Acts 16:16-34
Psalm 47
Revelation 22:12-14, 16-17, 20
John 17:20-26
7th Sunday of Easter
May 20, 2007
“As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.” (John 17:21b-23)
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
I believe that I grew up in a strange world on a far away planet of another galaxy system. In that world there were many things and concerns that are not present in the world I now inhabit and likewise there is much in this world that I do not remember from the one in which I came of age.
When I was a small child (before I started to school), I used to play with the granddaughter of my next-door neighbors. I remember her as being very nice and a lot of fun as a playmate. I also remember that there was a scandal and not a little concern that I played with her. You see, she was Roman Catholic, and her parents were divorced! What a scandal that the Baptist minister’s son was playing with a little Catholic girl, and the child of divorced parents at that! Who knows what terrible influences she might have on him? I guess you could say that fortunately for the sake of my soul’s salvation, Lee and her mother moved to another state when we were both in the third grade. I never saw her again.
As I look back on my childhood, I am rather amazed that, with all of that concern over a little Roman Catholic girl, no one was ever concerned about the three other neighbor children with whom I played three or four times a week nearly every week of the time I was in elementary school. After all, they occasionally attended Sunday school and were sometimes active in the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts. They must have been OK.
I never saw Lee again after she moved. A few years later, her grandparents died, and so I have no idea what happened to her in her life. I do remember very clearly what happened to the other three. One had a terrible academic record and was always in trouble. He dropped out of high school when he was about 16. About the time he was 18 he disappeared. I understand that a number of people were looking for him, including the police, for he left in a car that he had stolen, and he left three women (ranging in age from 14 to 36) pregnant. About the time he was 16, the boy who lived on the other side was arrested for a number of armed robberies and assaults with a deadly weapon. The last that I heard of him he was in prison. His sister, who was a few years younger, was picked up for prostitution when she was 17.
I also remember that it was not only the Roman Catholics who were looked upon with suspicion. The Methodists and Presbyterians were considered better but still of concern in many circles. I also received the message very clearly that, as a Baptist, the Roman Catholics did not consider me a Christian.
When I got to college, I became aware of a very active movement that one seldom ever hears about these days. It was (and is) the ecumenical movement. The School of Religion at Butler even had a professor of ecumenical studies. Real work was being done by various Christian Churches to find a common ground for belief and practice, even to unite where possible. Its high point was the Second Vatican Council – a true miracle, a gift of the Holy Spirit. We live daily with the fruits of that movement. Each time a priest invites all baptized Christians to receive at the Eucharist, a momentous change brought about by the ecumenical movement is proclaimed. Each time groups from various churches gather to serve at Elijah’s Promise the movement is recalled. Even the recent singing of Gabriel Fauré’s Requiem by the joint choirs of St. Barnabas Episcopal Church and Christ the King Lutheran Church would have been all but unthinkable at one time—never mind a joint Vacation Bible School.
Yes, even on that planet and in that world where I was a child there were ecumenical three-hour Good Friday services during which pastors from various denominations preached on the seven last words. From them I learned that the Methodists, Presbyterians, Lutherans and other denominations did not have tails or horns. But there was always a distance at the services. It was like all of those various churches should not really be worshipping together.
The ecumenical movement has its real beginnings in the 19th century. Its origins are fascinating. The 18th and 19th centuries were periods when the European and American Churches were very actively involved in missions work. Missionaries from most of the churches went throughout Africa, Asia and the Americas. A great deal of labor went into translating the Bible into hundreds of different languages. All of that work paid off. The peoples of those countries read the Bible and understood it. When they came to today’s Gospel though, they were puzzled. Here were all of these Christian missionaries from different churches saying that they proclaimed Christ as Lord, but they treated each other with suspicion and often contempt and hatred. The missionaries from each church said that if the people followed the missionaries of another church they would go to hell. The peoples of all of these countries began to ask the missionaries how they could be proclaiming the truth if they treated each other so badly when the Lord they proclaimed had prayed that they would be one and have love for one another? The peoples said to the missionaries that their Lord had said that it would be because they were completely one that the world would know that they were of God and God’s Son. With time the missionaries of the various denominations and creeds recognized the scandal and began to talk and to seek unity.
In the world that I live in today, some churches and church leaders still seem to seek the oneness our Lord prayed for and to work together in respect and love. For the most part though, division and focus on ourselves and why we are right seems to prevail. As Christians, we have been very good at defining why we are right and others are wrong. Most of the various creeds, including the Nicene Creed, were written for this purpose. At various times various groups have divided over almost every imaginable issue including infant baptism and adult baptism, the nature of the presence of Christ in the Eucharist, whether a person has truly received the Holy Spirit and been saved if they do not speak in tongues, and the list could go on indefinitely. In our own Church in the 1870’s, James DeKoven was elected the Bishop of Wisconsin and the Bishop of Illinois. Both times he was denied the consents of the majority of dioceses needed for him to be consecrated. What were his terrible sins that he was denied? Was he a murderer? Had he abused women? No! Among his greatest offenses was that he believed in the use of candles on the altar and in reverencing and genuflecting to the altar.
It had only been a few decades earlier that churches had divided over the issue of slavery. Was slavery the will of God as some proclaimed or against God’s will?
Today along with other issues that rip us apart are the issues of women’s roles and of homosexuality. I am both horrified and amused by the discussions that I have been seeing on television since the Rev. Jerry Falwell died. It seems that he had rebuked other evangelicals for getting involved in issues of the environment and global warming. He said that these were false issues created by Satan to distract them from the real work that God had called them to do.
What does it mean to be a Christian? What are the core values? How will I know a Christian when I meet one?
I am beginning to realize how often we take our own cultures and self interests and make idols of them saying that they are the truth.
I was watching one of my favorite TV channels a few weeks ago, the University of California Channel, when I ran across a lecture by a professor of Christian Social Thought at Georgetown University. I only had time to watch a short portion of the lecture, but what I saw fascinated me. He was talking about a new document that was discovered recently. It was discovered in China. Scholars have determined that it came from the period of the Tang Dynasty around 640 to 650 C.E. It is very clearly a Christian document, something of a theological statement of Christian beliefs. What is also clear is that it comes from a Christian tradition that has long roots in China that knows nothing of any of the books of the New Testament or of the creeds or of the theological traditions and arguments of the West. The entire Christian message is cast in Taoist categories. The professor then went on to say that the West’s tradition that Christianity started in Palestine, then gradually came to Rome and Europe and from Rome and Europe spread to the rest of the world is biased and in many ways wrong. We now know that Christianity spread into Asia and Africa even before it spread to Europe. Christian communities were established on those continents before they were established in Europe. What we know of them is limited; the Christianity that developed looked different than the Christianity that we know in the West, but it was and is Christianity.
We do not have time now, but I urge you take a copy of the Book of Common Prayer and turn to the section on Historical Documents of the Church that begins on page 864. Read through some of the creeds and other documents that have been adopted to proclaim what it means to be a Christian. How many of them can you say that you completely believe? Then take a moment and read through The Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral 1886, 1888 and the Lambeth Conference of 1888 Resolution 11 beginning on page 876. These two documents are the result of a lot of praying, heart searching, and theological debate. They are the fruit of our tradition’s response to the ecumenical movement. These two documents state the most basic beliefs that the Episcopal Church and Anglican Communion said were required. We need to take them seriously in our day.
What are the beliefs, the traditions, the behaviors, the attitudes that you think are the bedrock of being a Christian? What are the minimums that you require of yourself and of others to say you are a Christian? How did you come to these? Where did you learn them? Why do you believe them so strongly? How do these come together in you, in the Church, in the world as the oneness Christ prayed for? How are you willing to enter into dialogue with others about what you believe it means to be a Christian? Look at the Bible; look at our traditions; look at yourself.
Let me close with a piece that is from another tradition that I believe can guide us in our reflection and examination. It is from a “Liturgy for Peace” by the Buddhist monk, the Venerable Thich Nhat Hahn.
Evoking the presence of the Great Compassion, let us fill our hearts with our own compassion—towards ourselves and towards all living beings.
Let us parlay that all beings realize that they are all brothers and sisters, all nourished from the same source of life.
Let us plead with ourselves to live in a way which will not deprive other living beings of air, water, food, shelter, or the chance to live.
. . . with awareness of the existence of life, and of the sufferings that are going on around us, let us pray for the establishment of peace in our hearts and on earth.*
Amen.
The Rev. William O. Breedlove, II, TSSF
St. Barnabas Episcopal Church
Monmouth Junction, NJ
*The Oxford Book of Prayer (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 306-307.