The world we live in is divided - in many ways the tensions between people of different faiths are at the highest they have been for many a year. An incident that sticks in my mind is the one where two men were forced off a Manchester-bound plane from Malaga by a mob of passengers because they kept looking at their watches and because of the clothes they were wearing.
Distrust and hatred between faiths is nothing new. Any faith with a clear doctrine eventually proclaims itself as the 'true faith', and even Christianity - which we see within our church as reaching out to all people - has been divided over what Jesus really meant when he said "I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me."
The way we respond to intolerance varies from community to community - the outcry over images of the prophet Mohammed printed in a Danish newspaper went on for weeks, while in Britain the news that a bishop in the Church of England didn't exactly believe in the resurrection was greeted with little more than a raised eyebrow.
Intolerance within a faith
The differences between different faiths are for the main part fairly obvious in terms of belief and doctrine; but as our clip so helpfully illustrated - within a denomination, within a single church, even between the people sitting on the same pew in a single service - there is a divide. Even before Jesus was crucified, we have an example within the gospel of the disciples chastising a preacher who used the name of Jesus in his ministry - "We saw a man driving out demons in your name and we told him to stop, because he was not one of us."
We pray for a universal church, which is yet to be. Within MCC I believe there is a genuine balance that welcomes true diversity and denies the separation that intolerance causes. Yes I do believe that in many ways MCC gets the message and the balance right. But all churches believe that they have got the message right, and that it's all "them others" who should be listening. How we choose to act on that belief as individuals and as a church affects how oppressive and intolerant we become.
Our church should be glad that we've an atmosphere where people with different interpretations of scripture can sit alongside each other as adults and discuss some of those differences as grown-ups without feeling the need to convince or convert each other. Nor do we pick up our sandals or gourds and start hitting each other. It's easy to mistake true adult debate as being 'mean spirited' or antagonistic. Welcoming and celebrating those different points of view means we want to be in a place where this type of debate happens, because we can grow and understand each other better, because we are saying 'what can we learn from each other', or 'I don't understand your viewpoint - you need to explain it'.
Some of us have very open and liberal views on faith, others have more conservative even fundamentalist views - this is not something to be feared, even though it is our instinct to fear it. The ability to debate without bearing a grudge is a sign of spiritual maturity, which we should embrace and aspire to: life is too short and the message of the gospel is too important to divert our energies to fighting ourselves.
When we run out of other people to fight, there's only one place to look for a fight - with each other. And yet the one place where war is going on is within us. This is the one battle that we have to keep on top of all the time. The war against sin in our hearts.
Intolerance as an individual
None of us is exempt from the habits of rejection and the instinct to reject - our minds are hard-wired for it, and every disappointment and heartache we experience makes us better at rejecting. We can delude ourselves that just because we may have been on the receiving end of rejection or exclusion that we are not prone to behaving in the same way towards others.
People are only too ready to attack what is different, sometimes out of greed, out of a lust for conquest, sometimes out of hatred for what is different. We can demonise whole races of people so easily, forgetting that they're God's children just like us. The second world war and the rise of fascism reminds us that it only takes the right combination of events in the cooking pot and the wicked and the cruel can prey upon people's fear and despair - that ordinary people, who weren't that different to you and me, could be duped into believing that their country's acts of aggression and invasion were acceptable.
The Body of Christ
When we think about the scripture which defines the church as the body of Christ we usually apply it to the local church; we think about how different people perform different roles within the congregation and the community: folk who greet, folk who listen, folk who lead and folk who tidy up. We remember and value all of these roles and ministries as being so important to the church's atmosphere and the effect that it can have on people. But the concept of the body of Christ can be applied to the church as a whole, and this can be difficult sometimes, because sometimes we've been hurt or rejected by other parts of the Christian church. But when we think about how different churches perform different functions, meeting the needs of specialised communities, either because of geography or because of a particular calling, we can begin to see that sometimes we have to see ourselves as a part of something bigger.
Intolerance is a sign of immaturity
Our maturity as Christians is tested when we engage other people in debate: we can stand there shouting the odds, trading quotes from scripture like heat-seeking missiles, or we can grow up and ask 'how do we move on from here?' How can we engage people from other denominations without them accepting from day one what we say? One of the chief differences between our denomination and many other mainstream Christian ones is our attitude to human sexuality and gender. From the day it was born this has caused MCC to be in conflict with other denominations. We can forget that the way to engage is to compare our statements of faith and see that we have so much in common about what we believe - that our belief in the saviour who died for us is the same belief, and that our mission to see a world united is truly the same.
Conclusion
The scene from
Life Of Brian that we reflect on today was played for laughs, but exposes how
some people on the outside of church see the differences between churches; and
that what for some church people may be massive chasms of difference, may to an
outsider look like a petty squabble. Both in our dealings within our churches
and when we interact with people outside of it, we have to aspire to show
ourselves as mature Christians - able to celebrate what we have in common and to
respect those places where we disagree. This way we can grow in spirit and learn
from each other in the way that Christ wants us to learn.
(Dan Joseph)
This sermon was first preached in the Metropolitan Community Church of Manchester. Click here for further information.