The 16th Sunday after Pentecost
September 13, 2026
You’ve noticed by now that this morning’s worship has been different, but at the same time recognizably the same to what we do on a typical Sunday morning.
It’s been the same in that it has been built on the strong bones of a liturgical structure reliably holds our praise, our prayers, our readings, and our reflections each Sunday.
It’s been different most notably in that our readings have included readings from different faith traditions, and come in an unexpected order that has the Gospel reading first. . Maybe not as obviously, many of the prayers offered this morning have been informed by those of other faith traditions as well.
The word “liturgy” translates from the Greek as “work of the people”, and the people who have worked to shape today’s liturgy are all individuals who were part of a 6-week course on Interspirituality in the School of Christian Growth this last spring. The sessions explored the lived meaning of the term, Interspirituality, and provided an opportunity to experience just the thinnest slice of the vast range of spiritual wisdom available in the world’s faith traditions beyond our own.
By the end of the sessions, we felt that it was important to share our experience, however much we could, with our entire community. The liturgy today is offered in that spirit. On behalf of John, Fern and myself, and all those who helped turn this idea into reality, we offer our gratitude to Celebration Circle for offering us support all along the way. Thank you!
What IS Interspirituality? It’s sometimes helpful to start with what a thing is NOT. Interspirituality is NOT about interfaith dialogue: it doesn’t attempt to compare creeds, doctrines, practices or structures across faith traditions. There are many important conversations along these lines, especially since the 1960s, when the Catholic Vatican II Council gave its endorsement to these efforts.
But interspirituality works to meet across faith traditions at a different level: it’s about sharing at what’s been called the mystical levels of a tradition. The word “mystical” might be off-putting as something esoteric and strange, or inaccessible to us ordinary people. But what mystical really means are the kinds of knowing that come from the more experiential aspects of a tradition: what happens in particular kinds of prayer practice, for example, or our lived experience when we come together to take grain and grape in the communion circle; knowledge that isn’t about the various doctrinal positions about what communion means, and who can receive it. When I use the word, “mystical” this is what I mean.
When we share across this more mystical/experiential level of the world’s religions, the differences in creeds and doctrines tend to lose some of their importance and fade into the background: what comes to the surface are the essential truths about spirituality that are held in common by essentially all the world’s religions.
At this level, there is growing agreement among many of the world’s spiritual leaders that all religions bear witness to the experience of Ultimate Reality. Different religions give various names to this Deep Reality, but this mystical tradition knows that this Ultimate Mystery cannot be limited by any name or concept. Faith then becomes the opening up to, accepting, and responding to this Ultimate Reality: faith then means something more essential than adopting any belief system
It’s at this level that Interspirituality digs in. It is NOT a religion of its own, but it’s more what has been called a DISPOSITION—a willingness to learn from and be transformed by the inner life of other traditions, without abandoning one’s own.
Here’s a hopefully clear and simple example: When Steve and I became serious about our relationship, neither of us had been practicing in our faith tradition for some time. But there was something about the depth of our commitment to each other that required that we look more closely to how each of us had been shaped to which we found that we each felt still faithful. In the next years, Steve and I were practitioners of Interspirituality: we were deeply disposed to learn from and be changed by each other’s spiritual experiences in different traditions. We practiced Interspirituality before it even had a name.
But in the wider culture, Interspirituality has branched out in different directions since it showed up on the radar in the late 1990s. It was first shared among groups of individuals led by people like Thomas Keating (the creator of Centering Prayer), Thich Nhat Hanh and the Dalai Lama. These were beautiful attempts of individuals and groups to learn deeply enough of another tradition to be able to find the common threads of wisdom shared by their tradition and another. Later, some of these early efforts forward morphed into something more like new individual spiritualities, or splinter religions. For me, though, it is still about that original deep disposition to study and be open to spiritual wisdom from different faith traditions while staying grounded in my own.
There are a number of answers to the question, “Why does this matter?” One that is deeply compelling for me is this: Differences in religion have been implicated in many of the wars that have caused such great numbers killed, populations displaced, entire regions destroyed. If we and other peoples cannot go past our beliefs that our religion is the one right way, we will continue to kill and destroy, using religion as fuel for the inferno,
Today, though, I want to focus closer to home: on what gifts interspirituality can give to faith communities, including our own. I’ll start by sharing an ancient story common in Eastern traditions: it’s about a group of blind individuals who stumble upon an elephant.
As the story has it, each person tries to describe the elephant by touching it. One feels its trunk and speaks about its solidity and width. Another feels its tail and describes the elephant as thin and spindly. A third pats an ear and assumes the elephant is flat and floppy. A fourth touches its side and concludes the elephant is a rough-textured being without other defining characteristics. And on it goes: no one individual is actually wrong, exactly: it’s that each person knows one aspect, and none can comprehend the entirety from where they stand.
Usually, when this story gets told, it’s with the unspoken understanding that we the listeners see the entire elephant from the beginning. Right? If you’ve heard the story, that’s how it’s been told. And the story ends there, with every person holding on to their definition of an elephant. But WE, listeners outside the story, already know about the whole elephant.
But what if we get rid of the sighted outsiders living in a more enlightened world? Without our POV as sighted listeners, is there still a way the story can move toward a fuller truth? Well, it requires that at least one of those encountering the elephant becomes curious enough to want to explore further. By following their sense of touch to a new not-yet-known part of the elephant. And as they move, and they encounter other people, they can share notes on what each has experienced so far, and combined their separate knowledges into one map.
THAT curious exploration of those moving beyond their original location IS Interspirituality! It is THAT disposition of openness and willingness to explore for a more complete understanding. Of course, what we’re choosing to engage more fully with is not an elephant, but the possibility that Ultimate Reality can be more fully understand if we share our traditions’ understandings.
This is the kind of openness that I’m inviting us into as we now look at the readings for today.
You noticed that the gospel reading went first today, and maybe also that it wasn’t the lectionary reading assigned for today. Instead, we read a passage from John’s gospel that’s usually read in a different lectionary year. Those shifts were chosen to help us create an experience of laying the wisdom from several traditions side-by-side traditions to allow for a kind of conversation between the traditions on a particular point.
The conversation for today is whether we can learn from other traditions something about seeing salvation as less of being primarily about each individual’s concern, as the Christian tradition seems to focus on. This isn’t about resolving anything, or adopting any position by the end of the sermon: You can look at this more as a start of a conversation about an important spiritual question for faith communities in this time
In more Eastern traditions, and also in more indigenous traditions, there seem to be more of a sense that we are all in this together: none of us would be who we are without being in deep inter-relationship with the many aspects of the world around us. Salvation is necessarily seen as linked by our deep reciprocal interactions. Thich Nhat Hanh uses the term “Interbeing” to name the truth of our being who we are because other sentient beings, and the world around us is what they are.
In the Gospel of John, I found the strongest focus on this sense of mutuality, or of reciprocal interactions. And in John 17:20-23, I found maybe the deepest description.
It’s a beautiful prayer, which Jesus raises up to the Father on the last night he was together with his disciples. I didn’t approach it as the prayer it is, but for what it tells us about mutuality interbeing. I confess that though I have read it many times, I’ve had trouble getting into it, so I’m paying closer attention to it for the first time.
The first aspect I noted in a different way is that the beginning of the prayer is for something that doesn’t yet exist: the key sentence to me is: “As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us.”
Here, oneness isn’t the natural way of things: Jesus is praying that his disciples may all be one, which they definitely aren’t yet. The oneness is something that will come as a new gift from the Father. It’s a particular kind of oneness that he is praying for them: it’s the kind of deep connection that Jesus and the Father have between them: the Father is in Jesus, and Jesus is in the Father. Jesus is praying that his followers be allowed to experience and take part in the mutual indwelling that the Father and Jesus already have. Later in the prayer, Jesus prays that his followers be completely one.
This prayer is for a state of union between the Father, Jesus, and his followers where, in essence there would be no separation. They would share in one consciousness: the inter-being of all being prayed for in the intimacy of Jesus and the Father.
Of what I’ve read so far of the world’s faith traditions, what comes closest to this description is a branch of Hinduism that is called Advaita Vedanta. It holds that at the deepest core of each of us, our true self, we are simply pure awareness. It isn’t something that is granted at some later time: it is something we could discover in ourselves if we were to let other attributes of our personality drop away. At this level, there is no real separation between any of us, between any other sentient beings, or between ourselves and the divine ultimate reality.
But I have difficulty even envisioning what “being of one mind” or being of one heart” would really look like, or feel like. I suppose there are some images I have, like the Vulcan mind meld, a Star Trek deep telepathy with one other person. No real intuitions or images have carried me past that.
The first image that carried me forward in a powerful way is that of Indra’s Net, that I came across for the first time maybe 20 years ago. As you heard in the third reading today, in this ancient story, there exists a fabulous infinite net, and at every node of the wonderful net is hung a single glittering jewel. As the net is infinite, so are the jewels infinite in number. And each jewel is polished so brightly that in its surface is the reflect of all the other jewels in the net, and so forth. That still grabs my imagination and creates an inner spaciousness and wonder each time I sit with it.
And then I can import this image of numberless jewels of consciousness, and also the associations I have had to it, back to the reading from John. And when I do that, something new happens to my reading: I receive an exquisite image of what Jesus was praying for: where each and all of those within the net are connected and reflect back the light of numberless other beings, in their beautiful facets that also reflect the beauty of still other beings—including us, here, now.
Let’s sit with that a minute.
As beautiful and wondrous as this image is, a vision of a world that honors and reflects the light in each of us, the prayer reported by John as given by Jesus has an important difference from Indra’s net. What the prayer asks for is not about something infinite. It is a prayer to manifest a boundaried reality: It isn’t for everyone. Personally, one of my litmus tests for scriptures in any faith tradition is whether their worldview is one in which my husband would be included. Steve would not be a beneficiary of this prayer. Nor is anyone whose lives, no matter how exemplary, do not include following Jesus. I say this as a noticing– one that is more about John’s times, and not Jesus’ heart.
It’s difficult to accept that Jesus, who is one with the Father, would be praying for a future in which one group of humans would be receivers of a blessing, based on those who hold one specific understanding of who God is. As we heard in Fern’s reading from Richard Rohr in today’s reflection:
And why would a God worthy of the name God not care about all of God’s children? Does God really have favorites among God’s children? What an unhappy family that would create—indeed, has created.
So: as wondrous as this prayer is, part of what we can notice in our laying our readings side-by-side, including also what we could learn from the Sioux understanding of Wakan Tanka, is this question of whether there is a boundary between those who receive the blessing and those who do not.
This has been a LOT to take in.
But maybe you can get a feeling for the spaciousness that could help open up or deepen our understandings of scripture passage. Look at all the possibilities we touched on in just this limited time. The spaciousness that appears as we do this kind of pondering and wondering across faith traditions is essentially what has attracted me to interspirituality as a very vibrant and nourishing enterprise. If I have managed to convey just some of what I feel is the gift of Interspirituality, I would count that as a blessing.
I can well imagine that there may never be another worship service quite like this one: and I’m not sure that there ought to be. And I don’t have any concerns that Seekers Church is going to slide into becoming Unitarian. But today, we experienced ways that bringing in readings and wisdom from other faith traditions could enrich our Sunday mornings, while keeping us grounded in our structures and processes. And I deeply believe that doing this more often would please the Holy One who continues to bring us together as a Christian faith community.