Sermon at The Church of the Holy Apostles, New York City,
October 1, 2006, The Seventeenth Sunday of Pentecost: Year B
The Reverend Peter R. Carey
Numbers 11: 4 - 6, 10 - 16, 24 - 29
Psalm 19
James 4: 7 -- 5: 6
Mark 9: 38 - 43, 45, 47 - 48

     In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

     I think we need to face up to the fact that tolerance is not a big theme in the Bible. It’s not that it’s not there, it’s just that it’s not there in a big way. In many ways, the Old Testament is a text book on intolerant religion. God Himself is often depicted in the Bible as highly intolerant.

     In the book of Exodus, chapter 34, God orders the Israelites to destroy all the houses of worship of their enemies. To burn them to the ground. In chapter 22, God goes even further, when he says that persons of other faiths are to be “utterly destroyed.” In Numbers 21, God orders the Israelites to exterminate the Amorites and the Midianites. Why? Because their religious beliefs were different from those of the Jews. And in Deuteronomy 13, we read that religious prophets of other faiths ought to be put out of business by being killed. And we all know that in Leviticus it says that homosexuals should be stoned to death. There are plenty of other examples in the Hebrew Bible of intolerant religion.

     What these texts show is that the very idea of God Himself has evolved, slowly and over time, from one of a sometimes angry and vindictive and intolerant God to the loving and forgiving One that was preached by and indeed incarnated in the life of Jesus Christ.

     But while Christ may have preached tolerance, his church soon forgot it. In the Christian era, the church’s record of tolerance is just as bad as the one recorded in the Old Testament, if not worse. Once the Christian church became the official religion of the state with the Edict of Milan in the year 313, it lost no time at all in using state power to impose its faith on others. And the church’s theologians lost no time justifying both torture and capital punishment as legitimate ways of dealing with dissent. Both Augustine and Aquinas taught that such methods were permissible.

     So, crusades were launched, infidels were sent to the galleys, dissenters were tortured, witches were burned, nonconformists of all types were imprisoned or, if they were lucky, forced to convert to Christianity or to submit to the orthodoxy of the day.

     Certainly things have improved in modern times, but you can still find plenty of examples of religious intolerance. Pope Pius IX summed up the attitude of the Catholic Church in the early part of the 20th century with the phrase, “Error has no rights.” In the 1970s, Bailey Smith, who was then the President of the Southern Baptist Convention, said, “God does not hear the prayer of the Jew.” In the 1990’s, less than 20 years ago, a fundamentalist minister named Fred Phelps led his church’s members to the funeral of Matthew Shepherd, a gay man who was brutally murdered in Wyoming because he was gay. These born-again Christians stood outside the Episcopal Church where Shepherd’s funeral was taking place with signs that read, “God hates fags” and “Matt in hell.” After the funeral Phelps told the press, “Not only is homosexuality a sin, but anyone who supports fags is just as guilty as they are. You are both worthy of death.”

     It is true that we can take some comfort in the fact that in the Episcopal Church we have a pretty good record in the area of religious tolerance. However, it is by no means the dominant point of view within the Anglican Communion. Religious bigotry and intolerance are alive and well in the Anglican Communion. The organization of Anglican bishops of Africa recently declared our church to be a “cancerous lump” that needs to be “excised”, language that sounds a lot to me like ethnic cleansing. And the primate of the Anglican Church of Nigeria, a church of some 15 million members, urged his country’s legislative bodies earlier this year to pass laws that have now criminalized the practice of homosexuality and have even criminalized any individual or group that so much as speaks in favor of it.

     The record of Islam is no better. Three christians were executed in Indonesia on trumped up charges just a couple of weeks ago. In Iran, not more than six months ago, three homosexual men were publicly hanged. And we need look no further than to Iraq to see how well Muslim Shiites get along with their Sunni cousins.

     Why have the synagogue, the church, and the mosque fallen victim so often and so tragically to religious and racial and gender intolerance? Well, hatred of “the other” has long been recognized as a unifying force and institutions use intolerance as a means not only of encouraging unity, but also of assuring themselves of their own unique superiority. What better way is there to assure yourself that you are clean than by denouncing the other as dirty.

     We should remember that there lies deep in the heart of every individual a tendency to fear and despise others. Call it original sin. Call it human nature. Call it what you want. But religion sometimes permits and even encourages that tendency in order to promote itself. The tendency to be intolerant is very very strong in religion.

     Now faced with this kind of apalling record, is it any wonder that many people who believe in individual freedom of conscience, have a problem when it comes to associating themselves with organized religion? Study after study show that there are many people who believe in God and yearn for some sort of spiritual life, but who do not want to belong to a church. To tell you the truth, if it were not for the Episcopal Church, I’m not sure I’d want to belong either.

     So for all these reasons today’s Old Testament and Gospel readings are of importance to us as people who believe in tolerant religion, in open-mindedness, in freedom of conscience, in respect for the beliefs of others. These two texts--from Numbers chapter 11, and from the ninth chapter of the Gospel according to Mark put the lie to the assertion that tolerance is not present within the Judeo-Christian tradition. It is. The idea of tolerance is not, for sure, a major theme in the Old Testament, nor is a highly developed one in the New. But at the same time it is not an entirely foreign idea brought into Christianity in modern times. Rather, traces of it can be found in the Hebrew Bible and can be found as an integral part of the preaching of Jesus, as today’s Gospel makes clear.

     The idea of tolerance is present in today’s first reading in the story of Eldad and Medad, who were not members of the inner circle of seventy elders and hence not entitled to prophesy. But they were doing just that and were thereby operating outside the offically approved structure. So a zealous young man goes to Moses and urges him to shut them down, to make them stop, to put them out of business. But Moses refuses and he says, “Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets, that the Lord would put his spirit upon them.” Moses understands that God does not confine his gifts to previously authorized channels, but that the Spirit of God operates where She wills.

     Jesus understood that also. In today’s Gospel, he flatly refuses to ban or even to criticize the work of an unauthorized exorcist. “Do not forbid him,” Jesus says. “For no one who does a mighty work in my name will be able soon after to speak evil of me. For whoever is not against us is for us.” We have here a warning against the arrogance of organized religion when it refuses to recognize the charisms possessed by other members of the church (or indeed of people outside the church) or when it refuses to see in their activities a witness to the work of the Spirit and to the cause of Christ. When someone argues that women cannot be ordained because they have never before been ordained or that gays should not be accepted because they have never been accepted, they must deal with these texts.

     What these texts, and others, show is that the revelation of God did not come down in some finished form when God gave Moses the Ten Commandments on Mt. Sinai. That was just the beginning of a long hard road. Nor was the work of the Spirit finished at Pentecost. That work continues, often at a snail’s pace and frequently at tremendous cost. But it does continue.

     If you want to read more about that long struggle, go back onto the Holy Apostles website and read Steve Chinlund’s marvelous sermon on the 12th of May earlier this year. Read what he says about slavery and the staus of women and the lending of money, and about observing the sabbath, and war-making and social justice and about same-gender affection and, above all, read what he says about the church’s teaching on hell. In that sermon Steve shows how the church’s beliefs in many areas have changed over the centures and how many of its earlier cherished ideas have in fact now been abandoned and left behind in the dustbin of history.

     Both the church and society in general are learning that tolerance brings many gifts with it. When society and the church become more tolerant, they learn to appreciate the tremendous gifts of others and in that way the Kingdom of God is furthered.

     I want to add here a word or two about what tolerance is not. It is not weakness. It is not passive. It is not spiritual masochism. It is not doormat religion. It does not espouse the doctrine that all religions are equally true. It is not a form of spineless indifferentism or relativism. Above all tolerant religion does not espouse appeasement.

     Once an individual or an institution espouses tolerance as a fundamental value it will almost certainly be attacked by those who prefer to exclude others because tolerance then becomes a threat to their point of view. We need at those times to stand tall and to remain committed to tolerance as a better way.

     There is a small group that is closely associated with this parish that meets here every Monday evening that is trying to do just that. It is called WAKE UP and I invite you to join it. It is making a real contributuion and a real difference as our church struggles to uphold its tradition of tolerance and of full inclusion.

     In the hate-filled world in which we live, we as individuals and the church as a community should be models of tolerance because Christ was tolerant and because Christ taught that God loves and accepts us just as He made us and redeems and forgives us all. How can the church present Christ to the world if it is arrogant or uses coercion or espouses dogmatic intolerance to exclude or condemn others?

     It cannot and we should not--for Christ calls us all to a better way.

     Amen.

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