By The Rev. Ted Thornton The story of the Nicene Creed begins with what happened nearly three hundred years after Jesus’ crucifixion when secular and religious divisions brought the Roman Empire nearly to a breaking point. It’s a vast and contentious topic. So, I’m going to limit us to two guiding questions: What secular and theological forces were behind the formation of the Nicene Creed, and, what place should the Creed have for us in our spiritual and worship life today? Let’s begin by looking at something familiar: the Whiteman Windows behind the altar. Look behind the altar at the window just to the left of the cross at the top of the wooden arch. Can you see the ship and cross in the glass? And, can you see the Greek word in white glass just above the ship and cross? If you can’t see it, get a copy of the wonderful pamphlet describing those windows from our church website or the office. That Greek word oikoumene (Greek: οἰκουμένη) in the window is the single most important word in the New Testament for us Christians apart from the sayings of Jesus, and it’s the concept of oikoumene that guided the formulation of the Nicene Creed. Yes, by the way, oikoumene gives us our word ecumenical (also by the way our word economy: economics as an ecumenical activity? Hmm! Think about that. The root word is oikos, which translates literally as “household,” but in a wider, more global sense, the household that makes up the inhabited world. Forms of the word oikos appear 106 times in the Greek New Testament. Our New Testament writers were acutely aware how important the word is to the religious lives of Christians. The pamphlet about the Whiteman Windows will tell you that oikoumene translates as “one of many.” It’s more complicated than that. The term oikoumene is a combination of that Greek word oikos meaning “household” and another Greek word “mene” meaning “management.” Household management: this is the sense Aristotle used the word, his vision of our world as a coherent, well-managed household. Now, there is no escaping the fact that whenever the need to manage something arises, some degree of coercion usually isn’t far behind. Unity at the expense of diversity has always been trouble, and diversity at the expense of unity spells division, and division is never good. This means there will always be tension between the forces of unity and diversity. Attempts to resolve the tension have never worked in history: for starters think of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot The pursuit of perfection in human nature has always led to gargantuan amounts of bloodshed. For our purposes, the tension between unity and diversity was perhaps never so manifest as in the life of Aristotle’s most famous pupil, Alexander the Great. Alexander and his Greek and Roman successors including the Emperor Constantine used the term oikoumene to describe a vision of a global economic, communal, cultural, and political household, a universal household where unity embraced diversity and never descended into division. That was the vision. The reality was something different, as we shall see. We call Alexander’s brand of oikoumene “Hellenism,” because its cultural roots are in Greek culture, and “Hellas” is the ancient Greek word for Greece. Alexander dreamed of a unified world in which all people would share in the mutual pursuit of survival and happiness by cooperating fully with one another just as members of a single familial household ideally would. A glance at a map of the world after Alexander and his army rolled through shows the extent to which he made this dream come true. You’ll notice how many cities and regions were renamed with Greek names. Alexander wanted the world to be quite literally one big household, a vast melting pot of peoples and races all under the umbrella of Greek Hellenistic culture. To this end, he promoted racial mixing by encouraging his soldiers to intermarry with local women in conquered regions after which he gave them land upon which to build their homes. The Greek philosopher and biographer Plutarch (46-120 CE), in his treatise, "On the Fortunes of Alexander,” summed up Alexander's dream of a unified family of peoples with these words: “Brought together into one body . . . mixing all together in one loving cup.” The quest for a common “managed household” was further advanced through the institution of a universal coinage, universal use of the Greek language, compatible trade practices, and religion by importing the Greek gods into foreign cities everywhere, including Jerusalem, to the great dismay of some Jews, but not as many Jews as you might think. Much of Jerusalem was rebuilt in the Hellenistic style, and one of its most enthusiastic builders was the Jewish King, Herod the Great. Hellenistic cities were built with underground water delivery and sewage removal ducts that rendered these cities cleaner, healthier, more sanitary places to live than many others for the next two thousand years. Thanks to archaeology, today you can visit sections of these water and sewage systems that ran beneath the streets of Hellenistic Jerusalem. The famous Roman roads and postal service really did make material life better (the dark 1979 comedy movie, “Monty Python’s Life of Brian,” gets it right about this), and the inescapable fact is that most folks were willing to accept the coercion it took to maintain these standards. Followers of Jesus and other rebellious Jewish rabbis were the exception. After Jesus, there were many other exceptions to the rule, hence many more gospels than the four that made the final team, and many more writings laying claim to be Christian. Thanks to the influence of Alexander, what we call the “Old Testament” or “Hebrew Bible” was translated into Greek (guess where), not in Jerusalem, but in the newly constructed city of Alexandria, built on the site of the ancient Egyptian city of Rhacotis and renamed in honor of its conqueror. It was completed in the second century BCE and bears the title “Septuagint,” Greek for “Seventy,” so named because it was thought around seventy scholars were involved in the project. For a long time, most people living under Greco-Roman rule thanked the global dream of Alexander the Great for that. And, after Alexander died and the oikoumene began to break apart it was the Romans who put it back together again stronger than ever (yes, the Romans were Hellenists, too, through and through1). In addition to the word oikoumene, the Romans used a Latin phrase very familiar to those of us who still carry dollar bills around: e pluribus unum, “out of many one.” The great Roman statesman Cicero put it this way, “When each person loves the other as much as himself, it makes one out of many.” So, why spend so much time discussing this strange Greek word oikoumene in our window behind me? Because outside the New Testament, it’s that very secular Greek word that is perhaps most responsible for creating the spirit governing the creation of the Nicene Creed and for defining ourselves as Christians: people of God who strive to live in loving communion with one another under one roof in a unified “household” governed by faith. The chink in the armor of the oikoumene was the possibility that force would be used to maintain it. Usually, it took relatively soft power to keep order. When that didn’t work, the iron fist came down. The philosophical vision of “household management” that Aristotle passed down to his student Alexander ensured that the quest for common creeds quickly became exclusionary in Christian history. The fact is, there have always been multiple creeds in Christianity. Interestingly, the Greek word that gives us our word “heresy,” originally meant “choice,” not something to be condemned. Early Christians had many choices until “management” stepped in under Constantine. Okay, so Why did Constantine call the bishops to Nicea in the first place? Alexander’s dream of a singular world oikoumene didn’t last long. No sooner had he died of fever in Iraq while marching his army back home to Macedon than his generals fell to squabbling with each other and the dominion began to fall apart. The Romans, who inherited the remains of Alexander’s empire, tried hard to keep it together, but for a while fared even worse. There was indeed a period of a hundred years of genuine peace and order under Caesar Augustus, but otherwise it was chronic instability nearly everywhere. For the next 132 years after Marcus Aurelius (ruled 121-180) until the accession of Constantine, forty emperors were either assassinated or met some other violent death, a few of them through torture. One sad joke making the rounds in those times ran that a gladiator stood a better chance of surviving his contest in the Colosseum than did an emperor of escaping assassination. In addition, the imperial bureaucracy was riddled with corruption and inefficiency. Then there were the so-called “barbarian invasions”: mainly Germans from the north and Persians from the East. These movements of people into the empire, which was roughly the size of the continental United States, put pressure on increasingly scarce resources. Described in histories as “invasions,” for the most part they resembled the recent flood of illegal immigrants across our southern border states, people seeking a better life. As if all this weren’t bad enough, the empire had recently come through a pandemic. We aren’t sure what virus or bacterium caused it but that pandemic wiped out ten percent of the population of the empire, and at its height in Rome itself it was killing 5,000 people a day. Under such conditions of extreme social stress, it became so difficult to maintain civil order that it was decided to divide the empire into four quadrants. This tetrarchy (or rule of four emperors) was established by the Emperor Diocletian in 293. Constantine became emperor in the year 306 (d. 337) and thereby inherited this mess. He immediately set out to revitalize the oikoumene and restore unity. He abolished the tetrarchy in favor of his own singular rule; and in the year 313, he propagated what was known as the Edict of Milan, proclaiming our religion as officially recognized and protected. The problem was that our religion by that time had become riven with sectarianism. This was the immediate reason Constantine in the year 325 convened an ecclesiastical council, what came to be called the First Ecumenical Council (there’s our word oikoumene again!) in the ancient city of Nicea where the Turkish city of Iznik is located today. All that was needed was a catalyst to get the ball rolling toward the Nicene Creed, and that catalyst was a theological dispute we know as the “Arian Controversy.” Arianism was a theological doctrine, attributed to a Christian Priest from Libya named Arius. He held that Christ, whom Christians proclaimed as the "Son of God," was not actually divine, but physically created and therefore changeable, not eternal. In short, Christ was mortal. And so, to dispel Arianism, the council drew up a "creed" that described the oneness of God the Father and the Son using the Greek word homoousion ("one substance" - GK, ὁμοούσιον). The scriptural reference taken to support this definition was John 10 verse 30, “I and the Father are one.” Arianism was duly rejected. The hope was that this change would lead to religious unity in the Church and and with it civil and social unity. Unhappily, that didn’t happen. Ambiguities in the homoousion ("one substance") formula sparked fresh arguments and created the need for follow up councils. A Second Ecumenical Council in 381 was held in Constantinople (modern Istanbul) and that is when most of the final wording we use was put in place. But, the theological tinkering and wordsmithing continued in the Third Ecumenical Council which was held in the city of Ephesus in 431. This council featured wrangling over the status of Christ’s mother Mary. Then came in 451 the Fourth Ecumenical Council, this one at Chalcedon in the modern city of Kadıköy (Kadikoy), near Istanbul. At Chalcedon, Christ was affirmed to be one person with two full and complete natures one human the other divine. However, this formula made matters even worse because Christians to the east of Rome couldn’t tolerate the dual nature creed. Over the following centuries, other differences arose leading to the formal break in 1054 that created the Roman Catholic Church in the West and the Orthodox churches in the East. Theological differences aside, the real problem was regionalism: what Christians living to the east really resented was a pope in Rome telling them what they should do and not do and what they should believe. Most Eastern Christians, then, with some exceptions, affirmed that Christ had one nature only and this nature was divine, not human. Hence, they came to be called Monophysites (Greek for "one nature"). Today, the chief examples of Monophysite Christianity are the Syrian, Armenian, and Coptic (Egyptian) Churches. So went the process we call “the Christological controversies,” which can be summed up as arguments about the nature of Jesus Christ: “How human was he, and how divine?” It may be hard for some of us to understand what caused people at the time to get so riled up over this question until we consider how the forces of regionalism in our country, for example, are pitting the urbanized coastal regions against the more rural “heartland,” as it’s called; and how political instability, immigration, and a vicious recent pandemic have eroded our own national sense of unity and mutual trust today. What’s less forgivable about all this is how the regional power struggles in Constantine’s realm corrupted perhaps the most orthodox expression of our Christian faith, a failure to accept the relationship of God, Christ, and Spirit (our holy Trinity) for what it is: a mystery, a holy mystery. It’s a failure stemming from the hubristic (prideful) sin of thinking it possible that we could ever reduce the greatest mystery of life, the nature of divine reality, to rational concepts like “substance” and “nature.” God and Christ remain a mystery, a holy mystery, in theological parlance, ineffable, that is to say, indescribable, inexpressible, undefinable. We experience this mystery symbolically and spiritually, not rationally. It can only happen when we perform what the Danish philosopher Kierkegaard called “the leap of faith.” Saying the Nicene Creed meaningfully takes a leap of faith. The Creed - any creed - functions as a holy reminder that as members of God’s creation we are part of something much bigger than ourselves, something that continues to call us into ever widening circles of loving connectedness in this “household” of ours: connectedness with God and with God’s creation. Creeds remind us that indeed there is more to life and more to reality than what meets the eye. Having seen how the Creed came to be and how it functions, let’s turn our attention now to that second guiding question: How should we align ourselves with the use of the Creed in our worship today? I don’t think there is a single right creed or any single right way to say it. I suspect I share this view with at least some of you. When it comes to the Nicene Creed or any other affirmation of faith, I don’t think a coercive common response is right. Personally, I do strive to listen carefully to every word of the Nicene Creed as I recite it because for me it’s a way I can connect with other people of faith past and present stretching back two millennia. That approach may not work for you. Sometimes as we recite the Creed my attention strays. When that happens, the sound of other voices - your voices surrounding me - calls me back and reminds me that we’re engaged in a communal act that draws us together and connects us with the voices of all the Christians who’ve come before us. In these moments, we’re no longer individuals but a community of believers, the body of Christ, one ecumenical “household.” We are at least for that moment a bona fide oikoumene. One of the obstacles preventing the Creed from occupying a more central place in our spiritual lives is our radical American individualism, which we inherited from the European Enlightenment by way of thinkers like John Locke and David Hume. The French writer Alexis de Tocqueville in his two volume Democracy in America written after his visit here in the 1830s was anxious even back then about our excessive individualism. And, in his recent (2022) book,2 Bill McKibben chides us for what he calls our “hyper individualism.” I think excessive individualism is chiefly responsible for the difficulty some of us have reciting the creed and the difficulty a larger number of Americans have belonging to organized religion in general, not to mention the political madness that is presently tearing us apart. We Americans frequently forget that we are a “household” here on what Native Americans used to call “Turtle Island.” For this reason, the best starting point isto remember that when we recite the Creed, we begin by saying, “We believe.” It's that sense of “we-ness,” the first person plural denoting connection and oneness with others, that permeates the whole recitation. Reciting the Creed reminds us of the promise we made or was made on our behalf at our baptisms: the promise that God is at the very heart of every breath we take and everything we do here in this “household” of ours. On the subject of whether the holy mysteries of our faith should be sung or recited, I’m with the late Yale Professor of Medieval History, Jaroslav Pelikan, who argued that the Creed should be sung, as we do here in this church on high holy days, not merely recited. This reminds me of the famous formula attributed to Saint Augustine, Qui cantat, bis orat: “Whoever sings prays twice.” In the final analysis, the Nicene Creed is one way, among many, we express our identity as a “household,” an oikoumene. We also call ourselves “the Body of Christ,” but I confess I like “household,” too, maybe even more. The “management” part of oikoumene and the implied threat of coercion I can do without. But, the Nicene Creed need not be the only way to affirm our faith in public worship. As I said at the outset, I don’t think we will ever resolve the tension between unity and diversity in human behavior and I despair about the presence of coercion in human relations. I do think we should celebrate the alternate creeds we recite here at Saints James and Andrew (such as the wonderful South Indian Profession of Faith we recited here in place of the Nicene Creed last week). We have many possible ways to affirm and articulate our faith. Affirming our faith in different words is good for our spiritual selves just as a varied diet of healthy food is good for our bodily selves. The Nicene Creed was an imperfect, over-rationalized attempt to express what means most to us and a response to civil power struggles and disorder. The tumultuous history out of which it emerged, including the many attempts to refine it, stands in stark contrast to its place in the hearts of many of us today and to the millions of Christian hearts that have adored it these past two thousand years. Is it time to set it aside? Constantine’s admittedly coercive attempt to impose unity has been labeled a “heresy” by his severest critics, and they don’t mean heresy in the old sense as a “choice.” Similar coercive attempts to impose unity where regionalism threatens to undo it have occurred in other religions. Unhappily, households of all kinds can slip into intolerance, authoritarianism, and repression. The dynamics of coercion and conquest remain an omnipresent threat, never far from the surface in every relationship, from family households to entire civilizations. If our guiding principle is that we love one another, as Jesus put it in his new commandment to us in John 13:34, then we must remember that Jesus took love as something we do, not something we believe: we must walk the walk, not just talk it. So, think of creeds as things that remind us what we should do in our lives, not just things that bounce around in our heads. When we say in a moment, “We believe in one Lord Jesus Christ,” tell yourselves that those words translate into our commitment to act out that new commandment - to love one another - as Jesus delivered it to us in John 13:34. But. loving one another should never be restricted to any particular set of words. For this reason, I think it's spiritually healthy to prayerfully consider other ways of expressing what theologian Paul Tillich used to call the “ultimate concern” at the center of our lives. In the meantime, I hope we will continue to grant the Creed a place in our liturgical life and at the same time remain open to exploring alternatives as the Holy Spirit leads us. God has revealed Godself in many different ways beginning with how we perceive God throughout the Bible. It follows that we be drawn to a variety of ways to express how we experience divine reality. Amen. 1 Rome was perhaps the least original civilization in history. The Romans borrowed freely from the Greeks. Even the Greek gods had their temples in Rome: Zeus was renamed Jupiter, Aphrodite was renamed Venus, and so on. 2 The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon, 2022, 118ff. By The Rev. Ted Thornton From the Gospel of Mark Chapter 6: verses three and four: “Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon, and are not his sisters here with us? And they took offense at him.” How do you respond when someone close to you abruptly changes course and you either aren’t sure or you just plain don’t like what you see? When your son or daughter says to you one day, “Mom or Dad, I want to spend my life working at vocation A,” when what you’ve wished for in that person you gave birth to and raised all those years is that they will work at vocation B, how do you respond? When your grown son or daughter chooses a life partner very different from the one you were expecting and invites him or her to dinner, how do you respond? When your son or daughter says one day, “Mom or Dad, I’m gay,” or, ”I don’t identify with my birth gender,” how do you respond? It*s easy to assume we’re living through an era when identities of all kinds are in flux. Advertisers call it “rebranding.” More and more companies and individuals are “rebranding” themselves: leaving behind old identities and putting on new ones. But, has it ever been otherwise? I grew up in a small town in Delaware. When I was ordained, some people who remembered me from my college summers working as a carpenter’s helper building homes throughout town shook their heads in astonishment. I had been a full partner in a rough bunch of guys on that construction crew. Some of my buddies on that crew remembered me cussing with the best of them when I made mistakes or when I hit my thumb with my hammer. And, some fellow sailors in the Navy who knew me well and with whom I shared some questionable off-base escapades were struck dumb when at the end of my four year enlistment they watched me head off to divinity school (“Divinity school? You? Really?”). Some years later in Jerusalem, I studied with Hebrew University Professor Shmuel Safrai, considered by many the world’s leading expert on Jerusalem’s Second Temple period during which Jesus lived. He argued that Jesus wasn’t just a carpenter. He was also a very highly trained rabbi who worked closely with Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek (the language of the Greek Bible, the Septuagint, composed in the third century BCE). In fact, he had memorized huge portions of the Bible: his Bible, the Hebrew Bible, the “Old Testament.” He either studied in person with prominent rabbis such as Hillel or was deeply influenced by them. He was trained to adjudicate Jewish law in civil disputes. Expertise in that alone was and still is among orthodox Jews a skill that requires years of training. So, how do we square Jesus the rough and ready carpenter with Jesus the rabbi? This is the problem confounding the Nazarenes, the folks who watched Jesus grow up. The general fact is that rabbis in Jesus time often did work in more than one vocation, so apart from how he’s received in his hometown of Nazareth, it wasn’t a big deal. Saint Paul, also a rabbi and an expert in rabbinical scholarship and reasoning, earned his living making tents. There are only two passages in the New Testament that explicitly refer to the Jesus’ his neighbors thought they knew as Jesus the carpenter: today’s (Mark 6:3) and Matthew 13:55. The Greek word in both cases is τέκτων (tektone), a word better translated as “master builder,” not just a carpenter, but a person skilled in many of the building trades, especially limestone, of which there has always been an abundance in Palestine compared to wood which has been quite scarce since Greco-Roman times when whole forests were cut down to build Greek and Roman mercantile and naval vessels. In Jesus’ case, his hands were rough and calloused with labor and his mind was quick with Jewish law and philosophy. But, our problem today begins and ends with the fact that Jesus is no longer a “good ol’ boy” from Nazareth. His neighbors don’t like what they’re now seeing and hearing. And so, we are drawn into the vehemence and the violence with which Jesus’ Nazaene neighbors respond to his new life as a rabbi. Vehemence and violence! There are two passages that shed a poor light on Jesus’ Nazarene neighbors: Luke 4:14-30, where in verse 29, the townspeople drove him out of town and tried to throw him off a cliff. And, John 1:46, where we hear Nathanael saying to Philip, “Can there any good thing come out of Nazareth?” Nazareth was a tough town in a hardscrabble region. The problem of how we should respond to radical change in the personal life of someone we have known and loved cuts to the heart of one of the most vexing aspects of our human nature. Aristotle said human beings are political animals. He regarded politics as even more important than ethics, the realm of individual behavior and standards. His focus was on society, especially the rules by which communities govern themselves. Contemporary historian Keith Michael Baker defines politics more broadly as “making claims...the activity through which individuals and groups in any society articulate, negotiate, implement, and enforce competing claims they make upon one another and upon the whole.” Baker’s definition tracks closer to the kinds of politics Aristotle advocated for our individual lives. He taught the “golden mean.” The golden mean is the goal we should aim for in our dealings with others, the “happy medium,” many call it. Happy? Sometimes, it’s a pretty unhappy medium, isn’t it? Compromise? How many know the meaning of that word anymore in our society? What claims are Jesus’ neighbors in Nazareth trying to assert upon him? What claims do you and I make upon others, especially those close to us? Are these claims all fair? Do they aim for Aristotle’s golden mean? What happens when they don’t? In our personal lives? In our lives as a nation? We like to speak of these claims using the softer word: “expectations” when the harder but more truthful word is “claims.” The golden mean is a value that has been sought for millennia across a variety of world religions. Confucius called it chun yung (“the middle way”). The Buddha also taught the middle way using the Sanskrit term madhyama-pratipad. Muhammad used the Arabic word iqtisad advocating moderation in all things. The ancient Greeks carved the inscription μηδὲν ἄγαν- meden agan - “Nothing in excess” - on the lintel of their Temple of Apollo at Delphi, right next to the more familiar one: “Know thyself!” (Greek: Γνῶθι σεαυτόν, gnōthi seauton) Striking the golden mean, the middle way is often very hard. Giving one another time to adjust to change is among the best ways to begin. But, ‘fact is, as we all know, relationships can be permanently broken. And, where repair is possible, it can take a long time. One way to begin is to examine ourselves for signs of narcissism and nostalgia. Narcissus is the dandy of Greek myth who falls in love with his reflection in a pond and thereby becomes stuck, unable to grow, unable to live in genuine community with others, so self-absorbed he’s unable even to acknowledge the existence of others. Narcissism may be an obstacle to our ability to accept change in ourselves and others. Narcissism begins when we become frozen in our attitudes toward ourselves and others, when, like Peter Pan, we think it’s possible to make time stand still, to live in an eternal childish past, stuck in our ways and wishing everyone around us would do the same. Paul knew the challenges of people having trouble living together in harmony. In First Corinthians 14:20, he writes to his divisive congregation in Corinth, "Brothers, do not be children in your thinking. Be infants in evil, but in your thinking be mature." Narcissism and its cousin nostalgia are signals that part of us is still locked in childhood, that we are resisting changes somewhere in our lives where change may be necessary and more healthful. William Golding’s novel, Lord of the Flies, is one of the best fictional depictions of Paul’s notion of “infants in evil.” A nineteenth century Polish rabbi named Simcha Bunim offered this aid to his followers: write “The world was created for me” on one piece of paper and keep it in one of your pockets. Then, put a different piece of paper in the opposite pocket, with “I am but dust and ashes” written on it. This, he proposed, is a necessary tension. There are other guidelines we could put in our pockets. What would you put in yours? For example, I could write on pieces of paper things to remind me of my human condition: “I am capable of kindness” on one piece of paper and put it in one pocket, then I could write, “I am capable of cruelty” on another and put it in the opposite pocket. Muslims like to put it this way: Everyone walks through life accompanied by two angels: one angel sits on the right shoulder and records all good deeds, while the other sits on the left shoulder and records all bad deeds. In one pocket we might write “Be open to change.” In the other pocket, we might write “Don’t be too open minded.” That latter saying reminds me of something Arthur McKinstry, Bishop of Delaware in my early childhood used to say, “Don’t be so open minded that your brains fall out.” Notice that none of this is about striking a balance. Balance is not the right word here: it’s tension, not balance, isn’t it? We deceive ourselves when we think of the golden mean, the middle way, compromise as a balancing act. We live our lives in tension most of the time, not balance. That’s why life is hard and faith and prayer are so important. Another way to read Paul in that passage from First Corinthians is that once we grow up and leave our childhood behind, we realize that you and I were made to love the world, sometimes even when it hurts; the world was not made to love us. That’s the meaning of sacrificial love. That’s the meaning of the cross. I think in the end, the best way to tolerate the discomfort of tension in our lives is to strive for inclusivity. This doesn’t mean sacrificing our core values, but it does mean giving space where possible for others to live out theirs. In her opening remarks at General Convention in Louisville the other day, House of Deputies President Julia Ayala Harris perhaps said it better than most: “Inclusivity,” she said, “is the sacred work of recognizing the image of God in every person. It means honoring the beautiful diversity of the human family.” And, as Bishop Michael has been telling us over and over again, that’s the center of Jesus’ “m.o.” In which areas of your life will you strive to become more inclusive in the coming weeks and months? Amen.
I’ve been teaching, working, and traveling, with students and adults, in the Middle East for forty-five years. My experience has included working in churches in Jerusalem and Cairo, travel and study in Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey, teaching Arabic, and translating materials from Arabic into English, including a full length book by an Iraqi human rights lawyer on the concept of tolerance in Islamic thought.
In a moment I’ll describe an encounter I experienced with the sons of Abraham - Isaac and Ishmael - on a flight from Cairo to New York nearly twenty years ago. Of course, I don’t mean the actual sons of Abraham, but the eponymous ones: Abraham’s spiritual descendants: Isaac for Jews and Christians and Ishmael for Muslims. By the way, Ishmael’s name in the Qur’an is Ismail, a popular name for Muslim males. We know from Genesis that both Isaac and Ishmael were sons of Abraham: Ishmael by a slave woman named Hagar, and Isaac by Abraham’s wife Sarah. Isaac, of course, outranked Ishmael because his mother was Abraham’s legal wife while Hagar was only a slave. Ishmael and Hagar were eventually banished. Tradition says they wandered in the Arabian peninsula and wound up in Mecca where their descendant Muhammad would many centuries later introduce the world to the religion of Islam. And so was born the rivalry between the monotheistic religions that comes down to us to this day, a rivalry not only of religion, but also importantly a rivalry over the lands and resources of the Middle East. And, as Nine-Eleven reminded us, it’s a rivalry that has spread to include much of the rest of the world, even a flight from Cairo to New York nearly twenty years ago. So, what about that flight from Cairo to New York? In the spring of 2004, I took a group of students to Cairo to participate in a Model United Nations conference. Model UN is an international organization that brings students together from all over the world. In 2004, the conference was held in Cairo. I’ve also led my students to Model UN conferences in Amman, Doha, and Lisbon. And, I’ve taken students to Istanbul to meet and discuss international affairs with Turkish students. The Cairo trip began with sightseeing at the pyramids, the medieval Islamic monuments and markets in the Old City, visits to museums, and a boat ride on the Nile, all of this before the conference itself where my students debated the big international issues of the times with their peers from all over the world. When it was over and we’d boarded the plane for the twelve-hour flight back to New York, I was looking forward to a very long nap in the air. While my group was seated together several rows up from me, my seat was in the middle of a row in Coach between two strangers. It quickly became clear there would be no napping on that flight. I discovered I was shoulder to shoulder between two men whom I silently nicknamed “Ishmael” and “Isaac,” not those rival sons of Abraham in the Book of Genesis, but the Ishmael and Isaac of the religious conflict of our own times. “Ishmael” was an Egyptian Muslim from Alexandria and “Isaac” was an American Jew from New York City. These were men whose hatred for one another quickly became loudly apparent. And so, there I was, shoulder-to-shoulder between two of the world’s oldest and most deeply entrenched hatreds. When “Ishmael” and “Isaac” discovered who one another was, a shouting match erupted. Muslim Ishmael, leaning across me, yelled at Jewish Isaac, “I hate Jews; I’ve always hated Jews.” I asked him why he hated Jews. He yelled, “Because my father hates Jews and all my brothers hate Jews.” The New York version of “Isaac” hurled similar epithets across me at his Muslim enemy on my left. I helped calm them down. However, no minds were changed that day. Isaac got up and moved away to an empty seat behind us. Ishmael and I didn’t speak for the rest of the flight. My attempts to foster at least some reconciliation and understanding that day ended in failure. Needless to say, I didn’t get the nap I’d hoped for. After returning home, I tried to make sense out of that experience. I was drawn back to the Book of Genesis and to my first trip to the Middle East in 1979. On that trip, I’d visited the Palestinian West Bank town of Hebron, which Palestinian Arabs call al-Khalil. Traditions in all three faiths (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) say that Abraham, Sarah, and other patriarchs and matriarchs from Genesis are buried there in a cave called Machpelah. In the first century, King Herod the Great built a shrine over the cave. When Abraham died, Genesis 25 says that both Ishmael and Isaac returned to the Machpelah Cave to bury their father – together! Sadly, that spirit of mutuality was short-lived. Today, Israeli soldiers guard the tomb because there have been serious disturbances there, the worst, in February, 1994 when, during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, an Israeli-American physician opened fire on early morning Muslim worshippers inside the shrine killing twenty-nine and wounding 125. This incident typifies tribalistic animosities that seem bent on blotting out the memory of what happened there three thousand years ago when two brothers, who had become patriarchs in their own right, buried their differences long enough so that they could come together and bury their father. The Machpelah of Genesis was sadly as far away as I’ve ever felt it on that trip home from Cairo. So, is religion part of the problem in the Middle East? History is, after all, full of holy wars, crusades, and jihads. Is religion responsible for these divisions? To the extent that religious extremists feel free to exploit and amplify the differences between peoples in the region as they compete for land and resources, then, yes, religion is part of the problem. The late Israeli-American Rabbi David Hartman thinks monotheistic religions deserve a big share of the blame for the animosity and violence between people who really do have more in common than they acknowledge. He used to say, "The one god of monotheism is an indicator not of unity but of division between and among people. The message throughout monotheism is sometimes one of intolerance. When occupation and ownership of land become linked to monotheistic religion, the message seems to be, ‘There's only enough for one.'” This is especially the case, Rabbi Hartman says, in the Bible. In the Old Testament in particular there is a deep sense of scarcity. Adam has two sons: Cain and Abel. Abel gets his father’s blessing; Cain doesn’t. Abraham has two sons, Isaac and Ishmael. Isaac gets the blessing, Ishmael doesn't. Isaac has two sons, Jacob and Esau. Jacob gets the blessing, Esau doesn't." There never seems to be enough for everyone (in the Old Testament at least). Rabbi Hartman argues that if pluralism and inclusivism don’t replace exclusivism in the Middle East, then everything is going to be lost for everybody. Sadly, a portion of the exclusivism in the Middle East is being practiced by Americans, like my seat partner Isaac on that flight from Cairo: he belongs to that faction of evangelical Jews and Christians who believe that the Messiah will not come until Israel is a secure Jewish state and all challenges to Israeli sovereignty over all of Palestine are removed. But, while religion may be part of the problem, it can also be part of the solution. To the extent that religion encourages people to bury their differences, as Isaac and Ishmael did when they buried father Abraham, it can be a powerful force for hope and change in the world. For every vengeful soul in the Middle East who chooses violence (and in spite of what we see in the media, the number is actually quite small) there are many more who have chosen the way of peace and are working hard to make peace happen. Ishmael and Isaac saw their pasts come together and intertwine at that cave south of Jerusalem. As their pasts intertwined, my hope is that eventually so, too, will their futures. There are good reasons for holding onto that hope. Historically, Middle Eastern adherents of all three monotheistic sects have for the most part been good neighbors with one another: for millennia, they’ve attended one another’s worship services in the synagogues, churches, and mosques, and celebrated one another’s weddings, funerals, and other religious festivals together with mutual joy and good will. I’ve worshiped in a synagogue in Jerusalem made up of an interfaith Jewish and Christian congregation. I’ve known Muslims who routinely attend services or prayers of all three faiths: they go to mosques on Fridays, synagogues on Saturdays, and churches on Sundays. During a sabbatical year in Cairo, I served on the clergy staff of the Anglican All Saints Cathedral under Egyptian Bishop Ghais Abdel Malik and his Provost, The Very Reverend Philip Cousins, now retired and living in his hometown of York, England.. Services were held in both English and Arabic. On Pentecost, to honor the many tongues spoken on the first Pentecost day, scripture readings were both in Arabic and English. Meetings of the clergy staff with both Egyptian and non-Egyptian clergy together, opened with all of us reciting the Lord’s Prayer in both English and Arabic. The cathedral sexton was an Egyptian Muslim named Mustapha. His is one of the most revered nicknames of the Prophet Muhammad in the Qur’an: it means “the chosen one.” Mustapha put all of us to shame because he’d memorized the entire Eucharistic service and other large portions of the Anglican prayer book. What some might call doctrinally incorrect behavior included Muslim Mustapha coming to the rail and crossing himself before receiving the bread and wine. I’m reminded of those services in Cairo each time Heather or Molly says just before communion is distributed, “No exceptions!” There are many examples of people of all faiths who as I speak are working tirelessly for peace in the Middle East. But, let me close by mentioning a personal and somewhat unusual experience. I spent two summers working on the archaeological dig at Tel Miqne, the site of the ancient city of Ekron, a Philistine city mentioned in First Samuel 17 in the story of David and Goliath. I made friends on that dig with a Palestinian Muslim college student named Talal Nasrallah. Talal lived in Gaza, just a few miles away. To pass the time, Talal and I discovered we liked to sing rock ‘n’ roll oldies (in my late teens, I played in a rock band on the Eastern Shore of Delaware and Maryland. I still occasionally do public gigs with another veteran of ‘60s era rock bands). One of Talal’s favorite American groups was the Beach Boys. Never in my life did I expect a bond would be forged between an American Episcopal Priest and a Palestinian through singing Beach Boys songs together, but that’s what happened: “Isaac” and “Ishmael” singing rock ‘n’roll songs together while digging up biblical history on steamy hot summer days in Israel/Palestine! Go figure! God works in mysterious ways. In today’s New York Times, British author Karen Armstrong says her understanding of religion has been influenced by the renowned medieval Muslim scholar and mystic Ibn al-Arabi (1165-1240). He says in his Fusus al-Hikam (“The Seals of Wisdom”) that he felt at home in all places of worship because no faith has a monopoly on truth: He wrote, “Do not praise your own faith so exclusively that you disbelieve all the rest. If you do this, you will fail to recognize the real truth of the matter. God, the omnipresent and omnipotent, cannot be confined to any one creed, for he says, ‘Wheresoever ye turn, there is the face of Allah.’ (Qur’an 2:115).” And with that, I want to close with a traditional Arabic blessing. It goes, السلام عليكم ورحمة الله وبركاته As-salaamu alaikum wa rahmatu Allahi wa Barakatuhu! May the Peace, Mercy, and Blessings of God be upon you! Amen. by The Rev. Ted Thornton My text this morning comes from our Epistle, The Letter to the Hebrews, Chapter 11, verse 16: “...for he has prepared a city for them.” And, two chapters later - 13:14 - we read a more extended development of this image, “For here we do not have an enduring city, but we are looking for the city that is to come.” A city! According to the author of Hebrews, the Christian dream from the beginning has been an urban one, a community marked by all the features we'd expect from a city: cooperation and interdependence chief among them, and as a Christian city, defined further as a place where its citizens practice loving charity one with another. Let’s listen to those lines again: “For he has prepared a city for them," and, "here we do not have an enduring city.” These lines strike my ear at a time when they are especially hard to hear. When Covid struck, and more recently when Russia launched its attack on Ukraine, I, like many of you perhaps, began to feel even more acutely than usual the sense of impermanence that pervades our human existence on this planet: a military attack on a democratic country on top of a potentially deadly virus that just won’t go away, the relentless poisoning of our global biosphere, the senseless loss of life as people armed to the teeth with high tech weapons take life after life in our streets, churches, shopping centers, and homes, political, social, and cultural turmoil and divisiveness in our society, perhaps the worst since the Civil War and Reconstruction. Yes, at times like these, I often succumb to what the Buddhists call a sense of the extreme impermanence of existence: a penetrating reminder that nothing this side of the grave lasts forever and, sometimes it seems, most of the good things hardly any time at all. But then into these dark thoughts comes the lovely reminder of God’s promise. Our solace and salvation, Hebrews tells us, is our faith, based on God’s promise in scripture that all of us are in perpetual motion toward a perfect “city that is to come,” however that phrase may translate for each of us. For us Christians, beginning with the author of Hebrews, that city which is to come has been a heavenly version of Jerusalem. Jerusalem? Jerusalem which to date has been sacked and burned to the ground over and over again by its neighbors near and far? Even the Mongols from far off East Asia raided it. There has been nothing permanent about the earthly Jerusalem to report in our telling of its story. Throughout its long history beginning in the fourth- millennium BC, Jerusalem has been attacked fifty-two times, captured and recaptured forty-four times, besieged twenty-three times, and completely destroyed twice. Jerusalem? No, not the earthly, finite, transient, and vulnerable Jerusalem of our times. Not that Jerusalem, but "the city that is to come.” What a beautiful vision (if visions are to be trusted)! Whatever we make of Jerusalem’s often grim history, it is true that cities are the result of relationships, relationships hewn from the trust - the faith - that human beings can cooperate and come together to build healthful, nurturing, and secure communities for the mutual benefit of all. This morning, I find myself looking back nearly fifty years ago to my years in Divinity School and one of the greatest teachers I’ve ever known. His name was Dieter Georgi. Dieter was a German émigré to this country, a minister and New Testament theologian. But, it wasn’t in college or seminary that Dieter Georgi became a scholar. He became a scholar, he used to say, at the age of fourteen, in 1944 and 1945 as whole swaths of his homeland of Germany were being reduced to rubble in the wake of the Allied advance. Much of that time he remembered spending on the move from bunker to bunker to escape the bombing raids. He was still too young to fully fathom the horror Hitler had been wreaking upon Europe or to be held responsible for any of it. He saw his home town of Frankfurt go up in flames. And, he was in an underground shelter in Dresden when the “firestorm” destroyed that city. These experiences taught him that the essence of life is impermanence, and the essence of faith is what Christian theologians call theologia viatorum: the theology of pilgrims, wayfarers, a people and a theology in perpetual motion, never at rest, always on the move. What this means is that our search for an understanding of God and God’s purpose is never complete this side of the grave. God is never revealed all at once, only by degrees as we journey through life. The best we can do is put ourselves on the path and journey on. Our atheist friends think we’re fools. They always have. Yes, as Paul tells us in the first century, “we are fools for Christ’s sake (First Corinthians 4:10).” Whether one is religious or not, the lesson seems to be that nothing stands still and none of us is ever everything we can be; and that, therefore, we should never seek refuge in static dogmas about ourselves, about others, or about this changeable “city” we call our world: no final judgments about anybody or anything. We are never complete; we are never finished products, not on this side of the grave anyway. Dieter’s experience instilled in him an acute sensitivity to change, a critical capacity for anyone who aims to become a genuine historian or theologian. And, his experience, mediated through his teaching, cemented my own twin loves of history and theology. Dieter was the best teacher of both disciplines I’ve ever known. His principal lesson was that we’re always on the road, always in flux: this is the chief reality of life. As Heraclitus taught the Greeks, we never step into the same river twice. So, we’d best be humble about any conclusions we’re tempted to draw about one another, and, we’d best nurture a healthy tolerance for ambiguity, a quality, it seems to me, that is in desperately short supply in our world today. Dieter Georgi’s favorite novelist was William Faulkner, who, he used to say without a trace of irony, was also in his view America’s greatest theologian. One of his favorite Faulkner novels was The Reivers. Like many great novels, the story is about a journey, this one to Memphis in a stolen (or “reived”) automobile. There are many hilarious misadventures on this journey. Along the way, the car gets traded for a racehorse who, it turns out, always comes in last because he likes to look at the other horses. His owners finally get him to win by slipping him one of the more innovative performance enhancing drugs out there: administered on the sly, of course, and rumored to be a sardine. The story is a metaphor for life as movement, life as surprise, life as a joyride, a joyride none of us asked to be put on and for which none of us has full permission. Faulkner’s metaphor of life as a journey from one state of impermanence into another is a good fit for all our readings this morning. Notice that in our reading from Genesis when God promises Abraham an eternal line of descendants, the promise does not include what might happen to those descendants along their way through history. It doesn’t include what they will suffer, what adversities they will endure, only that the line of descendents will persevere; it will endure. And maybe that’s the point: to persevere, to endure. The late Harvard University Chaplain Rev. Peter Gomes used to say that the most fundamental truth is perseverance in the face of human folly. Implicit in Jesus’ warning in our reading from the gospels today - to be watchful, to be alert - is the discipline of perseverance. To me perseverance is best summed up in our frequent advice to one another to “hang in there,” to endure and in watching out for the return of the master to prepare ourselves to welcome the promised kingdom, God’s new and lasting reality, again, "the city that is to come.” Jesus’ call for us to be alert, or, literally in the original Greek, to be watchful for the return of the master doesn’t contain a foretelling of what might happen to us while we wait, watch, and remain on alert through our years walking this earth. There is nevertheless a great blessing attached to being watchful. The Greek word Luke uses in 12:37 we translate as “watching” (or being alert) is the present participle γρηγοροῦντας (do you know any males named “Gregory?” They’re the “watchful ones”). Jesus says, “It will be good for those servants whose master finds them watching when he comes.” More importantly, in asking us to be watchful for the return of “the master,” Jesus is asking us to be alert for signs that God is already at work in our worldly, our secular cities. Another of my old teachers (still alive at the age of 93) is Harvey Cox, most famous for his 1965 best seller, The Secular City. That title and an insufficiently incomplete reading of the book led many to associate Cox with the “God is Dead!” movement of those times as people started looking for ways for us to carry on without God. Cox, who is an American Baptist minister as well as a theologian, says his original title was not “The Secular City” but “God and the Secular City.” His publisher thought the longer title wouldn’t sell as many books and insisted on the shorter one. But, it’s the longer one that gets at Cox’s real point: that God has not removed herself from the saeculum, the lifetimes of earthly cities and their citizens, but is already hard at work creating “that city that is to come.” This coming week do your best to comfort someone, especially someone who appears to be in doubt or seems to be losing faith. Encourage them to be watchful, to be alert, to hang in there: in short, to become good “Gregories.” Encourage them to look for signs of God already at work on that “city that is to come” right here and now in our secular cities where people are working to heal, help, feed, shelter, and sustain others. Amen. |
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