Christian Unity
Pentecost 9, Proper 11
July 21, 2024
Fr. Tim Nunez
May my spoken word be true to God’s written word and bring us all closer to the living word, Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
A few years ago, Meg and I visited our son Rob and his family in Frederick, Maryland. We were less than 30 minutes away from Harper’s Ferry, which was a key city in colonial days and is brimming with history. It is now a national park. No one lives there, but it has lodging, lots of shops and restaurants and sites to see. I could go on at length about why to visit it, I loved it, but we’ll focus on just one thing we saw there.
On the east, Harper’s Ferry comes to a point. If you stand on that point, you are in West Virginia. To your left is the Potomac River, and across it is Maryland. To your right is the Shenandoah River and across it is Virginia. In front of you, those two famous rivers come together. They do not continue as Potomac and Shenandoah. No, they come together and the Potomac continues to our nation’s capital, Washington D.C.
As we trace our religious roots, we find that Judaism hit a point where it split. Some Jews, a small minority, began to follow Jesus and became Christians.
Jesus was a devout Jew. He described his coming, his ministry and the Kingdom of God as the fulfillment of the Law and the prophets – meaning the Law of Moses and the Old Testament prophets of Israel. All of Jesus’s leadership team, the 12, were Jewish. Almost everyone Jesus encountered, save for a few gentiles along the way, was Jewish.
When the disciples start spreading the Good News about Jesus they go first to their religious centers, the Temple and synagogues in Jerusalem, and then radiating out to synagogues in Antioch and other places.
Soon they start getting nudges from God about reaching everyone. Philip meets and baptizes an Ethiopian Eunuch. Peter is called by God to visit a Roman Centurion named Cornelius and baptizes his entire household. They also get kicked out of the synagogues.
Now that stream of what had been a Jewish sect meets up with a huge river of Gentiles and took off from there. And there were a lot more Gentiles to meet!
This all led to a question that became a huge controversy in the early church. Did someone need to become a Jew to become a Christian? Were the Jewish Christians, as steeped as they were in the Law and Prophets and of Jesus’s race somehow superior to the Gentiles who knew none of that? How could they reconcile those two and carry on together?
One impulse we have when trying to overcome differences is to sit down and calmly share our perspectives and try to find common ground. That can certainly resolve issues and sometimes conflicts. Or, we lay our competing visions and concerns and have an election. That doesn’t tend to resolve things so much as allow us to move fitfully forward, correcting course again and again and again.
True unity comes from a shared vision and purpose. For example, an Army platoon doesn’t form cohesion by sitting in a circle telling their stories and learning to appreciate each other. Rather, they are thrown together in boot camp and training exercises and given difficult tasks to perform together. Maybe they wind up in battle together. Bonds form that last a lifetime despite differences in race, where they are from and on and on.
The same is true in corporations, sports teams, families – really any group we are a part of. When things get frayed, we remind each other of what binds us together. Our nation will never be united by an equitable tax policy or any other policy. What unites us is our commitment to ideals like life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, freedom of religion, speech and the press.
Our point of Christian unity is, of course, Jesus. He is the cornerstone. That doesn’t mean he is a sort of lowest common denominator, a baseline idea to which we all agree. No. He has broken down any and every barrier that ever existed between any and every human being and the One true, living God. He came to reconcile all of humanity with God and with each other.
As I contemplated that this week it occurred to me that somehow the church morphed into the public scold. I see it all the time. I get it. We see things that are wrong and we feel compelled to make it better. And, honestly, it is hard to get through to people. (It’s certainly hard to get through to me.) But we cannot let those challenges suck us into wagging our finger at the world and saying, “You’re wrong.”
It's far better, more faithful to Jesus, to say as Paul does in 1 Corinthians 13:1, “And now let me show you a more excellent way.”
Paul says to the Ephesians that Jesus has drawn together those who were far off from him and those who were near. It doesn’t matter where they came from, which tributary or how far upstream they jumped in once they are with him. He says that we are to be so knit together that we become a holy temple. Not our building. Us.
We flow together as those two rivers, bringing our uniquenesses together to build the body of Christ, in the power of the Holy Spirit; redeemed and bound together in love.
We had a beautiful slice of that this past week with our Vacation Bible School. The program, completely designed and written by Christopher and Tiana Maslanka was excellent. We had dozens of volunteers, we had dozens of kids, many from our church and many from outside. All of it came together by God’s grace to form a dwelling place for God.
And I truly hope that happens every time we gather for worship, for classes, for events, for project, for ministries and even when we make our spaces available to other groups. We just want to be a people united in, by and through our ongoing encounters with the Father through Jesus and the Holy Spirit.
AMEN!