“What if Jesus ISN’T the Only Way?”
A Message Shared with the Community Church of Lake Forest/LakeBluff – 1/17/16
A month or so before he died, I had an interesting conversation
with my dad. We both knew he was dying – he had lung cancer. It’s a
conversation that I never thought I’d have with him, but I’m sure glad I
did. It went something like this…
“So, dad,” I said, “let’s imagine for a minute that you died…and you
went to heaven, where you are welcomed and embraced by God. Mom is
there, your folks are there, and all your deceased friends and loved ones
are there. But a lot of other people are there too: all the Jews, all the
Buddhists, all the Hindus, and all Muslims too. Literally, everyone is
there, dad – everyone. How would you feel about that?”
Dad looked puzzled and tense, and said, without hesitation, “Well,
I wouldn’t like it…not one bit.”
“Why not?” I pressed.
“I just wouldn’t like it. I’d feel cheated.”
“But you’re there, dad! You’re in! You’re right there with God and
Jesus - physically present with you! Mom is there! All your loved ones
are there! You didn’t lose a thing! How is that being cheated?”
“It’s not what I expected. It’s not what I’ve been told all my life…”
What about you? What have you been told all your life about
heaven and who gets in? How would you feel about a heaven imagined
in the particular way I asked dad to imagine it?
Part of what we’re asking here, whether we realize it or not, is the
unfathomable question, the most tabooed question in all of American
Christianity. It’s a question that I wouldn’t dare to even ask in about
99% of all Christian churches in America. But I’ll go ahead and risk
asking it here, cause, heck, I’m leaving town tomorrow! What do I care?
So here’s the question: What if Jesus ISN’T the only way? What if
there is more than one way to God?
For my dad, this was a very tough possibility to accept, especially
when he’d gone 82 years without ever speaking to or encountering a
real live Muslim, Hindu, or Buddhist. Heck, to dad - and to most folks of
his generation - people of other religions were “foreigners” in the truest
sense of that word - strange, distant, remote, even a little scary!
But my life has been very different from that of my father. I had
Muslim and Hindu professors in both college and grad school. I taught
students in several prep schools from every major religion and from
countries my father had never even heard of. My brother had a Muslim
business partner for years. People in my and my daughter’s generations
have Facebook friends and regular Skype chats with people half way
around the globe. If my Eloise grows up to attend a school like
Northwestern or University of Michigan, she’ll have Jews and Sikhs on
her dorm floor. She’ll have Buddhist and Muslim sorority sisters.
Friends, the world has really shrunk.
It truly is a global village we live in, and most people who are under 55
don’t see or experience the world anything like my father and his generation did. It was one thing to say that Jesus was the only way to heaven in the 1950’s, 60’s,
or 70’s. But it’s an entirely different matter to make that claim in 2016.
For in taking such an exclusivist approach today, we Christians would be
condemning our own friends, our own neighbors, our own professors
and suite mates, and that is something that fewer and fewer people are
willing to do – especially people who are your kids and grandkids’ ages.
And if you don’t think that our Christian insistence on Jesus being “the
only way” has an awful lot to do with why so few of your kids and
grandkids want anything to do with a Christian church anymore, I’m not
sure what you’ve been smoking.
For reasons I’m not entirely clear on, the vast majority of
Christians are still clinging to an exclusivist perspective, even as
membership in their churches plummets to an all time low, even as the
average age of those still attending Christian churches has risen to 70
years old. Christian exclusivists are so quick to cite passages like John
14, in which Jesus supposedly says things like, “I am the way, the truth,
and the light; no one comes to the Father but by me.” Or Romans 10:9,
where Paul declares, “if you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and
believe in your heart that he raised from the dead, you will be saved.”
But I’ve never been one to take words that supposedly came out of
Jesus’s mouth and then use them to exclude or condemn others,
especially when Jesus’s actions were so constantly geared toward
expanding the circle of God’s community. You know what I’m talking
about, right? There were the Samaritans – whom all the Jews and Jesus’
disciples thought didn’t have a prayer. Then Jesus goes into Samaria and
has the longest conversation in all the gospels with the woman at the
well. And then to make sure the disciples didn’t miss the point, he then
told them the story of the GOOD Samaritan. Oops – I guess Samaritans
ARE in.
Then there were those nasty, no good tax collectors, turncoats
who were working for the Romans. They’re out of God’s kingdom for
sure, right? But then Jesus chooses Matthew – a tax collector – as one of
his 12 disciples AND then goes to Jericho, where he elects to stay in the
home of Zaccheus, one of the most corrupt of tax collectors of all. Oops –
I guess the tax collectors are in too.
The Gentiles! We’ve GOT to be able to keep them out, right? Nope.
Jesus welcomed them too. How about Prostitutes? C’mon! We’ve at least
got a right to shun and condemn them, right? After all, adultery is one of
the ten biggies! There’s no WAY we’ve going to let the hookers in, are
we? I don’t know…Jesus hung out with them, and there was that woman
caught in the act in John 8. Plus, Jesus told a bunch of Pharisees that
prostitutes and tax collectors would enter the kingdom of God before
they would! Oops! I guess we’ve got to let them in as well.
Folks, whatever fences, boundaries, and parameters WE think God
has drawn around his kingdom and his love, whoever we think has been
kept out, we can be pretty sure we’re wrong. We can be pretty sure God
welcomes people whom we would just as soon shun. The New
Testament is full of examples of God being far more open that we are. In
Matthew 13, for example, Jesus tells a story about a farmer who planted
wheat in a field, but soon finds that there are weeds growing alongside
the wheat. His field hands ask the farmer if they should get out and pull
up the weeds to get rid of them. But Farmer Jesus says, in response to
the servants’ offer to go and weed the garden, “No! Leave the weeds
alone. Let them grow together. I’m afraid that you might pull up some of
the wheat along with the weeds…Just let them grow together until the
harvest, and I’ll take care of it from there.”
The next passage I want us to think about is John 10, where Jesus
talks about himself as the good shepherd, the one who the sheep know,
recognize, and trust. In an often over looked part of that discourse, Jesus
says, “And I have sheep that are not of this fold…Sheep of another fold,
and I must bring them in also.” Sheep of another fold…hmm?
Folks, I have chosen to follow Jesus. I have chosen to try and live
as his disciple. But in making that choice, I do not put myself above
those who follow the Buddha or Krishna or Muhammad, or anyone else.
There are great and deep commonalities in all the great faiths. In the
end, Jesus promises that if we are ever to be judged, it will not be based
on our beliefs. God’s judgment will be based on our actions, and
particularly how we respond to the human needs around us. When we
see the hungry, do we feed them? When we are made aware of the
thirsty, do we give them drink? When people are naked do we clothe
them? When people are homeless, do we house them? In this deepest of
truths, all the great religious paths of the world agree.
Jesus was not an exclusivist. He called everyone his brother and
sister. He treated everyone as his brother and sister. And he showed us
again and again that the only people he found intolerable were the ones
who thought they were in and everyone else was out.
Obviously, neither I nor anyone else can tell you with any
certainty what heaven is going to be like or who is going to be there.
Hamlet was right when he called death “that undiscovered country from
which no traveler returns.” We’re all just taking shots in the dark when
it comes to speculating about the afterlife. But if Jesus’s life and actions
are any indication, we can be pretty sure of one thing: there are going to
be a whole lot more people there than we think. My dad was always
hoping that heaven would be a nice, exclusive, gated community. But
chances are that there aren’t any gates, anywhere in God’s kingdom.
The reason I like to raise this question of what if Jesus ISN’T the
only way – whether it’s with my dad, my friends, my congregation, or
with all of you - is that it helps us look at and evaluate the size of our
hearts, the scope of our love. Is your heart big enough, is my heart big
enough for all those people that God loves? I may not have ever been to
heaven, but I’m pretty sure, from everything I’ve studied about Jesus,
that there are going to be a LOT more people at that party than just
us…a LOT more!
The other day, I was with an elderly woman from my church, who
is depressed, struggling with the question of why she’s still alive, when
she can’t really do anything for others anymore, when she feels like such
a burden to her family. You know what I said to her? I said, “If you’re
still here, there’s a pretty good chance God isn’t finished expanding your
heart yet. God’s probably giving you more time, so that you can make
SURE that your heart is large enough to love and accept ALL those
colorful characters He lets into his kingdom.” And you know what? I
believe that the same is true of every one of us sitting here today. If
we’re still alive and kicking on this planet, it may well be that our hearts
still need expansion. It may well be that we’ve got too many gates
around our community. It may well be that our hearts aren’t quite big
enough for all the people who are going to be with us in the kingdom of
God. “Let every heart prepare him room.” Amen.
