"Truly, I Perceive God Shows No Partiality"

Sermon by Diana L. Eck

Church of the Redeemer, January 13

I am delighted to be here this morning, sharing worship with you at the Church of the Redeemer.  My work in the university is also my joy: the study of religion, the religious traditions of the world, my own religious tradition, and the many ways in which human religious life has shaped and reshaped cultures and nations, our geographical landscapes and our inner landscapes. My work has taken me to India to study the many religious traditions of the Hindus, Muslims, and Buddhists --and more recently my work has taken me around the United States, discovering the ways in which our own life as a nation of immigrants has been shaped and reshaped by the religious traditions we all have brought with us. Recently, I published A New Religious America --a book that makes plain the history, the life, and the struggles of Hindu, Buddhist, and Muslim traditions in the United States. Ours is truly a new religious America; a new world of religious diversity --and maybe the real engagement with diversity I call pluralism.

 There was a time when you and I were surprised to find that there are more Muslims in the U.S. than Episcopalians, but since September 11 most of us know this fact with a kind of sobering realism that we did not have before.  In the months since then, we have been eager to learn; we have tuned into Oprah's Islam 101 on daytime TV. We have heard Muslim men and women on Larry King live, and we have read the portraits of Boston's Muslims in the Living Section of the Globe. We have perhaps heard the call to prayer or a recitation from the Qur'an at an interfaith service --here in our community, or televised from the National Cathedral in Washington. We have had exposure that many of us missed in our education, raised as we were in an era when we could graduate from high school without knowing a thing about Islam, the faith of a fifth of the world.  All this is to the good.

 But have we thought enough about what our deepening knowledge of our Muslim, Hindu, or Buddhist neighbors might mean for our faith as Christians?  There is still the view, so common among Christians, that God's most special place is reserved for those of us who are Christians. Perhaps only for those of us who are Christians.  So I was especially heartened to find that the readings for today included part of the wonderful story in Acts 10 of the meeting of Peter with the Roman Cornelius. It gives us all a chance to think theologically, for a moment, about the question of God's relation to people of all cultures and faiths-- a question that could not be more important.

Cornelius, we are told at the outset, was a "devout man who feared God with all his household, gave alms liberally to the people, and prayed constantly to God." Devout. Generous. Prayerful.  He was not a Jew, certainly not a Christian, but an Italian, a Roman living in Caesarea. But God knows him by name. An angel appears to him and says, "Your prayers and alms have ascended to God. Now send for this man Peter dwelling down at Joppa and tell him to come visit you.  So Cornelius, obeying the angel, sends for Peter.  And in the meantime Peter also has a heavenly vision: angels bear a great white sheet filled with all sorts of animals, birds, and reptiles and Peter is told that these are the things he should eat. "No, Lord," he says. "I have never eaten anything that is common or unclean."  And the Lord says, "Don't call anything that I have made common or unclean."  And about this time, Peter is told that three men have come with an invitation to visit the Roman Cornelius in his home. And so, even though such a visit is unusual for a law-abiding Jew as Peter was, he goes. And Cornelius greets him warmly, falls at his feet. 

 And Peter says, "You yourselves know how unlawful it is for a Jew to associate with or to visit any one of another nation; but God has shown me that I should not call any man common or unclean. So when I was sent for, I came without objection. I ask then why you sent for me." 

 And Cornelius tells his story: How an angel came to him and told him that God had received his prayers and alms, and that he should send for a man called Peter. "So I sent to you at once, and you have been kind enough to come. Now therefore we are all here present in the sight of God, to hear all that you

have been commanded by the Lord."  We are all here present in the sight of God: He doesn't say my God or your God, but just God --the one who received the prayer of Jews and Gentiles alike.

 Peter is astonished, and the first thing he says is this: "Truly I perceive that God shows no partiality, but in every nation any one who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him."  And then, Peter tells him about Jesus, the one who preached the good news of peace, the one anointed with the Holy Spirit, who went about doing good and healing, who was put to death and raised on the third day, who will judge the living and the dead, and who will forgive all sins.

 As Bishop Krister Stendahl once put it, speaking of this passage, "It took a miracle to open Peter's eyes to the Gentiles." It took a miracle to demonstrate to Peter, the Jew, the wide expanse of God's love for humankind and God's lack of partiality. "It is not easy for God to teach the church that he does not play favorites, that God has many ways of working in the world."

 This passage is read today because it also a kind of baptismal passage. It repeats themes of descent of the Holy Spirit at Jesus' baptism and the descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. For as Peter was speaking, the Holy Spirit fell upon one and all, upon Peter and his company, and upon Cornelius and his family, Jews and Gentiles alike. Cornelius receives the Spirit, becomes part of a community that knows no distinction of insider/outsider/high or low. But the point of the passage is the status of Cornelius in the eyes of God --right at the beginning: one who is upright, devout, who prayed constantly to God, and whose prayers were heard and received by God. Indeed, it took a miracle to convince Peter that we are all on the same footing in God's sight. Those who fear the Lord in any nation, of any race, are accepted in God's sight.

 Let us turn back, for a moment, to the people round about us who are, like Cornelius, devout men and women, but not part of our company and family. It took a miracle to demonstrate to Peter that God has his eye and his ear attuned to all people, not just to us. And so, we might say today, it took a tragedy, a catastrophe, to demonstrate to those of us who are Christians today that God's eye and ear are attuned to all people, not just to us.

 This past fall, as Americans of all faiths grieved for thousands of dead, as American bombers flew non-stop from Missouri to Afghanistan, American mosques all over the country were holding open-houses, inviting their Christian and Jewish neighbors to come visit, to meet them face to face, to come to their houses of prayer. The mosque in Cambridge wrote a letter of invitation to all of us. "Together, God willing, we can lend one another strength to find hope in these uncertain times."  More than four hundred people came.  In Austin, Texas, hundreds of people responded to the invitation. For most, it was their first visit to a mosque. One woman, a Christian, who attended the open house, told the reporter from the Austin American Statesman, "The time of not getting to know each other is over. It's more American to reach out and be friends than to turn our backs and say, 'We don't want you here.'"  And, one might add, more Christian too.

 But these have also been months of suspicion and anxiety. It has not been easy to   get to know one another in this climate. As President Clinton once put it, “Our diversity is a godsend for us and the world of the twenty-first century. But it is also the potential for the old, haunting demons that are hard to root out of the human spirit.” In the wake of the catastrophe of Sept. 11, there has been an unprecedented number of hate crimes, providing chilling evidence of those old, haunting demons, ugly incidents of revenge taken against what the perpetrators must have felt was an enemy in our midst, directed against people who seemed “different,” people of many religious traditions.

 A brick wrapped with messages of hatred shattered the windows of an Islamic bookstore in Alexandria, Virginia; a furious man drove his car through the plate glass doors of the elegant mosque in Cleveland; someone fired a rifle and pierced the stained glass dome of the mosque in Toledo, and a firebomb landed in the mosque in Denton, Texas, and just two weeks ago vandals broke into a mosque in Columbus, wrecking whatever they could and tearing up copies of the Qur'an.   Sikhs were targeted because of their turbans; there were dozens of incidents –a Sikh attacked with a baseball bat, a Sikh shot with a paint-ball gun, a Sikh hauled off an Amtrak train in Providence, handcuffed, and charged with carrying a concealed weapon, his ceremonial kirpan. And Hindus also experienced a new wave of suspicion: a Hindu temple in suburban Chicago and another in New Jersey were vandalized. And there were murders too, adding to the Sept. 11 death toll: Balbir Singh Sodhi, a Sikh shot in his gas station/convenience store in Mesa, Arizona; Wakar Hassan Choudhry, a Pakistani Muslim killed in his store in Pleasant Grove, Texas; Adel Karas, a Coptic Christian who had fled Egypt twenty years ago, shot in his shop in San Gabriel, California.

But there is another story embedded in this violence and vengeance. It is the insistence in each and every case that this suspicion, violence, and vengeance is simply not who we are –as Americans and as people of faith. The Palestinian bookstore owner in Alexandria, frightened by the bricks, the shattered glass and the ugly messages, soon discovered hundreds of supportive neighbors he had never known as they delivered dozens of bouquets of flowers, scores of cards and messages of both sorrow and support.  In Toledo, as Cheriffi Kadri, the woman president of the Islamic community told it,  “That small hole created such a huge outpouring of support for our Islamic community in Toledo. A Christian radio station. YES-FM contacted me wanting to do something. They called out on the airwaves for people to come together at our center to hold hands, to ring our mosque, to pray for our protection.  We expected 300 people, and thought that would be enough to circle the mosque, but 2000 people showed up!” In Columbus, Ohio, churches and synagogues, even the Rotary Club, reached out to the Muslims with heart-felt statements of solidarity. And in Mesa, Arizona hundreds of people visited the gas station where Balbir Singh Sodhi had been shot, thousands of people who had never met him or any other Sikh came to the civic center for a public memorial service. At last count Balbir Singh Sodhi's family had received 10,000 letters and cards. People who had known nothing about Sikhism or the devout, god-fearing, alms-giving neighbors in their midst now knew.

 These are the stories we need to hear and to tell as we work to claim a new vision of our faith, as Christians in a multireligious America. As the woman in Austin put it, "The time of not getting to know each other is over.” And in getting to know each other, we will be met more than half way by our Muslim neighbors.  One of the most oft-quoted verses in the Quran is this one: "Do you not know, O people, that I have made you into tribes and nations so that you may know each other."  Our difference, so they say, is not to set us asunder, but to enable us to know each other. And when Imam Sirah Wahaj, imam of Masjid al Taqwa in Brooklyn first opened a session of the U.S. House of Representatives with prayer in 1991, these were the words he chose for his prayer. "Do you not know, O people, that I have made you into tribes and nations so that you may know each other."   It is a god-given difference, and the challenge of reaching across the lines of difference is ours.

 God will always surprise us with his presence in the places we least expect. In the barn in Bethlehem. Among fishermen in Galilee. On the road to Emmaus, where we walked and talked with amazing man who warmed our hearts, and we did not know that it was the Lord. God will always surprise us with his presence --in church and synagogue, temple and mosque, among people we know and who join hearts with us in song and prayer, and among people we do not know and whose ways of song and prayer are very different from our own. The signal of God's presence is not our label or religion, but as with Cornelius, our heartful prayer, our generosity in giving, and our righteousness and justice.

 As David Brown, the Bishop of Guilford, put it more than two decades ago, "Christ did not come to make God's love and power the exclusive possession of the church,  but to reveal the nature of a God who holds all beings in His embrace." (KCr. 61) May we, like Peter, discover that God has already heard the prayers of many a Cornelius. May we, like Peter, discover that God shows no partiality, but in every nation whoever fears God and works righteousness is accepted by God."  And may we, like Peter, be deeply thankful for the gift of God's presence, wherever we may find it.

 Eternal God, who created the heavens and stretched them out, who spread forth the earth and what comes from it, who gives breath to the people upon it and spirit to those who walk in it, may we and all your many peoples respond to your call to walk together in righteousness, and justice, and peace. Amen.

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