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Wildacres Baptist Response 1996

Our Common Heritage: What Do We Teach About It? What Should We Teach About It My first consciousness of Jews and Judaism came one day, when I was in, maybe, the third grade. Some older kids at school had said I looked like a Jew, or had a Jewish nose, or some other Jewish feature about me. They taunted me all the way home from school, and I arrived home crying. My mother, in one of her wiser moments, stopped my crying and said, Well you just go back tomorrow and tell those boys that Jesus was a Jew, and if it was good enough for him, its good enough for you! About age 11, I began attending Sunday School at a rather conservative Southern Baptist church in the suburb of Atlanta where we lived. Beyond the fact that Jesus was born Jewish, and that the first 39 books of our Christian Bible were about Gods dealings with an ancient people called Jews, and that Jesus dealt with some pretty shady Jewish characters called Pharisees and Sadducees, the subject of Judaism never really got discussed there. Oh, I knew there were people who practiced the Jewish faith in modern times, and that they didnt believe Jesus was the Messiah. We had no particular antagonism toward Jews, but we just never actively discussed Judaism or the things Christians and Jews might have in common. If Jews were mentioned at all, their significance was relegated to Old Testament times and to the first century of the Common Era. Sometimes we did discuss other Christian groups. We allowed for the possibility that Methodists and Presbyterians, and maybe some Lutherans and Episcopalians were probably going to heaven with us Baptists. We were a lot less certain about Jehovahs Witnesses, Christian Scientists, Mormons, and most Orthodox and Roman Catholics! About that time [1958] a large synagogue on the other side of Atlanta was bombed. This is the incident that is portrayed in the movie, Driving Miss Daisy. But I dont remember anyone in my family or my church asking why such a thing could have happened, any more than I can recall anyone questioning the rightness of segregation in those days. I entered the University of Georgia in September 1960. My first roommate and I lasted about three days. He was a Baptist in name, but pretty secular in outlook, and couldnt put up with my nave Fundamentalism. We traded roommates with another couple of guys in the dorm. My new

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roommate, Alvin, was Jewish, and, I gather, he had a roommate who did not like that fact. The two of us were cordial, but, unfortunately we did not have a lot in common, and never became especially close. Alvin was not an especially religious person at the time. We almost never discussed religion, and had an unspoken agreement not to bring up the subject. But I did plaster the wall above my desk with various syrupy Christian plaques as some form of witness to visitors in the room. Alvin soon joined a Jewish fraternityprobably the only kind he could belong to in those daysand his Jewish friends began to come to the room and made snickering comments about my wall plaques. But after a while that ceased. At the end of the school year Alvin told me he had appreciated how well we had gotten along together. He said he hoped his friends had not been too obnoxious to me in the early days. And he told me that their remarks to me had bothered him and he had told his friends to lay off. He said he knew what it was like to have folks treat you badly because of your religion, and he didnt want me to have to put up with that. It began to dawn on me that I had never taken the time to get to know this person with whom I had shared a room for nine months. And I was the real loser. I had missed a genuine opportunity to get to know a person from another faith and cultural tradition. It was another college classmate, John Williams, who just happened to be Roman Catholic, who was next to help me to appreciate the common heritage that all of us Christians and Jews have with each other. John had a ready wit, and just bowled me over with his contagious friendliness. He used to visit the Baptist Student Union with me and would sometimes volunteer to play the piano for our vespers services when the regular pianist failed to show up. It seems he had studied piano with a devout Baptist lady in Richmond, and she had required him to practice, using a Baptist hymnal! John was the first to teach me about interfaith dialogue. Pope John XXIII was now on the scene. A breath of fresh air was blowing through John Williams faith community, and he allowed me a whiff of it. He used to say jokingly, You know, we Catholics used to call you Baptists heretics, but now you are our separated brothers and sisters. John and I have maintained our friendship through the years. He completed his Ph.D. at Georgia, and taught English for a while at the University of Richmond, a good Baptist school, and I visited him there while I was in the army, stationed in Washington, D.C. John later went to Switzerland
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and completed a doctorate in canon law. I was privileged to be present at his ordination as a Catholic Deacon and later as a Catholic Priest. Father John now serves as pastor of three Churches in the area of Clinton and Mount Olive, NC. [MJW note, July 2005: I understand John has now been promoted to
the status of a Monsignor. I dont know exactly what that means, but it sounds important. He now serves as pastor of St. Josephs Catholic Church in Raleigh.]

One of these days I am hoping he can visit with us at Wildacres. He was the first, but by no means the last, to teach me that the ties that bind all Christians and Jews are more important than the things that divide us. During my seminary years in the late sixties and early seventies, I was encouraged to appreciate the common heritage we had with other Christian groups. My class advisor was Dr. Elmo Scoggin, professor of Hebrew and Old Testament Theology, and a former missionary to the Arabs in Israel. His wife is an observant and practicing Jew. Dr. Scoggin made us aware of some of the Christian sins of commission and omission that contributed to allow the Holocaust to take its course. But even so, during my seminary years my knowledge of Jews and Judaism was, for the most part, confined only to the Biblical period. It was only when I first began to participate in these Interfaith Institutes at Wildacres some six or seven years ago that my consciousness was aroused. Now, I am like a sponge, soaking up insights and seeking to make up for lost time. The experience of getting to know all of you, and of hearing your views and experiences, and of experiencing the presentations here has changed my life. Let me give just one example of how this has worked out in practical terms. I enjoy teaching, especially in adult Sunday School in my church. Nowadays when our lesson is a passage from the Hebrew Scriptures (a term I hardly knew ten years ago!) Im always impelled to check out, not only the Christian sources of interpretation, but also the Jewish ones, the Mishnah, the Talmuds, the Midrashim, and modern Jewish commentators when I can locate them. We did a series of lessons in January on the poems of the Suffering Servant of the Lord, in the second half of the Book of Isaiah. Now, we could no longer glibly conclude that Jesus was the one and the only total and complete fulfillment of what the prophet was trying to convey to his audience. We had to deal with traditional Jewish views. My notes and recollections from our week-long examination of the Book of Isaiah at
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Wildacres a few years ago contributed greatly to that series. And our class members understanding of the concept of the suffering servant of God is much richer as a result. And in March and April of this year, when we studied the parables of Jesus, we could not stop with the New Testament Gospel accounts. Where did Jesus get the themes and imagery of his parables? Was there not some common fund of ideas and concerns among other Jewish thinkers of that period from which Jesus drew many of those gems? For example, one Sunday we studied the parable of the Prodigal Son, who took his inheritance from his father and squandered it in a far-off country, and then repented, and returned to receive forgiveness from his father (Luke 15:11-32). Our lesson was enriched that Sunday by comparing two Rabbinic parallels from the Midrashim. Here is one of them:
There is nothing greater than repentance. . . . Rabbi Meir said: To what is the matter like? To a kings son who turned to evil courses. The king sent his tutor to him to say, Turn again, my son. But the son sent to his father to say, How can I return? I am ashamed before you. Then the father sent to him again to say, Can a son be ashamed to return to his father? So God sent Jeremiah to the Israelites in the hour of their sin, and He bade the prophet, Tell my children to return [i.e., to repent] (Jeremiah 3:12). The Israelites said, How can we return? . . . Then God replied to them, My children, if you return, is it not to your Father that you return? As it is said, I am a Father to Israel (Jeremiah 31:9). Midrash Deuteronomy Rabbah, Waethanan, II, 24.

And here is the other:

A king had a son who had gone astray from his father a journey of a hundred days; his friends said to him, Return to your father; he said, I cannot. Then his father sent to say, Return as far as you can, and I will come to you the rest of the way. So God says, If you return to Me, I will return to you. (Malachi 3:7) Midrash Pesikta Rabbah 184b end - 185a beginning.

In a lesson devoted to Jesus parable about repentance and about God as loving Father, how impoverished we would have been, had we neglected to consider those gems from our Jewish heritage that were preserved in the Midrashim! It is clear to me that, even though the extant Rabbinic literature is more recent than the New Testament, it contains much that was handed down in Jewish tradition long before. And it is clear that examples such as
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those I have quoted must have been current and in the air during the time of Jesus. Jesus certainly must have drawn upon his Jewish roots, just as we draw upon those of our own faith traditions today. I love my Baptist roots. I appreciate those Baptist saints, whose love and acceptance of me first convinced me that God also could love and accept me. I revere the principles that Baptists at their best have cherished: the trustworthiness and authority of the Biblical revelation; the soul competency of every individual before God; the priesthood of every believer; the autonomy of the local congregation of believers; a free Church in a free state, and the concept of separation of Church and state; and especially the understanding that God was acting in the person of Jesus, the Jew from Nazareth, to reconcile the sinful world and even sinful me to Himself. But I must confess the shame I felt some years ago when a leader of the Southern Baptist Convention said that he did not believe God hears the prayers of a Jew! Of course, it is now clear in the SBC that the hierarchy in control in Nashville these days probably would doubt whether God hears my prayers, or the prayers of any of the many of us Baptists who are more liberally-inclined than they! I now perceive that God is bigger than my denomination, and bigger than my individual beliefs or preconceptions about God. God is bigger than the Baptist expression of the Christian faith. God is bigger than Christianity. The experience of interfaith dialogue at Wildacres has been a major factor in correcting my near-sightedness. According to the New Testaments Fourth Gospel, the one traditionally referred to as according to John, Jesus once said, You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free. Lately the scholars of the socalled Jesus Seminar are saying that its doubtful Jesus ever said anything of the kind. I dont take a lot of stock in their opinions. But on this text Im almost inclined to think Jesus probably said something like, You shall know
the truth and the truth will make you very uncomfortable!

As a result of my participation in interfaith dialogue these last several years, especially at Wildacres, but elsewhere also, I have come to know some new aspects of the truth. And what I have learned has made me very uncomfortable at times. But it has also made me become a better person, a better Baptist, and a better Christian. Thank you all for helping me to discover new truths.
Rev. Michael J. Watts, Interfaith Conference, Wildacres Retreat, August 1. 1996
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