January 18, 2026

“The Mystery Hidden for Ages”

Well, strap yourselves in.  I have a message today that would get me thrown out of most churches (I thank the Lord, incidentally, that I’m here with all of you, because I don’t think you’ll expel me for this).  Here it is: Christianity is not the one and only true religion.  In fact, I believe all religions have a comparable claim to truth.

Some folks from a Baptist convention I attended a number of years ago would disagree intensely.  I heard a speech at that convention in which the elevation of “inclusiveness” to a supreme virtue was railed against.  The speaker said that those who promote “inclusiveness” are sending us on a whole new direction that is the antithesis of the Gospel.  According to him, the message of Christ was not one of inclusion, but exclusion.  I’ll never forget him saying, to the applause and affirming smiles of many in the crowd, that Jesus drew firm lines between the saved and the unsaved, the righteous and the sinners.  And it was our job to make sure we didn’t blur that line, but continued to cast out the evil-doers from our midst.

His take on the gospel is not new.  In fact, it’s pretty standard fare not only in Christianity but in most world religions.  One cynical but disturbingly accurate take on the institution of religion is that it’s all about preserving and promoting its beliefs and moral codes by excluding those who don’t adhere to them, thereby elevating to a special status its own adherents.  Christianity, through the centuries, has maintained those high walls, identifying itself largely by those it excludes.  Much the same could be said of Judaism as well as Islam.

But the reason I can make such an outrageous claim as I have this morning is that I’m in pretty good company.  In the passage you heard read this morning from Ephesians, the Apostle Paul, in one sudden, broad gesture, simply swept away the long-standing division between Jews and Gentiles.  He said in very plain language, “. . . the Gentiles have become fellow heirs, members of the same body, and sharers in the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel.”  It is interesting to pay close attention to these words, and specifically to what Paul did not say.  He did not say that the Gentiles remain outside of the grace of God because they don’t follow the laws and commandments of sacred scripture contained in the books of Moses and the prophets.  He did not say that the Gentiles have been given a new way – God’s true and righteous path – and therefore have left the Jews behind to follow their old, godless myths.  He did not say that the Jews and Gentiles had both better shape up and learn a whole new set of religious doctrines or they’ll all miss out on God’s salvation.  No, astonishingly, he called the Gentiles and Jews “fellow heirs, members of the same body.” Contrary to what you may hear at any given Baptist convention, Christianity was founded as a religion of inclusiveness.

Paul knew full well what he was doing.  He knew that he was speaking heresy, and that his words were so far beyond everyone’s concept of “religion” that he may as well have been speaking Swahili.  It’s clear that Paul knew just how revolutionary all this was, because he explained it in such grandiose terms.  He called it an ageless “mystery,” and said, “In former generations this mystery was not made known to humankind, as it has now been revealed to his holy apostles and prophets by the Spirit.”  He referred to it as a “plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God who created all things; so that through the church the wisdom of God in its rich variety might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places.”

This is the mystery: that in Christ we discover an unexpected intention for us. It is not exclusiveness but inclusiveness; it is not a high wall constructed to protect the pure from the ungodly, it is an expansive embrace of our brothers and sisters whose names and faces we have forgotten in our haste to divide the sheep from the goats.  The mystery of Christ is that, in him, religion is counterintuitive.

That’s the same counterintuitive message that Martin Luther King, Jr. preached in Birmingham and Selma and Memphis, the message he thundered down from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.  He preached it in churches, he preached it on television, he preached it from jail houses.  He preached it until it got him shot.  They could kill the man, but no one can kill the message.

The trend among many people of faith in our time is toward the closing of ranks, perhaps because people feel insecure or threatened by the future, I don’t know.  But we’ve seen the consequences of this tendency in its most extreme, defining all those who are outside the circle of salvation as infidels, and waging holy war on them with righteous passion.  In its more genteel form, this kind of religion quietly sanctions discrimination, and subtly promotes intolerance and hatred.

And the “outsiders,” the “unrighteous ones” are readily identified.  For liberals, it’s conservatives; for Christians it’s Muslims; for Jews it’s Palestinians; for Protestants, Catholics; for straights, gays; for Arabs, Americans; and on it goes.  If our purpose in religious practice is to draw ever more circles around ourselves to define the infidels, we will have no shortage of targets.  Doing so doesn’t open up an enlightened new path through the world, it’s simply following the oldest and most common of human tendencies.

If the Lord is disclosing to us through scripture a whole new way of being human, a spiritual life that transforms our baser and meaner motives, then Paul must be right.  The path of faith must not be the way that comes most naturally to us, the way of judgement, condemnation and separation.  A more challenging way is revealed to us: that we are one as children of the Lord of All, and that we are to reach out to one another, find and secure the ties that bind us together.

This is not as easy as it seems.  It means facing the most basic and instinctive kinds of judgements and negative feelings that each of us has inside.  I know for a fact how difficult that is.  My blood has a low boiling point when it comes to dealing with certain kinds of folks.  My biggest hangup is trying to connect on a human level with Christian fundamentalists (as you might have guessed from time to time).  I have been in more heated theological discussions that have elevated my heart rate than I care to confess.  And when the passions start to flare, the most natural thing in the world is to conclude that the other person is somehow simply “blinded” to the truth by some form of ignorance, voodoo, or brainwashing that makes them, at least for the purposes of the argument, a little less human.

You see, my challenge is rather complicated.  If I believe in inclusiveness, how am I supposed to treat those who promote exclusiveness – exclude them?  Seems rather inconsistent, doesn’t it?  What I have to keep working on is this: when I start to lock horns with someone, I need to find a way to listen, and if I ultimately disagree, to do so with the gentle respect and humility that acknowledges our common share in the heritage of eternal truth.  I’m still a pretty good distance from being able to do that.  But Paul points me in the right direction.  And I suggest he’s pointing all of us in that direction.

So, if we truly opened ourselves to learning from others, what might we discover?  I’d like to suggest just a few of the things I believe we could learn from other religions if we were open to doing so.

Judaism is centered around a powerfully beautiful elevation of the individual and the family.  There are rabbis and synagogues and rites and services of worship, but in many respects, the focus of Jewish life is not the worshiping community so much as the family and the individual within it.  There are prayers, rituals, important lessons that are taught around the family dining table, and there are solemn spiritual and ethical expectations of each person that are learned from an early age and carried through each day’s activities.  We could learn something from them about “decentralizing” our faith, taking it out of our Sunday sanctuaries and making it live in our homes and lives.

Buddhism emphasizes the oneness of all of creation, and the inner peace and depth of understanding that one can attain by letting go of the superficial anxieties that consume us and living deeply into that oneness of the universe.  We could learn from them something about the surpassing value of a deep life of prayer and meditation, and how lives can be transformed one at a time by such a process of awakening.

Islam is an all-encompassing system of religious belief and practice.  Muslim adherents take very seriously their spiritual and ethical responsibilities.  Their lives are centered on the worship and praise of Allah with repeated daily prayers, and the “five pillars” of the faith are at the foundation of their lives.  We could learn from them about not having such a casual, “I’ll show up on Sunday morning if I feel like it,” “take-it-or-leave-it” approach to the almighty Lord of this universe.

Yes there are extremists.  There are Christian extremists who gun down abortion doctors in cold blood, Jewish extremists who want to keep taking Palestinian land and squeezing them into an ever tinier pressure cooker, and Muslim extremists who want to blow up airliners.  But unless the great majority of us in all religions who love the Lord and love one another can start learning from each other, we may be headed down a very dark road indeed.

What social or political body, what ideological niche, what cultural or religious group do you most readily cast into the outer circle, disregard, and even dehumanize a little?  You will find the task of discovering common bonds with those people as fellow children of promise to be your greatest challenge.  And I would submit that it is also the place in your life where the transforming power of the Spirit is most likely to be at work.

So, does our religion open us to certain beliefs, does it offer us ethical and theological norms?  Of course.  But is it the primary purpose of our faith to separate ourselves from one another because of our adherence to those beliefs and norms?  I would submit that it is just the opposite.  All over this world, we are sisters and brothers, because we are all inheritors of the Divine promise of creation.  One of the central purposes of our faith is to help us cut through the “theological twaddle” and sift through the nonsense so that we can comprehend that truth more fully, and so that, as Paul says, “the wisdom of God in its rich variety might now be made known.”  And that is a “mystery hidden for ages.”