This article was written by Dr. Anthony Baker,
theologian-in-residence at Saint Julian’s Episcopal Church in north Austin
As the Christian season of Lent draws to a close, and HEB begins cramming the bins near the checkout aisles with linebacker-sized stuffed rabbits, you can almost feel the sigh of relief. The annual commemoration of Jesus’ forty day fast is nearly at end. Easter is coming, and soon we can renew our strained relationship with chocolate. Or wine. Or ribeye.
But there are some Lenten disciplines that don’t go away on Easter morning. Last year, in his Lenten message, Pope Francis preached a rather novel idea. What if Christians gave up indifference for Lent? “Indifference to our neighbor and to God … represents a real temptation for us Christians,” he said. To be indifferent is to paint over particularities, to fail to acknowledge one another by failing to acknowledge the ways in which someone is unlike me. If I am indifferent, I am only really noticing myself in the other, and do not see those characteristics that make her … well, different.
One church in North Austin has taken up a version of the Pope’s challenge this Lent. The adult formation committee at Saint Julian of Norwich Episcopal Church, where I serve as Theologian in Residence, made a decision a few months ago to spend the six weeks leading up to Easter educating itself about the faith and practices of Muslims. There are no scholars of Islam in the church, and no one so far as I know who has any particular expertise on the topic. But this, so the argument went, was precisely why the study seemed appropriate. We found ourselves indifferent to the praying Muslims of our community, and felt intuitively that we were missing something. So this Lent, we decided to try giving up our indifference to our Muslim neighbors.
Easier said than done, of course. We found a decent video series made for Christians in our situation, those hoping to exchange the heightened political rhetoric around Islam with some grounded reality. Each week we watch and discuss, and we have taken to listing out together the Five Pillars and Five Doctrines. We are now looking toward next steps, and in conversation with a neighboring mosque about sharing some time together.
One interesting thing we have discovered is that giving up indifference in interfaith work requires that we not turn to the all too easy “aren’t we all basically the same” kind of sloganeering. Too often these initiatives stall out at what various faiths have in common—concern for the poor, practices of social justice or personal prayer—and never get into to the depths of what makes them unique. Our theologies, for instance. Could it be that we are afraid that, at some primitive level, differences really are a threat? The various ways that we talk about God are strange, mysterious, and different. It may be that these conversation are where true indifference begins take hold.
Christians, for instance, have a reason all their own to engage in interfaith dialogue. When God became incarnate, as Pope Francis puts it, God showed a profound lack of indifference to us. Or simply: God cared for our differences. Christ’s followers repeat this boundary transgressing movement of God by crossing over any boundaries we find that keep us from being friends and families and communities. Muslims, as I have begun to understand, have an entirely different set of theologically rich reasons to reach outside of their faith communities and share life with others. For instance in the Ramadan feasts, when many Muslim homes honor the truth of Judaism and Christianity by opening their sacred tables to them.
Overcoming indifference is hard work. It involves caring not only for the things we share, but equally for the things we don’t. It involves building the sorts of boundary-crossing friendships that, in the end, as one of our parishioners at St Julian’s reminded us, are the only real pathway to overcoming fear. My church has done some exciting work this Lent, practicing self-denial by intentional talking about someone besides ourselves. Hopefully giving up indifference is a practice we will not be finished with, come Easter morning.
