Today is the last Sunday of Easter. The church observes Easter for 50 days, beginning this year on April 16 and concluding on this Pentecost Sunday. As God gives new life to Jesus of Nazareth, God gives new life to the Jesus’ community. On this occasion we remember the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, a time of energy and invitation.

Pentecost is originally a farm festival for celebrating the early harvest. Later, the celebration remembers the giving of the Ten Commandments at Mt. Sinai. But, in the church, Pentecost is the giving of the Spirit of God to the people of God.

If there is a day in the church year that should be observed, it is Pentecost because without the Spirit there can be no St. Luke’s. We would simply be like any other community group, gathering together. We like each other. We do things together. We try to do a good deed here and there to justify our existence, but that fundamentally would be it.

It is the Spirit of God that makes the church, the church, just as it is the Spirit of God that makes Israel, Israel. They cannot live forever on the memories of being delivered from slavery in Egypt. Those memories wear thin. They have to have the vital presence of God, which the Hebrew scripture calls the shekinah. They never try to define it. They simply know it is there and they know when it is not there.

When they misbehave and live totally to themselves, the prophets get up and say, “The shekinah is gone! The glory of God is departed.” The prophets know what all Israel knows. Without the presence of God they are a poor huddle of frightened people. And the church knows the same thing.

According to Acts, three thousand people are baptized on that day. It is the birthday of the church, when the circle of disciples receive power from on high and proceed to turn the world upside down. What happens in that room spreads from Jerusalem to Athens to Rome to Alexandria. It spreads across nations, across centuries, across cultures as far removed from Israel as we are from the moon. Because of what happens in that room, people who do not speak a word of Hebrew come to believe in a Hebrew God, who is worshiped today in every language on earth.

Pentecost is the day to speak about interfaith community because the Spirit is celebrated in traditions beyond Christianity. The Spirit provides a bridge for conversation which seeks common ground.

We are daily in relationship with persons of other faiths - co-workers, neighbors, and friends. Our children study other faiths in school, have friends who are of other religions, and live in a world that is increasingly diverse.

Hundreds of millions of people practice religions other Christianity. They seek to serve God as they understand God. God forms these people in their mother’s wombs, as Psalm 139 professes. God knows each by name – knows their stories and has heard every prayer. Believing all this to be true, it seems important for us to talk about interfaith community. Indeed, our conversation will be a reflection on the character of the God we claim to love and serve: the God revealed in Jesus Christ

Several perspectives give us a framework for dialogue.

The first is the PLURALIST view. All religions are equally valid paths to God. Put another way, pluralists believe that religious people around the world are all saying much the same thing in different languages, or at the very least they are pointing to the same truth.

Pluralism is probably the predominant view in popular culture. Most people who hold this view do so with a desire to show respect for all faiths – to be open-minded, fair, and non-judgmental. Persons who hold this view might say, “Your truth is true for you, and my truth is true for me.”

This view does not, however, honor the particularity of faith. Muslims might not feel that we understand if we say that what they believe is as true as what Hindus believe. Second, the pluralist perspective fails to differentiate between the merits of various claims. Twice within the past thirty years, we have seen religious leaders start new faiths, claiming to have spiritual insight from God, and ultimately lead their followers to mass suicide.

At the other end of the spectrum is the EXCLUSIVIST view. This view holds that all who do not accept Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord will be condemned. To the exclusivist, it does not matter whether persons of other faiths are devout or whether they are earnestly seeking God. They believe that unless people learn of and accept Jesus, God is bound to exclude them from the possibility of eternal life.

To me, the exclusivist view is inconsistent with the way God interacts with people in the Bible. It does not mesh with the very spirit of the gospel, which tells of God’s love for all people. And it paints a picture of God who punishes two-thirds of the world’s population because they are not born in a predominantly Christian culture.

Persons often point to John 14: 6 as the Biblical grounds for this view, when Jesus says to his disciples: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”

Is Jesus the only way to God, the only way to experience God and to know God?

You may be surprised that one of the answers to this question comes from the Bible itself in Paul’s letter to the church at Rome. Paul says that there are other ways to know God besides Jesus. Paul says that God is not confined to Jesus.

He is laying out an argument that all people have fallen short of God’s hopes. He begins by saying that every person has a chance to see and know God. “Ever since the creation of the world, God’s eternal power and divine nature have been understood and seen through the things God has made.” We can see and know God through creation. So when we do not honor God or when we fail to live responsibly, it is our fault and we have no excuse.

Paul’s answer to whether Jesus is the only way to know God and to follow God’s ways is “no”. Everyone may know and experience God through God’s creation.

Other answers to this question come from the heart. In my Disciple classes, I ask students when they feel God’s presence. They experience God in the mountains. They know God’s presence at the birth of a child. When facing the end of life, they experience being held in God’s promise. Often God comes through a song, or a prayer, or the greeting of a close friend.

You echo the same truth that Paul tells us: we can see and experience God in more ways than in Jesus. For people in the Bible and in our own congregation, God is not confined to Jesus. God is defined by Jesus but not confined to Jesus.

Jesus points beyond himself to God, inviting the intimacy of a caring, compassionate father, known as Abba. Some have suggested that Jesus does not say that no one comes to know God except through him. It is unlikely that Jesus, a devout Jew, would say that Moses, or Isaiah, or Jeremiah, or his grandfather, David, knew nothing about God.

He says that no one comes to know God as father. The point is that Abba is the word by which a Jewish child calls his or her father in the home circle. It seems bizarre to talk to God like that, but what the word settles once and for all is our relationship with God. This is what Jesus does. He does not reveal just God. What he does reveal is that God is Abba, something which is quite new.

Other scholars answer the question “Is Jesus the only way to God?” by looking at the metaphor, Jesus is the way. A way is a path or a journey, not a set of beliefs. To follow Jesus is to follow him, day by day, along the way.

And Jesus says, “Very truly I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.”

The way of Jesus is the path of death and resurrection understood as a metaphor for life with God. That way - the path of dying to an old way of being and being born into a new way of being - is the only way to God.

Marcus Borg tells of a sermon preached by a Hindu professor in a Christian seminary several decades ago. The text for the day includes the passage, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” The professor says, “This verse is absolutely true – Jesus is the only way. But he goes on to say, “And that way of dying to an old way of being and being born into a new way of being is known in all of the religions of the world. The way of Jesus is a universal way, known to millions who have never heard of Jesus.”

If we want to be an inclusive community of faith seeking to meet people where they are, we have to struggle with this passage.

My concern evaporates when I explore the historical context. John’s community of Christian Jews is experiencing social ostracism from non-Christian Jews. I don’t think John is concerned about all the religions of the world. He is angry at his neighbors in the synagogue across the street. Reading the verse in historical context relativizes it. It is not an absolute pronouncement about all other religions for all time; rather, it is a pastoral plea in a particular time and place.

I claim a third view as I enter into relationship with brothers and sisters of other faith traditions. I call it the “PERSPECTIVIST”. I am a professing Christian who believes, as we say in our vows at St. Luke’s, that Jesus offers new life.

Jesus is the way, and the truth, and the life. He is bread of life that satisfies my deepest hunger and the light shining the darkness that brings enlightenment. He lifts me out of dying into life. He is the Word and Wisdom of God embodied in a human life. He is the disclosure of what a life full of God – a life filled with the Spirit – looks like.

I can say that this is who Jesus is for me without also saying that God is known only in Jesus.

I’m going to Wales for a week this summer to study Celtic Christianity as a part of my Doctor of Ministry studies. This spirituality speaks of “thin places” where the thick walls that divide spiritual worlds become translucent and permeable.

I experience thin places at St. Luke’s when we experience the gift of our many interfaith families: when all are welcomed to this table, when we share each other’s holidays, when we teach out of the scriptures that we love, when we commit ourselves to peace.

So, maybe God is calling us to simply live in the experience, guided only by the questions. It is not by might, or by power, or by a belief but by the Spirit that we share common ground.

Marty Davidson calls this process, “shared discernment that is Spirit confirmed”.

Marty is a part of the Wednesday evening Disciple 1 class. This quote is his gift to the class who, through living the questions and valuing our diversity, became loving community.

Have patience with everything
unresolved in your heart
and try to love the questions
themselves.
Don’t search for the answers,
which could not be given to you now,
because you would not be able to live them.
And the point is, to live everything.
Live the questions now.
Perhaps then, someday far in the
future you will gradually,
without even noticing it,
live your way into the answer.

-Rainer Maria Rilke (4th Letter to a Young Poet)