Graciously holding a strong & benevolent identity.

What does it look like?

Sound like?

Feel like?

simplicity

complexity

perplexity

harmony

egocentricity

simplicity

complexity

perplexity

harmony

The Anonymous Member Approach:

“You are really one of us - you just don’t know it.”

Strengths:

Weaknesses:

The Incarnational Approach:

“I am really one of you - you just don’t know it.”

Strengths:

Weaknesses:

The Common Ground Approach:

“We’re talking about the same thing ...

using different words ...

or different imagery ...

reflecting our different cultures.”

Deen = Tao = Torah = Kingdom of God

Satyagraha = Holy Spirit

Mindfulness = mind of Christ

Trinity = nonduality

The Common Ground Approach:

Strengths

Weaknesses

The Incommensurable Approach:

“We’re not saying the same thing about the same thing ...

Nor are we saying different things about the same thing ...

We are saying different things about different things. We are asking different questions, solving different problems, engaged in different research.”

The Incommensurable Approach:

West: Rights of the few/one versus the rights of the many.

East: Rights of the dead versus the rights of the living

Indigenous: Rights of the living versus the rights of the not-yet-living

The Incommensurable Approach:

Buddhism: personal enlightenment before death/solving problem of desire/attachment/suffering

Conservative Christianity; personal salvation after death/solving problem of original sin

Prophetic Judaism/Progressive Christianity: being a just person and a just people to make a more just world/solving problem of personal and systemic injustice

From E. Stanley Jones (1884-1973)

The Christ of the Indian Road

Pentecost Sermon (Paul Nuechterlein)

For me, another clear sign of hope comes through the irony of God raising up a faithful disciple of Jesus Christ who was a Hindu and remained a Hindu. I'm talking about Mahatma Gandhi, who said this, among many other things, about Jesus:

“Jesus expressed, as no other could, the spirit and will of God. It is in this sense that I see him and recognize him as the Son of God. And because the life of Jesus has the significance and the transcendency to which I have alluded, I believe that he belongs not solely to Christianity, but to the entire world, to all races and people.”

We might ask, So why didn't Gandhi simply convert to Christianity? But I think the better Pentecost question would be, Why should he have to convert? Why should he have to change religions? Why should he have to play into religion into the negative ways that bring division? Did Jesus come to offer us a new religion to add to our ways of dividing into differing cultures and languages -- the Tower of Babel reality? Or did he come to help each of us within our own religions and cultures to find the one true God of unity? I think that Pentecost shows us the latter. We can welcome, as many Christians are coming to do, the diversity of religious practices that help lead to the experience of our oneness in God. Christians are learning from Hindus and Buddhists and Muslims and indigenous religions the effective religious practices of how to become closer to the God of Jesus Christ. That's the Pentecost pouring out of the Holy Spirit on all peoples, so that their experience of oneness transcends their many languages and cultures.

Finally, the greatest sign of hope to me is how Gandhi helped deepen our understanding of the Spirit of Truth, the Advocate. He had his own name for it in Sanskrit: Satyagraha, he called it, which translates as Truth Force. Satyagraha moved him and many millions of people over the last century to learn Jesus' way to peace through loving, nonviolent resistance to evil. Like Jesus on the cross, in this way to peace we risk taking that old way of sin, righteousness, and judgment on ourselves in order to reveal its futility, its wrongness, and offering instead God's way of grace and forgiveness. Pentecost is Satyagraha poured out on us so that we may bring peace to our lives as family members, co-workers, neighbors, citizens, and, yes, as both Jesus and Gandhi compelled us to do, as children of God -- all of humanity, children of God. Amen

Rev. Paul J. Nuechterlein

Delivered at Prince of Peace Lutheran, Portage, MI, May 27, 2012

As the child of missionary in India, 

who was the child of a missionary in India, 

who was the child of a missionary in India, 

I have 

a lot of India 

in my soul/marrow/terra forma.

I breathed 

the ancient heritage of India 

when I was three.  

I learned Marathi.  

I ate jalebes.  

I sucked the delicious juice of the sugar cane.  

I played in the dust of our school-for-orphans-yard 

with Machinder

 . . . and, then I got older 

and went south 

to Tamil Nadu 

and Kodaikanal 

to boarding school near Madurai.

I visited,

as a child,

the caves of Ellora.  

I didn't know what to make of them,

then.

As an adult 

i visited them 

again . . . 

Hindus and Sikhs and Buddhists and Jains . . 

all carving caves 

next to 

each other 

in ancient times . . . 

side by side.

The Anonymous Member Approach

The Incarnational Approach

The Common Ground Approach

The Incommensurable Approach

The Neighborly/Common Good Approach ...

We are different families with different traditions bound together by the past, present, and future ...

and we must figure out how to work together

for the common good,

for the alternatives to conviviality are unacceptable.”

What do good neighbors do?

They love one another as they love themselves.