This has been an interesting week in the news. After months and months of watching one Republican candidate after another bite the dust, finally Donald Trump was left standing, and it looks like he will be the Republican nominee for President of the United States. Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders are continuing to duke it out, but most everyone is assuming that Mrs. Clinton will be the nominee, and that when it’s all over, either Trump or Clinton will be the next President of the most powerful country in the world, and will himself or herself be the most powerful person in the world. Meanwhile, surveys say that the American people are more divided now than we have ever been, or at least as long as surveys have been taken. But there’s one thing that unites us: everyone celebrates Mother’s Day!
Our Lord Jesus prayed for his disciples that “They may all be one even as he and the Father are one.” Jesus’ will for the Church is that it should be one Church, one body. That there are thousands of Christian denominations is, therefore, contrary to God’s will. Of course, God meets us where we are and grace is to be found even in our fractured state, but let’s not fool ourselves that this is the way things are supposed to be. I’ve never counted them, but there must be at least 75 different Anglican groups that are not in communion with one another. We all use a Book of Common Prayer and still we can’t seem to get together. Furthermore, there doesn’t seem to be much interest in getting together.
So when we look at the situation in our country, where we appear to be more polarized than ever in most people’s memories, we certainly can’t point them to the Church and say, “Look here. This is how people can live together in unity!”
We live in the most prosperous country in the history of the world, have a standard of living that is the envy of the world, and have a tremendous amount of time at our discretion because of all of the laborsaving devices that we have. And yet, there seems to be a tremendous amount of anger just beneath the surface in most peoples’ lives. That anger gets expressed in increasingly belligerent ways about all kinds of subjects, some important, some trivial.
Sometimes it even happens in parish life. A family had just been to church and as they were driving home mom and dad were discussing the service. Mom said, “You know, I didn’t think the music was all that good today, that soprano was a little flat, and the flowers didn’t have their usual pizazz. Dad said, “I agree and Fr. Fred’s sermon was really, you know, the same ole same ole.”
Little Susie was sitting in the backseat, listening to all of this, and she decided to add her two cents. She said, “I thought it was a pretty good show for a dollar.” That exchange, harmless as it is, and others like it would not appear to further the cause of Christian unity.
Our Lord’s High Priestly Prayer, found in the Gospel according to St. John, was the prayer he prayed just before his passion and death. The apostle John recorded it several decades after the resurrection. Jesus knew that unity would be a problem for the Church, for it’s a very human problem, ingrained in us in our fallen condition. When St. John wrote his account of the Gospel in Ephesus, a city in what is now Turkey, Ephesus was second in importance only to Rome.
When St. John recalled Jesus’ prayer “that they all may be one,” he must have thought about what was going on in his own environment in Ephesus. We know what was going on there because of St. Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, in which he writes, “I want to urge you, in the name of the Lord, not to go on living the aimless kind of life that pagans live… There must be no more lies… Even if you are angry you must not sin…. Anyone who was a thief must stop stealing… Guard against foul talk… Let your words be for the improvement of others… Otherwise you will only be grieving the Holy Spirit… Never have grudges against others, or lose your temper, or raise your voice to anybody, or call each other names, or allow any sort of spitefulness.” In other words, the church in Ephesus had enough liars, thieves, gossips, and hotheads that Paul felt it necessary to admonish them. The kinds of behavior he talks about shows that that church was not unified.
We still need to pray for unity. In fact, every time we celebrate the mass, there is a short prayer for unity in the Eucharistic prayer. But in addition to praying, we need to do what we can, by the grace of God, to work for unity. We need to remember that Jesus calls us first of all to love one another, whether or not we agree on any given issue. David Webber said that “Christian unity is based upon me loving Christ enough, to love you enough, to let you be different… To let you have different points of view… To let you have different ways of seeing things.”
The love of Christ must transcend all barriers among Christians. We cannot solve the problems that exist in the polarization that’s going on in our society today, but we can affect how we treat others, not engaging in the belligerent rhetoric that has become such a part of 21st century American life. The Church needs to begin working to be what God intends us to be, and each of us needs to take it personally. “Let there be peace on earth and let it begin with me.” If we do that, I believe that Jesus will smile upon us and I know our mothers will!
Sermon preached by the Very Reverend Fredrick A. Robinson
The Church of the Redeemer
Sarasota Florida
7th Sunday of Easter
8 May 2016