Many roads, one God?

The lectionary reading for this week is one that I grew up with as a child - "I am the way the truth and the life, no-one come to the father but through me". It was for many years a passage which underscored my pure faith and belief as a Christian. Nowadays though, I have to say, it troubles me.

Over many years I have worked alongside, and learned to deeply value men and women of faiths different from my own. I recall a local Rabbi who taught me so much about the Jewish faith and what it meant to be a persecuted people. He told me once that he felt protected and cherished by God like a small and tender bird in the hand. He asked me if I felt the same and I can honestly say that I did, and still do. I won't name him, but I am in no doubt that he was a man who walked with God, and I honour his faith. But he did not believe that Jesus was the only way to The Father, and he did not believe that no-one can come to God except through Jesus. 

We reflected that he was a Jew and I a Christian essentially because of accidents of birth, and if our positions were reversed, then as men of faith it is likely that our religious stand points would likewise be reversed.

This week has seen many remarkable events. The world's largest democratic country, with (relatively) free and fair elections. I am referring of course to the magnificent Indian election where a possible 800m people were able to vote and around 90% appear to have done so.

Some of these people will be bad people, there will be many murderers, rapists, fraudsters and the like, but there will be many Hindus Muslims Christians and a myriad other faiths represented in people who live good devout lives according to the faith they were brought up in, each believing that they hold the true way, and that others are mistaken. Are we saying that the vast majority of that 800m will be condemned because their faith is in someone or something other than Jesus?

How then, as today's Christians are we to reconcile this?

C.S.Lewis faced the same dilemma and tried to answer it honestly. In "The Last battle",  he depicts a battle which may well represent the final battle between good and evil - i.e. the people and animals of Narnia versus those of a neighbouring, hostile and country called Calormen who worship a different deity called Tash. It is a battle in which Aslan the Lion is noticeable only by his absence. A Prince of Calormen offers to go through a doorway which he believes will bring him face to face with Tash, a deity he has worshipped honestly since a child believing him to be the true god. What he finds the other side is Aslan who accepts him as a true son. Lewis is saying clearly that whoever you worship, as long as that worship is pure and honest, that God will accept it as his own.

I recently spent some time leading sessions with Christians of different churches some miles away. I asked what had brought them to church. The answer was unanimous - family. One man had attended the church all of his life, even though he now lives next door to one of my own church members and travels a long way to church each Sunday. Why? Because that was the church his parents went to.

If this is true of your church and mine will it not also be true of people who were brought up Muslim? Hindu? Jew? Of no faith?

What do you think?

Alan

Xenophobia

I am writing this to you as I study my postal vote ballot paper for the forthcoming European Elections with something approaching dismay. I receive mine early as I always choose to vote by post.

There are 11 parties to vote for, but only vote. I find myself asking "what has happened to us a nation?" Most of the parties are overt in their nationalistic fervour, stating clearly that Britain should be OUT of the European Union, and some simmer just below boiling point at the prospect of non- British workers here in the UK.

Some years ago I was fortunate to spend some time living and working adjacent to an "informal settlement" (squatter camp to you and I ) in Johannesburg, South Africa. Approx. 5m people living in cardboard and wooden shelters with no running water, no gas or electricity and no sewerage. If you think that the UK has an immigration problem, - South Africa has a worse one. The camps are at the same time dangerous and filled with desperate but generous and educated people. (As I write this this my mind returns to "big John" a veteran of the apartheid wars, fluent in 11 languages  and church elder but living in a cardboard hut).

However, this is not about South Africa, it is about you and I as we wrestle with the practical implications of the teachings of Jesus, about welcoming the stranger, about walking the extra mile, about taking only what you need and offering grace in exchange for welcome. I am left asking - as I often do - what would Jesus do?

I do not think that there is an easy answer to this because as I read the Bible stories, I find that Jesus was often invited to make political gestures (such as the coin with the face of Caesar) but rarely chose to do so.  Instead he dealt with poverty, hunger and need where he found it, and I suspect that He invites us to do the same.

But that does not help me as I look at my ballot paper. What would Jesus do?

I guess that my church is not the only one to have helped asylum seekers. We have welcomed a family quite recently and I supported them at tribunal. I stare at the paper and find myself completely fulfilling F Scott Fitzgerald's definition of an artist - someone who holds diametric points of view yet still functions. "Can we afford to take in every stranger who knocks on our door as a country?" No. "Can we afford to turn them away?" Equally, No.

But I stare at my ballot paper, 11 choices, but only 1 vote.

God Bless

Alan