Enlarge Dr. Ricky Woods, Rabbi Judy Schindler and the congregation at Temple Beth El.

Posted: January 17th, 2011 Greg Lacour

It might seem an odd exchange – a black Baptist minister delivering a sermon at a synagogue, a rabbi doing the same at a Baptist church – but the two faiths and their histories share more than you’d think.

So when Rabbi Judy Schindler of Temple Beth El and Dr. Ricky Woods of First Baptist Church-West swapped pulpits on the weekend before Martin Luther King, Jr. Day – a trade that kicked off the second year of the Xchange Sermons program – the words were different.

The context was different. The people were very different. But the message was essentially the same.

“Our challenge is to work together,” Woods, First Baptist’s senior minister, said at Temple Beth El’s Shabbat service the night of Jan. 14. “Our challenge is to walk together. Our challenge is to serve together … until every person enjoys the blessings of God without fear and without frustration.”

“We need to wake up and right our wrongs,” Schindler, Temple Beth El’s senior rabbi, told congregants at First Baptist the morning of Jan. 16. “We need to come together, Christians and Jews, and create the city, the county, the state and the country that lives up to the guidelines of our faith.”

That’s one of the main ideas behind Xchange Sermons, a joint project of Crossroads Charlotte and Mecklenburg Ministries: to introduce worshipers to other faiths in the hope that they can recognize the similarities rather than fixate on the differences. Last year, 56 churches took part in the program; the two organizations hope even more sign up by the time it ends in May.

In the case of Temple Beth El and First Baptist, the gap between the two actually isn’t that wide. Woods and Schindler are friends, and there’s a long history of cooperation between Southern black Christians – usually Baptists, as King was – and white Jews, especially during the civil rights movement in the 1960s.

Schindler mentioned in her sermon that she’d grown up in New York hearing stories about Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who marched with King and later wrote, “When I marched in Selma, my feet were praying.” (Both services closed with the same song: “We Shall Overcome.”)

Woods’ sermon traveled a classic path: “Two Men, Two Mountains and God.” He isn’t the first to draw a parallel between Moses and King, two men who led their flocks to the edge of a promised land, were allowed to glimpse it but could not enter. But the important thing, he said, was that we continue to strive for the promised land of peace and equality: “Sometimes we don’t get what we see,” he said, “but we should never lose the blessing of being able to see it.”

Schindler used the simple theme of night and day to illustrate her call for unity: a parable about a rabbi who tells his students that when they see those of different faiths and skin color as their brothers and sisters, “then night has truly ended and day has begun.”

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