Hilton Head Island, SC – September 18, 2015
The Chapel Without Walls
Isaiah 42:1-9; Luke 21:20-24
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – Luke 21:24 – “They will fall by the edge of the sword, and be led captive among all the nations; and Jerusalem will be trodden down by the Gentiles, until the times of the Gentiles are fulfilled.” – Luke 21:24
No one ever would have heard of Muhammad of Mecca had there been no Jesus of Nazareth. And no one ever would have heard of Jesus had there been no Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, no Moses or David or Isaiah. There are three major religions in the Western World. They are, in historical order, first Judaism, then Christianity, and then Islam. Without Judaism, there would be no Christianity, and without Judaism and Christianity, there would be no Islam. All the adherents of those three religions are called “The People of the Book.” And they are called that by none other than Muhammad himself in the Book of Islam, the Quran.
It took almost two thousand years for the religion of the Old Testament to perceive itself as a religion. Historically that fully happened only in the century before the time of Jesus. It took Christianity more than three centuries for it to see itself as a functioning religion which sprang from, but which also was separate from, Judaism. It took Islam five years to see itself as a religion which sprang from, but which also was separate from, Judaism and Christianity. Within five years of the death of Muhammad in 632 CE, an Arab army had swept north out of the Arabian Peninsula. They conquered Jerusalem in 638 and Persia by 651. Later the Muslims turned west, conquering all of North Africa, which had been completely Christianized, crossed the Strait of Gibraltar, conquering all of Spain, and only in 732, at the Battle of Tours in northwest France, did Charles Martel, Charlemagne’s grandfather, stop the rapidly flowing tide of Islam. The Muslims retreated south of the Pyrenees, where they remained in Spain until 1492, the same year in which Columbus sailed the ocean blue, and the Jews, along with the Muslims, were driven out of Iberia by those two not-so-kindly Christian monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella. Had the French not stopped the Muslims in the eighth century of the Christian Era, instead of reciting the Apostles Creed or any other creed of the Church, we might say each Friday (but never on Sunday): La illaha il’Allah, “There is no God but God,” “God” being spelled “A-l-l-a-h.”
Winston Churchill said, “Beware of all generalizations, including this one,” and then he went to give a generalization. Here are three generalizations. Judaism eventually became a world religion by people who first called themselves Hebrews and then Israelites and then Jews having babies, but not in large numbers, and not in any kind of a hurry. Christianity became a world religion by missionaries going out into the Mediterranean Basin over a three-century period, and then beyond, converting Gentiles (i.e., non-Jews) to become Christians. Islam became a world religion in an astonishingly short time when a Muslim army conquered millions of people from Gibraltar to western India in one short century. In general, therefore, Judaism became Judaism by means of procreation, Christianity became Christianity by means of millions of individual conversions, and Islam initially became Islam because the Arabs were incredible at militarization.
However, once the Muslims had conquered nearly all the lands they were going to conquer, and that happened within a century of Muhammad’s death, they settled down and lived in peace. The word for “peace” in Arabic is “salam,” and the root word for “Islam” (which means “Surrender” or “Submission”) also comes from the word “peace.”
Most of the people who attend The Chapel Without Walls are, to use a familiar expression, “of a certain age.” Those of a certain age have been around for quite a while. They are like wine or Scotch whisky or cheese; it takes time for them properly to ripen. Up until September 11, 2001, or “9/11” as we call it, most Christians did not pay much attention to most Muslims. They were “there,” somewhere in the Eastern Hemisphere, and we were “here,” somewhere in the western part of the Eastern Hemisphere or in the Western Hemisphere. Oh, there had been wars between Christians and Muslims, many of them. But mostly they weren’t really big wars, with the primary exception of the Crusades. Charitably, the Crusades can be called the efforts of lunatics to win back the Holy Land from lunatics. There were never enough Jews in the Holy Land until the twentieth century to fight anybody over the Holy Land, so it was the Muslims and Christians who waved the banners and the swords in and around the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea. But since the middle of the eighth century of the Common Era until almost the end of the twentieth century, there was far more peace (shalom, salam) among the Peoples of the Book than there was warfare and bloodshed.
Starting in the 1980s and 1990s, that began to change. Most Americans were not aware of it, because the growing tension was all centered in the Middle East or Central Asia or North Africa. Then came 9/11. And then fear started to grip the spirits and psyches of many Americans. However, for every American or European killed by Muslims in the past thirty years, there have been a hundred or two hundred Muslims killed by Muslims in that same period. We happen to be living in the opening years of what may turn out to be another huge religious conflict in the world. Nonetheless, up to now it is almost exclusively Muslims attacking Muslims rather than Muslims attacking Christians, and that includes Europe and elsewhere where there is a preponderance of Christians. To date the bloodshed is mainly intra-Muslim rather than inter-Muslim/Christian. In order to maintain a proper historical perspective, it is imperative to remember that.
Isaiah 42 is a chapter of scripture which is frequently read in Christian congregations during Advent, the Sundays leading up to Christmas. For Christians, it is a messianic passage, and we believe it refers to Jesus. To Jews, because it is messianic to Christians, it is no longer messianic to Jews, if it ever was. It is the Christian understanding that the Messiah (Jesus) was going to be, was, and still is a “light to the nations.” In Hebrew the word for “nations” is goyim, and in Greek, the word for goyim is “Gentiles.” We believe that Jesus became God’s light to the nations, the Gentiles, so that they who dwelt in darkness ultimately saw a great light.
During the lifetime of Jesus, almost no Jews accepted either Jesus himself or his teachings. A few did, the twelve disciples, a few hundreds or thousands of others, and Paul. But most Jews rejected Jesus in his own time, and he was painfully, even excruciatingly, aware of that. (The word “excruciating” literally means “from the cross.”) Thus it was that only two or three days before Jesus was crucified, he foresaw the destruction of Jerusalem. It wasn’t because most Jews had rejected him, however. It was because the Jewish nation had foolishly deluded themselves into thinking they could defeat the Roman Empire on the field of battle. When they tried to do that forty years after Jesus died, they were crushed by imperial Rome. Seeing this disaster coming, Jesus said of his fellow Jews, “They will fall by the edge of the sword, and be led captive among all nations; and Jerusalem will be trodden down by the Gentiles, until the times of the Gentiles are fulfilled” (Luke 21:24).
Jesus surely was thinking about the Romans. But might he also have foreseen the rise of the Arab Muslims six centuries later? Different Christians would answer that question differently, but it is a fact that six hundred years after the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus (and the first was affirmed by Muhammad in the Quran, but not the second), a Muslim army came and conquered Jerusalem, almost without a fight. (The word “Jerusalem,” incidentally, literally means “City of Peace.” Yerushalayim: what an ironic name for a city which has been fought over for four thousand years!)
And now, two thousand years after Jesus, young Muslim soldiers, but especially young Muslim terrorists, are shooting and bombing Christians in the Middle East, Egypt, the Balkans, France, Spain, and Britain, and to a far, far lesser extent in the United States of America, even including 9/11.
It is very easy to lose perspective when events start to move forward relatively quickly on the time-clock of history. We imagine that civilization is clashing, and that it is coming unglued. “I will show you fear in a handful of dust,” said T.S. Eliot in his monumental poem The Waste Land. And indeed, there have been multitudes of handsful of dust, in Kabul and Baghdad and Damascus and Paris and Madrid and London --- and in New York and Washington. However, in the great scheme of things, these incidents may be mere blips on the screen of history, compared to major huge interreligious wars which have confronted us previously. It all depends on how international leaders act from now on. It is not politicians who are inspiring angry, unemployed, emasculated young Muslim men to make bombs or take rifles to kill their supposed “enemies”; it is charismatic and lethally misguided fanatics who incorrectly assume that jihad means “holy war.” It doesn’t. Originally and primarily it means “internal struggle.” In Christian terms, Jihad is the attempt for individuals to “get right with God.” No one is following the will of Allah who kills innocent people or even the soldiers of a purported enemy’s army who are not initially fighting back. God is a God of peace who desires peace among all His children, as disparate and divided as we determine ourselves to be.
Remember the young man who drove the truck down the crowded street in Nice, France? A newspaper story said he was a 31-year-old father of three who was obsessed with fitness and sex. His radicalization went unnoticed by his wife, children, or anyone else. He drew inspiration from the Internet for his plans. Were there no Internet, I suspect that millions of people all over the world would be alive and uninjured, living ordinary existences. But these are extraordinary times, and it does not require a great deal of effort, direct or indirect, to push young men who feel powerless into despicable actions. The 18-year-old who shot several people outside a Munich shopping mall had been bullied in his younger years, and he had been watching “killer video games” on his computer before he went on his rampage.
Sometimes easily-suggestible young males do not need much coaxing to go over the edge. Sermons like this were never preached forty years ago, and they may not be preached forty years from now. But at present, millions of American and other Christians are wondering how to respond to Islam. Is Islam the enemy, are Muslims the enemy, or are Islamists the enemy? Islamists are people, almost all of them boys or men, who feel threatened by the Christian West, and want therefore to turn the world into a gigantic Umma, an All-Muslim world. It is imperative that we realize that only a very small percentage of Muslims feel that way.
Remember when the Muslim terrorists went into a French church several weeks ago and slit the throat of an octogenarian priest as he was preparing to serve Mass to his parishioners? Pope Francis did not directly condemn the killers. He condemned what he called “absurd violence.” But these Islamist terrorists killed an innocent elderly priest! How could the Pope justify that? He did not justify it. Instead he called their violent act absurd. The Pope said, “If I talk about Islamic violence, then I also have to talk about Catholic violence. Not all Muslims are violent, just like not all Catholics are violent.” We all must condemn the absurdity of all such violence. It is madness. It is anarchistic mayhem. It is essentially an effort to evoke fear in the hearts of everyone on “the other side,” and if primal fear is thus evoked, the terrorists always succeed.
On the cross Jesus did not condemn violence; he absorbed violence. “Father, forgive them,” he said, “for they know not what they do.” For some time to come, Christians are going to have to absorb violence. Islamist terrorists are conducting much of the violence going on in the world today. They think they know what they are doing, but they don’t. They must be combated; tragically, there is no alternative to that. But success against Muslim terrorists must come almost exclusively from other Muslims. If the Christian West sends troops against armies in the Muslim East, we will only succeed in creating untold larger numbers of Islamist terrorists, because there is no shortage of very troubled young men from Indonesia to Indiana. But please remember this: After the men killed the old French priest, the heads of the French Muslim Council said, “We are all Catholics of France now.” Do you recall where the idea behind that statement originated? After 9/11, thousands of French citizens carried signs saying, “We Are All Americans Now!” The French said that about us, the Americans!
In grossly overheated times, cool heads must prevail. Overreaction to overreaction only stokes even more irrational overreaction. Intentionally promoting fear is an exceedingly dangerous choice in the face of absurd violence. We must pay far more attention to the best that is in Islam, not the worst. It is true there are some calls to violence in the recorded words of Muhammad in the Quran, but the same is true for Jesus. “Do you think that I have to bring peace on earth?” Jesus asked his disciples. “No, I tell you, but rather division” (Luke 12:51). Muhammad was far more a man of peace than of war, and the same is true for Jesus. Whether something got lost in translation is open to debate, but it is not truly debatable that the founders of both religions were lifelong supporters of shalom and salam. And after all, Hebrew and Arabic are both Semitic languages.
The Quran is divided into chapters. In Arabic, “chapter” is surah. All but one of those surahs begins with the words, “In the name of Allah, full of compassion, the Compassionate.” It is a deliberate mistake and an intentional slur for Christians to insist that the God of the Jews and the Muslims is a God of war, but the God of the Christians is a God of peace. He is one God. He has always been one God. And whether we call God “God” or “Allah,” God is solely a God of peace and compassion.
In the tension of our times, many Christians will point to the misuse of the Quran by Muslims rather than to its proper use. In like manner, many Muslims have pointed to the misuse of the Bible by Christians and Jews, rather than to its proper use.
Bruce Lawrence concludes his book about the Quran with these words: “The message endures, as do it critics and its carriers. The ocean will not be exhausted; its waves will sustain generation after generation. A Book of Signs continues to challenge and to change both worlds.”
And so, to the Judaeo-Christian world and to the Muslim world, we end with the Shema, the ancient creed of the Jews who were the spiritual progenitors of all the Peoples of the Book, “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is ONE!”