A Common Word

A Common Word

(Matthew 28.18-20; Acts 16.30-31; Matthew 7.1-8, 12; Romans 12.18; Mark 12.28-31;
Al-Muzzammil, 73.8; Sahih Al-Bukhari, Kitab al-Iman, 67-1, Hadith no. 45)
A reflection by Dave Shull
Spirit of Peace United Church of Christ
Sammamish, Washington
The Fourth Sunday after Pentecost: July 10, 2011

The fourth in a summer series on topics you’ve asked to hear addressed in reflections.
This morning’s question: “Why should Christians try or not try to convert Muslims?”

“Why should Christians try or not try to convert Muslims?” Which is another way of asking, How should Christians relate to Muslims?

Some Christians believe we follow Jesus best by trying to convert as many people as we can to Christianity. They say that’s what Jesus commands us to do. They point to Bible passages like this to prove their point:
Matthew 28.18-20

Jesus said to the disciples, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”
(New Revised Standard Version)

Go and make disciples of all nations sounds pretty clear. It seems Jesus wants us to convert others.

But then there are those words he says next, where Jesus talks about teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you? What did Jesus command his disciples to do?

Listen to these words from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount:
Matthew 7.1-6, 12
Jesus said to his disciples, “Don’t pick on people, jump on their failures, criticize their

faults – unless, of course, you want the same treatment. That critical spirit has a way of boomeranging. It’s easy to see a smudge on your neighbor’s face and be oblivious to the ugly sneer on your own. Do you have the nerve to say, ‘Let me wash your face for you,’ when your own face is distorted by contempt? It’s this whole traveling road-show mentality all over again, playing a holier-than-thou part instead of just living your part. Wipe that ugly sneer off your own face, and you might be fit to offer a washcloth to your neighbor ….
“Here is a simple, rule-of-thumb guide for behavior: Ask yourself what you want people to do for you, then grab the initiative and do it for them. Add up God’s Law and Prophets and this is what you get.”
(The Message)

Over and over in his teachings, Jesus tells his followers to be humble. How can we try to convert people and be humble at the same time? Isn’t telling someone they need to become Christian like saying, Let me wash your face for you? If I try to convince someone the god I worship is better than the god they worship, aren’t I being just a little bit holier-than-thou? If I don’t want people to try to convert me, Jesus says I shouldn’t try to convert them.

So how do we follow both of these teachings at the same time? What does a ministry of humble evangelism or humble conversion look like?

What I think it looks like is to love. A favorite theologian of mine says love is active care (Miroslav Volf, in Miroslav Volf, Ghazi bin Muhammad, and Melissa Yarrington, A Common Word: Muslims and Christians on Loving God and Neighbor, Eerdmans Pub. Co., 2010, p. 24). So a friend of ours who isn’t part of a faith community might notice the ways we actively care. They might notice our compassion. They might realize that we don’t judge. And that we’re genuinely interested in them and their lives. They might hear us talk about cooking meals for homeless people each month. And hear us talk about eating with them, and being changed by them. When they are going through a hard time, they might notice how we want to be there for them. How we bring meals and send cards and offer to pray for them. They might hear us talk about what’s going on in the larger world. They might hear how the church community we’re part of wants to try to create a world where people have enough to eat and a place to sleep. A world where there is no fear of bombs or bullets. They might experience us as being very forgiving. And experience us caring about people everyone else criticizes or people they wish they didn’t have to deal with. They might realize that we seem to be people who really want to help people feel like they are loved just as they are.

One day they might ask us, “Where does your love come from?” That’s when liberal Christians can get kind of nervous. We’re so afraid that people will experience us as pushy that we tend to pull back when people ask us about our faith. But that’s a mistake. This person genuinely wants to know what makes us tick, and why we seem to live differently from so many others. And we owe them an honest response. If our faith helps us walk in the way of Jesus, if our church community or a Bible story grounds us, feeds us, inspires us, changes us, then we tell them that. That’s not being arrogant. That’s being humble. Because we’re responding honestly to their curiosity. They might genuinely hunger to be part of a community that loves with that much love. They might thirst to feel God real and in love with them. So if they ask us questions like this, then we can say, “If you’d like to come to church some Sunday morning, or if you’d like to serve meals some Sunday evening, or pick lettuce at the P-patch, or come to a potluck or a book group, I’d be happy to come by and take you there.”

That is humble evangelism. That is a humble kind of conversion. Showing with our lives that we believe God’s love never runs out. So we keep giving it away. That is how non-Christians might find themselves drawn to us. Not because we decide they need Jesus. Not because we’ve concluded they’re “not saved”. But because we love them. And they find themselves drawn into our circle of love. Our circle of active care. It’s how the early Christian church grew so fast. When an infectious disease ravaged a community, families would often abandon their sick loved ones in order to protect themselves. Christians not only refused to do that. But they would choose to care for those whose families had left them. People saw people loving with that much love. And they wanted to worship a God who filled communities with that kind of love.

I think that’s what humble conversion should look like for other faiths as well. Say I make friends with a Muslim. She tells me about her faith. She tells me how her life is changing by reading the Qur’an and by worshiping the one true God. I see her doing her prayers five times a day. I see her fasting, and know she gives to the poor. I hear how gathering with millions of other Muslims on pilgrimage in Mecca made God so real for her. When I am with this Muslim woman, I feel compassion, love, peacefulness, and an unyielding commitment to justice. If those are values I long for, and I’m not part of a faith community, I might ask to go to the mosque with her. Or to attend a class with her to learn more about Islam. Or she might sense my hunger. And know I’m not part of a faith community. So she might ask me to come with her to some service or some class. And see what it’s like.

Humble conversion is about mutual respect. It isn’t about judging others. It doesn’t coerce or manipulate by telling people they’re going to hell if they don’t follow the God you follow. Humble conversion comes through loving friendships. And seeing each other as people God loves just as they are.

Every person I know who works to build love between people of different faiths says the same thing. It’s a huge mistake to believe people of different religions will get along with each other better if nobody takes their faith too seriously. People who take their faith seriously have a living relationship with the God they worship. The God they worship fills them with love. And calls them to love all people, no matter who they are or what they believe. Of course the exception is those who practice fundamentalism. Fundamentalists of all stripes believe their way is the only way, and all others are wrong, bad, mistaken, evil, or damned. Except for fundamentalists, people in interfaith conversations say the deeper our faith is, the more loving we are. If I’m serous about loving God and loving my neighbor, then I will work for peaceful ways for all people to live together, no matter how deep our disagreements. The more committed I am to being a passionate follower of Jesus, the more committed I am to forming a living faith and to knowing the Bible and the history of my faith, the more I will work for a radically inclusive society that seeks the common good for all people (ideas from Volf, et a., p. 24).

Instead of trying to convert others – instead of looking for a smudge on your neighbor’s face – those involved in humble evangelism keep our attention on our own faces. We want to keep walking the path which frees us most fully to love God and our neighbor. So instead of praying that someone else will convert, we ask the Holy Spirit to keep converting and re-converting us. Because we drift away from the path Jesus asks us to walk with him. We fall into bitterness, cynicism, cruelty, apathy. So we need to keep asking the Spirit to help us, to help us let go of what pulls us away from the love we want to shower upon this world.

The terror attacks of September 11, 2001, radically changed the ways people in this country view Muslims. So I believe any response to Catherine’s question has to look at this. People in this country, including many Christians, know next-to-nothing about Islam. We still read stories in the paper of Muslims who are thrown off of airplanes for doing their daily prayers because people around them are afraid of them. We are still engaged in the longest war in U.S. history … a war against a Muslim country. There are 2 billion Christians in this world, and 1.5 billion Muslims. Together, we make up almost half the people on this planet. If there is to be peace, we have to learn how to love each other. How might we begin to do that when many extremist Christians and Muslims are trying to make us hate and fear each other?

Around the year 60, Paul wrote a letter to Christians in Rome. In that letter, he said,

Romans 12.18

As far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone. Don’t insist on getting even; that’s not for you to do. “I’ll do the judging,” says God. “I’ll take care of it.” (The Message)

In October 2007, 138 Muslim scholars wrote an open letter to the world’s Christians. The title of their letter is “A Common Word Between Us and You.” (The text of this letter and thoughtful discussions of it by Muslim and Christian scholars can be found in Miroslav Volf, Ghazi bin Muhammad, and Melissa Yarrington, A Common Word: Muslims and Christians on Loving God and Neighbor, Eerdmans Pub. Co., 2010.) These 138 scholars invite us to take a different path. What these Muslims remind Christians of is that what Jesus says are the two greatest commandments are exactly what the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) calls the two greatest commandments.

These Muslim scholars point to the following texts from the Holy Bible and the Holy Qur’an to show what we have in common:
Mark 12.28-31

One of the religion scholars came up … and put in his question: “Which is the most important of all the commandments?”

Jesus said, “The first in importance is, ‘Listen, Israel: The Lord your God is one; so love the Lord God with all your passion and prayer and intelligence and energy.’ And here is the second: ‘Love others as well as you love yourself.’ There is no other commandment that ranks with these.”
Al-Muzzammil, 73.8

God said, “Invoke the Name of thy Lord and devote thyself to Him with a compete devotion.” (The Holy Qur’an)

Sahih Al-Bukhari, Kitab al-Iman, 67-1, Hadith no. 45

The Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) said “None of you has faith until you love for your neighbor what you love for yourself.” (The Holy Qur’an)

While Christianity and Islam disagree about a lot, they agree on this core teaching: that God is One, and we show our love for God by loving our neighbor. If Christians and Muslims know that we have this in common, then we certainly can “love God and neighbor together” (Volf, et al., p. 20).

A Christian leader in this effort to live this common word says this:

Agreement on the dual command of love encourages each community to hold the other accountable to its best insights and commitments. A Muslim as the target of Christian verbal attacks can now say to a Christian, “How can you claim that you love me when you only speak ill of how I understand and worship God, when you malign my Prophet, and when you despise my way of life?” A Christian convert from Islam, [who in some countries risks being put to death for doing that] can now say to a hostile Muslim, “How can you say that you love me if you want to kill me just because I have followed my conscience and embraced the Christian faith?” (Volf et al., p. 22).

Christians walking in the way of Jesus and Muslims walking in the way of Prophet Muhammad finally will be about more than respecting each others’ lives and faiths. “A ‘common word’ between Muslims and Christians … should also be, and maybe above all be, about the common good for the little boat that is our common world. In addition to sitting face to face and trying to make peace with one another, we need to start walking shoulder to shoulder in trying to heal the deep wounds and inspire the noble hopes of all people in our common world” (Volf, et al., p. 25).

May it be so. Amen.