Sermon: The (Squabbling) Children of Abraham- Vayera 2009

Written by Writings & Sermons by others — 16 November 2009

I am not quite sure that they got what they wanted.  Earlier this week at a Synagogue in central London the producers of a Channel 4 series on the Bible assembled an interfaith panel and set them to talk to each other and hopefully to fight with each other.  The idea behind the series, which will be broadcast in early 2010 is that each week a TV personality of stature will present a documentary about their relationship with the Bible.  The week which I am ending up part of is being put together by the journalist Rageeh Omaar, who made his name reporting on the Iraq invasion for the BBC.  Rageeh was born in Somalia and is from a Muslim background but has spent his life living in Christian Britain.   His programme is going to be about his understanding of Abraham.

Before filming the segment of the programme this week in London he has filmed in Ur, the biblical birthplace of Abraham where a great ziggurat still stands among extensive remains from its ancient civilisations.   He went to Hebron, where in next week’s Torah portion Abraham buys a burial place for his wife Sarah, and spoke with Palestinian residents and Jewish settlers about Abraham.  He went to Jerusalem to film on the top of the Temple mount, where the binding of Isaac is said to have taken place, hence the Dome of the Rock, and, below, the Temple mount at the Western Wall.    On his travels, as you can imagine, he met people with strong opinions about the rights that their spiritual descent from Abraham gave them – to land, to places of worship, to spread a particular ideology.

Then this week he was back here in London.  In the Bet Tefillah of the Liberal Jewish Synagogue in St John’s Wood he brought together two Rabbis, Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg and myself, two Muslim clerics, Sheikh Muhammad al Husaini and the Imam of the Streatham Mosque and three Muslim women scholars, the vicar of St John’s Wood Anders Bergquist, Sister Claire Jardine and her fellow sisters from the Christian order of the Sisters of Sion.  He gave us foundation texts about Abraham from the Torah, Christian New Testament and the Muslim Koran and waited to see what would happen.

The producer asked us to talk about who Abraham was and what his heritage requires us to do.  A couple of times during his introductory talk he suggested that we might like to hit each other with the texts that we had been given and I feel that he was genuinely disappointed that we did not do so.

He was clearly on a hiding to nothing as nuns rarely commit acts of violence against Imams and Rabbis tend to control themselves around scholars.  Yet our discussion did become heated – as it should have done.  Rageeh Omaar’s question to us was whether the figure of Abraham was a source of peace and reconciliation or of division and discord.  As our shiur this morning showed, Abraham is a central figure of Jewish, Christian and Muslim scripture.  Indeed when a politician aims to appeal for calm between struggling peoples he will say “you are all Children of Abraham” so surely it must be possible to get on?

In Judaism Abraham is the spiritual ancestor of all Jews, the first to enter into Covenant with God in a way which binds his descendants to God and begins to establish the Jewish people.  In Christianity he is the ancestor of Jesus who willingness to offer his son Isaac – called in Christianity but not in a Judaism the sacrifice of Isaac – presages the life story of Jesus and his relationship with his father in Heaven.  In Islam Abraham is the first fully fledged Muslim, practicing the rites of Islam, founder of the Ka’aba in Mecca, father of Ishmael and Isaac, both prophets in Islam with Ishma’el’s story at the basis of the Hajj to Mecca.

Same man?  Anyone who has ever been a member of a family with more than one child knows that each child has a different relationship with their father.  And it was in this light that our dialogue for Rageeh Omaar’s programme continued.  We were unable with honesty to do that rather annoying thing of early interfaith dialogue which is to sit there and say “gosh we are all the same really aren’t we” – and we were also unable to consider ourselves so divided by our ideas that the producers of the documentary would get their shot of warring Imam’s, Vicars, Scholars, Nuns and Rabbis.

Interfaith dialogue of quality is an opportunity to see concepts which inform your own faith through the eyes of a person of another faith.   It helps you to broaden your views and ideas, to understand better what matters to you, to understand points of conflict because you see why they matter to the other person.  Last week in our Synagogue we heared Fiyaz Mughal Director of “Faith Matters” speak from the perspective of a Muslim who is trying to find reconciliation between the faiths in Britain.  Rabbi Josh, who was leading the service, last week said to me that while Fiyaz Mughal spoke about everything the Jews and Muslims share in common it was difficult to engage with his sermon because this is not so much the issue – but then when he turned to the issues which we find difficult between each other – it was at that point that he found the beginning of real dialogue.

It is like a family – the children of Abraham, Jews Christians and Muslims, obviously share much in common – we are all monotheists, religion informs our lives, the values of family, family celebrations, the celebration of the life cycle, dedication to our sacred writings all unite us.  But the true work of dialogue is dealing with the tougher issues – such as claims of Chrisitanity to supersede Judaism, or of Islam to complete it, such as the need of Jews for Israel to be the Jewish state as against Muslim understandings of the Middle East as the Islamic centre of the world.

At this Synagogue on Tuesday we saw how this dialogue can begin.  We hosted the Barnet schools conference for 6th formers, organised by the Three Faiths’ Forum.  For one day Alyth was the classroom for young people from many of the borough’s schools, Christians, Jews, Muslims and Hindus and people of no faith.  What impressed me about this day was the way in which the Three Faith’ Forum organisers began with the family stories and faith journey stories of each participant.  It meant that before the ideologies and dogmas you came to know the person and the struggles that they and their families before them had been engaged in.

It made it obvious – we are not all the same – the particularity of our human journey is what makes us who we are – like the different children of one family.  But our duty then, if we are to live in a world at peace is to hear our particularity, to hear our stories and how they influence us and then to yet seek ways to be a human family, indeed to be the children of Abraham, despite the squabbling.

Abraham becomes a figure of peace and reconciliation when we seek in him the struggler for justice, the man who made a covenant of peace with the warring powers of his day, when he hoped for a new generation to take on his legacy, when he opened his tent in hospitality – all stories which are shared in the Torah, the Christian Bible and the Koran.

In our generation we have to deal with the Abraham who was given land as his possession – because we have different perspectives on that gift, we have to deal with the Abraham who rejected part of his family and favoured the other, because we cannot reject each other in a globalised world.  We have to deal with the Abraham who might indeed have gone through with the sacrifice of his child for a greater cause.

That is the ground of dialogue – Judaism does not say that our father Abraham is a paragon of perfection – his struggles are our struggles – and if we at Alyth can be pioneers in the dialogue which pushes the difficult issues then we can indeed contribute to a better world for the future