Alice Davis, President
National Ministers Council
Green Lake Worship
Sunday, August 13, 2006
John 17: 20-26
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. I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one: I in them and you in me. May they be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me. Father, I want those you have given me to be with me where I am, and to see my glory, the glory you have given me because you loved me before the creation of the world.
In this text that is our subject for today, Jesus is praying for the church’s unity. The unity Jesus is praying to God for here is all-encompassing, isn’t it? All believers are to be one, and just like God is in Jesus and Jesus is in God, we are to be in them. But then Jesus says that he is in us and God is in Jesus. That means God and Jesus are in us, we are in them and they are in each other and we are all one. The Holy Spirit is in this unity, too, as a part of the “God in three persons” who we serve. Whew!
I try to picture how this looks in my mind and it’s hard for me to grasp. I think back on theologies of the Trinity and different Trinitarian understandings of God, which are hard enough to get, but when I try to picture me and you and all the other believers in with Jesus, God and the Holy Spirit, it just boggles my mind. At first I thought of nesting dolls or concentric circles, but neither of them quite gets it, because the outside ones have to be inside the inside ones, too, according to Jesus’ prayer.
So what I’ve come up with is my own theological Trinitarian unity plus believers image—we’re just all tangled up together. That’s the best I can come up with. Us with each other, all of us with Christ, God and the Holy Spirit, they in each other and in us and us in them, all tangled up together. Each of us maintaining our distinct personalities, but at the same time lost within each other. What unity! Not like a ball of yarn that’s easily unrolled, but tied up like a knot. But not like a slip knot or a bow, but a tangled mess, even more tangled than those Christmas lights that you didn’t put up right last year. A tangled up knot that’s totally unlooseable. That’s unity.
What I’d like for us to think about today in light of this tight, tangled up unity that God calls us to is the “so that…” part of Jesus’ prayer. Verses 21 and 23 tell us that we’re called to this tangled up unity “so that the world may believe.” So that the world will know that God has sent Jesus. So that the world will know that God has loved the world just like God loves Jesus. This is Jesus’ prayer to God--that the unity of the church will make the world believe. Jesus wants the church’s unity to be the evidence to prove that Jesus is truly the son of God.
Jesus wants the unity of the church, us believers, all tangled up with him, to be testimony about him. Not like a witness on the stand gives testimony, although there is some of that in the evangelizing and witnessing of the good news. But being in unity “so that” the world will believe means, to me, that the unity of the church itself, by its very being, would cause the world to come to know in Jesus. Like a job well done testifies to the ability of the doer. Like a piece of art testifies to the talent of its creator. The church’s unity will speak for itself, and what it will say is that Jesus is truly the son of God and that God so loves the world. That’s what Jesus prayed for.
The question I’d like for us to wrestle with today is: Has God answered Jesus’ prayer? Is this one of those times when God’s answer is no? When we look back at the history of the church, and at its present state as well, there is so much division, controversy, diversity of thought about who God is, how God is to be worshipped, what God expects us to do. You’d think that if we’re all tangled up with God and Jesus and the Holy Spirit, that we’d have some kind of agreements on who they are and how they work and how we should serve. We ought to have some uniformity in our beliefs, you think? But the testimony the church has provided throughout its history, what the church has said to the world through its existence does not seem to be unity, at least not to me.
As a matter of fact, the testimony of the church is that it has had major disagreements and breakups from Biblical times. Paul and Barnabas went their separate ways because they couldn’t agree on whether John Mark should go with them; the early church leaders disagreed over whether or not the message of Jesus was to be delivered to the Gentiles and then when Gentiles were converted they disagreed over whether they must follow the Jewish laws. The Biblical record testifies that there were in the early church diverse understandings and disagreements about how we are to understand Jesus and God, like the Gnostics and the Marcionites, who were considered heretics by Paul and the early church fathers.
Throughout the ages, great fights have taken place in the church over who God is and how Jesus is to be understood. That’s the church’s testimony to the world. When Emperor Constantine engineered the royal takeover of Christianity, the response by some church leaders was to retreat into the wilderness, creating the orders of the Monks who reacted to the royal takeover by denouncing all things material. There were the challenges and great debates over Arius’ claim that Jesus was not fully God, causing great debates and finally resulting in the Nicene Creed being established in 381. There were and still are today great debates over how the church should operate in service to God, including the split between the Roman Catholic and the Greek Orthodox Catholic churches, Luther’s challenge to the Roman Catholics which spurred the Protestant movement, and the breakups and divisions that have kept on going since then.
Now we have so many denominations, all calling ourselves believers in Christ and all challenging each other with the claim that we do it right and the others don’t. Even within our denominations we can’t seem to get along. Then there are the non-denominationalists and free churches telling us that we don’t need denominations. This must not feel like unity to those outside of the church. Certainly it doesn’t feel like the kind of unity that will help them to understand who Jesus is. When we look at the testimony that the church has provided throughout its history, we are called to ask the question: Did God say no to Jesus’ prayer?
If you believe like I do that God’s design for the world is intentional, then you will look with me back at this history, and help me try to understand what it is that God wants us to get from all of this? What wisdom from God are we to gain by the fact that God made us, the believers, to have so many different views on so many things? I believe there is something that we can learn from our history about the unity that God is still calling us to.
One conclusion I believe we should draw is that God is calling us to understand unity in some newer, deeper ways. Maybe we aren’t looking for the right kind of unity. Maybe what God is trying to get us to see is that unity is not the same as uniformity. Unity is not being the same. If that’s what we think unity is, we’ll never get there. Unity is not acting alike or saying the same things or even believing and thinking the same things about God. I believe that God is trying to get us to understand what it means to be a church that is unified in God, all tangled up with God, Jesus, the Holy spirit and each other. But in that tangled up mass, we don’t lose our distinct identities when we become one, anymore than a tangled ball of threads becomes fused into one thread.
The testimony that the church has given to the world throughout its history is that it is as multi-faceted as God’s creation. The church is as diverse in its makeup as the flowers in our gardens, as diverse as the number of kinds of birds that fly in the air, as diverse as the different kinds of frogs and toads there are in this world, as diverse as the fishes in the sea. God does not expect or even want us to look alike, act alike and especially not to think alike. We come together because we all believe and worship Jesus Christ as our Lord, not because we all have one understanding of what that means. That’s the kind of unity we have, and that is our testimony to the world about the God that we serve.
And if this is true, if it is true that what feels like disunity is a part of God’s plan, our job is to seek the wisdom behind it. If our differences are a part of God’s plan, then there is wisdom in it. If it is God’s plan for us to be different, then it is through our differences that we learn how to be more like the people that God wants us to be. Brian McClaren, one of the leaders of the new emergent church movement, points out in an online discussion on Trinity.com, that the more we are around people who are different from us, the more we are able to learn from each other. He points out that if we all thought alike, there would be nothing new to learn. The testimony of the church’s unity is that we disagree because we are different, and the wisdom behind that diversity is ours for learning to move in new directions. The key is not to argue about the differences, but to learn from them. Neither are we to ignore our differences, but to really appreciate that we are different, and that is as God has planned it to be.
One of the things we begin to learn when we accept the wisdom of God’s diversity is that we ought to be humbled by it. Through our bickering we should begin to see, it should begin to dawn on us, that God is bigger than any of us could possibly understand. Because each of us is only able to see through a glass darkly, we are challenged to lower our egos and listen to each other. When we look at the history of the church we see that much of the bickering that has caused us to split into different denominations and argue to the point of death with each other is a part of the wisdom of God’s plan to keep any one group of us from thinking they can wholly define and speak for God. God is not to be used by any of us to make the world into our own image. I don’t need to serve a God who’s no bigger than me, who’s thoughts are not any bigger than my thoughts, who’s ways are never beyond the ways I know and understand. Through the challenges that we are faced with that demand we seek peace with each other, we’re all called to a higher level of tolerance, a greater sense of responsibility for listening to the other, a deeper struggle to lower our own egos and arrogance to figure out how to work together.
The testimony of the church’s unity to the world is that we must learn to love like we’ve never loved before. The recognition of our differences as being a part of God’s plan calls us to a deeper understanding of what it means to love each other. We must have love that doesn’t demand that you be like me, and that doesn’t expect that I should be like you; we are to have a love that loves in spite of our differences, and celebrates those differences. A love that determines to work together for the sake of God, even though we disagree on things that we feel are important to us. God is calling us to love each other more like the love that God has for Jesus., and more like the love that Jesus has for us.
He came down from a safe place in heaven to die on the cross, for us, because it’s what Jesus wanted to do. We’re called to love each other with a love like Jesus has for us—a love that is willing to give our lives for people who we don’t understand and who don’t understand us. We are called to a love like Jesus, who never said we must be different than who we are, or that we must do anything other than believe and serve, to act and to love. His love is a love that says people are different and that’s ok because that’s the way I made you; a love that says that people will disagree with each other and that’s ok, because none of us has the wisdom of God; his love is a love that allows people to feel and express the presence of God in their lives in different ways, and says that’s okay, because God loves each of us in the way that God created us. When we learn to love like that, that’s when the world will see Jesus in us. That’s when we will be the people that Jesus prayed for us to be.
It’s an amazing thing, that the church, even with all of its divisions and breakups, has continued to grow. There are now estimated to be more than 2 billion Christians in the world. God is doing God’s part, God’s word will not come back unfulfilled. Our job is to do our part. Can you imagine if we were working together instead of against each other, what we might be able to do to share the Good News in this world?
The answer to the question of “are we there yet?” in response to Jesus’ prayer about unity is no, not yet. We don’t yet have the kind of unity that testifies to the world the truth about Jesus. But there are signs that help us to see that we’re on the way. Brian McClaren said in that same interview that one thing that this new “emerging church” movement is doing is to look back at the church’s history and traditions through the lens of the present to see what new thing God may be doing now. He says what the church needs is a continual process of discernment to discover the new possibilities and new beginnings to which God is calling the church. That’s what emergence means: “Out of what has been, something new has come.” This emerging church movement crosses denominational lines. It’s meeting people where they are now, moving in sync with society in all of its technological advances that have given people new ways of perceiving.
The new ways that God is helping us to understand the church’s unity is also seen in what’s happening in our seminaries. Young persons who are called out to ministry no longer have as much concern for denominational affiliations as they do for doing the work that they believe God has called them to. The young seminarians are not as concerned about pastoring churches as they are concerned about impacting the world about them with their gifts of ministry. I believe the young people are getting it. We are moving in the right direction, but that doesn’t mean we can forget about the past. When we look back at the past, we see that the unity that we are moving toward, that we are growing into, comes most easily when we adhere to Baptist polity and principals that respect the individual’s right to work out their own salvation with fear and trembling.
The church’s unity throughout history shows us that Jesus’ prayer has not been fully answered, at least not yet. But as we let the church’s testimony speak to us about where we ought to be headed in the future, we see the church is on its way. We are headed to a new wisdom about unity, we are becoming more humble about our differences, the kind of humility that is demanded if we are going to bring peace to this world. We are moving towards deeper and more meaningful love for each other: That’s what God is saying to the world through us. Are we there yet? No. But we are on the way. Our job in this tangled up mass of unity in all of it’s differentness, is to continue to walk humbly with our God and each other, seeking justice and loving kindness, and striving to understand the wisdom of God.