On being called to prayer by a Muslim
All Saints’ Nottingham, 2nd before Lent
11 February 2007
Genesis 2: 4b-9, 15-25
Welcoming a Muslim leader to the Annual Service for the Legal Profession
I am in trouble. A couple of weeks ago, as you know, the annual High Sheriff’s service for the legal profession took place in St Mary’s. At the very beginning of the service, Dr Musharraf Hussain, the Imam at Bobber’s Mill Mosque and his colleague led a ‘Call to Prayer’, as they would do in the mosque. This was included at the request of the High Sheriff as a way of recognizing the wider community of Nottingham. The text of the Call, chanted as you would expect in Arabic, is entirely God-centred but contains the phrase ‘Mohammed, a prophet of God’. It was quite long, which may be one of the prompts to the outrage which has been expressed by some of those present. But some, apparently, returned to St Mary’s in the evening for the Eucharist because they believed the church must be cleansed of what had happened. Well, if they were outraged, so be it. But their response was outrageous. And I believe it was close to the new crime of stirring up religious hatred. Let us put aside for a moment that the Call to Prayer is just that, and that Muslims in general put Christians to shame by their discipline of prayer. The truth of the matter is that the ether of this city, this nation and this world is filled with the prayer and praise of thousands and millions of people, all of them seeking to give God his worth-ship (and many of them set an example to us Christians of how that might be done). That fact is one to be celebrated. It hardly needs me to say that included in that worship is the prayer of Catholics and Protestants, who a few hundred years ago were killing each other over who had the truth, and still today only just manage to get on well enough to occasionally get together for prayer. Only a hundred years ago, two Anglican bishops were arraigned in front of the Archbishop of Canterbury for allowing joint worship with the Church of Scotland and the Methodists in the mission field in Kenya, and forty years ago an American Anglican was prevented from taking up a ministry post in the Church of Scotland because it wasn’t appropriate in the context of ecumenical relations in Scotland.
Being called to prayer in a pluralist world
Today, fewer and fewer people are going to church to praise and pray to God, and one of the key reasons for that is that in a modern pluralist world, we the religious communities are simply unable to cope with either the challenges or the opportunities that open up as we discover that other people in the world might be on the same sort of pilgrimage after truth as we are. Instead, we batten down the hatches and claw the concept of truth to ourselves. I am not naive. This is not a problem peculiar to Christians. Muslims are just as bad at it, and so are adherents of other religions. Just because we use a name for ultimate truth – God – we seem to think we have the right to claim copyright. It is spiritually and intellectually dishonest, and it is deeply ungenerous and disrespectful to other people whose search for truth takes them along different but equally pious and rocky paths. Of course there are problems between Christians and Muslims. Of course there are different perceptions of God between us and of how he has revealed himself to us. Of course there is a very small minority of extremist Muslims stirring up hatred against the west and against Christianity, just as there is a small minority of Christians who are stirring up hatred against Islam and a lot of other things besides, and supporting wars that attack the foundations of our common humanity. But the fact that one Imam in Nottingham, who has been prominent in the building of good community relations both locally and nationally, had the generosity to accept an invitation to stand in the midst of the gathering of the heart of our local establishment and remind us of the nature of God, a nature which we can only ever partially grasp, is something to be celebrated; and the more I have been forced to reflect on my decision to respond positively to the High Sheriff’s request, the more I am convinced it was right.
The human desire for truth: The creation myth
The human desire to grasp truth is both one of our greatest gifts and also leads us towards some of our deepest vulnerabilities. And the amazing thing to me is that that basic truth has been known and acknowledged from the very earliest times. From time immemorial, we have known the dangers of humanity’s role in the stewardship of creation. We have an unquenchable thirst to know and to understand; and we have an unquenchable thirst to control and overpower.
The great myths with which Genesis is peppered are an attempt to acknowledge and describe that human lust over against the creative and sustaining power of God, putting into story form that eternal struggle in which we reach for the sky, and God reminds us that we will never reach it. Adam and Eve, Noah’s Ark, the Tower of Babel, the Covenant, the faithful wanderer in the desert, Abraham. They are ancient stories, some of them having elements in common other stories of the beginnings of humanity from other cultures. They are stories deliberately gathered and honed and edited by a gifted literary editor who saw the need at a particular point in Israel’s history to do a bit of populist philosophy. You know well that the story around which the Old Testament books as a whole gather is a great adventure story of a community, a people and in some sense of the word, a nation who have a strong sense of God in their corporate life, but who find as they travel along the journey both to the physical and the spiritual ‘promised land’, that they are constantly drawn away from the guiding hand of God. They are tempted by the vision of their own giftedness, their own capacity for power, their own vision of truth. The story is focussed around a number of, to use the word literally, crisis moments, moments of key change in the nation’s development. One of those was the development, around the early years of the first millennium BC, of a system of monarchy, a stable government for a static nation, after centuries of being essentially a nomadic tribe. In that process of establishment, the great narratives handed down from generation to generation that had sustained the people on the journey needed to be recalled and adapted to feed the new situation. Stability was a new experience, the need to defend against marauding neighbours and to create economic wealth, to create the identity of a new people in a hostile land was the priority; and Israel showed all the human vulnerability that has been shown throughout history. And the person who gathered the great creation story we have heard this morning, and others of those ancient myths (as well as putting into some order, probably religious rather than historical the stories of the early wanderings of God’s people), now commonly known as the Yahwist, must have seen that those cautionary tales that had lived from generation to generation through telling and retelling around the campfires, needed to be formalised and established in order to be a constant prompt to the conscience of God’s primacy and of the dangers of the human lust for power and knowledge.
Will we ever learn?
We have not learnt. We continue to read, and hopefully to pray the stories. We love to hear about Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden and to dream away of Paradise. We shake our heads at the arrogance and stupidity of the people as they sought to build the tower whose top would be in heaven. But they are timeless in their application. We know, in ways of course that that early community of God struggled to understand, so much more about how God reveals himself, because we have access to the story of God created for us and for the world in human form. But that Jesus, whom we still do not fully comprehend, does not need to be defended behind stone walls with the deadly darts of our arrogance and smallness of heart. How we love those words of Desmond Tutu ‘We are the rainbow people of God’. This world, like Joseph’s coat, is a creation of a myriad of colours. We are privileged to have been given some of those colours to wear for ourselves. Let us rejoice in them, and give thanks to God that others share in that divine outpouring of diversity and beauty. There is no place for dogs in the manger in God’s plan.
Brilliant - a true reflection and helpful words. I hope that your people listened to such wise counsel.