It’s fun to root for our favorite sports teams, to curse Yankees or Steelers or Rangers, draw battle lines and wipe out the competition. And, of course, no matter the result we look forward to returning to battle the next season. But imagine if the battle was drawn this way.

This very afternoon, even as we sit here, a battle is brewing. We, donning crosses and carrying bibles, live in the serpent’s lair. At the crossroads of humanity, we will face armies of stars, crescents, Buddhas and Krishna. Victory is the only way forward. Our side must eliminate the other for all time.

In the words of Ralph Reed, former head of the Christian Coalition, “What Christians have got to do is take back this country, one precinct at a time, one neighborhood at a time and one state at a time.” Pat Robertson offered that our strategy should be “the same as General Douglas MacArthur employed against the Japanese in the Pacific ... bypass their strongholds, then surround them, isolate them, bombard them, then blast the individuals out of their power bunkers with hand-to-hand combat. The battle for Iwo Jima was not pleasant, but our troops won it. The battle to regain the soul of America won't be pleasant either, but we will win it.” Startling words? Yes, but throughout its 2000-year history, Christianity has often envisioned itself in this way—dominating the world in Christ’s name, converting all to one mind.

I suspect those of us who gather here at the Old South Church do not quite share this vision of our Christian faith. We might even label it as narrow-minded and exclusive. There is something about that vision of Christianity for some of us that may even turn our stomachs.

Against this narrow-minded vision of our Christian faith, we label ourselves as inclusive, highlighting the inscription on our portico: “Behold I have set before you an open door.” Biblically, we argue that Jesus practiced kindness to strangers of other faiths and nations, and we quote Jesus saying, “judge not, lest you be judged.” Theologically, we argue that God’s greatness cannot be contained by our limited expressions, that Christ teaches us humility and thus we cannot presume to know all the ways God’s revelation manifests itself in humankind.

I have heard this kind of Christianity lauded as “cosmopolitan.” In an interview, Civil Rights activist Evelyn Dorsey Polk described herself this way: “I'm a cosmopolitan Christian. By that, I mean, I was born and raised in the Congregational Church. When I moved to Meridian, I took instruction in the Catholic Church. I joined the Methodist Church and then I ended up in the Baptist Church because of family requests.” That understanding of cosmopolitan Christianity seems to make a lot of sense in a Christian context, where doctrinal differences get skimmed over, but Christ remains central at every turn.

But I wonder at the aptness of that metaphor in our pluralistic, interfaith context.

You see, Webster’s defines “cosmopolitan” is “belonging to all the world; not limited to the politics, interests or prejudices of one part of the world … a person who is free from local, provincial or national bias or attachment.” While I do not side with Ralph Reed, Pat Robertson and others who seek the elimination of all non-Christian traditions, I see a disharmony between the words “cosmopolitan” and “Christian,” too. What about my bias and attachment to Christ? I don’t belong to the world; I belong to Christ. Biblically, the whole of the New Testament points to Jesus Christ as the central figure of God’s revelation, and I might quote Jesus’ own words, “I am the way, the truth and the life.” Theologically, I profess Jesus Christ as my savior, as the revelation of God’s own self, the center of my life. I find hope and sustenance in the proclamation of the reign of God, the triumph of peace and justice and love for all people. That is who I am. If I didn’t believe that, well, I’d be a Unitarian.

Indeed, no religious tradition can be cosmopolitan without sacrificing its very soul. As a Christian I cannot stop professing Christ, just as Jews cannot stop understanding themselves as the “Chosen People”, and Muslims cannot cease confessing that, “There is no god but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet.” To do so violates the very core of our faith identities.

So what then are we do? If you will permit a pagan image in a sermon about interfaith relationships, I feel caught in a scene from Homer’s Odyssey. Odysseus and his crew face a treacherous turn on their journey, forced to navigate the narrows between two deadly foes, Scylla and Charybdis. Scylla on one side, a mass of tentacles, heads and fangs eager to snatch boat or crew, and Charybdis on the other, a whirlpool that three times a day sucks down and spews up the sea tide in a whirling maelstrom. I worry that Christianity might be entangled in tentacles of self-righteousness and triumphalism, becoming part of a Scylla-like religious monster that gobbles up all who oppose it. At the same time, I reject the whirling maelstrom of Charybdis, sucking down all religious traditions only to spew them out in a unified mass of symbols, ideologies and rituals. Like Odysseus, we must somehow navigate between a cosmopolitan erasure of Christ’s uniqueness and a self-righteous destruction of all others.

This question grows more pressing as we become aware that people of other faiths do not dwell an ocean away, but right in our own neighborhoods. Diana Eck, in her book A New Religious America, describes a new picture of America’s “we the people.” While the United States has always contained people of various faiths, over the last 30 years we have become the most religiously diverse nation on earth. Immigration has brought people from all over the world to become citizens, and these new citizens have brought with them the religious traditions of the world—Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Jainism, Sikhism, Zoroastrianism, African and Afro-Caribbean traditions. Herself a United Methodist, Eck says, “It’s one thing to be unconcerned about or ignorant of Muslim or Buddhist neighbors on the other side of the world, but when Buddhists are our next-door neighbors, when our children are best friends with Muslim classmates, when a Hindu is running for a seat on the school committee, all of us have a new vested interest in our neighbors, both as citizens and people of faith.” Since September 11, the reality of that intimate diversity has come home to us in a new way, as we realize that people of every major religious tradition worked in the World Trade Center, and as we struggle to understand violence while avoiding harmful stereotypes about Muslims. With Eck, I find this new religious pluralism exciting and enriching, but struggle to navigate the Scylla and Charbydis of self-righteousness and cosmopolitanism.

Our shared life here at Old South has reflected our collective search for faithful ways to interact with those of other religions. The Women at the Well have dedicated their entire program year to hearing from speakers of various faith traditions. They began by hearing from those within other Christian denominations, and are beginning to branch out to Judaism and Islam. Just last week, over 40 people gathered on a Wednesday evening to engage in a brief introduction to Islam. In November, the Church Council voted to become a member of the Greater Boston Interfaith Organization, in part spurred on by the realization that we share with our interfaith neighbors a common interest in our shared community. Then Lael Murphy led an Adult Education series during Advent entitled, “Who is your Savior? Embracing Christ’s Coming this Christmas Season,” refocusing us on the uniqueness of Christ in our pluralistic world. In all our explorations, we remain Christians. There is something in us that must still confess that Christ is the way, the truth and the life.

What amazes me about this particular question is that it is not new. Although it may manifest itself uniquely in the contemporary United States, Christians have been carefully negotiating relationships with other faiths from the very beginning. The story Liza read for us from Acts evidences it. Paul has been preaching the Gospel of Christ’s grace and salvation throughout the Mediterranean world, but his outreach had typically been to Jews and to those labeled “godfearers,” Gentiles who were sympathetic to Jewish ideas and beliefs. There is common ground in their understandings of the world But this passage from Acts today is a little different. He is not addressing faithful Jews or sympathetic Gentiles.

In this story Paul finds himself in Athens, the cosmopolitan center of intellectual life, perhaps not unlike Boston. And he’s addressing Epicureans and Stoics, two well-established philosophical groups. This is Paul’s first encounter with people who do not share his basic framework for understanding the world. In the section prior to what Liza read, Paul made a first attempt to extend his same message of the Messiah to the Athenians, but it made no sense and they labeled him a babbler. Still, his conviction intrigued them and they invited him to speak at the Areopagus, a hall where the Supreme Athenian Council held its meetings.

What does he do? Does he emphatically and more loudly repeat the same message he preached in Galatia and Corinth, commanding with passion that they must adopt Christ or face dire consequences? Or does he accommodate their understandings and abandon his own convictions in favor of some common ground? He does neither, and both. Look back with me to the story. Open up your bulletins and look at it again. Paul begins not with harsh condemnations, but with an acclamation of the religious spirit of the Athenian people. He grounds this acclamation in an altar inscription he has found: “To an unknown God.” Paul proceeds to expound upon the uncontainability of God, the mystery of God that cannot be contained in shrines (or, one might add, in words) that are made by human hands. Human beings “search for God, and perhaps grope for him and find him.” Paul expresses this understanding of the uncontainable God not in his own Christian or Jewish words, but in the phrases of two ancient Greek poets: Epimenides and Aratus. Paul quotes from them: “In him we live and move and have our being,” and “for we too are his offspring.” He finds God through Greek poetry. It sounds downright cosmopolitan, does it not? One might summarize these statements from Paul like this: God is the ultimate unknown, and we all search for God in various ways, yet God is the unity that runs through all our traditions.

But that’s not the end. Keep looking at the story. Throughout that cosmopolitan approach, Paul weaves an explanation of the God revealed through Jesus Christ. After citing the altar inscription to an unknown god, he says, “What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you.” Yes, he says, God’s mysteries are too great to be contained, but I have experienced God in the incarnation of Jesus, and I must testify. Paul bears witness to God as creator of heaven and earth, to God’s desire for repentance, and to the life, death and resurrection of Jesus.

At the same time he is affirming the traditions of his Athenian audience, he is speaking his own truth and offering Christ to them. He does not condemn, nor does he silence his own testimony to Christ. Paul manages to enter into respectful and knowledgeable conversation with the people of Athens while maintaining the centrality of Christ. He does not retreat into the rhetoric of sameness in which Christianity and Athenian paganism are fundamentally the same, nor does he launch into a self-righteous repetition of Christian doctrine.

So, did Paul get it right? Is this the way we should go? Christians disagree. Some say he should have tried harder to win converts, others that he should have tried harder to find universal principles and common ground. I tend to think he negotiated pretty well—finding genuine conversation without relinquishing his own commitment to Christ. But who’s to say for sure? The debate has never stopped.

How can we confess Christ as God’s son and our savior yet remain open to people who faithfully follow other paths? We could probably fill the sanctuary from floor to ceiling with all the theological treatises on this topic alone. I will not, therefore, attempt to outline some definitive answer this morning. Anything I might say would be tentative at best, over-simplistic at worst. But in light of our common attention to interfaith relationships, through programs happening here at Old South, I wanted to draw our attention again to the complexities of the situation, lest we get entangled in self-righteousness or lost in sameness. Paul’s encounter with the Athenians gives us one example of how to navigate this Scylla and Charybdis, and we might certainly be able to list many others.

But this tension does not going to go away, nor should it. When the goddess Circe first describes the dangers of Scylla and Charybdis to Odysseus, he immediately demands to know how to defeat them once and for all. Circe only shakes her head and replies: “Must you have battle in your heart forever? … Old Contender, will you not yield to the immortal gods? …that nightmare cannot die…no, no, put all your backs into it, and row on.” My friends, our own quandary has persisted these 2000 years. I do not see a ready end in sight. May we row on, with prayer, faith and humility, laying all our trust in the unknown God made known to us in Jesus Christ.

Let us pray: Vast, eternal, uncontainable God, bless and strengthen every striving for truth, justice, love and freedom in your world. Open our hearts to all people, yet keep our eyes always focused on you. Help us to share, with faith and humility, the grace we have come to know in Jesus Christ. Amen.

Scripture Reading
Acts 17: 22-31

Then Paul stood in front of the Areopagus and said, “Athenians, I see how extremely religious you are in every way. For as I went through the city and looked carefully at the objects of your worship, I found among them an altar with the inscription, ‘To an unknown god.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. The God who made the world and everything in it, he who is Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by human hands, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mortals life and breath and all things. From one ancestor he made all nations to inhabit the whole earth, and he allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live, so that they would search for God and perhaps grope for him and find him—though indeed he is not far from each one of us. For ‘In him we live and move and have our being’; as even some of your own poets have said,

‘For we too are his offspring.’

Since we are God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the deity is like gold, or silver, or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of mortals. While God has overlooked the times of human ignorance, now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will have the world judged in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed, and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.”