Readings: Acts 1: 6-14, John 17:1-11
Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the mediations
of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our rock and our
sustainer. Amen.
In the Gospel reading for today Jesus
prays, just hours out from his arrest, for the community of faith, pulling
together all the strands of his teaching into a rich message of love and hope:
he prays that they will continue to know God through Jesus’ life and ministry,
that knowing God will draw them into a new reality shaped around love and
justice and service, and that they recognise the need for the continuing
presence of the Holy One in their lives to guide, nurture and protect them in
their very humanness, and finally, that they might be one as he and the Father
are one.
And it is this last sentence that I would
like us to think about today. What does it mean to be one with God and each
other? If we go back through that last paragraph and use ‘we’ instead of ‘they’
what does Jesus prayer mean for us as a community of faith today?
Because this sense of oneness is clearly a
core message from John’s Gospel – he begins his writing with the same message
in the familiar first verses of John’s Gospel:: “In the beginning was the Word,
and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”[1]
The son and the father –one with each other as we are to be one.
According to Linda Clader, some ancient
theologians who studied these John 1:1 verses talked about Jesus’ oneness with
the Father in terms that suggest movement – a kind of interweaving or even
dance among the Father, Son and the Holy Spirit. And she asks “What if the answer to Jesus’
prayer for unity was not about solidifying
into a monolithic block but, rather, was about joyful interplay,
glorious dancing? If we tried that idea
on for a while, could it affect how we view our own disagreements with our
brothers and sisters....[and see it instead as] the ability to join, in our
disparate ways, in the common dance of faith.”[2]
Too often the idea of oneness conjures up a
picture of total agreement, no deviance from the one accepted way. We have been pulled into this way of thinking
time and time again – all those phrase like ‘if you are not with us you are
agin us’ and using all our energy (and power) to prove our way is right. You
have heard me on this particular soap box before. It’s not about duking it out in the boxing
ring till one side wins and we all are expected to live in victor’s truth (some might call that democracy) and
it’s not about one person grabbing the
reins and dictating their truth to everyone.
I have just read about an extreme example of a place where that happened
– it was a short book on the happenings in the Exclusive Brethren Community in
NZ and the wider world – a faith group who, for many years, had lived by common
beliefs with a reasonable dollop of discernment and communal integrity. Then one person took up the reins of power
and decided their way was the right way, their connection with God was the only
true one and their right to dictate to all others their way of living was to be
unconditionally accepted. You then end
up with every form of abuse, mental, physical and spiritual open to our
creative little minds being applied in the name of God. That’s not oneness!
Jesus prayer for us was much bigger, more
creative and fruitful – it was for a oneness that comes from knowing God in
Christ, in sharing in a new reality, the kingdom here and yet to come, and
knowing we need the presence of the Holy Spirit to guide, nurture and protect
us.
As so as we wait for Pentecost –the rather
spectacular birthplace of the Church – we are encouraged to contemplate how we
might live out that prayer into that oneness.
For Jesus knew our propensity for arguing and grandstanding, and so
spoke into that – praying that we could, in the guidance of the Holy Spirit,
live in unity in Christ amidst the reality of our own diversity. He knew this was pivotal to our being
effective disciples in a world that was always going to challenge and subsume
our intentions and our vision – without oneness with God and each other we
would be just as likely to stuff up as anyone.
Why is the acceptance of diversity is such
an important part of unity? Some would
argue strongly for just the opposite – a one look, one view church. Well we go back to Jesus teachings and
example: in all his stories, his encounters, his teaching did he ever try to
make one person become someone else, ever want them to stop thinking for
themselves, or impose their views on others – no he just wanted them to love
God, and their neighbour as themselves, to follow the path of service and to
know God in their daily lives. That was
their commonality of belief, of vision, of fruitfulness. And from there, it was
in their diversity that the world would be reached, the Word opened up, the
vision shared with all people. Paul and
Simon Peter walked different paths of ministry, I’m sure they didn’t agree on
everything - but they both were one in
their faith and their love for God and the world.
So it is actually about how we nurture that
unity, that oneness without boxing in or imposing limits upon our diverse ways
of being the people of God.
And paradoxically, as we read in Acts, we
are told to do that in community, (never in isolation), and in prayer. It is with each other and in communion with
God through prayer that we will be effective witnesses to Christ throughout the
world – that we will hold oneness in creative tension with diversity. So how are we doing? And what can we do better?
Well we need to look to our own ways of
standing in this tension. Do we leave at
the first sign that someone has said something we don’t believe in, or do we
corner them until they come round to our way of thinking, are we not so
welcoming as we could be or do we share our understandings with respect knowing
that there are many paths. I do know a
Minister once who preached as if they had the answer to all questions and were
just waiting for the congregation to catch up – hope I don’t do that! I know people who have walked away from a
church because they have heard a disturbing word, and will only come back if
they can dictate the sermon – just like that young priest in Chocolat having his
sermons edited by the Count until they were ‘right!’ I know people who have chosen to stay with a
community that has tried to impose particular views contrary to their
understandings of how Jesus prayed for us to live. And others who have left, hurt beyond all
measure. You know the one interesting
thing about the book on the Brethren was the extent to which people who knew
that the new direction was unbiblical and just plain wrong were prepared to
work from within to recover what they believed were their core faith
understandings – in the end much separation and pain took place and new
communities formed back around the foundational beliefs of the Brethren.
And do we pray as a community to not just
know God in this place but also to affirm our oneness and celebrate our
diversity. Perhaps not as much as we could.
Don’t be like a friend of mine in North Canterbury who refused to come
to a bible study because there would be prayer – she had been part of the
separatist church where prayer was only ever about your failure to conform to
particular church standards and behaviours. We perhaps need to think about the
opportunities we offer for prayer, the words we use and the ways we affirm each
other in the presence of God. For it is
in the stillness and the waiting of prayer that we hear God opening ways for us
to be part of the new vision, the new reality where love and justice and mercy
are known, where God is known to all.
And it is in prayer too that we come together in, one with God and each
other, to be in the presence of God and each other, to wait for the Holy Spirit
to guide and protect us – not from the world but from our propensity to take
paths that cause division and lead us away from realising the glory of God here
in this place. Amen.
Margaret Garland
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