Christian Unity
By Mark Oakley, Monday 21st January, 2008
It is awful, but every time I hear that gospel reading I am reminded of my school. I was privileged to go to a good school in England and I was, on the whole, very happy there. In your final year the headmaster chose 12 boys to be the school prefects, or praeposters as they were known, and because the headmaster was a sporty man he liked to choose the fit and athletic men of the pitch (they are all now overweight bankers by the way). The weekly school rag of a newspaper, edited by boys, ran a spoof of how the prefects were chosen: and behold God walked by the edge of the pitch and saw them in their cricket nets, follow me he said, and immediately they left their nets, dropped their bats, and followed him. Now, for some reason I was also chosen to be a prefect but I wasn´t known as a sportsman (difficult as this is to believe, I know). I was known as an actor and had just had rave reviews (though I blush to say it myself) for my Malvolio in Twelfth Night – in his yellow stockings cross-gartered….and so of course the piece went on….and behold he passed by the theatre and saw Mark at work in the wings, follow me, he said and immediately he dropped his fishnets and followed him. It won´t surprise you to know that my school was the school that all the creators of the satirical magazine Private Eye went to…
Well, it always moves me to know that the workman on the quayside put down what was so important to them, to their daily lives and livelihood, and decided to start a very different journey. Perhaps all of us know something of having to put down, lay aside, important things if we are to take the spiritual adventure, if we are to take God, seriously. God likes us to travel light.
But what I want to look at with you in these few minutes is what can happen when the individuals who have made the decision to follow Christ then find themselves placed together in what came to be known as �Church�: remember, in the early days Church was not a place you went to (they had no buildings), it was something you were, a community of Christ-followers. Something of the beauty of the gospel reading we just heard can be tarnished when we then think what those who follow Christ get up to when they form the Church today. But I say �today� and it is tempting to think about all the scandals, the arguments, the divisions, the discriminations and at worse deaths, that the Church has harboured – not least in our Anglican communion at the moment. But what that reading from Paul´s letter we just heard teaches us is that actually it was like this from the very beginning as well. It seems that the conversion of Christians is not a one off but a lifetime´s work.
Paul was writing from Ephesus to the Christians in Corinth around 51-52 AD. It is a very early glimpse into the early Church. Corinth in the first century was a busy, loud, exciting place. It was a reasonably wealthy trading centre and so it was made up of people of many religions and races. We know there was a sizeable Jewish community there and we know there were temples to the Greek gods as well. In other words to be a Corinthian was to have grown up in a diverse, competitive, multicultural society: perhaps this sounds familar? Acts tells us that Paul stayed 18 months in Corinth and he mentions people by name from there: he thought the other Christian communities ought to know about the people of substance there.
Not only Paul saw potential in Corinth though. Other missionaries preached there as well. It is hard to tell if there was rivalry among them all of whether this is just typical of the Corinthians to pick up a good idea and turn it into something to argue about, but either way the outcome was a divided and contentious church. If there had been telephones in thsoe days you might have got a message: �Hello. We´re in the middle of a family fight right now. Leave your name and number at the beep and whoever wins will call you right back�. Now in other places Paul is not afraid at Christian infighting when he thinks the truth is at stake but in Corinth he says that the Gospel is not just being undermined but is being fundamentally misunderstood because the Christian community is divided. Christians are being loyal to the missionary of their particular group and forgetting the heart of the gospel. Is this about your teacher or about your God, asks Paul. Are you out to win wars or to end them? When you walk away from another Christian, when you attack them or their reputation, just which Christ are you claiming to follow?
Now Paul knows full well that the gospel rubs against the grain of so much in us, the competetive instinct, the dominating instinct, our boosting self-value by devaluing someone else: of course a gospel that rejects all these sounds foolish to city ears but, he says, it is God´s foolishness, the same foolishness that loves even to the point of dying to show just how much.
On the night before Jesus went to the cross, as Mark Russell has said, the gospel of John records that he began to pray. It’s a big prayer in three bits. In the first bit, Jesus prays for himself, in the second, he prays for his immediate group of disciples, and then in the third bit, he prays for all his followers yet to come. I wonder as Jesus prayed this prayer, could he see the church of the future, growing and expanding, spreading across the world, as it sought to be His body on earth. Lives being changed, people moved by the power of the holy spirit, his followers being salt and light, changing communities through love.
I wonder did Jesus scan the room. Did he look into the face of Peter, in that circle of 11, and behind Peter, could he see the thousands who came to faith at Pentecost, the thousands more behind them. Did he look into the face of John, Could he see the church of Corinth and all the churches of Asia Minor And when he saw the gap where Judas had been, I wonder did he see St. Paul, and all the churches of Europe that grew through his ministry.
And crossing generations and oceans, continents and people, times and places, right down to this very time and place, I wonder could he have seen us. 140 people, gathered here in Copenhagen. All part of that pilgrim people committed to living lives that count. He said, in 17v20 “I will pray for every one of them who will believe through the word of that original elevenâ€? “Every one of themâ€? – Jesus prayed for you and me.
And he prayed for just one thing. Think of what he could have prayed for. For courage, or boldness, or vision, or hope, or strength, or even for numbers. Looking at Peter, he could have prayed for the gift of wisdom, and knowing when to keep your mouth shut! But what did he pray for? Jesus saw through all history, and he saw the one thing the church would struggle with the most, and he prayed for unity. He prayed that we would be one.
Unity is not saying that we will always agree with each other, unity is a deeper spiritual reality. Unity allows me to love my brothers and sisters even when I don’t always agree with them. Love allows me to hold difference and diversity. Unity is not uniformity. Unity is generated by the Spirit of God, it cant be manufactured or organised, or strategised. It comes when Gods people seek to live in tune with His Spirit, and to love others as themselves.
No mission statement will cause the world to believe, no mission programme, no strategy, no amount of books or trendy church literature and conferences. What impacts and transforms this world, what causes people to see the love of Jesus, is simply this. It’s the people of God, living authentic life changing radical lives, and united under Jesus Christ. That has all the the potential to change this world, starting with you and me.
