"Our Faith is Over 2000 Years Old. Our Thinking is Not."
May 14, 2006: 5th Sunday of Easter, Year B
The Rev. John MacIver Gage, pastor
United Church on the Green, UCC: New Haven, CT
www.newlights.org
Scripture:
John 17:20-23
Jesus said: "O Holy God, I ask not only on behalf of these disciples, but also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one. As you, Father, 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. The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me."
May God take these words and make from them a holy word for us today. Amen.
Sermon:
If you like mysteries and puzzles and puns, the Gospel According to John is for you. That's where this morning's scripture reading comes from, of course, and even in these few verses, you can see what I mean. But the whole Gospel is like this, from the very beginning. Remember, this is the Gospel that gives us "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God" (John 1:1). Wha-huh? In the course of the Gospel, John has Jesus tell Nicodemus that "no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above"... or is it "born again"? (John 3:3). The words are the same in Greek. And John's Jesus promises to give the woman at the well "living water"... or is it merely "fresh water"? (John 4:10). Mysteries, puzzles, and puns.
The height of this Word-play—that is, capital W—comes in the heart of the Gospel, in John's extended meditation on Jesus' last supper with his friends and disciples in chapters thirteen through seventeen, including today's reading. In these dense chapters the words bend and twist and shift like branches before the wind, forming first one image, then another against the mind's sky. A few scant words appear over and again, each time in subtly different ways. They trace complex spiritual geometries, giving us the impression that whatever, whoever the author is getting at remains just over the horizon of the next sentence... and the next. Jesus himself stands at the heart of the mystery, never apologizing, but promising more understanding, in time. "I have said these things to you in figures of speech. The hour is coming when I will no longer speak to you in figures, but will tell you plainly" (John 16:25)—about God, about Jesus, about us, about the world and where we're going.
The hour is coming, sure, but in the meantime we are left with Jesus' prayer for his disciples, that is, for us, for the church:
O holy God, I ask not only on behalf of these, but also on behalf of those who believe in me through their word, that they may all be one. As you, Father, 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. The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me. (John 17:20-23, emphasis added)
"So they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one." And you say the Creator's on first, Christ's on second, and the Holy Spirit's on third? That's what I'm trying to find out! Hmpf! And friends, dear friends, this passage—this mysterious, puzzling, pun-ny little passage—is where we get the United Church of Christ motto "...that they all may be one." Well! all I can say is: It must be a pretty a funny kind of "one."
But, you see, that's exactly it. It is a funny kind of one, Jesus is talking about. I mean, think about it: There's God on the one hand, and there's human beings, over here. God, being God is infinite in power and majesty, the Ground of All Being, the Ancient of Days. And we, not being God, are not—not infinite, not majestic, just beings on the ground, growing more ancient daily. In the face of this disparity, we might be moved to join the psalmist in throwing up our hands and wondering aloud, "When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, O God, the moon and the stars that you have established; what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?" (Psalm 8:3-4). In other words, what are we compared to God, that God should give a flip for us, much less desire to be one with us?
Yet these are Jesus' last words for us as his own hour approached, his prayer that we should be one with God and God with us. This is Jesus' purpose for us, that the whole world should be atoned, at-oned, that is re-united, re-union-ed with God through him who is, the church has come to confess, Immanuel, "God with us" in Hebrew, or, as we're fond of saying around United Church on the Green—because you know we have to put things just so—the one in whom we see the face of God turned toward the world in love.
It's a funny kind of "one," this one Jesus is talking about here at the end of John's Gospel. A funny kind of one, with a whole lot more room than your usual one, with room for God and for us, all of us, and for Jesus all mixed up together. It's more like one-plus, this roomy-cozy kind of one where somehow God is still God and we are still us and Jesus is still, well, somehow in between, or both and we are all one.
And it's a funny kind of one we've got going on in the United Church of Christ, too.
As a denomination we've not quite reached our fiftieth birthday, having been born only in the last days of the ecumenical fervor that gripped the wider church in the first half of the 20th Century. Yet the four major strands that came together back in 1957—the Congregational, Evangelical, Reformed, and American Christian churches of our spiritual forebears—taken separately, they represent hundreds and hundreds of years of ministry stretching back through the Protestant Reformation of the 16th Century all the way back to those first disciples gathered around the table with Jesus in today's reading. We are a new thing, it's true, but we are also the product of history—not only of these four mainline stories, but we are the children of slaves who received the teaching of the American Missionary Society and built their own traditions of church, and the children of the mission stations of the Pacific, of Hawaiian and Samoan and Chinese Christians come to this country.
As a denomination, as a church, we are of course an essentially conservative institution. It's true: we are committed to preserving the memory of Jesus, now two-thousand-plus years old; and the sacred rites of the church, of baptism and holy communion; and the truth of the Gospel. These are precious treasures we have inherited from the past. But we also believe that God's Gospel truth is leading us still today—leading us out beyond our comfort zones into deeper engagement with the world, out beyond our boundaries to where we are constantly surprised to find God's Spirit already at work among the least and least likely of our sisters and brothers. We are called to be God's Pentecost stormchasers. One after another, our limited and limiting horizons—horizons of race, gender, class, sexuality, and ability—have given way before the irresistible power of the Holy Spirit. Our God is not trapped on a dusty page in a musty church. Our God is still speaking today.
All of which means, of course, that as a denomination, we are a holy muddle-y mess! We are a mystery, a puzzle, a pun. Puritans and Polynesians and pooftahs, oh my! It is a heady mix of old and new, conservative and progressive, this one and that one and that one over there. And when we walk out in the world, when we show our face in public, some of our sibling denominations look at us askance and tsk and tut, as if to say, "It's sad, really. The poor thing thinks she's a church! Someone really should take her aside and set her straight." And folks without a church stop to gape open mouthed in wonder as if to say, "Mommy, what is it?"
But what it is, what we are, is an experiment in Gospel living. Who we are is not just a function of where we've come from or what we believe, but we are how we live together. We are trying to live into the power of Jesus' prayer for us, "that we may be one," a funny kind of one, a Gospel kind of one. We are trying to stitch together the body of Christ in an uncommon way, based not on any natural likeness, some presupposed prefabricated unity of dogma or nationality or history, but instead based on our common trust in God through Christ. Our unity has not so much to do with us, ourselves, and everything to do with God.
Granted, some days we look a bit more like Frankenstein than DaVinci. Some days the bonds of covenant chafe, and our freedom dissolves into mere license. Some days, it really is a sad matter of the foot saying, "Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body," or the ear saying, "Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body" (1 Corinthians 12:15-16), or even the hands and he eyes saying, "You know, you're right. You don't." We're as human as everybody else, and some days we are more like the Untied Church than the United Church of Christ, but, hey, at least we're trying, and look at what God is doing through us! Look what God is making of us!
Look at us. Look at this congregation God planted here on the corner of Temple and Elm Streets in downtown New Haven some 264 years ago now. Who'd have thought we'd grow up to be us? We are a wonder, and a funny kind of wonder indeed. Not that we're all that, but we're something—oh, we're something alright. Let's take a look:
How many of you live within walking distance of this meeting house—on a warm sunny day, that is? And how many live in New Haven proper? And the flip-side? How many don't live in New Haven at all? Where do you live? I know we've got Oxford and Wallingford and Cheshire and Stratford and Norwalk and even Groton in the house.
Let's try another tack: How many of you sitting here today grew up in the United Church of Christ, or, going back, in the Congregational Church? Let's get at this another way: How many grew up in another Christian tradition? Of those, how many Roman Catholics? Baptists? Disciples of Christ? Others? Which ones? And how many of you all spent time outside of any particular religious tradition at some point in your life?
And how many of you are members—full, voting members—of United Church on the Green? And how many of you aren't... yet?
Now, don't worry, I'm not going much further. I'm not going to ask you to divulge your annual income, or to divvy yourselves up by race or marital status or physical ability or political party affiliation or sexual orientation. But we've got all of that, too, to a greater or lesser degree. Since we're an Open and Affirming church, let's make the point this way: How many of you know and love someone who is lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender?
We are a funny kind of United, a funny kind of one at United Church on the Green and in the broader United Church of Christ. In some mysterious, puzzling, funny way we participate together in a one that isn't based just on demographic data, but is in fact as broad and high and deep as the love of God, the love we see revealed in Jesus. And not just together within the walls of our little upstart denomination alone, but, we believe, with the wider Church, capital C, and even with persons of other faiths, and of no faith. In Christ we are free to be you and me, and we are bound in covenant love with one another and all creation. We are many and we are varied—oy vey! are we varied: put any three United Church members in a room and you'll get five opinions, it's true—but in Christ, through Christ, somehow we are one: one-plus, one with room, plenty good room for many-a-more. Why? Borrowing from Jesus, as all good preachers should do: So that the world may know that God has sent us and has loved them even as God have loved us." I in you and you in me and we in them and them in us and God... God in all in all. No joke.