2008 marks the one-hundredth anniversary of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. So today it is all the more fitting for us to hear read part of St. Paul's first letter to the church at Corinth, the beloved community he helped to found (Acts 18:1-11), but which had been shaken by strife and division on important doctrinal and ethical issues, broken by self-righteous and litigious factions. The church he had carefully established was “not yet” one in heart and mind. The plaintive song we sang in Advent, praying that “our sad divisions cease,” has been in reality a prayer since the very birth of Christianity. There never has been a pure moment when the church, “called to be saints together,” has not suffered the pain of separation and disunity.
On one research trip I made to Greece a few years ago I stayed in ancient Corinth with an archaeological team exploring nearby Isthmia, the Panhellenic sanctuary where the warring Greek city-states set aside their divisions temporarily to compete in sacred athletic events. But I was also in ancient Corinth, a city refounded by Julius Caesar after war, to walk in the public places where Paul had lived, worked as a leather craftsman, and preached (although apparently not as elegantly and persuasively as other early preachers there). And I stood on the Bema, the tribunal where the Roman proconsul of Asia, Gallio, the brother of the philosopher Seneca, heard a list of charges against Paul, charges of fomenting religious division and strife. But for that Roman magistrate the Empire had no interest or role in judging private religious disputes.
While I was there, a colleague of mine insisted that I accompany him to the distant top of the Acrocorinth, rising almost 1900 feet over this ancient port city, up to the ruins of the temple of Aphrodite, the patron of this city of scandalous love, the deity who had ruled over this crossroads of commerce, seafarers, and strange new religions. So – taking leave of my better mind – I began the long climb up the zig-zagging road, under the blazing summer sun, without a hat or water. Each time I begged to turn back, my colleague insisted: “it’s just around the next bend.” Even when we met a party of exhausted German hikers descending who ominously shook their heads when I asked how much further it was to the top, my colleague kept insisting: “Just around the next bend.” Eventually we arrived, and I was startled to find an outdoor cafe. I was even more startled when a taxi, with horn blaring, speeded around the final curve in the road and smarter travelers emerged. I choked out: “You mean there was a taxi we could have taken?”, only to be told that my colleague thought I would want the exercise. Refraining from homicide for the moment, I proceeded to vent about the high crimes visited on me by this so-called colleague as I had tortured feet, lungs, and head around each excruciating bend in the long road traveled. And he replied: “But now you are here, and all you can think about is the past, when you were not yet here.”
St. Paul is our reminder about the “now and not yet” of the life we lead simultaneously in the church, whether it was in his own day or now in ours. We are already one, baptised in the one Lord; we are already “there” – our true unity is with Christ, in Christ, because Christ is already one with us, with our humanity, that we might be one with his divinity. This letter of St. Paul’s reminds us: “God is faithful [emphasis], by whom you were called into the fellowship of his son, Jesus Christ our Lord” (1 Corinthians 1:9). It is God’s faithfulness, God’s gift, that is the sign and promise, the reality of our unity: yesterday, today, and forever.
More unites us – even though there are over 33,000 types of Christianity today – than divides us. Like my moment at the pinnacle of Acrocorinth, we are already there, even if we cling to the “not yet.” The truth is that we have not yet given ourselves fully to being there. We struggle, within and between churches, for some more visible unity, organic and vital, perhaps sincerely, but perhaps really less so, comfortable in our sad divisions, our easy ride into self-righteous judgment of each other and the world. As the bumper sticker says: “Many folks want to serve God...but only as adviser.” We want to witness church unity – but only as advisers, from a safe distance of correctness, without service, sacrifice, or humility. The good news despite this is that even in our flawed state, our “not yet,” God condescends to our frail grappling with unity, as our lives are intimately bound up with each other, in our sin and need for saving grace, our common need to recognize and follow the Lamb of God given for us. We have found the Messiah, only because the Messiah has first found us, and loved us. Unity is God’s gift, a gift into which we live; it is the “not yet” that is still ours despite our brokenness, even in the broken table of the eucharist that should be the meeting place of our “one bread, one body,” the bread of life and the cup of salvation. It is the one Lord, God who is faithful, who gathers the fragments scattered on the many hillsides and makes them finally one. We need to remind ourselves, as our fragmented communities meet separately on Sundays, distant from each other, to break bread and hear the word, that only Christ is the agent and aim of our true unity, and God’s own self-offering is the root and branch of that unity. The fractured body we are now, like Paul’s Corinth, is itself a foreshadowing of our final communion. And the pain of separation, our brokenness, within the church is a hint of the pain we feel from our separation from God. But as St. Paul writes elsewhere (Romans 8:38-39): “...[nothing can] separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
Still, there is no quick taxi to that place we want to be. And if there were, it would be more like a careening New York taxi in which driver and passenger spoke incomprehensible tongues, and neither had a clear idea of a correct route and destination. That is why, I think, St. Paul includes later in this letter to a divided people in Corinth those stirring passages about the eucharist, about the nature of transcendent love, and the resurrection, our shared experience now of the not yet. It is only by sharing with each other the love Christ has for us, patient, kind, selfless, the love that the Father has for the Son, that we can be raised up for life together in unity, into the inner, hidden life of God. If we believe in resurrection, as the Apostles preached to the community in Jerusalem, believers with “one heart and soul” and who “held all things in common,” then our life of unity is truly a life for others, like the life of Jesus. As it was said of the early church: “There was not a needy person among them” (Acts 4:34). And we are all so needy now. But we are raised up, made whole, healed by the mutual love and care we have for others. This is a theme I will speak about later this afternoon at Evensong.
In the meantime, in the betwixt and between time of our life here and now, let us pray together in the beauty of God’s holiness in word and song, so that the world with wonderment will one day exclaim: “See how these Christians love one another!”
Sisters and Brothers: Love one another.
