of the work of great thinkers like the recently died Hans Georg Gadamer and Paul Recoeur we now also realize that no knowledge can ever be completely objective, for we the knower are an integral part of the process of knowing. In brief, all knowledge is interpreted knowledge. Even in its simplest form, whether I claim that the Bible is God’s truth, or the Qur’an, or the Gita, or indeed, the interpretation of the Pope, or John Knox, it is I who affirm that it is so. But if neither I nor anyone can know everything about anything, including most of all the most complicated claims to truth, religion, how do I proceed to search for an ever fuller grasp of reality, of truth?

The clear answer is Dialogue. In Dialogue I talk with you primarily so I can learn what I cannot perceive from my place in the world, with my personal lenses of knowing. Through your eyes I see what I cannot see from my side of the globe, and vice versa. Hence, Dialogue is not just a way to gain more information. Dialogue is a whole new way of thinking! We are painfully leaving behind the Age of Monologue, and are with squinting eyes entering into the Age of Global Dialogue!

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