Paul speaks about the unknown God found on an altar as he enters in the Greek city of Athens. Paul is committed to Jesus, God’s Christ crucified and resurrected. But who is this unknown God that Paul is speaking about? I have certainly talked about God as Creator, Christ, and the Holy Spirit over the years, and I do not abandon such talk. I believe and know that God has been revealed in the story of Jesus Christ, and there is always more to know about God. There is much about God I will never comprehend with my human mind and experience. And I need to learn from other peoples’ experience of God as well.

Several years ago I had Ashkenazi Jewish student for a Buddhism class. I give my class the assignment to make a field trip to the Thai Buddhist Temple at the corner of Rosco & Coldwater in North Hollywood. As a church, we made a Saturday morning field trip there years ago.

She refused to go because of Buddhist images; it violated her interpretation of the commandment not to worship graven images. In talking to her, she would even refuse to visit a Catholic or Orthodox Church on the same religious grounds. Catholics have statutes all over their churches. I gave her an article to read by my old mentor Dr. W. C. Smith, the grandfather of Comparative Religion, at Harvard University. He wrote an article arguing that no human has ever worshipped an idol or statute in human history. Our interpretations, like my student, are too simplistic and fail to understand how religious peoples comprehend the symbolic nature of images and icons. They are like stories, assisting in recalling the divine. She would not budge, so I had her write a 10 page paper, how Buddhists experience Buddhist images. We become trapped in our narrow views of God and how other folks understand the same phenomena that we call God. She could not conceive the rich heritage of religious images point to the divine, to God. Her fundamentalist Judaism blinded her to the rich heritage of spirituality of Buddhists. Any Hindu, Buddhist, Catholic or Orthodox Christian would tell you that they do not worship images, for images and icons are simply pointers or symbolic reminders of God. They call our attention to be mindful of God who is bigger than earthen vessels or human imaginations.

Maybe what idolatry consists of is placing human constraints on God or placing God in human boxes, for the prophet Isaiah writes, “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the LORD. “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” (Is. 55:8-9) Our ways and God’s ways are always very different, and this spiritual principle should be ingrained in our psyches.

We constrain and project our egos often upon God. We place human restraints of our imaginations, whether narrow or wide, upon God, and that is not God. Fundamentalists, for example, constrain God and often distort the nature of God as wrathful and angry. They use such a god to control people’s lives and force them to conform to rules and regulations that they hold valuable. They project upon God their own narrow views of morality and sin, often failing to talk about the gracious God who extravagantly loves and forgives us all.

We live in a multicultural and multi-religious society. LA is one of the most religiously diverse communities. We have Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Sikh, Jews, neo-pagans and wiccans, new age religions and spiritualities, atheists, humanists, nihilists and so on.

How can we as Christians carry on conversations with our neighbors with such differing religious and spiritual background? Oftentimes, we don’t engage our neighbors, or if we do, we try to convert them to one right only way of seeing and understanding God.

There is a reason for the banner on our east wall. It was a gift to Rev. Jeff Pulling for his service to the Valley Interfaith Council, but it remains in the sanctuary to remind us that this a house of prayer for all peoples. Peoples of differing faiths are always welcome here.

I have attended clergy and police meetings, and there are clergy from other religions than Christianity in attendance. And I find myself annoyed and cringing at fundamentalist clergy who insensitively lead a prayer or give blessing as Christians without acknowledging the meeting is interfaith. I find it ignorant, intolerant, and insensitive. I have prayed in interfaith settings, using the various names of God from other faiths: Allah, Adonai, Ishwara, Buddha, Goddess, higher power, the God of all, the God with many names. I live in an interfaith content and compromise recognizing the values of other religions and paths to God. I call this “compassionate pluralism.” I have prayed with rabbis, imams, Buddhist monks, Hindu priests, Sikhs, wiccans, neo-pagans to the Goddess, a native American and so on. Does this mean I have watered down my Christian devotion to God as creator, Christ, and the Spirit? If I call God father or mother, God or Goddess, does that change the nature or reality of the one whom I am trying to make contact with or the God for whom I have prayed to my whole life as a Christian?

Does God love Christians more than non-Christians? Sometimes in moments of lost patience, I might think God loves Christians far less than non-Christians. But that is the human me more than God. In those temptations, I remind myself that God made us all for greater things in life such as to love and be loved. God made non-Christians in God’s image as well. There is one God for all us with many names. All of us are children of God.

God keeps God’s self for Christians only. You get that feeling from listening to some Christians: But God is closer to every human being than they are to themselves. Our existence and being depends upon God being so close to us, within us. God is near to us, but we can distant ourselves from God. God is close not only when we have faith and trust in God, but God is close to us when we don’t believe in God, deny or ignore God.

But non-Christians don’t acknowledge the Bible, so they don’t know God, some will falsely argue. But Christians have proposed that there is the Book of scriptures and the Book of Nature, both of which reveal God. Thus, many non-Christians have access to God through the natural world.

Once we recognize that God is a mysterious oneness that dwells within us and within the world; we can then recognize that mysterious oneness in each other. When a Pentecostal Christian can proclaim that he or she is full of the Spirit, is that person closer to God than a Buddhist who is in deep meditation experiencing a calmness or oneness or a Native American who experiences a oneness with the Great Spirit as he or she touches the Spirit in the wind or in the beauty of the Earth. Many peoples of different religions experience oneness with God and speak about this oneness with different descriptions, names, and languages.

For myself to deny the oneness of God in my brothers and sisters of other religions is to deny my own oneness with God. I call this the path of compassionate pluralism. “Compassionate” because I am listening to God in other people of faith who are different from myself. “Pluralism” because there is no one way to know God or discovering God. If we listened to stories of God in our lives from everyone in this room this morning, we would have as many different stories on how we discovered God or how works in our lives or who God is. By listening to each other, we catch a greater glimpse of who God is.

Compassionate pluralism recognizes that God’s ways are greater than any human notions of God. It recognizes the word of Jesus: “Be compassionate as your Abba God is.” Compassion is to listen to the faith journeys of other peoples of other faith, for they are searching for God genuinely as any of us here this morning.

But how do we judge other religions as authentic. The same we judge authentic Christianity. We judge authentic relationship with God by the fruits they produce in people in relationship with God. Genuine experience of God leads to human transformation that bears fruit in how compassionate we are, how caring for one another and the Earth and all life, how we love and forgive one another, how we include, not exclude others from God, and how peaceful we are with each other.

Mother Teresa preached to her nuns and brothers, “We are supposed to preach without preaching not by words, but by our example, by our actions.” We teach about God more effectively through our actions of love than trying to force people to accept our own narrow experience of God. If we compassionately listen to each other, we discover a God whose mysterious love and generosity exceeds all our expectations and beyond our imagination and who we never get bored with because God is always new, extravagantly loving, and abundantly and warmly hospitable. This is the way of compassionate pluralism.