Worldly Wisdom and Foolish Grace. Barbara Carnegie Campbell
the Churches of Christ in the USA. This version replaced the Revised Standard Version which the National Council of Churches had published in 1952.
The spiritual quotes from the Islamic tradition are taken from two sources. I take these quotes from the Quran which contains the revelations the Prophet Muhammad received from God’s messenger, the Angel Gabriel; messages which Islam considers the literal word of God. I will be quoting from “The Study Quran” with Editor-in-Chief, Seyyed Hossein Nasr. This is the translation and commentary that sits near my desk at all times.
Islamic quotes will also be taken from “The Wisdom of the Prophet: Sayings of Muhammad” which translates selections from the Hadith, the second most important literary source in Islam, into English. The Hadith do not contain revelations, in the sense that the Quran is considered a complete revelation. Hadith was collected about two centuries after the Prophet’s death to document what the Prophet is remembered as saying or doing during his lifetime and relied on people’s memories over generations. A rule of thumb in Islam is that if any hadith is contrary to or not supported by the Quran, it cannot be considered valid.
Let me share, a this point, a few stories from my personal faith and interfaith journey. I have spent nearly seven decades listening to and studying stories about the man people call “Jesus of Nazareth” and “Jesus, the Christ.” This man, most agree, lived two thousand years ago on the other side of the world. As a child, adults told me stories of Jesus that led me to understand him as a man of compassion, acceptance, and love. As I grew in understanding, I accepted that Jesus uniquely and sacrificially revealed the divine One to me and therefore had “saved” me from all that sought to destroy my life.
Later, I began to hear from some Christians that only the followers of Jesus were “saved.” Many said he was the only divine son of the one and only God who judged people severely for their mistakes and saved only those who believed in Jesus. Believing in Jesus, many told me, made people “good enough” to go to heaven when they died. Only by God’s grace did I refuse (eventually) to believe that the one God was vindictive and violent and continue to know Jesus as one who perfectly revealed a compassionate, forgiving, and grace-filled Creator.
Perhaps it was this conflict between two understandings of Christianity that finally led me to seek a seminary education. I went to learn how to study the words of Christian scripture more deeply so that I could defend and share the compassion and justice of the God I knew and trusted. In a Christian seminary, it was no surprise that as I learned how to study ancient literature most of what I studied was the Younger Testament. I had chosen to attend a progressive seminary within a reformed Christian denomination so that I could study many theologies of the divine other than that of a God who seeks retribution and saves only a chosen few.
When I became an ordained Presbyterian (PCUSA) minister who preached to a congregation regularly, I continued to study the biblical texts that I was called to interpret to others. I read many different interpretations of these stories from many Christian commentaries.
I found the same interpretations repeated almost verbatim again and again in many of these commentaries as if the authors were simply copying each other. Once in a while I found newer research based on what is called “The Search for the Historical Jesus.” The theologies of these scholars, who other Christians sometimes considered heretical, began to line up with the Jesus I had known since childhood. The “historical Jesus” spoke less to salvation doctrine and more to how one could live faithfully and in keeping with a divine calling.
In 2003, I became the pastor of St. Mark Presbyterian Church in Portland, Oregon, one of the most progressive Presbyterian Church in the USA (PCUSA) congregations in Oregon, and one of only three open and affirming “More Light” congregations in Cascades Presbytery. I felt I had finally found my people, my tribe, within my life-long PCUSA community. St. Mark had been a founding member, before I became their pastor, of both the Community of Welcoming Congregations of Oregon and the Interfaith Council of Greater Portland.
In 2007, a member of a small Jewish Renewal congregation called P’nai Or (which means literally “faces of light”) walked into my office at St. Mark asking if her community could rent space in our building on Fridays and Saturdays. Since we were not using the building on those days, our congregation agreed eagerly anticipating, initially, some much needed additional income. It wasn’t long, however, before we appreciated even more deeply the relationship that began to develop between P’nai Or and St. Mark and the fact that they could help us reconnect with our Christian roots by teaching us much more about stories within the Elder Testament and Judaism.
We grieved with these brothers and sisters from P’nai Or when their founding rabbi and our friend, Rabbi Aryeh Hirshfied, z’tl died in a tragic scuba diving accident in Mexico in 2009. (z’tl is a shortened Hebrew phrase which is transliterated as “His name is a blessing” and is used in the Jewish tradition to show deep respect to those who have died.) St. Mark stood alongside P’nai Or, in compassion and support, at Aryeh’s memorial service at St. Mark.
Almost a year later, two amazing experiences brought us even closer together. First of all, Rabbi Zaslow, the Interim Rabbi of P’nai Or at that time, offered to teach a class based on his soon to be published book, Roots and Branches. One night each week for six weeks, over sixty people from P’nai Or, St. Mark and other churches in the area, came together in an over-crowded fellowship hall at St. Mark to study with Rabbi David. I took on the assignment from Rabbi David to prime our discussions each week with some of the sticky issues that complicated our Christian/Jewish dialogue.
In this class, Christians and Jews alike began to understand Jesus as a spiritual seeker who had been immersed in the study of Torah. Torah is also called the Pentateuch (from the Greek, penta, for five) and refers to the first five books in the Elder Testament which are attributed to Moses. Jesus had been taught the words of Torah since he was a young boy. Most of the words, images and stories that Jesus used in his teachings were learned from Torah. The justice and healing that Jesus worked to create during his lifetime was the justice and healing that he had learned from Torah and had heard the Elder Testament prophets declare to be God’s will.
Not long after our shared class, during our Wednesday night choir practice preceding Good Friday, I looked down into the sanctuary from the choir loft and saw that P’nai Or’s set up person was preparing the sanctuary for their Friday Shabbat service. St. Mark also planned to be in the sanctuary at the same time for our Good Friday worship that night. I had forgotten to remind P’nai Or of our Good Friday worship service!
The following morning, I called Rabbi David. He immediately came into the church where we recognized that we had little time to get word out about a change of venue for either group. After considering whether we could simply find separate places in the building for each group to meet, we began wondering if it would be possible to create an experience of worship that would connect spiritually with Christians (who were mourning the crucifixion and death of Jesus) and Jews (who had been blamed for the death of Jesus by Christians for nearly 2,000 years). We knew full well that such a thing had probably never been attempted before but decided we should do what we both felt called by the Spirit to do.
I knew that first of all I had to remove the First Century CE anti-Semitic editorial polemics from the Passion Story of Jesus’ arrest and crucifixion that attempted to blame “the chief priests, all the elders, and the people;” and subsequently “all Jews” for the death of Jesus. Some of those anti-Semitic texts are: Matt 26:3–5; 27:1–2, 20–22, 24–25; Mark 14:1–2; 15:1, 6–15, and Luke 22:3–6, 66–71, 23:1–5, 13–23.
As I began to re-translate the offensive words of the Passion Story into phrases that perhaps better reflected the truth of what happened, Rabbi David walked back and forth from my office to the sanctuary where he had continued to pray about whether such an interfaith Good Friday/Passover experience was even possible. When I read him the texts I had revised, he asked me, “Can you do that?” My response was, “It’s been retranslated and revised for two thousand years!”
We decided to create a fairly traditional Christian Good Friday worship experience with the P’nai Or congregation being invited to stand with us in our time of mourning with their prayers and worship. We began, however, as the Jewish