Becoming one

 

A Sermon preached on Easter VII, May 29, 2022, at St. Augustine’s and St. Christoph

Acts 16:16-34, Revelation 22:12-14, 16-17, 20-21, John 17:20-26

I know that Hannah Cranbury only preached about unity only a few weeks ago, but both with today's gospel reading and having just returned from the Katholikentag[1], which is an increasingly ecumenical event, and where I was helping to staff the ecumenical stand run by the ACK, the German Council of Churches, I can hardly not talk about church unity.

Here, in the longest recorded prayer of Jesus, he prays to the Father, asking that his disciples enjoy and preserve the unity shared between the Father and himself. But as we also heard, he prays not only for those in the room with him, “but also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word,” (John 17:20) so in a sense, Jesus is praying for us!

This a special sort of unity, divine unity, it is not enforced or commanded. Jesus asks and desires it. It is the unity of love and a reflection of the intimate unity of the Father and the Son: “As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us.” (17:21)

Unity is a theme of our service every week, when we recite the Nicene Creed and say together: “We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church.” How can we claim to be one if we are clearly still divided? Well for one thing we say we believe, not we are. We can believe that we are one even if that oneness is not immediately visible. The Nicene Creed is for example a shared creed. Unlike the Apostle’s creed, which has its origin in the western church, this is also used by the Orthodox and Oriental Churches. But we are one even when we don’t share a formal, written creed, like many free churches. All it takes to be part of the ACK is to “confess the Lord Jesus Christ as God and Savior according to Scripture and to seek to fulfill together what they are called to do, for the glory of God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.”[2]

In his prayer, Jesus also made reference to this glory of God as a sign and element of unity: “The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one.” (John 17:22)

Not only do we believe that we are one, or should be one, but also that we are holy. Holy is another overladen word. “Holier than thou” describes a form of excessive self-righteousness. Holy can be understood to mean perfect …. which we are not, and the church is not! But we use holy here to mean devoted to God and to God’s work, to fulfilling together what we are called to do, and that is certainly something all churches should share in.  

The church we believe in is also catholic. Not catholic as in the sense of Roman Catholic but meaning universal. As Anglicans we do not claim to be the Church, but to be part of God’s universal church. together with the RC and OC, and the Lutherans, and the Reformed, and the Baptist, and the Orthodox and any church that shares in God’s mission of reconciliation.

Finally, the church is called apostolic. To be apostolic means two things, that the church is built on the teaching of the apostles. As Jesus said: we are those who believe in him through the word of the apostles. Secondly it means we are sent (Greek = Apostolos – one who is sent) with a mission (Latin = Mission – to send), “so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.” (John 17:23) The Church’s purpose is to bring the Good News of God in Christ and of the God of love to the world.

Again and again in this prayer, Jesus says that it is when we are completely one that the world will believe that God has sent Jesus. Clearly, we are not yet completely one and that can hinder the mission if we send conflicting messages to the world or if we stand more for division than for the Oneness of God. “If we are one in faith, there can be no final reason why we may not be one, also, in our life and worship;”[3] Tom Wright says when commenting on this passage. As I said earlier, I have just come back from the Katholikentag and we are not one in worship while we cannot all share in the bread and wine made holy at the Lord’s Table.

Of course, when Jesus is taking about unity he was not thinking of denominational boundaries. I doubt that even Jesus foresaw how creative we can be in finding and defining differences! The unity he was thinking of is the one crossing all the traditional barriers of nation, race, class, custom, gender etc. His word, his teaching, his sacrifice, his promise was and is meant for all people.

And yet, however important it may be, unity, divine unity cannot be forced. It is not uniformity, as Hannah told us a couple of weeks ago, nor is it sameness. Too often, throughout history, unity has been enforced by coercion, by propaganda, and the elimination of dissidence and difference. I understand that it was the custom of the time, but I still always feel a little uncomfortable when I hear, as we did this week in the Acts reading, that the gaoler “and his entire family were baptized without delay” (Acts 16:33) or last week that Lydia “and her household were baptized.” (Acts 16:15) How much choice did they have in the matter, I ask myself.

Here in Germany, after the Reformation, the principle known as cuius regio, eius religio provided for internal religious unity within a state: The religion of the prince became the religion of the state and all its inhabitants and the only escape for those who could not conform to the prince's religion were to leave and to move to a place where their particular brand of religion was established or at least tolerated. That is not the unity God wants.

God’s unity is never coercive, it is an invitation into a relationship with God through Jesus and through Jesus with one another. Divine unity flows out of that relationship when “the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them.” (17:26) Our unity with other Christians is not so much the result of structures, but a sign of the presence of Jesus in our churches, in the sacrament, and in us. It is this presence that provides the great bond of union connecting Christians of all times.[4] Christians are not one, for the sake of being one, but are called to be united in the love of God and tasked with bringing that love into the world. It is when we embody this love that we will be like an advertisement, inviting people to join in union with God – in whichever church may suit them best. Our invitation is to share in one single common life in Christ, the invitation we heard at the end of the Book of Revelation:

The Spirit and the bride say, ‘Come.’

And let everyone who hears say, ‘Come.’

And let everyone who is thirsty come.

Let anyone who wishes take the water of life as a gift. (Revelation 22:21)

Amen.

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[1] https://www.katholikentag.de/

[2] https://www.oekumene-ack.de/fileadmin/user_upload/Grundlagen_der_Zusammenarbeit/ACK_Satzung.pdf

[3] John for Everyone II, N.T. Wright, p. 100

[4] Raymond Brown, The Gospel and Epistles of John, p. 86

Do you want to be made well?

 

A Sermon preached on Easter VI, May 22, 2022, at St. Augustine’s

Acts 16:9-15, Revelation 21:10, 22 – 22:5, John 5:1-9

And Jesus said to him: “Do you want to be made well?” (John 5:6)

My mind sometimes works in strange ways, so one thing that came to my mind when I read Jesus’ question was an episode in the Monty Python film the Life of Brian. Brian encounters a man begging for money, who says to him, “Okay, sir, my final offer: half a shekel for an old ex-leper?” “Brian replies: “Did you say "ex-leper"? “That's right, sir, 16 years behind a veil and proud of it, sir.” “Well, what happened”? “Oh, cured, sir.” “Cured?” “Yes sir, a blooming miracle, sir. Bless you!” “Who cured you?” “Jesus did, sir. I was hopping along, minding my own business, all of a sudden, up he comes, cures me! One minute I'm a leper with a trade, next minute my livelihood's gone. Not so much as a by-your-leave! ‘You're cured, mate.’ Blooming do-gooder.”

Clearly if that leper had been asked, “Do you want to be made well?” he would have said no!

But I don’t think this is the reason why the sick man in today’s gospel story gets asked the question or why he answers rather indirectly. It is an unusual question. Quite often we have heard of people come to Jesus knowing both that they need healing and believing Jesus can heal them. In Mathew’s gospel a leper approaches Jesus saying:  "Lord, if you are willing, you can make me clean." (Mathew 8:2) In Luke’s gospel we hear about the woman who had been suffering from haemorrhages for twelve years, no one could cure her, and so as she is afraid to even ask Jesus “she came up behind him and touched the fringe of his clothes, and immediately her haemorrhage stopped.” (Luke 8.43-45)

In the case of our sick man, it is not clear that he wants to or even believes that healing is a possibility. His reply to Jesus is not a simple yes or no. He offers an excuse. “Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up, and while I am making my way, someone else steps down ahead of me.” (5:7) You see, this wasn’t just any pool. It was rumoured that angels came periodically and stirred the water, and whoever got in first received miraculous healing. Not surprisingly, people flocked from near and far for a chance to participate in this miraculous phenomenon.

But our sick man seems to have become resigned to his fate, and possibly even a little comfortable in his situation. Getting healed at this pool is a bit of a lottery if only the first person gets it. And if you have no one to help you then of course you are at a considerable disadvantage. Having to move fast when you are lame is very difficult. But as it turns out, this man does have someone to help him: Jesus. Once again, we see Jesus reaching out not only to the sick, to those needing healing, but also to the disadvantaged, to those who neither have the family, nor the money to get help. Jesus does not help him by getting him into the pool, but by healing him immediately, just with the power of his word. The word “stand up” or “rise” is by the way the same verb used for being raised, as at the resurrection. That’s not a coincidence. The man has not just been made well; he has been raised to new life.

Jesus came to save and heal the whole world, to make the whole world new. The individual healings, like the one we heard about today, are of course expressions of his compassion and love for those who cross his path, but they also act as signs both of a wider need for healing, and of the offer of healing and wholeness in Jesus. The question “Do you want to be made well?” was also addressed to all of Israel. Sadly, the answer given by those in power was a clear NO! And in an attempt to silence the one asking that uncomfortable question and thereby reminding them of that need, they had him killed.

“Do you want to be made well?” is a question the risen Jesus still asks us individually and collectively today. And far too often the answer is still NO. Our sick man in the story at least knew he was ill, even if he doubted that he could or would be healed. In the episode from Acts we also heard this morning Paul has a vision: “There stood a man of Macedonia pleading with him and saying, ‘Come over to Macedonia and help us.’" (Acts 16:9) The people there were aware of their need for help, saving, and healing.

That is also our Christian teaching, as St. Paul told the Christians in Rome, “Since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, they are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.” (Romans 3:23-24) The world is broken and needs healing and each of us has the propensity to sin. But this is not something we like hearing – that we fall short, that we are less than perfect, that we are incomplete.

Some people do not accept that there is anything wrong, or anything that needs improving. If you live in the rich part of a rich country, it is easy to ignore the problems both of poorer people in your country, and of the poorer countries around the world. If you have health insurance and expensive doctors it is easy to forget that many people do not have this access and that their illnesses are often exacerbated and prolonged unnecessarily by poverty and a lack of affordable care.

And if there is something wrong – with me or society – we do not need another, especially not a supernatural other, to make us well, to solve our problems. There are all sorts of ways to self-improve, to get better, and human progress – medical and technological – will solve all our problems. Well, the myth of progress has been proved to be just that, a myth - in the sense of a fallacy. History has not ended with the victory of a single, fundamentally better system of government, as Francis Fukuyama predicted in his 1992 book[1], the benefits of technology are often outweighed by the costs, like climate change, and human greed and the desire for power are as strong as they were in Jesus’ day, but now much more dangerous.

The final chapters of the Book of Revelation contain one man’s vision of what the healing of the world can look like, in the new Jerusalem. This new world is full of beauty, delight, tenderness and glory,[2] full of life, and free of anything evil and destructive. God and the Lamb are at the centre, the tree of life is for the healing of the nations. It is a vision of restoration and reconciliation, a return to the status at the very beginning of creation, in the Garden of Eden, before sin entered the world. God and the Lamb are at the centre and there can be no healing without them. We are not complete, not whole, and not healthy without God.

So, Jesus’ question must be our question, “Do you want to be made well?” We have Good News for the world, but uncomfortable news. We all fall short of our potential as beings made in the image of God. God’s Creation is good, very good – but only if we care for it, not if we exploit and spoil it. Our Good News is not only that we all need to be made well, whole, healthy, free of sin, but that we know how, by believing in and following and becoming like the Word made flesh, Jesus Christ.

Amen.

 

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[1] The End of History and the Last Man

[2] N.T. Wright, Revelation of Everyone, p.189