Jan 21st 2022
Uniting Church, Whaley Bridge
Christian Unity
One June morning a few years ago I got up at 6am and walked from my hotel through empty London streets to the House of Commons. After queuing and security clearance I found myself in the dazzling surroundings of Westminster Hall, where 75 circular tables were laid for breakfast. I chatted around the table with my MP Kevin Barron and around the table with church leaders, lay and ordained, of every denomination. After a welcome from the then Speaker of the Commons, John Bercow, we were led in worship by members of the House of Common and the House of Lords, representing every nation of the UK and all the main political parties. Our keynote speaker was Archbishop Angelos, leader of the Coptic Church in the UK and an inspirational Christian who advocates around the world for human rights and religious freedom. Archbishop Anglos comes from Egypt and spoke most movingly of the suffering and faith under persecution of Christian people there. With his words still ringing in our ears we sang the hymn “Beauty for brokenness” – as we will do today. Then we went off to a range of practical seminars about different ways churches can engage with their communities at local level.
It was an unforgettable experience, a glimpse of glory. Here at the beating heart of the British democratic system were Christian people coming together across denominational and regional boundaries, coming together to be a church at the service of the nation. For me it was a wonderful vision of Christian Unity, and I felt humbled to be part of it.
This was the Parliamentary Prayer Breakfast, an annual event organised by the Bible Society in conjunction with the all-party group Christians in Parliament. We Anglicans may feel ambivalent about being an established Church that ties into institutions of power and privilege in ways that sit uncomfortably with the radical teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. Yet at best being established creates a space for all Christian denominations to come to the table at the heart of British life and government– and Moslem colleagues have assured me, it also creates a space for other faiths to take their place there too.
This week is the week of prayer for Christian Unity, and I reckon it’s a week for letting God widen our horizon by a few inches. Do you ever have that itch for a view from a hill? For me on these winters days when the light is clear and bright, only a view from a hilltop will do. Eccles Pike, Pym’s Chair – the big vista of landscape. I need to be reminded of that grandeur, let my vision be filled with the sheer vastness of it.
That widening of perspective is what Christian Unity Week offers us. There is a beauty is the local. If we are ensconced in a local church that tends to be the lens through which we see our faith - that’s fine, that’s good – but sometimes we need to let the bigger vista of Christian belief unfurl itself before us. We need to notice how expansive this landscape is, how rich and varied. This week of prayer is an invitation to see bigger and see differently.
We heard in our second reading how the Apostle Paul was challenging the Christians at Corinth about their pride and blinkered vision that was creating such divisiveness within the community. He invites them to see themselves as parts of the body, and to realise how ridiculous it would be if, instead of being diversified the body was all one thing. “If the whole body were an eye, where would the sense of hearing be? If the whole body were an ear, where would the sense of smell be?” Unity in Christ is not about uniformity, Paul wants us to know. Unity does not mean we are amalgamated into a homogenous lump of believers. No: our unity in Christ acknowledges and values our diversity.
And then Paul develops his arguments some more: The eye cannot say to the hand, “I don’t need you!” And the head cannot say to the feet, “I don’t need you!” We are different, and we need each other’s difference. I find this challenging. It’s not about loving each other despite our difference but loving each other because we are different.
The beauty of our Christian faith is that it invites us to encounter a God who is both with us and beyond, us, both “immanent” and “transcendent” to use some slightly technical church-talk. First of all God is near, reachable, knowable. “See I am with you, with you always” says Jesus. “The kingdom of God is within you.” “We are all baptised in one Spirit” assures Paul. We can know within our own experience, and we should take confidence in this. We can trust what we have come to know of God in our Methodist Circuit, in our Anglican parish church, in our house church, or whatever other tradition. That is the immanence of God, God with us. But what of this other aspect of God, God beyond us, the God who is so much bigger than we can imagine? How do we encounter that transcendent aspect of God?
For me ecumenism – the encounter with in different Christian faith traditions is one way into that. The ecumenical encounter has been a constant through my Christian journey and has been a tremendous gift and a blessing. Because my background is in the study of modern languages – German and French – there have always been opportunities to get to know Christian people in Europe and share faith from their perspective. That difference interests me and the spiritual experiences that have formed me most have nearly always been in the context of difference – being alongside Christians of a different tradition or nationality from my own and being nudged into seeing the God of Jesus Christ through their eyes. Those have been the moments when my vision of God has expanded a little and I have seen the glory from the mountaintop. It’s in these moments of encounter with difference that I catch a sense of the transcendence, the beyondness of God.
The Easter I was eighteen I spent in the Taize Community an ecumenical community in France that has a special ministry with young people. There was snow on the ground as I sat in the tent that formed the main church, along with about 800 young people from around the world. I was cold, I was hungry, and we sang chants in Latin until I felt dizzy. And then we prayed the Lord’s prayer, each in our own language. All around me there were voices speaking words I did not recognise; there were hundreds of voices, probably thirty of forty different languages, and it was an extraordinary experience to be part of. So many different sounds, and yet one single intention. Christ was among us, teaching us to pray, connecting us to one another. It was a powerful and profound experience of the Holy Spirit. Something had taken hold of me and would not let me go.
Twenty years later I began training for the ministry – and my call to ministry came from a newly Anglican Methodist Local Ecumenical Partnership where a coming together of different people with diverse gifts and traditions released a great wave of creativity in mission and ministry. It’s easy to perceive unity as bland and dull, as when all the paints in the palette merge into brown. Yet when unity cherishes and affirms difference – that is a beautiful thing.
The prayer for Christian Unity is not an end in itself. Our gospel passage reminds us that ministry of Jesus was to fulfil Isaiah’s vision: to proclaim good news to the poor, to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.” It is always good to be reminded that Jesus came not to set up a church, but to heal and liberate the people of the world he loves. The kingdom, the rule of God was Jesus’s constant theme and the fulfilment of the kingdom is at the heart of the prayer he gave us. We work and we pray for God’s coming kingdom and when we gather together as Christ’s church, as we do this morning, it is as a sign of that kingdom, in which every nationality and language and faith tradition is loved and reconciled.
In this week of Prayer for Christian Unity may God bless us and enlarge our vision. Amen.