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Septuagesima
The Second Sunday After The Epiphany
God, whose Son our Savior Jesus Christ is the light of the world: Grant that thy people, illumined by thy Word and Sacraments, may shine with the radiance of Christ’s glory, that he may be known, worshiped, and obeyed to the ends of the earth; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord, who with thee and the Holy Spirit liveth and reigneth, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
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The Second Sunday After The Epiphany
Septuagesima
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A Sermon by
Dr. Royal W. Rhodes, The Donald L. Rogan Professor of Religious Studies, Kenyon College
✛
A Sermon for the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity (II)
There is a much-told story about an old monk, renowned for holiness and wisdom. A very eager young man attached himself to this holy hermit, and pestered him every night and day, demanding the secret of wisdom. One day as the two crossed a deep river and the young man continued to harp about getting a revelation, the old man took him and held him under water. When he finally let the young man surface, choking and sputtering, the hermit asked: “What do you want?” “Air!”, the young man gasped. The old man then said, “When you want wisdom as much as you want air, then it will be given to you.” So it is with Christian unity. Do we seek it as ardently and constantly as we want air, or food, or any number of things that we desire for our material life? Do we long for it, in the lonely, dull days and weary nights, with tears, with fathomless yearning, and with troubled hearts hungry to receive it? Or do we leave it to a few ecumenical officers and church officials, who soldier on in our name? Do we each see our own deep responsibility towards not only our particular community of faith, but to all believers in the one, holy, undivided Christ? Do we say, “Our Father,” in an all-embracing, inclusive way, or do we really address some denominational God in our image, a Father only for us or for those who agree with us?
This past Fall I went to a Convocation at Yale Divinity School with a priest friend, both of us classmates of Fr. Mead, your beloved Rector. Yale was, in our time there and today, a place of intense theological learning, discussion, and committed service, a school of the soul, uniting the diverse expressions of Christianity in common purpose in the name of him who has sent us into the world. We learned there that all of us, Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox, and Anabaptist, all of us share the common inheritance of the Christian tradition and are responsible for it. Another friend and former teacher of ours preached, and told the story from his own time as a student at Yale when he went to Professor Niebuhr’s office to ask for the German edition of Karl Barth’s classic book on Paul’s letter to the Romans. He admitted he felt somewhat pretentious in this mission, and wondered how this distinguished theologian would react. Niebuhr responded with a question: “Are you serious?” Not, as my former teacher later realized, a flippant judgment on this eager student’s capabilities, but a sincere inquiry about his real commitment to matters as important, finally, as life and death. “Are you serious?” That is the question for us too, as we seek to understand and work towards greater unity: Are we serious?
If we are, if all of us together are, then there are some things to remember. We will be going places that will change us all, to places and thoughts and work more risky, more unsettling, and more uncertain than the safe, familiar, and secure nests into which our divisions have let us settle. The idea of unity expressed by Jesus is more radical and transformative than we have ever imagined. You might want to turn back right now. Warning: Our new life together will cost more than we could expect. The reward? Priceless. Hope is our only basis to believe this shaking up is worth the total discomfort, the dismay, the dis-ease we will all face. We will have to learn to become what we really are meant to be, not what we are now, however right and good and proper that appears. W.H.Auden, that curmudgeon of the soul, was referring to this when he said: “Christianity is a way, not a state, and a Christian is never something one is, only something one can pray to become.” Are we serious?
And what then is our prayer for unity. “How” does our prayer mean? If it is only that all 33,000 different denominations of Christians play nice with each other and share, then our vision is pathetically limited. Christian unity is meant to be a vital, living sign: “…so that the world may know that thou [O Father] hast sent me and hast loved them even as thou hast loved me” (John 17:23), as Jesus voiced his high-priestly prayer we heard again today. If the many churches were truly one with Christ, were known as places of peace and reconciliation, service, self-sacrifice, compassion, the world would come running, would see Christians as a people of joy, fulfillment, and victory over the dehumanizing forces that weary our world. Then truly “sorrow and sighing shall flee away.”
We need to ask ourselves seriously whether we choose to endow with power in our lives the constant reality of Christ’s love or the forces of disunity? Disunity is not the same as diversity. My dissertation-father, the late George Huntston Williams, often said: “The history of Christianity reveals that unity is diversity, and diversity is unity.” But you need the eyes to see it. Diversity in unity is the manifestation of the essential community at the heart of the one God, Father-Son-Spirit, the three-in-one, and one-in-three, in whose image and likeness we are all created, redeemed, sanctified, and called into community. Community is our goal because it is the very life of God. That divine life in turn directs us inevitably back into the created world, :”As thou didst send me into the world, so I have sent them into the world” (John 17:18), as Jesus addresses his Father. The journey into the sacred in human life is our journey into the life of God, transforming us, making us one. We pray for that and labor for what we pray. The compassionate service to God’s world already is a step in our reconciliation with each other.
Archbishop Demetrios of the Greek Orthodox Church in America has written: “…our churches share much in terms of our commitment to safeguard human rights and religious freedom, to protect our natural environment from human harm and to advocate for justice and peace — especially as we are mindful of those who live with poverty, threats of terrorism, war and disease” (Op-Ed Contributor, “More Than an Easter in Common,” The New York Times, April 8, 2007). Our quest for church unity is barren, then, unless we can “Say to those who are of a fearful heart, Be strong, fear not!” (Isaiah 35:4). There is not real unity possible for us unless we reach out to the poor, the weak, the hurt, the voiceless. And if we ignore the injustices of the world, those entrenched denials of God’s life in creation, there is no experience of resurrection, no time when “…the desert shall rejoice and blossom.” Our fear and failure would proclaim that we believe that evil is stronger than the one God.
We can see, I hope, that there is really more at stake in discussing Christian unity than mere ecclesiastical dialogue and organization. What is at stake is how God’s life is received and God’s reign is made manifest. Someone who understood how our prayer and our work of love can show forth the strength of God’s abiding presence in the world was the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr., the 40th anniversary of whose death we commemorate this year and whose life and witness we celebrate as a nation tomorrow. He knew how profoundly transformative it would be if Christians, all Christians, spoke with one heart and soul the truth against power, if we truly became what we say we are, followers of Christ, a people who recognize clearly Christ in “distressing disguise”, as we feed the hungry, house the homeless, clothe the naked, and reject the structures of injustice that assault basic human dignity. If only we rejected the destructiveness of religious zealots in their many forms. And if we recognized, as others have, that Christ came to take away our sins, not our minds.
This outlook is, in a special way, close to the sacred story of the patron saint of this church, St. Thomas the Apostle, who proclaimed after he had placed his finger into the open wounds of Jesus our common affirmation of faith that unites all Christians: “My Lord and my God.” May we humbly follow that example, placing our hands, united in loving acts, into the open wounds of Jesus in our world today, to overcome the pain and fear around us.
“Are you serious?” Be strong, fear not.
Are you ready to let “our sad divisions cease”? Then love one another.
So that some day, we pray not far off, we can sing with the whole host of heaven: “One at last, one at last. Thank God almighty we are one at last!”
