Nineteenth Sunday after Trinity

‘Muslims and Christians together make up well over half of the world’s population. Without peace and justice between these two religious communities, there can be no meaningful peace in the world. The future of the world depends on peace between Muslims and Christians’.

That assertion, as startling as it is sonorous, heads a letter issued this week to the leaders of the Christian churches by representatives of global Islam. It seeks common ground between the writings that our two traditions call holy, and identifies a basis for peace and understanding between Christian and Muslim.

The letter’s authors find that basis in the shared conviction that God is one and that humankind is called to love him, citing both the New Testament and the Qu’ran in support. Jesus Christ teaches that the Shema, the ancient prayer of Israel, is the greatest of the Commandments: ‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is One. And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ And the first Shahadah of Islam is comparable: ‘there is no God but God’. The Qu’ran teaches ‘devote yourself to God with a complete devotion’. The similarity is plain.

Love of neighbour constitutes a second foundation stone of this basis. The letter rehearses Jesus Christ’s commandment ‘you shall love your neighbour as yourself’ alongside that of the prophet Muhammad: ‘none of you has faith until you love for your neighbour what you love for yourself’.

So, in the light of what the letter’s authors term the ‘Two Commandments of love’, Muslims invite Christians to come together, to come to a common word.

I suspect that what I have disclosed of the letter’s contents will come as little surprise to you. Perhaps you are already aware of the agreement of the faiths as to these essentials; perhaps you think such agreement bland and unspecific; perhaps you are unconvinced of its cash value. Or perhaps you are even of the opinion that the opening statement, with which I began and which is the essential rationale for the letter, can be criticized. It perhaps overstates the potential for damage of conflict that is properly inter-religious rather than economic or geopolitical. It perhaps plays unwittingly into the hands of those who seek to caricature our present status as that of combatants in a war on terror. It almost certainly miscalculates wildly the numbers of those who can be called Christians in any real sense.

I am no scholar of Islam, but it seems to me that three features of the letter merit our particular attention. The first is the collective authorship. It is the work of one hundred and thirty-eight Muslim scholars and academics, whose diversity must call us to listen. They come from north Africa, eastern Europe, north America, Asia and, crucially, from the Gulf and Middle Eastern states, and so the letter appears genuinely comprehensive in its origins.

Secondly, the letter is clear in its bold suggestion that the prophet Muhammad did not bring anything fundamentally or essentially new to God’s revelation. It instead surmises that in calling the faithful to love the one God the prophet of Islam restated and alluded to the Hebrew Bible’s commandment to love the one God.

And, thirdly, it has little truck with those of any tradition who use or sponsor violence to achieve their ends. It states ‘…to those who relish conflict and destruction for their own sake or reckon that ultimately they stand to gain through them, we say that our very eternal souls are all also at stake if we fail to sincerely make every effort to make peace and come together in harmony’. It has little truck with Muslims who seek to make enemies of Christians and reminds its readers that in the words of the Qu’ran Christians and Jews are ‘people of the Scripture’, among whom ‘there is a staunch community who recite the revelations of God, falling prostrate before him. They believe in God and in the Last Day, and enjoin right conduct and forbid indecency, and vie with one another in good works. These are of the righteous’.

Those three features persuade me that in this letter we have more than a series of worn-out platitudes whose repetition will do little to change the face of God’s earth. In the diversity of authorship, in the acknowledgment of our common ancestry in the Abrahamic tradition, and in its rejection of violence it seems to me that we have received a peace-offering. It might serve as a new basis for the treatment of religious minorities, whether Christian or Muslim. It might lead to a re-casting of the fear and suspicion with which we have come to view one another.

For this morning, of course, we heard retold the story of a Syrian warrior, the forbear perhaps of those who bring bloodshed and division to the Middle East today. It is the story of an Arab who seeks healing at the hands of his Israelite enemy, who is asked to undress and bathe seven times in the waters of a foreign stream. It is the story of a man who, in his willingness to submit to a strange jurisdiction, and in his nakedness before something he does not understand, is made whole in body and brought to a knowledge of the truth.

Dare we follow him into those unknown waters, or will we remain in the security of a chariot parked safely on the river-bank? Amen.

Sunday 14 October 2007

2 Kings 5: 1-5, 7-15c;
2 Timothy 2: 8-15;
Luke 17: 11-19.