We Are One

John 17:1-11  May 21, 2023

 

I was born Roman Catholic.

I was baptized Catholic, had my first communion as a Catholic

was confirmed as a Catholic, and, after I was confirmed,

it was the Roman Catholic church that I was actively

not attending in my teen years.

 

St. Thomas the Apostle Catholic Church
of Woodhaven

My first congregation was St. Thomas the Apostle

Catholic Church. It was on the next corner from our house

in Woodhaven. When you were Catholic, at that time,

you were assigned a church depending on where you lived

that was your parish, and you didn’t dare try another church.

I’d like to say that church was full of close relationships

and meaningful encounters, but looking back, it was

pretty cold and mechanical.

You went in, you went to mass, you went home.

To be honest, the whole time I lived in New York,

I don’t remember going to another Catholic church,

I certainly didn’t go to any protestant churches

and I frankly, until I was 8 years old and we moved

into the South, I didn’t know that there were such a thing

as churches of other denomination besides Catholic.

I don’t think this was just because I was a dumb kid.

I think it was because people just didn’t go back and forth too much,

we didn’t mix with other denominations.

 

Now things are much more fluid.

I hear Catholics are choosing which church they want to go to.

People are moving around to other denominations willy-nilly.

 

I chose the Lutheran Church because

it was closest to my apartment in New York.

It was the first one I went to .

I was going to try one of the dozens of different

kind of churches in my neighborhood, but this one stuck

for many reasons.

 

Some people see this recent fluidity as a bad thing.

A departure from God’s will.

They long to go back to the days of strict delineation.

And some think that the only way to do God’s 

will is to go back to having one denomination. One expression of Christ’s Church.

 

In Columbus, there was a guy named Bruce

who would call up Lutheran pastors and try to 

persuade us that the Roman Catholic faith was the only true faith.

I guess he started with us because we were the first to leave

it would be right for us to be the first to come back.

I talked to him on the phone about five times 

and he tried to persuade me to leave the ELCA and join his church downtown.

 

I once told his priest about his calls and the priest gave me the

sympathetic pastor face,  which told me that he had interesting ideas

on quite a lot of other things too.

 

Bruce’s vision for this, which we fleshed out on the phone,

was that I would come into church on Sunday and tell 

my congregation that we were going to all become 

Roman Catholic again and then we would all get up and get downtown somehow.

We never figured out how the transport downtown would happen,

(he said if I committed to it, he would figure it out.)

And we would all become Catholic again.

I always ended our conversation by telling him,

I have no intention of doing this, Bruce, but I love your dedication.

 

One of the places that Bruce and other people get the idea

of Christian unity is from this Gospel today.

 

Jesus is talking to his disciples again this week.

It’s the end of his long, three chapter farewell discourse.

He ends with a prayer to God. The preamble to the prayer

is pretty confusing, so much so that you might want to give up.

All are mine, and mine are yours, and we are all together.

But the actual prayer is pretty straightforward.

Jesus just says:

“God, protect my followers,

so that they might be one as we are one.”

 

Jesus was praying for his followers, for the church.

For us in other words.

That we could be as close to each other as God is to Jesus.

That we would be one.

 

And that is it for Jesus. After this prayer, he goes right out

into the garden and he’s arrested. Jesus’ last prayer:

Protect them, so they may be one as we are one.

 

And if you look at unity as defined by denominations,

we have failed miserably in Jesus last prayer.

 

Now lots of people, Bruce included, believe that

the real trouble started when Martin Luther

separated from the Catholic church in 1517.

But there have been troubles long before that.

 

Right in the beginning, even in the scriptures, we see

signs of division, Peter and Paul start fighting and

Writing letters about how wrong the other was.

Talking bad about each other in their churches.

 

Paul and John, who was also called Mark,

start off working together, but then they part ways and

Paul starts complaining about him to Barnabas.

Then Barnabas and Paul start fighting about things.

(Maybe Paul was the problem)

 

We don’t have a good beginning examples of Christian unity

and we don’t have a good history of it either.

Whenever you talk about Christian unity,

it seems vaguely hypocritical.

It’s hard to pick out a time when Christians

were unified in the same spirit that Jesus wanted us to.

Even before the Martin Luther when we were

at least one church, the unity was kept with threats and violence.

 

And then, for the entire time he was alive after

The Catholic Church threw him out,

Luther was involved in heated debates with other reformers

about how the new church should live it’s life.

 

I’m reading a lot about Lutherans in the Civil War,

and in 1863 the Lutheran Churches in the South

divided themselves from the General Synod of Lutheran churches

over the issue of slavery and the war. 

The church was divided like the country until 1918 when they reunited.

 

And the Lutheran Church in America has spent the last 100 years

trying to get together and just when it looks like 

everything is working out for the ELCA, hundreds of churches left the ELCA

over issues of sexuality. Now Methodist churches are leaving

their denominations because of the same issue.

 

It doesn’t take an expert in religious studies

to see that Christians have trouble getting along.

All you have to do is post any opinion you might have on

a Christian page and see that most people don’t 

agree about anything. And some Christians are willing to curse at you,

call you names, and even threaten

bodily harm to you when they do disagree.

 

There are thousands of denominations that have been

churches created out of Christian disagreement.

Wars have been fought over Christian disagreements.

 

Even at the personal level,

in most churches you can

Just sing the wrong song, or change the drapes,

or misplace something in the kitchen

and you can start a small war.

We’re all better than that here now, of course.

 

But, of course,  this congregation has its own history of divisions

over the course of its 50 years that have added to this mix.

Some very recently.

 

So to some extent, it could seem like Jesus prayer

hasn’t been fulfilled at all. Like we and God have just ignored it.

 

But as I was thinking about this,

this week, kind of consumed in the despair of our divisions,

I decided maybe I was thinking too literally about this.

It’s easy to see the division and point out the fights,

The devil would like us to only see the separation between us

and lose hope for the future.

But as I thought more, I believe  there is hope.

 

I don’t believe that Jesus was praying for denominational unity.

If I know Jesus at all, he doesn’t really care about our denominations

and our hierarchy and our structures and constitution.

But Jesus does want us to get real about preaching the gospel.

He does want us to get real about sacrifice, about care for each other and our community,

 about loving the outcast, about justice,

and about forgiveness, about taking up our crosses and following him.

 

Jesus doesn’t want us to put on happy faces and act like we’re

fine just so we can put on a show of unity.

Our divisions over the years are us trying to work

all this important stuff out, we’re trying to figure out

what is vital to the gospel and what is not.

Jesus wants us to have a deeper sense of unity. A unity of the Spirit.

 

For more than 2000 years,

this church has held together in one form or another.

Though it’s changed over time,

we’re still talking about the same things,

sharing the same words, using the same creeds.

We’re still amazed by the same stories,

we still call ourselves followers of Jesus.

And  even through all the disagreements,

we still have a connection over the

centuries to the people that have come before us.

That is unity that very few can claim.

 

When I went to a Lutheran Church for the first time,

when I moved back to New York City,

I couldn’t tell what it was. It SEEMED like a Catholic Church.

The only difference was that they didn’t say the Lord’s Prayer.

I left going, okay, this denomination doesn’t say the Lord’s Prayer.

but I didn’t know that the pastor was a little forgetful sometimes

and he just skipped it that week, so other than that,

I wouldn’t have noticed any significant differences in the liturgy

from my childhood Catholic Church.

 

And right now I know there are thousands and thousands of

people of all denominations, all over the world who are

sharing the same scripture this morning,

and struggling to figure out what it means,

and wondering some of the same things we are.

though we don’t all know each other,

or agree with each other most of the time we are a community.

And wherever I go, I know I can depend on that community.

 

And I know that if I went to any church -

even if they have a theology and beliefs

that I couldn’t relate to at all,

I know that I could find some

common ground with the people there,

that we would know the same stories,

that we have shared some of the same history.

 

And I’m pretty sure that anywhere in the world,

I could find a Christian Community that would welcome me,

who have struggled with the same Word,

and who know the same Jesus that I do.

And who would pray for me and help me if I asked them too.

 

 Things seem to be splintering apart,

but maybe that’s part of God’s plan to join us back together again.

 

When we say, in the creed that we believe in the

Holy catholic church, notice that it’s catholic with a small c, not a capital C.

This catholic means the universal church.

The definition says “including a wide variety of things, all embracing”

 

Who here grew up in another denomination besides Lutheran?

Now things are fluid enough so we all don’t stay in our

strict lanes and only see one denomination our whole lives.

We’re switching lanes, trying others out, learning about each other.

We know much more about people of other denominations

than we did in the 20^th century.

We are starting to belong to the catholic, the universal church.

 

So, maybe Jesus prayer has been fulfilled.

Maybe the disciples heard it too and have passed it on to us.

Maybe we are still working it all out.

And we may be a long way away from visible unity

or any kind of agreement on anything.

But maybe this is God’s path we’re on.

 

In spite of our differences,

we are joined together by something larger

and more powerful than our opinions or actions.

We are all joined together by God’s Spirit.

And Jesus is glorified by our life together.

We are all on God’s long plan for unity.

And even with our earthly divisions,

we are one as God and Jesus are one.