On Sunday, October 27, three churches and the pastors of six churches in Centralia, Illinois worshiped together under the vision of taking the reunion of the churches seriously. This was the sermon I preached on that occasion:
Imagine
Jesus at the Last Supper; in John’s Gospel, he closes with prayer, the prayer
recorded in the seventeenth chapter. A part of it was read this morning. Jesus
does not pray about himself. He will do so not long afterwards, in the Garden
of Gethsemane, for he knows that he will be dead and buried in less than 24
hours. The end of his earthly ministry is at hand. But at the Last Supper, in his
prayer he shows that his vision is for the future, and he prays for his
disciples and for the believers to come. He prays for us. He prays, “I do not
ask for these only, but also for those
who will believe in me through their word.” (verse 20) That is us.
And
what does he pray? “That they may all be one, just as you Father, are in me,
and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that
you have sent me.” (verse 21) And “The glory that you have given me I have
given to them, that they may be one even as we are one.” (verse 22)
This
kind of oneness is amazing, and beyond our understanding; it is a union like
that between the Father and the Son. It’s not a contract or a fellowship, but a
loving and inseparable bonding like that in the divine life. And it is brought
about by Jesus’ gift to us of glory, the same glory that the Father had given
to the Son.
What if Jesus really meant it? This is Jesus praying for us on
the night of his passion. It must have been important to him. He prays that the
believers to come might be one, and he prays it three times in that prayer. (verses 11, 21, and 22-23) This is the
prayer of a man poised for death, the culmination of his presence on earth.
It’s got to be important!
If
he prayed for it, he must have seen the need for it, and if he saw the need for
it, then the threat of the breakup of the community of believers was real. And
evidently for good reason, for now we believers are indeed broken. And
therefore we must recognize that we have violated the will of Jesus, whom all
of us call Lord and Savior.
But
in his mercy, God has blessed us even in our brokenness, for the glory he gave
to us has remained, though diminished and disconnected. We might think of a
puzzle. A puzzle, whether of twenty or a thousand pieces, begins with a single
picture, usually complex, diverse, detailed, and beautiful. When it is cut into
pieces, it remains obvious that the pieces are all made to fit together and
therefore each piece, by its very shape, bears testimony that it is itself
incomplete and finds its true identity in being assembled with the others. And
each piece, even when it is alone, still bears a small part of the whole
picture, a part that is unique to itself, and vital to all.
Paul
had a similar image, but one far more powerful, when he described the Church as
a body in 1 Corinthians 12. He did not use the word “family”—in fact, I don’t
think the Church is anywhere described in the New Testament as a “family”—he uses the word
Body. A family is a number of independent individuals linked by a shared
heritage; but a body is a single entity made up of diverse parts—eye, hand,
foot—under the head which is Christ. Each is a vital part for the wellbeing of
all. “The eye cannot say to the hand, I have no need of you.” (1 Corinthians
12:21a). None of us can look at any other Christian and say, “I have no need of
you.” The opposite must be true then: “I need you.”
The
New Testament knows nothing of denominations. Where there is even the hint of such a
thing, Paul leaps on it fiercely. “Each one of you says, ‘I follow Paul,’ or ‘I
follow Apollos’, or ‘I follow Cephas,’ or ‘I follow Christ.’ Is Christ
divided?” (1 Corinthians 1:12-13a) Note: he does not say, “Is the Church divided?” He says, “Is Christ divided?” The believers are the
body of Christ, Christ himself being the head. Paul takes as a given the unity
of believers Jesus prayed for.
When
the Church divides, then, it is not a separation of parts, or the breaking of a
fellowship; it is the dismemberment of Christ’s Body.
By
this teaching, is it not clear that if we accept living with denominations, if
we are complacent with how things are, that we are at variance with the
teaching of Paul, not to mention the prayer of Jesus? Five hundred years ago,
the Church was, without doubt, corrupt and in dire need of correction. The
Reformation was needed. But was the breaking of the Church the best or right way
to go about it? I don’t know. Did the Reformers do the right thing in the wrong
way? I cannot answer that. But it is
what happened, it is history, and we are the heirs of a broken Church. By God’s
mercy, the gifts were retained, but scattered and divided, and therefore
weakened. But they were preserved.
What
was the Church like in the New Testament? The things that separate us now were
all there, and belonged to all. The Church was structured and hierarchical and
it was Spirit-filled; it was intellectual and it was emotional; its people
prayed in a way that could shake people up; it knew miracles; and it had
Tradition; it was liturgical and it was spontaneous; it baptized (by
immersion), and it celebrated the Lord’s Supper often; its preaching was
intense and challenging; it taught the Scriptures (it was what we call the Old
Testament, but the principle of teaching and knowing Scripture was a given); it
was prophetic; it was generous; it changed lives; it impacted its society; it
rejected the world’s ways of doing things; it was the first (and still only)
organization that anyone, anyone at all,
could join—Jews and Gentiles, slaves and free, nobles and impoverished, educated
and illiterate, young and old; it produced martyrs; it honored its heroes and
heroines; and more.
And
it had great variety. Look at it:
The
church in Jerusalem was conservative, law-oriented, Jewish.
The
church in Antioch was a very busy
place, socially-oriented, mission-oriented, Gentile and Jewish, filled with
people from different stations in society.
The
churches in Galatia were not particularly well educated, most were first-generation
pagan converts, they were off the beaten track.
The
church in Ephesus was cosmopolitan, business-oriented, powerful and influential,
successful, and shaped its individual members well.
The
church in Colossae was small, had few resources but was eager to learn.
The
church in Corinth was made up of people who were both wealthy and wanton, who
were resistant to authority, and reluctant to leave their old life behind, but
rich with spiritual gifts.
The
churches in Thessalonica and Philippi were made up of blue-collar workers,
eager to know Christ, generous with their limited resources of money and time,
loving, and mission-oriented.
The
church in Rome was sophisticated, made up of both Jews and Gentiles, and of all
levels of society from slaves to members of the Emperor’s household, in
constant threat of danger from persecution, but persevering and growing.
Each
was unique, with a mix of strengths and weaknesses, but they were one Church. If
a believer traveled from Crete to Rome to Galatia to Antioch, he was in that
Body which Paul describes as one. The Philippian church was a blessing to
Corinth, and all the Gentile churches helped the Jerusalem church during a
famine. They were one.
And
every Christian denomination today can find itself and its gifts in at least one
of those churches of the age of the apostles. We are all, all Bible churches. But now that we are broken, none of us is fully
a Bible church, not completely. Each one of us has a gift, but no one has them
all.
Consider
today: What are our gifts? What are the gifts of others that we need? Who are
we in our denominations? I’m simplifying now, but bear with me:
There
are churches that have the gift of converting people and families with
impressive results—but with little sense of history or contemplative prayer.
There
are churches that draw on emotions—but with little sense of intellectual depth.
And there are churches with strong intellectual content—but they are often
boring.
There
are churches that bear prophetic witness to the world—but often without a clear
definition of Christian belief and moral standards.
There
are churches that manifest the gifts of the Spirit, and where miracles are
found, and where prayer is immensely powerful—but with little understanding of
the prayers of earlier generations who wrote their prayers into a book as a
gift for future believers.
There
are churches that have a beautiful, historic liturgy—but often depend too much on
written words and repetitive patterns at the cost of direct inspiration, and
with an unimpressive record of truly converting their own people.
You
get the idea.
And, to speak boldly—we would be foolish if we considered this
vision without recognized the place and the gifts of the Roman Catholic Church,
without which none of us would be here. They stand firm against the world, they
recognize the great heroes and heroines of the Christian generations, they
honor the woman whom God himself chose and which the Gospel describes as “full
of grace”, whom all generations are to call blessed. And the Pope is the only
Christian in the world who can go anywhere and draw hundreds of thousands of
people to worship. And yet… they themselves recognize that rarely do they truly
convert their own people. They know Christian things, but often do not
intimately know Jesus.
What,
then? We are puzzle pieces, each with a part of the whole, a part unique to
ourselves but needed by all. By putting the pieces together, each part remains
its true self with its gift, but the great picture is assembled and each gains
the gifts of the others. When a long-time friend of mine, a Roman Catholic
priest, and I were talking about this very vision, he swelled up with emotion,
envisioning a time when all might be one, and said fervently, “Not one
storefront church would have to close!” All would be preserved, and all
enriched! And we all, all, proclaim
Jesus as Lord, and all claim that salvation is found in him alone, through
faith and not by anything that we can do to earn it. The essence, the heart of
Christianity, rediscovered and proclaimed by the churches of the Reformation,
is now taken by all to be central, vital, and unquestionably true: Jesus first,
Jesus always, Jesus only, Jesus all, and for all.
And
what of Jesus’ prayer? There was a purpose in it: “…that the world may believe
that you have sent me.” The unity of believers is a powerful evangelical witness.
When we are broken, our ability to bear effective testimony to the world is
compromised. We are hiding our light under a bushel.
Moreover,
the unity greatly expands our ability to bear prophetic and effective witness
in the world for the sake of the poor and those suffering from injustice.
Pastor Johnnie saw this when he and I were planning this event, and he saw the
potential for a powerful united force that could effectively address the problem
of gun violence in our neighborhoods, of drug addiction, of abuse in families.
For the neighborhoods right here are rich soil for the Gospel, but most of us, being
separated from one another, are weak when it comes to sowing seed in that soil.
And people are perishing. They are perishing in our own neighborhoods, people
whom God loves, people for whom Christ died.
Paul
wrote with triumph, “There is one Lord, one Faith, one Baptism, one God and
Father of us all.” And one body of believers. And in his time from the power of
that unity there was an eruption of goodness, victory, and the power of God.
Within one generation, the Christian Faith spread throughout the entire Roman
Empire. “You are the light of the world,” Jesus said, and “You are the salt of
the earth.” By our brokenness, we have dimmed that light and diluted that salt.
Making these things true again is the clear, uncompromising will of Jesus. So
he prayed on the night he was betrayed.
What
will come next? There is much that has been done in the past century, praise
God, to bring the churches together again. Our authorities and official
dialogues have borne much fruit. Recently, a Catholic blogger, a young woman,
stated that of the 95 theses posted by Martin Luther just over five centuries ago,
Roman Catholics now accept 91 of them. (I don’t know what the four remaining
ones are, but still, it’s an amazing statement!)
“How
pleasant it is when brothers live together in unity.” (Psalm 133:1) I, for one,
think that it is the grass roots where the reality is going to gain its
traction. It is essential to this vision of mine that my vision be incomplete;
it requires the input of others to fortify and correct it under the Lordship of
the Holy Spirit. What will come next? Maybe a meeting of pastors to take
seriously what we have begun today, and pray and talk and love and seek to be
faithful to the prayer of Jesus, “That they may all be one… so that the world
may believe ...” I am convinced that when we do, none of us will lose anything
of what is important to our identity or our tradition, but each one of us will provide
a blessing to others, and receive blessings back from those others, within the
will of God, and the empowerment of the Holy Spirit, and in answer to the
prayer of Jesus.
