unlikelyclay.com

I was listening to NPR this morning and they had a story on a group of parents from different faith backgrounds joining together to teach their kids common values. (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=87809254).

Families from Protestant, Muslim, Jewish, and Bahia backgrounds all were talking about the commonalities of faith.

Now I am not a neanderthal - I believe we should treat all faiths with respect.  But this part of the story caught my attention:

And to that end, Layli calls the children to the dining room table. In front of each child sits a little lamp shade.

“Remember how we talked about how religions are a lot like lamp shades?” she asks the group. “They may look different, they may be different colors or sit in different rooms, but they all have the light of God inside of them.”

The kids glue symbols of various religions onto the shades — a Christian cross, a Buddhist wheel, a star and crescent for Islam. Then Layli calls out, “Come to the light!” And the children, one by one, place their decorated lamp shades on a light bulb.

This is not right.  You don’t have dig very far to find out the god of Islam is very different than the God of Christianity.  Buddhism leaves the whole question of God open ended.  The Christian understanding of God is not the same as the Jewish understanding.

This is the kind of story that is sweet and nice - the kid’s voices are cute and the underlying premises is “Let’s all get along.”  But the God we worship is different.  All religions do not hold the same light nor do we teach the same things.  We may share common values, but there are clear distinctions.

The Gospel of John makes a clear statement about the light:

In Him was life, and the life was the light of all people.  The light shines in the darkness and the darkness did not overcome it (John 1:4-5).

Christianity makes this clear claim - Jesus is the light.  Period.  It’s not the same light.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 7th, 2008 at 2:01 pm and is filed under Observations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.