Worldly Wisdom and Foolish Grace. Barbara Carnegie Campbell

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СКАЧАТЬ in fact, has become quite common, but what we lack is face-to-face connection. What we lack even more is the opportunity to sit down and reason together with people who think and worship differently. If we did that more often, perhaps we would let go of fear and understand what Abdullah, another youth participant, realized: “I learned that we are all more alike than I thought.” Maybe we’re concerned about offending. Maybe we don’t know where to begin a conversation or don’t want to appear ignorant. Interfaith dialogue requires courage, but the alternative, as we have seen (during this summer of violence against strangers), can be tragic. St. Mark, P’Nai Or, and the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community took a chance for one week that some in all three faiths might frown upon. But sixteen children now have a greater knowledge of themselves and the world in which they live after walking through the flaps of Abraham’s Tent together. And peace just took a monumental step forward.

      As part of Abraham’s Tent, Jewish, Christian, and Islamic children and their adult leaders were amazed to learn that the Quran contains many of the stories found in the Elder and Younger Testaments. The message that the Prophet Mohammad delivered to his people, the Quran, is filled with stories about Abraham, Moses, the Prophets, Mary, Jesus, and many other characters found in the Bible. It became clear that we could understand our own sacred texts better as we became more familiar with the other sacred writings from Abraham’s tent.

      P’nai Or worshipped with St. Mark every year after that on Good Friday and we continued our summer interfaith Abraham’s Tent Day Camp until the St. Mark congregation was dissolved due to declining finances. St. Mark members moved on to several other PCUSA congregations in Portland while P’nai Or staying on in the building which they rented from the Presbytery.

      During these years, I had the wonderful opportunity to share a small sacred text study with two special friends: Angela, a life-long leader in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, and Arif, a life-long leader from the Rizwan Ahmadiyya Muslim community. The three of us met monthly having decided ahead of time that we would come with texts, stories or understandings from our own faith tradition that spoke to a certain theme such as peacemaking, ecology, compassion, salvation, prophets, inclusion, or justice. My faith was so enriched and broadened by these conversations and loving friendships.

      At the beginning of each chapter in this book, I include epigraphs of sacred texts from Torah, The Younger Testament Gospels and The Quran or Muslim Hadith writings as examples of how all three of these ancient texts reveal the same truth and divine will on how we are to live together.

      For the sake of time and convenience through this study, I will call the one divine Ground of all Being, the one divine energy of love and peace that we worship, “God.” In my own mind, I sometimes substitute the word “Good” for “God” when I’m trying to see things from the point of view of those of no faith or those whose faith is non-theistic. I do not claim to understand “God,” as separate or different in any way from “Adonai,” “Allah,” or any of the other names people give to their experience of the Holy.

      Ancient Lessons for Today

      Jesus, was a Judean religious teacher called, by those who knew him, “Yoshua,” a common Hebrew name which would have been pronounced Yeshua or Yehoshua, in Hebrew. The English names “Jesus” and “Joshua” are derivatives of this common Arabic name.

      Jesus lived 2,000 years ago in what is now Israel and Palestine. His words, which many believe are recorded, in some fashion, in the Gospels, are ancient words spoken for people who lived long ago and far away. We live in a time and place that is changing faster than ever. Younger generations are no longer accepting, verbatim, what religious institutions have long been trying to convince others to believe through the literal reading of their ancient texts.

Sharing the good news that Jesus taught is the true definition of “evangelism.” Evangelism is usually misunderstood by today’s culture. Evidence of this comes even from Webster’s Dictionary which includes as its definition of “evangelism” “1: the winning or revival of personal commitments to Christ 2: militant or crusading zeal.”4 News reporters say that 72 percent of white evangelicals support Trump as if 72 percent of all Republicans and other conservative citizens are out there spreading the good news, trying to create or revive commitment to Christ.

      It is harder than ever to teach the ancient lessons of Abraham’s tent, because fewer and fewer people have heard the stories enough times for the stories to have the same effect on their lives that they have had on others. At one point in history, most tribal life included participation in the rituals and beliefs of the entire tribe. At one time the majority of people in a village shared the same understanding of the God that they worshiped and the direction of the village priest, which dictated every part of their lives with the requirements for going to heaven or hell. Most of the Europeans who came as the first immigrant settlers to North America would have professed to being Christian, even as they became colonizers, killing off those whose land they assumed God had given to them to inhabit because of their faith.

      Faith is not as easy to come by as it used to be. Recent generations have been born into a world filled with technologies and scientific understandings far beyond that of the world their parents and grandparents knew. Cultural connections, community relationships and moral perspectives can now be found in many places other than religious centers. And on top of this, the hypocrisy, injustice, and violence of many religious traditions has become all too evident.

      We live in a different religious culture today. Many changes have taken place throughout the course of human history in the understanding and practice of established religions. Some of these changes took thousands of years to take effect and others, such as the Great Reformation of the 1500s, took little more than a hundred years. With the turn of the twenty first century, not only the United States but other modernized nations began to experience another “reformation” of culture and tradition. Historians predict that the twenty first century will dramatically change not only economic, technological, and social norms, but the theology and practice of our faith traditions as well. Within another hundred years everything will look and work differently around us.

      But take heart, if you are a person of faith! Faith is not dying. It is just evolving, as it did 500–600 years ago. That’s how human societies seem to operate. Every 500 years most advanced cultures of the world experience a systemic and dynamic change in everything people once held as true, traditional, and trustworthy. New light starts gradually shining on established roles, norms, and expectations during the century preceding these great changes and eventually, even those most unwilling to change eventually do so.

      Dr. Phyllis Tickle, a historian, professor and scholar of Christian history and theology, wrote in 2012 about this next wave of great societal change in her book “The Emergence Church:”

Of the several general characteristics that the Great Emergence and Emergence Christianity hold in common, these of deinstitutionalization; non-hierarchical organization; a comfortable and informed interface with physical science; dialogical and contextual habits of thought; almost universal technological savvy; triple citizenship with its triple loyalties and obligations; a deeply embedded commitment to social justice with an accompanying, though largely unpremeditated, assumption of all forms of human diversity as the norm; and a vocation toward greenness—these undoubtedly are among the most characterizing.5

      Tickle’s book should be “required reading” by any who hope to ride out the wave of the next reformation into a better understanding of what it means to be people of faith and church. What Tickle and other emergent faith leaders are saying to faith communities is that the generations born after the 1970s are more likely to be disillusioned by the hypocrisies of established religions than any generation before them.

      Yet, as many who reject religious institutions look for a way to make life better, more just, and more meaningful, many alternate worshipping communities, who draw in Millennials by gathering in brew pubs or coffee СКАЧАТЬ