Faith Matters

Peace, Shalom, Salaam

What makes America truly great

Last week, I asked our local rabbi and the imam of the Islamic center, if they would be available for coffee and conversation. Having heard the national news of vandalism at multiple Jewish cemeteries, and the anti-immigrant attack at a mosque in Quebec City, I wondered if it was time in Northwest Arkansas for Christian faith leaders to take effective action against hate speech and hate crimes -- or at the very least discover additional ways to support our neighbors in faith and increase the quality of interfaith dialogue.

The rabbi and the imam are my friends. We share books with each other, visit each other's houses of worship, and most recently, helped lead an interfaith prayer service after the xenophobic executive order of Donald Trump in January. Sitting down for coffee was thus one more step on the journey of discovering together how to be people of faith -- and friends -- in a moment like this.

As we talked, we discovered together that perhaps it was more important -- at least in Northwest Arkansas -- to celebrate the quality of our interfaith community rather than to call out hate speech. Both the synagogue and the Islamic Center have experienced an outpouring of support these past few weeks, and although members of both communities are wary right now, they feel thankful for the welcoming culture we share together in Fayetteville.

Consider ... the national agenda of many -- white nationalists in particular -- is to demonize black and brown bodies and their religious traditions. The new administration was unwilling to name Jews as the particular target of the Holocaust on Yom Hashoah because it prefers to dog-whistle anti-Semites rather than to stand in support of the Jewish community. Similarly, they prefer to gaslight Muslims by painting the entire religion as terrorists, while ignoring -- to the considerable national security risk of our nation -- home-grown terrorism repeatedly enacted by white supremacists.

Yet in our local community, we have an alternative story to tell. We can tell you about interfaith meals shared together, flowers delivered by the Christian community to the Islamic Center as a show of support after the executive order, hundreds of people coming out to hear stories about the immigrant and refugee experience at a Canopy Town Hall and literally thousands of people gathered for the town hall meeting of U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., who cheered when a Christian pastor uttered a very simple sentence: "We love Muslims."

This is the real news, the counter-narrative that needs telling: We are stronger and better together. We are more human and more humane because we are open to, respectful of and generous toward those who differ from us.

As we sat in the law library coffee shop and shared stories, I learned something else. We drifted during the course of our conversation into matters theological. Specifically, I learned more about the Muslim perspective on Jesus. Although I have known for some time that Muslims venerate Jesus, I did not know they anticipate his coming again as a specific doctrine of their faith. As we talked, I learned that the three traditions -- Judaism, Christianity, Islam -- all have a certain kind of Messianism built into their traditions.

This is of course quite multi-faceted. Orthodox, conservative and reformed Jews each have their ways of anticipating the Messiah. Christians have an entire spectrum of perspectives on the basic creedal commitment, "He will come again to be our judge." And I learned, in that one conversation, that Muslims also anticipate the return of Jesus, albeit informed by their own tradition and sacred text.

Wrapped up as we were in this alternative conversation, we completely left behind the original impetus for the meeting. No longer were we concerned about hate speech. Instead, our own words, the shared words between us, were facilitating mutual and greater understanding. There was space for jokes, for personal anecdotes, for questions, for simple joy in being together.

I wish I could tell the whole world about the beauty of interfaith relationships here in our small Arkansas university town. I especially wish I could share the story with the fear-mongers, the many folks trapped in their whiteness and narrow Christianity who simply cannot imagine they have something to learn from Judaism or Islam. Rather, I wish they could know they have nothing to fear from these historic faiths and much to gain by engaging them as neighbors and friends.

While those currently in power are offering us images of walls and closed borders and trucking in fear and hate, quite a few of us are living a counter-narrative of joy in community. I'll take a coffee with an imam and a rabbi and a Lutheran pastor as a vision for what makes America great. Such small graces are practiced all over our nation. If we amplify them, perhaps we can drown out the hate speech with joy speech, of shared peace, shalom, salaam.

NAN Religion on 03/11/2017

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