THE CHURCH AND ITS INTENDED POWER OF UNITY.

“One heart and mind.” “Unified and together.” “Mature in this oneness.”

John 17:11                  I will remain in the world no longer, but they are still in the world, and I am coming to you. Holy Father, protect them by the power of your name – the name you gave me- so that they may be one as we are one.

John 17:20 – 21.  My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you 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.

John 17:22.                    I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one.

“One heart and mind.” “Unified and together.” “Mature in this oneness.” Two thousand years after Jesus prayed this prayer, we see scant evidence that these pleas are being answered. Denominations arise over dogma, congregations draw lines based on social demography and so on but what can we do as a church to Make Jesus Famous.

Just as in the Lord’s Prayer in John 17:20-25, the context for the Christian faith is not the experience of a lone individual. The Christian faith requires a community of fellow believers.

If I take this prayer of unity seriously, I must give up the arrogant illusion that my salvation, my spiritual life, and my sins are personal matters. I must admit that I cannot follow Jesus Christ alone any more than I can get married alone. To follow Jesus, I need the fellowship of other believers. So do you, and so has every saint in the history of the church.

That is why it’s not completely accurate to say that any of us has a “personal relationship with Jesus.”  What we have is a communal relationship with Jesus. I owe my understanding of Jesus Christ to the scribes who preserved the stories, the saints who live the stories and the Sunday school teachers who repeated the stories even when I was more concerned with impressing the female class members with my belching abilities.

Were these scribes and saints and Sunday school teachers perfect? No. they were as imperfect as the men and women who share your pew every Sunday mornings. The scribes made some mistakes, the saints sinned, and by the end or our class time, my Sunday school teacher was inexplicably cranky. But I have needed every one of them.

Without the scribes, I could never have experienced the raw honesty of the prophet Jeremiah or the concern for the downtrodden that has led me to love Luke’s gospel. Without the diverse saints of the past and present, my faith in Jesus Christ would never have grown beyond the simple plea of a five year old boy. “I need to know Jesus”

Miraculously mismatched.

That is why I have no desire to join a church filled with people “just like me” if everyone’s educational level, economic status, and racial profile were similar to mine, why would we need each other? Part of the “foolishness of the cross” is the fact that those who rub shoulders in the shadow of the cross are people whom the world would never dream of blending together (See.1Cor. 1:18, 26).

When I fellowship and pray with my Christian family, I long to be surrounded by a congregation that is multicultural as an Itesot drinking Ajono from Ekyanzi (gourd). I want to sing the “Mungu ni mwema.” back – to back with “Katonda mulungi,”  “I will fly away,” and a string of rollicking praise choruses. I want to shake brown hands and white hands, smooth hands and callused hands, wrinkled hands and tiny, trembling, newborn hands.

Why? Because church is not about my personal tastes or desires. In fact, church is not about me at all. It is about a mismatched community of recovering sinners, bound by a spirit that no one has ever seen. C.S.Lewis wrote that in the first weeks after becoming a Christian,

          “I thought that I could do it on my own, by retiring to my room and reading theology. …….. I disliked very much (the hymns that they sang in church), which I considered to be fifth-rate poems set to sixth-rate music. But as I went on, I saw the great merit of it. I came up against different people of quite different outlooks and different education, and then gradually my conceit just began peeling off.”

To share “one heart and mind” with our fellow believers means that we give up our foolish delusion that we can make it on our own. We confess this surrender in the Apostles’ Creed by declaring, “I believe in the communion of the saints.” And, as I contemplate the crazy collection of believers that repeats the ancient creed alongside me, my mind echoes, I believe in this communion of saints- for without you, I could not believe at all. I believe in this communion of saints – for this fellowship is the sphere of the spirit’s work in my life. I believe in this communion of saints- for you are my sacrament, the living reflection of broken bread and wine of the body of Jesus broken for the fellowship of believers.

Walter Burk put it this way,

I love this church because it consists of sinning people. I find here a tradition of reason…. For all the fear of sex, I discover here the redemption of my body. In an age so inhuman, I touch here tears of compassion. In a world so grim and humorless, I share here rich joy and earthy laughter. In the midst of death, I hear an incomparable stress on life. For all the apparent absence of God, I sense here the real presence of Christ.

The reason to believe.

The community of faith has a greater function than my personal spiritual development, though. According to Jesus’ Prayer,

The goal is for all of them to become one heart and mind- just as you, Father, are in me and I in you, so they might be one heart and mind with us. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. John17:20-21 MSG.

Do you get what Jesus is trying to mean? Let me paraphrase His point; the world will be won not through the wisdom of our words, but through the witness of our oneness. One of the ancient kings Mutesa I in this nation Uganda had this to say concerning Christianity (the Church Missionary Society from England and the Mill Hill Fathers from Rome in the eighteen hundreds when it was first presented to him.

“How can two white groups of people be contradicting about the same (Jesus and God) religion called Christianity? One is saying this and other that. So who should I actually believe?”

According to Jesus, our best hope for convincing the world that He was no ordinary human being in our unity. For only then do we accurately reflect the inner nature of God- a nature in which the diversity of Father, Son and Spirit coexist in perfect complementality.

I know, I know. It sounds pretty crazy to me too. Someone once commented that the communion of saints is a lot like Noah’s ark- if it weren’t for the storm on the outside, no one could stand the fact that it smells like you-know-what is on the inside. But what would happen if we focused less on the church’s shortcomings and more on the church’s wondrous possibilities?

Suppose that we did constantly consider the fact that the way we commune with our fellow believers is the primary proof of God’s presence in Jesus Christ. (If, after all, God’s power can’t change your prejudices and mine, can persons outside the Christian faith freely expect Him to change their lives?)

Perhaps then the world would see that despite its many failures, the church is a wondrous miracle. It is loving and forgiving, laughing and weeping, worshiping and seeking God in the midst of this motley multitude of sinners and saints.

The THINNEST place.

Want to experience the ultimate thin place – a place where heaven and earth intersect? How about a unified church? (The world would never be able to explain that one.)

Not certain where to begin? (I mean, getting the Orthodox and Catholic Churches back together might be a little too ambitious a project for this weekend.)

How about asking that Church member you can’t stand to eat Lunch with on Sunday?  Hey, I never said it would be easy.