Last week I was fortunate enough to be in conversation with open-minded people. It was a delight to sit around a table to share a meal, share my stories, and share my faith with people who were willing to listen to different points-of-view about Christ and our responses to what we think the bible and our God calls us to be.
As is usually the case when people are allowed to share their stories in an open and safe (from judgement) environment, we all found our relationship with God, one another, and ourselves grow a little deeper. This is not to say there were questions about different aspects of the beliefs which were shared, but what was allowed was the opportunity to ask those questions in order to hear a different idea than ours and to possibly learn a little more about where our faith stands.
As we sat around the table I had an opportunity to share a story I may have shared here before. It was of a young lady in my high school whose grandmother had recently passed away. In her grieving she had approached the youth pastor of her church who had told her that it was too bad her grandmother was a Buddhist when she passed because now there was no chance of this young girl seeing her again in heaven.
In other words, she wasn't a Christian, so she wasn't going to heaven.
I don't have to tell you how much deeper the pain of this young girl went.
I had seen her in school a couple of days after this happened and it was obvious she had been crying for a very long time. I told her to follow me so we could talk. She told me what had happened over the weekend then asked me, with a look of desperation on her face, if it is
true she'll never see her grandmother again just because she was a Buddhist.
I told her as honestly as I could that I really didn't know. But, if it helps I could tell her what I believed. I told her that I don't think God would alienate anyone just because they were Buddhist and that heaven is for all people, regardless of who or what they were in this world. Her pain seemed to lessen as we talked about a God who is unconditionally all-accepting.
The question for us should be this: Does the God we believe in, the God we put all of our selves into, welcome all people to his table, or just some? If the answer is some, I think we have more work to do on this planet to help people see that alienating others based on race, religion, sexual identity, gender, or abilities only leads to division.
If the answer is all people, then you understand, and can actually vision, Isaiah's banquet on the hill.
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