"A Night at the Museum" is a movie that opened last year, starring comedian Ben Stiller. Although I haven't seen the movie, I gather from the previews that it deals with the adventures that befall a night security guard when the exhibits become alive on his watch. As a result, the whole museum has a rather magic, other-worldly feel to it, providing the backdrop for some funny and unlikely encounters.

Although I'm sure it isn't nearly as funny, spending time in Jerusalem was not altogether different from such a night at the museum. Spending time in Jerusalem, you see, was like spending time in a living church history museum. The various branches of the Christian tree of faith about which I had hitherto only read in my textbooks -- well, suddenly they were alive before me. It almost felt as if long extinct animals had miraculously come to life in front of my eyes. Needless to say, the overall "weirdness quotient" was very high. Over there you had the oldest national church in the world, the Armenian Orthodox, established at the beginning of the fourth century, before Christianity had become legal in the Roman Empire. In that church you could worship with the Syrian Orthodox in Aramaic, the language that Jesus spoke. Or on certain special days of the year, you could worship at the Russian Orthodox Church of Saint Mary Magdalene -- White Russian, not Red Russian. What does "White Russian" mean anyway, and who knew there was such an animal? Greek Orthodox, Greek Catholic, Coptic, Melkite, Franciscan, wearing their distinctive forms of dress, from all over the world, it all seemed too real, too much to take in.

I took advantage of and learned much from this living church history museum. But when it came time for Sunday worship, being the exceptionally good and model Presbyterian that you all know me to be, I normally worshipped at St. Andrew's Presbyterian Church, a Scottish Presbyterian church in Jerusalem. After all, there isn't a Presbyterian church in Bethlehem, where I was living, and at least they spoke English at St. Andrew's.

On several occasions, however, which I firmly deny had anything to do with the time I got out of bed on a Sunday morning -- those are malicious rumors -- on several occasions, I went to the nearby Lutheran church for worship. Worship there was in Arabic, and even after I had been there almost a year, studying Arabic the entire time, I understood about all of didly-squat of what they were saying.

One thing, however, one word, stood out. When they read the Bible, when they sang hymns, when the pastor preached . . . throughout the entire service, they used the word "Allah" for God. This really shouldn't have been that surprising to me. After all, the word "Allah" just means "God" in Arabic. We read in the New Testament that Arabs were present at Pentecost, so Arab Christians have been worshipping God, "Allah", since the first century. Indeed, one could say that Christians have been worshipping Allah longer than they've been worshipping God, by which I mean that the Arabic word for God "Allah" was being used by Christians long before the English word "God" was ever used.

This should not have been surprising to me, but it was. It just felt kind of weird to be standing with other Christians worshipping Allah. Like most of you, I suspect, I had implicitly associated the word "Allah" with Islam, with the Muslims. "Allah" was their God, their God was different, other. This worship experience challenged that association, it muddied the waters a bit. It made me wonder about how the faith of Arab Christians living in a predominantly Muslim society has been affected by its context, it made me wonder about the God of the Muslims and the Christian God.

Thinking about that experience in the context of this sermon series about interfaith dialogue, it reminds me of the question, Is the Allah worshipped by Christians really different from the Allah worshipped by Muslims?

Some would certainly say so. They say, "Their God is a different God." Certainly it would seem that there is much to support their case. Almost any trip to a Muslim country will reveal different dress and different architecture. Most Muslim women wear the hijab, for example, the scarf that covers their hair. Their minarets distinguish their mosques from churches and other forms of architecture. Inside their mosques, they don't have an altar or even seats. A minority of Muslim men have several wives -- in the desert of southern Israel, I once met a Bedouin man who had four wives and somewhere in the neighborhood of thirty children.

Most would agree that many of these differences are cultural, or at least are not essential to the Muslim faith. But when you probe down a bit more deeply, important differences nevertheless remain. The differences between the Bible and the Qur'an for example, are substantial. Christians believe the Bible was written by many different humans over the course of several hundred years. Our Bible is not a textbook of Christian faith, rather it is primarily a storybook that tells stories about who we are and who God is. Many Christians, myself included, don't believe the Bible is literally true, in the sense that everything happened exactly as it was written.

The Qur'an, in contrast, is a collection of recitations of one man, Muhammed, over the course of a little more than two decades. The Qur'an is perhaps more explicitly theological than the Bible, it is less story-focused, and Muslims believe it is the eternal Word of God, not created by Muhammed, but rather the eternal and literal truth from Allah.

Then there are different practices of faith. Devout Muslims fast together during daytime for the month of Ramadan, which we are currently in. If possible, they are supposed to make the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca, at least once during their lifetime. In contrast, Mecca holds no special importance for Christians, nor does any place or site have primary importance in the Christian tradition.

Furthermore, and perhaps more important theologically, Christians and Muslims have different understandings of sin and grace. If I understand it correctly, always a big "if", Islam acknowledges that people make mistakes and do the wrong things. They are encouraged then to repent and to find forgiveness with God. Christians, however, don't just believe that sometimes we choose to do the wrong thing, rather we believe that the situation is worse than that, sin is more powerful than that, sometimes we don't know what to do, sometimes we can't seem to do what we know we should. We believe there is a power of sin at work in our world that is larger than who we are as individuals, it is an evil force that is present not just in us as individuals, but in the systems and networks of relationships into which we are born and in the midst of which we live. As Paul says, all have fallen short of the glory of God, which is to say, the entire world is somehow broken, it is broken so badly that it is beyond our power to fix. Only the undeserved action of God can save us from ourselves, can bring new life into the destructive patterns in which we live as individuals and communities. We call that grace. I am not saying that there is no grace in Islam, not at all, but I am saying the understanding is different.

Differences, therefore, between the Allah worshipped by Christians and the Allah worshipped by Muslims, are real. But I can't help but feel that when some say, "Their God is a different God," they are perhaps going a bit too far. Because on top of or below or next to these differences are a whole host of similarities. In contrast to the religious traditions of India and China, both Muslims and Christians affirm that God is the Creator and Sustainer of all existence. In contrast to many of the societies around them at the time of their birth, both Christianity and Islam are monotheistic. They believe not in a pantheon of gods, but in one God, and are vehemently against any form of idolatry. This God is just and is compassionate and merciful. When Muslims read from the Qur'an, for example, they say "bismillah ir-rakhman, ir-rakhim" -- "in the name of God, the compassionate, the merciful" -- similar to how we say, "the word of the Lord -- thanks be to God." While there are differences between the Qur'an and the Bible, both feature many of the same figures -- Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah, Abraham, Joseph, Moses, etc. These prophets of the Judeo-Christian tradition are present in Islam as well. Many of you probably know that Jesus is one of Islam's greatest prophets. Both faiths are religions of the book, in which readings of a book, either the Bible or the Qur'an, are essential to community formation and its life together.

For both Christians and Muslims, Allah is centrally concerned about justice, about right relationship with each other. Both religions enjoin their followers to treat others as they would like to be treated. Both religions speak against lying and stealing and killing. While Christians don't have a call to prayer five times a day or a month of fasting, we are nevertheless similarly called to pray without ceasing and to engage in periods of fasting ourselves. Both religions affirm that God is the sovereign lord of history, that God is ultimately in charge, even as they both hold that fact in tension with the reality of humanity's free will. There is a mystical tradition within both Christianity and Islam, and if one didn't know any better, many of the poems written by Muslim mystics could easily be mistaken for poems written by Christians.

The list of similarities goes on from there. When one is conscious of all these similarities, I think it is a bit difficult to justify the statement, "Their God is a different God." That statement strikes me as a bit too simplistic, the similarities are deeper than that, more real than that.

Instead, when one focuses on this long list of similarities, one is perhaps more inclined to say, "It is really the same God." I've heard people say that, haven't you? "It is really the same God, we all just worship the same God in different ways."

I would be more inclined to agree with such a view were it not for one stumbling block, one important difference. I can't seem to get around that difference,

and I admit that most of the time I don't try. It is not just an important difference between Christianity and Islam, it is a major difference between Christianity and every other religion as well. That difference, of course, is Jesus Christ.

This last week, when I asked a Muslim friend of mine about the differences she saw between Christianity and Islam, the first thing she mentioned was our view of Jesus. This was not surprising to me, rather it was what I expected. You see, for Christians, God's activity in Christ changes things, it changes everything, Christ is the starting point and the ending point for us -- for everything. Without Christ, there is of course no Christian theology. For Christians, if you want to talk about God, then you have to talk about Christ -- we believe that it is in Christ that we most fully see and understand who God is.

I am reminded of an exchange I observed two months ago in Chautauqua, New York during a week of interfaith dialogue. One woman who identified herself as Christian said to a Muslim man, "If we Christians threw out the incarnation, the atonement, and the Trinity, would that make dialogue easier?" I must admit, I had a hard time taking her seriously after that. It was like saying, "If we Christians just got rid of Christ, how would that change things?"

But maybe that is not such a bad question after all. What difference does Christ make? What difference does Christ make in our understanding of who God is? Does he make any difference at all?

I suppose that is a question that each individual must answer for him or herself, that each community must answer for itself. I challenge you to examine your own answer.

As for that woman, I don't know her, but in her willingness to discard the incarnation, atonement, and Trinity, it would seem that Christ really didn't make that much difference, or at least not a radical one. That is a valid answer, and one that continues to exist today.

But I don't think that answer would have gone down very well with Paul, or with any of the other apostles for that matter. You see, Paul, in our Biblical text for today, writes, "For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified." "nothing . . except Jesus Christ, and him crucified." Paul just couldn't seem to shut up, he just kept talking about Jesus, on and on for years, not just him but the other apostles as well, even when talking about Jesus got them in trouble and put their lives at risk. Paul was saying that the God whom they knew, the God with whom they were already familiar -- that God had done something radically new, radically different. Christ turned their understanding of God upside down. The difference that Christ made was so radical that it transformed their understanding of God, they had to accommodate the difference that Christ made with new theologies. That is where the doctrine of the Trinity comes from, the doctrine of the Trinity is a response to the claim that Jesus Christ is Lord and is worthy of worship. I have said it before and will say it again -- the Trinity is the uniquely Christian way of speaking about God. Saying that God was present in Jesus, that Jesus is Lord, that was offensive and off-putting to many of the Jews and Gentiles of Paul's day. Even today, that remains the biggest difference between Christianity and Islam and Judaism.

Christianity and Islam both affirm that God is above human speech, God is beyond our understanding, God is so much greater, Allahu akbar, God is so much bigger, so much better, so much more it blows the mind. But in the incarnation of Christ, in the doctrine of the Trinity, Christians affirm that this God who is other and bigger and more powerful has become one of us, the powerful Creator of the Universe became vulnerable in a little child.

I was reminded of this in a sudden epiphany in my conversation with my Muslim friend last week. With my heart beating a little faster as I felt the excitement of this revelation come upon me, I suddenly asked, "Does your God suffer?" The answer was, "no."

The Christian God does. "For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified." God in Christ suffers, not for suffering's sake, but because God is so committed to justice, God is so committed to being with us, that God will pay any price, God will not allow suffering to separate us from God's presence with us.

I don't know about you, but for me that's good news. That's the kind of good news that changes lives. By the power of the Holy Spirit, may God continue to change us, and use us to witness to the good news of Christ.