I am delighted and grateful to be here with you today, in this beautiful new sanctuary. I thank Rabbi Gertel for inviting me -- of course, I will, and I hope many of you will be at Rockefeller Chapel on Thanksgiving Day to hear him preach. I have now been in Hyde Park for 12 years, since 1989, as pastor of what used to be Cornell Baptist Church, but now is Ellis Avenue Church. In that period of time, I have come to appreciate the religious diversity that is so prominent in Hyde Park, but not only that to build deep and lasting relationships with clergy and lay leaders of a variety of congregations.

Associating with diverse religious traditions is not new to me. I was born in Sri Lanka, an island nation at the southern tip of India. It’s a lush and beautiful tropical country, now devastated by an 18 year old ethnic war that is tearing the country apart. I grew up Baptist in a largely Buddhist environment. My grandfather, converted from Buddhism through the work of British missionaries, and father were Baptist pastors before me, so the Baptist heritage is in my bones! But I am very aware that I am an anomaly. Almost 68% of Sri Lanka's population is Buddhist, about 18% is Hindu, about 8% is Christian and about 6% is Muslim. Less than 1% is officially categorized as Other. If there are any Jews in Sri Lanka, they may fall in that Other category. I certainly don't know about them.

Growing up Baptist, I learned about Jews -- but only from the story of the Jew I have learned to call Lord and savior. My Sunday School teachers did not know to teach me anything apart from the perspective of Jewish life that the missionaries gave them. As a teenager, I learned about the Holocaust and was horrified as I read the Diary of Anne Frank, but much of my understanding of Jewish life came from -- where do you think: "Fiddler on the Roof." I was in my twenties when this movie came out. I was so fascinated with it that I saw it at least three times in the first couple of months.

I came to Chicago twenty years ago to do graduate study in Religion at Northwestern University, and there I met my first real-live Jew. Professor Manfred Vogel, became my friend, encourager and challenger. He was the first to challenge me to dig deep into my understanding of Jesus of Nazareth, not as a white-washed, diluted representation of the British missionary, but as "Jesus, the Jew," the radical prophet of ancient Palestine.

In 1995, there was an important convergence for me. At the time, I was a member of the Board of Directors of a group called the Alliance of Baptists. These are Baptists who broke away from the Southern Baptist Convention, when that denomination was hijacked by its fundamentalist faction. In March of that year, the Alliance of Baptists, following a series of conversations within itself and with the Institute for Jewish Christian Studies in Baltimore, adopted what I consider to be a ground-breaking statement on Jewish Christian relations -- at least for Baptists. It was a profound statement -- it didn't glaze over our sin of complicity and silence at the holocaust, but called us to confession. And it called us to a new way of relating with our Jewish sisters and brothers -- rather than find in Jews targets for conversion, we would hope to find fellow travelers. We found that new way, by the way, not by being unfaithful to our scripture, but by being more faithful. At that convocation held at Vienna Va, a suburb of Washington DC, about 500 participants visited the Holocaust Museum as a part of our program and believe it or not, held a prayer service on the Museum grounds -- much to the consternation of the museum staff! And the concluding worship for the entire convocation was a Jewish service led by a rabbi, a cantor and a liturgical dancer.

At the about the same time two important books came out. One by a prominent New Testament scholar, John Dominic Crossan, who teaches at De Paul University, called, "Who killed Jesus?" He presented not only the evidence to identify the real culprits of Jesus' murder -- not the Jews, but the Romans, but also a powerful plea for Christians to turn from our old ways of thinking about this matter. The second book was by another New Testament Scholar, Howard Clark Kee, entitled, "Removing Anti-Judaism from the Pulpit." This book pointed out all the places where Christian scripture and liturgy is clearly anti-Jewish and called on clergy to re-work their liturgies particularly those that pertain to Holy Week and Good Friday.

And I felt a strong conviction that I needed to respond to this convergence. That year, Passover and Good Friday fell on the same day -- another convergence. And I took the opportunity to write to my rabbi colleagues, Elliot Gertel and Arnie Wolf. I expressed to them my sadness at the way Christians continue to be careless about our use of our Good Friday liturgies that foster old stereotypes, and my commitment to edit my liturgy in such way that it wouldn't take away anything from the power and pathos of the Good Friday story, but would remove anti-Jewish references. I use that liturgy to this day.

As you can see, this has been a journey. Let me point out to you a couple of things I have learned along the way, from both Christians and Jews.

First, we stand today at the brink of a brand new era of Jewish Christian relations. As you may know, last year, shortly before Rosh Hashanah, four respectable Jewish scholars published "Dabru Emet: A Jewish Statement on Christians and Christianity." They took a full page ad in the New York Times on September 10, 2000. If you have not read it, you can find it either on beliefnet. com or in the Institute for Jewish Christian Studies web page. In their introduction to the statement, the authors said the following:

"In recent years, there has been a dramatic and unprecedented shift in Jewish and Christian relations. Throughout the nearly two millennia of Jewish exile, Christians have tended to characterize Judaism as a failed religion or, at best, a religion that prepared the way for, and is completed in, Christianity. In the decades since the Holocaust, however, Christianity has changed dramatically. An increasing number of official church bodies, both Roman Catholic and Protestant have made public statements of their remorse about Christian mistreatment of Jews and Judaism. These statements have declared, furthermore, that Christian teaching and preaching can and must be reformed so that they acknowledge God's enduring covenant with the Jewish people and celebrate the contribution of Judaism to world civilization and to Christian faith itself." "We believe these changes merit a thoughtful Jewish response," continue the authors and add, "we believe it is time for Jews to learn about efforts of Christians to honor Judaism." As a first step offer eight brief statements about how Jews and Christians may relate to each other.

Of course, many of us may argue with the statements and the assumptions they are based on. Frankly, some Christians are still living in pre-holocaust days. Just a few days before Dabru Emet was released, the Vatican released a statement saying that salvation of non-Catholics is "gravely deficient." This statement perplexed caught many Catholics and Protestants, particularly because almost forty years ago, it was the 2^nd Vatican council's proclamation "Nostra Aetate" that gave significant boost to Christians' relations with those of other faiths. Sometimes the Vatican gets tripped up by its own conservatism! Eugene Fisher, who leads Catholic-Jewish relations for the National Conference of Catholic Bishops responded more reasonably, saying, "What God is doing with the Jewish people and what God is doing with us are intimately related. They are not lines that never meet. There is one root, and that is biblical Israel, and there are two branches that are separate but intertwined--Christianity and rabbinic Judaism."

At the other end of the Christian ecumenical spectrum are the Southern Baptists, with whom my church, I am pleased to say, cut off relationships. Since the fundamentalist take over of that denomination, they issued a series of statements -- including the obnoxious tract they released in 1997, on targeting Jews for evangelism -- statements that went completely against what we value as a church. Apart from these aberrations, I believe that the authors of the Dabru Emet are right in their understanding that most Christians want to make serious attempts to reconcile with Jews. And I, for one, am grateful to these Jewish leaders for their initiative.

Secondly, it took many attempts to get here. Perhaps some of you bore terrible indignities of violent insults hurled at you in the name of Christ and Christianity. But I hope we don't need to go there to begin this conversation. Perhaps we can begin with the Christian assertion that Israel's story was simply a preparation for the Christian one and that Christianity supercedes Judaism. For a long time this was the best that Christians could say about Jews.

More recently, several mainstream Protestant bodies have issued statements that affirm the central propositions of the Jewish faith: the permanent election of Israel, the ongoing efficacy of the covenant, the continuing validity of Torah life and worship. Among these bodies is the Alliance of Baptists and I glad to have been engaged in writing, dialoguing and working to achieve a unanimous vote. You have before you a copy of this statement.

There have also been many Jewish responses, of which the Dabru Emet is perhaps the latest broad-based expression. Among the more interesting responses that I know of, is the one made by one of Hyde Park's respected rabbis Hayim Goren Perulmuter. Rabbi Perulmuter's long standing partnership with Catholic theologian John Palikowski at CTU is well known. His book "Siblings" makes a convincing case for giving up the old idea of Christianity being the daughter of Judaism. He points out how the Judaic struggles with the Romans for two hundred years, and particularly following Pompey's occupation of Judea since 42 BCE, caused the ferment in which Rabbinic Judaism, that is the form in which Judaism survived the destruction of the temple in 70 CE, and Christianity arose. They both arose as Messianic movements. One believed that messianic time was at hand and should be grasped boldly, and the other, took a more long range view. The short range movement became Christianity, and the long range one, Rabbinic Judaism. So, rather than a parent-child relationship, Perulmuter points out that what is needed is for Christians and Jews to understand each other as Siblings. After all, he points out, who else but siblings can fight with each other so vehemently, but still stick together!

Most responses don't go nearly as far as Perulmuter, but tend to hold that the highest level of Jewish response to the Christian faith is that we can come to "understand" what Christians are talking about. One of the more provocative expressions was by Irving Greenberg, who wrote that Christianity is a "divinely intended outreach, and Jesus …. God's instrument for the world." That may be too much for even some of us.

Out of the responses I have read, I have come to appreciate the work of Michael Kogan, professor of Montclair State University, in New Jersey, who in an article entitled "Toward a Jewish Theology of Christianity" in the Journal of Ecumenical Studies, offered an interesting option. He suggested that Jewish theology may hold open the possibility of the truth of Christian claims, as long as it insists that these claimed truths are for the gentile nations. I like that because he is talking about me. Consider this: having been born in Sri Lanka, I would have had no way to know about the God of Abraham, had it not been for the Baptist missionaries. The key difference, Kogan points out is in the missionary nature of the two religions. He suggests the possibility that the covenant has been opened to the nations because of the missionary nature of Christianity. If this is the case, Christianity is not a threat to Judaism, but can be seen as the Jewish outreach to the world, an outreach that has certainly brought a blessing to its recipients, as it was promised to Abraham, who would otherwise be pagans. Just as it was for me, people around the world have come to know Israel's God -- this I hope, you can celebrate.

Thirdly, an important part of my training and study is in Interfaith Dialogue Although that has been primarily with Hindus and Buddhists, the principles can be applied to any religious tradition. I have come to see, not just how people of different faith traditions must respect each other, but find ways to mutually influence each other and even to mutually enlighten each other. For instance, is there something about covenant that Christians must learn from Jews and is there something about the missionary impetus that Jews can learn from Christians? Is there something about strict monotheism that Christians can learn from Jews and is there something about incarnation that Jews might learn from Christians? And then, would it be possible that we Christians and Jews (Ellis Avenue and Rodfei Zedek) might find ways to pray and worship such that we might experience God's grace together. Hmmm .. perhaps that's too much for right now.

But I am encouraged. I think the Alliance statement on Jewish Christian relations and the Dabru Emet suggest to me that the time is coming, if it isn't already here, when we can put behind us old misunderstandings and develop relationships of trust -- when Christian's can walk in a Jew's shoes and experience life from her perspective, and the other way around.

Let me end with a story called "The Rabbi's Gift". It’s a story about a monastery that had fallen upon hard times. Once a great order, now all its branch houses were lost and it had become decimated to the extent that there were only five monks left in the decaying mother house: the abbot and four others, all over 70 years of age. Clearly it was a dying order.

In the deep woods surrounding the monastery there was a little hut that a rabbi from a nearby town occasionally used for a hermitage. Through their many years of prayer and contemplation the old monks had become a bit psychic, so they could always sense when the rabbi was in his hermitage. "The rabbi is in the woods, the rabbi is in the woods again," they would whisper to each other. As he agonized over the imminent death of his order, it occurred to the Abbot to visit the hermitage and ask the rabbi if by some possible chance, he could offer any advice that might save the monastery.

The rabbi welcomed the abbot at his hut. But when the abbot explained the purpose of his visit, the rabbi could only commiserate with him. "I Know how it is" he exclaimed. "The spirit has gone from the people. It is the same in my town. Almost no one comes to the synagogue anymore." So the old abbot and the rabbi wept together. They read parts of the Torah and quietly spoke of deep things. The time came when the abbot had to leave. They embraced each other. "It has been a wonderful thing that we should meet after all these years," the abbot said, " but I still don't have an answer. Is there nothing you can tell me, no piece of advice you can give me that would help me save my dying order?" "No, I am sorry," the rabbi responded. "I have no advice to give. The only thing I can tell you is that the Messiah is one of you."

When the abbot returned to the monastery his fellow monks gathered around him to ask, "well what did the rabbi say?" He couldn't help," the abbot answered. "We just wept and read the Torah together. The only thing he did say, just as I was leaving - it was something cryptic - was that the Messiah is one of us. I don't know what he meant."

In the days and weeks that followed, the old monks wondered whether there was any possible significance to the rabbi's words. The Messiah is one of us? Could he possibly have meant one of us monks? If that's the case, which one? Do you suppose he meant the abbot? Yes, if he meant anyone, he probably meant Father Abbot. He has been our leader for more than a generation. On the other hand, he might have meant Brother Thomas. Certainly Brother Thomas is a holy man. Everyone knows that Thomas is a man of light. Certainly he could not have meant Brother Elred! Elred gets crotchety at times. But even though he is a thorn in people's sides, when you think about it, Elred is virtually always right. Maybe the rabbi did mean Brother Elred. But surely not Brother Phillip. Phillip is so passive, a real nobody. But then almost mysteriously, he has a gift for somehow being there when you need him. He just magically appears. Maybe Phillip is the Messiah. Of course the rabbi didn't mean me. I'm just an ordinary person. Yet supposing he did? Suppose I am the Messiah? O God, not me. I couldn't be that much for you, could I?"

As they contemplated in this manner, the old monks began to treat each other with extraordinary respect on the off chance that one among them might be the Messiah. And on the off, off chance that each monk himself might be the messiah, they began to treat themselves with extraordinary respect.

Because the forest in which it was situated was beautiful, it so happened that people still occasionally came to visit the monastery to picnic on its tiny lawn, to wander along some of its paths, even now and then to go into the dilapidated chapel to meditate. As they did so, without even being conscious of it, they sensed this aura of extraordinary respect that now began to surround the five old monks and seemed to radiate out from them and permeate the atmosphere of the place. There was something strangely attractive, even compelling about it. Hardly knowing why, they began to come back to the monastery more frequently to picnic, to play, to pray. They began to bring friends to show them this special place. And their friends brought their friends.

Then it happened that some of the younger men who came to visit the monastery started to talk more and more with the old monks. After a while one asked if he could join them. Then another, and another. So within a few years, the monastery had once again become a thriving order and, thanks to the rabbi's gift, a vibrant center of light and spirituality in the realm.