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SOUTH PARK JEWS & SUNDAY CHRISTIANS

In Wilshire Baptist Church’s community hall after the combined service, audience members had the opportunity to quiz Mason and Stern on various aspects of their differing faiths, and the two clergy responded off the cuff. Here are excerpts from the Q&A:

Q: Most of my knowledge of Jewish faith comes from the TV show “South Park”. In what ways might daily life be different for Baptists and Jews?

A: Rabbi Stern answered by describing himself as “terminally uncool” and saying he doesn’t watch “South Park”, but that “you at Wilshire know that ‘Baptist’ means a lot of different things in this town, and ‘Jew’ does as well.”

Q: Jesus was born a Jew, so when did he become a Christian?

A: “When we made him one,” Mason says. “Christianity comes after the church was founded. We believe Jesus inaugurated the coming kingdom of God” and that Jesus is the “anointed one”, “the one who is to come”. The word “Christian” enters the language “a full generation after Jesus himself,” Mason says.

Q: Why are Christians more focused on the afterlife than Jews?

A: “In conventional Jewish reading, there are only a few late and scattered notions of afterlife in the Hebrew Bible,” Stern says. The consequences of sin in Hebrew texts are more “earthly — agricultural, military, having to do with safety and security of family Covenant relationship for us is so much about this earthly realm.” However, he points out, the Jewish notion of afterlife has been around 2,000 years, and “we could probably stand to emphasize it a little more.”

A: “Christians are all over the map about the afterlife,” Mason says, reminding the audience that “Jesus says, ‘Behold, I make all things new,’ not ‘I make all new things.’ Immediate afterlife is more Greek thinking. It is the restoration of all things here that we look forward to.”

Beginning of a beautiful friendship

BENEFITS INCLUDE: joined an interfaith group that met monthly for breakfast, and through it he formed relationships with Temple Emanu-El leaders. Mason and Stern also began receiving invitationstointerfaithpanelsathigh school auditoriums or community colleges.

“It’s not as if we sort of met on the racquetball court,” Stern says, now away from the limelight and relaxing with Mason in his Temple Emanu-El office.

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The two men each found their way to Dallas in 1989 — Mason as Wilshire Baptist Church’s senior pastor and Stern as one of Temple Emanu-El’s assistant rabbis, later becomingassociaterabbiandthen,in 1996, senior rabbi. They are comparatively young leaders (Mason is 54, Stern, 49) ofprominentcongregations Wilshire Baptist, with 3,000-plus members, is one of the largest in the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, and Temple Emanu-El’s 2,800 families makes it the largest reform synagogue in the Southwest.

“We were both very young when we took the senior office of our parishes and congregations,” Mason says.

Sternsaysthatinperiodswhenhe needed guidance, “George has been a rabbi to me.”

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Mason, seeming humbled by this statement, thanks Stern and says the relationship is “mutual”.

SoonafterarrivinginDallas,Mason

As they got to know each other, something just clicked.

“We get along because we get along,” Stern says. “I think that there is so much more conversation among diverse clergy than congregants expect.”

It’s not a traditional friendship, Mason says, in that “it’s not like we have dinner together every Friday night.”

“We wish we did,” Stern interjects, but what’s more important is that “we know we’re there for each other.”

Days like this, then, in which they have a few minutes to catch up face-to-face, are rare — even if a reporter and photographer are present for most of the meeting.

What makes this occasion even more unlikely is that it takes place during one of the busiest times of the year for each clergyman. It is Holy Wednesday for Mason, with PalmSundaybehindhimandMaundy Thursday, Good Friday and Easter quickly approaching, while Stern celebrated the beginning of Passover the night prior with his congregation in a three-hour Seder.

“How did we get you here during Holy Week?” Stern asks Mason, inquiring as to whether Mason has his sermon prepared for Sunday.

“It’s the same story every year, David,” Masonretortsgood-naturedlyabout the Christian holiday celebrating Jesus’ resurrection.Hethenasksabouthis friend’s Passover Seder.

“DidElijahshowup?”Thequestion refers to the Passover tradition of setting out a cup of wine and opening the door for the prophet Elijah.

“No evidence as of yet — the world is still broken,” Stern says.

“Oh, it surely is, isn’t it?” Mason agrees.

Getting comfortable with discomfort

“When you listen to and see someone else’s practice, it’s like holding up a mirror to your own,” Mason says. “You see the richness of someone else’s and the poverty of your own, and sometimes you see the richness of your own and the poverty of another.”

Thetwomen’sforthrightdiscussions about their differing views are “some of the richest I’ve ever had,” Stern says.

Their greatest satisfaction, however, is not in the dialogues that take place within their respective offices, but in the way their friendship has impacted their two congregations.

“If I wanted a successphotoofthese years of dialogue, it would not be George and me under the lights on the stage at Brookhaven,” Stern says, referring to the interfaith panels in which he and Mason have participated.

“It would be that night at Wilshire with peopleclimbingovereachotherand mushed together.”

Such a relationshipbetween a Jewish synagogue and a Baptist church has been more than a decade in the making. In the late ’90s, Temple Emanu-El began inviting Wilshire folk as honored guests to its annual interfaith shabbat services. Mason participatedintheTorahdiscussion,andthe Baptists were invited to sing in the Jewish choir — blue robes mixed with white robes. Mason, in turn, has invited Stern to lead classes and lectures at Wilshire, and most recently worked with Stern to arrange the combined service at Wilshire.

These days, they’re focusing on such congregation-to-congregationgatherings,and doing “less of the dog and pony, intentionally,” Stern says, referring to formal inter-

The Sheep And The Goats

To listen to Rabbi David Stern’s sermon on Matthew 25, visit and search: Matthew 25. Other portions of the service — including the prayers and a call to worship read by the Rev. Tiffany Wright of Wilshire Baptist Church and Rabbi Debra J. Robbins of Temple Emanu-El (who are also good friends) — also are available for listening.

After the joint service at Wilshire, Stern and the Rev. George Mason spent some time discussing the sermon and text. Here are excerpts from their discussion:

Stern: There’s always a risk in interfaith dialogue to cherry pick and, in doing that, disrupt the integrity of the whole. As a Jew, [I chose to] tread lightly on final judgment and sheep and goats The magnet for me was the set of criteria [rather than the end result].

Mason: The passage is intended to be read by the covenantal community who should be doing the reading It’s written to people who are already themselves insiders ... As you read the New Testament, the harshest judgment is always reserved for those who consider themselves insiders [the “included” are first, then the “excluded”] ... The assumption is we’re already here; now will your life reflect this, or will you miss this by your own choosing?

Stern: The sorting felt too tidy for me. What kept jumping out at me was the past tense: Everyone’s already in, and you have to sort of screw up to be out. What about the kind of existential, sometimes we have sheep days and sometimes we have goat days? How do we hear this as an ongoing challenge instead of a summary challenge?

Mason: If you look on a hillside grazing, can you tell the difference between the sheep and the goats? The shepherd knows the sheep from the goats; the sheep may not know, and the goats may not know. We are not to spend our time deciding who are God’s children, but being God’s children, and leave the sorting up to God. What does it mean to believe in Jesus but not to do what he says for the least of these? Do you really believe and not care for your neighbor? Clearly Jesus is saying, “No.” faith programs. Usually in such contexts, “the focus will tend to be what you agree upon,” Stern says. “We’ve moved through and past that. I believe that the depth of our dialogue is the result of the depth of our relationship.”

And though their congregants may not feel confident enough to engage in the same kind of in-depth conversations, Mason says, “they are always happy to see it modeled for them, and that makes it easier for them somehow.”

Wilshire members probably feel more comfortable attending a bar or bat mitzvah, for example, or after attending a number of interfaith Shabbat services at Temple, feel welcome to visit on their own. Some Temple members worship at Wilshire on occasion, and one in particular meets Mason in the narthex almost weekly with a “clarifying question,” Mason says.

“A Jew from Temple Emanu-El would not worry that if they came to a Good Friday service at Wilshire, I would be blaming the Jews for killing Christ,” Mason says. “We would not take the easy road with that. We would wrestle with it and include ourselves in the complicity.”

Humor never hurts to break the ice, either, and Mason and Stern are kings of the one-liner.

When Temple members visited Wilshire, Mason announced that “we will, because this is a Baptist church, take an offering later in the service,” which garnered a few laughs, but not as many as his smirking confession that “we considered an altar call, too.”

Afterward, during the discussion in the community hall, Mason was momentarily sidetracked by a conversation that reminded him of a movie he wanted to see, and he suggested Stern accompany him.

“I’ll like it better than the last one we saw together,” Stern said pointedly. Mason thought for a second, then smiled and told the two congregations: “That would be ‘The Passion of the Christ’.”

Suchwittycandorisnodoubtwhat encouraged Wilshire and Temple members to pose such questions during the potluck dialogue as: “Most of my knowledge of Jewish faith comes from the TV show ‘South Park’. In what ways might daily life be different for Baptists and Jews?” Or, “Jesus was born a Jew, so when did he become a Christian?”

Where it gets trickier for Wilshire and Temple congregants is when their leaders begin to express jealousy.

“When we start talking about what we envy in the other’s tradition, then you start to see people fidget in their seats a little bit,” Stern says. “You tend to want to see your religious leaders in the ramparts saying, ‘Go team!’ ”

Some congregants have asked if Mason and Stern couldn’t just abandon the dialogues and return to solely sermons.

“Itookitas a hugesignofsuccess because they’re starting to make people uncomfortable,” Stern says.

The theological abyss

Just as Mason may be criticized more than Stern for his failure to proselytize his friend, he also takes more heat for his interfaith efforts.

“Reformcongregationsexpectreform rabbis to do this kind of stuff,” Stern says. “But when George shows up somewhere, he’s a Baptist minister, and for that reason he always has to wear a bit more of a flak jacket than I do.”

It benefits Mason that his Baptist brethren are not of the Southern ilk but of a self-professed progressive strain that broke away about the time the senior pastor took the pulpit at Wilshire. Plus, Mason has a different background than most Texas Baptists in that he, like Stern, is a New Yorker. Staten Island, where Mason grew up, was more than 90 percent Catholic, and his family was Protestant. He attended public school, but remembers playing in baseball games that routinely began with the Hail Mary.

“And I would have no idea what they were talking about,” Mason says. “I had much more experience knowing what it was also like to feel like ‘the other’, and I do think that makes a difference. I don’t know who I would be if I had grown up in Dallas.”

New York also had a strong Jewish cultural footprint, and Mason had Jewish friends living across the street. It gave Mason a different perspective than most oftheChristiancommunity,hesays, many of whom assume that engaging in dialogue with a Jewish rabbi means conversation will be polite and placatory with watered-downconvictions,ratherthan seriously addressing differences.

Inhisownexperience,Masonsays, “that’s simply not been true.” He and Stern disagree, sometimes emphatically. But their disagreements take place in the context of a friendship.

“The relationship with David and I, we have no ulterior motive, [as in] if we could just get each other to do x or y then we will have succeeded,” Mason says. “Love doesn’t have ulterior motives. It simply gives itself out of a desire for well-being, and that’s the difference, I think.”

Finding such a relationship consists of “feeling your way through to the right partner where it’s someone you can learn from,” Stern says.

That’s why his friendship with Mason “doesn’t strike me as unlikely at all. I don’twanttodismissitascommon, either,” Stern says, but “all sorts of things make it make sense.”

There is one strong belief difference, however, that threatens to drive a wedge between them.

“We do come apart over the fact that I was a Mets fan,” Mason says.

“It’s a hugetheologicalabyss,”says Stern, a Yankeesenthusiast.“Ilove George. I know he’ll come around.”

Go Online

To read the Rev. George Mason’s worship column on differences between Jews and Christians, visit prestonhollow.advocatemag.com and search: messiah.