10.15 Holy Communion 24th January 2010 - Epiphany 3

May they all be one… so that the world may believe that you have sent me. John 17:21

Week of Prayer for Christian Unity

I have chosen a very obvious text for this Year’s Week of Prayer for Christian Unity.

It’s a special year this year because we are celebrating the centenary of the event that is usually recognised as the beginning of the ecumenical movement. In 1910, under the banner of the text from Jesus’ prayer in St John that I began with, missionaries from many different churches met in Edinburgh. They were convinced that by exporting Christian divisions all over the world the Gospel of reconciliation and unity that they preached was compromised.  How could a Gospel of reconciled life be taken seriously when missionaries competed for territory, set tribe against tribe, and built competing churches facing one another on different sides of the street? Wasn’t this a denial of Jesus’ prayer that they might be one so that the world might believe? It all sounds so obvious doesn’t it?

Edinburgh, 1910, was the start of the ecumenical movement, the search to bring divided churches into a life where they could preach the one apostolic faith together, celebrate one common baptism, eat around one Eucharistic table, serve one another and serve the world’s needs together, never again saying - ‘I have no need of you’. That passage we heard as our first reading is such a powerful passage urging us, whatever our disagreements, to stay together and work through them.  So it all began in Edinburgh 100 years ago.

You might ask – ‘Where has all this praying year by year got us?’ It’s easy to forget just how far we have come. I don’t suppose a hundred years ago in Edinburgh those missionaries would have believed it if you had told them that an Archbishop of Canterbury would go on pilgrimage to Lourdes with a Cardinal from the Vatican, as Archbishop Rowan did  this past year. Or that a Pope would give his Episcopal ring to an Archbishop of Canterbury. Symbolic gestures often speak louder than words don’t they?

Who would have thought that participants from churches as diverse as the Eastern Orthodox and the Seventh Day Adventists would have take an active part in a meeting of our Anglican bishops at the last Lambeth Conference ?

Who would have thought 100 years ago that Lutherans and Roman Catholics would have come to agree on the doctrine of justification which lay at the heart of the Reformation break?

Who would have thought that more than 350 churches would act together to seek to overcome violence in the world, as churches joined in the World Council of Churches are doing?

Or that Christians in Cockermouth would act together to help those whose homes had been flooded. I’m sure that you have your own stories of Christians together in Bradford acting for social justice, caring together for the homelsss and the asylum seekers.

I could go on and on with stories of positive signs of changed relations over the last 100 years, the fruit of prayer and commitment of many Christians to seek unity. We have come out of our denominational corners. We have come to understand the causes of our divisions, we do act together in serving local communities, we do often witness together for peace and justice – or at least we do when we remember that it is better together.

So, perhaps this is enough. Perhaps it’s time to put an end to this annual Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. I know that’s what many of my friends think. They tell me that it’s enough to be polite to one another and cooperate when it suits us, or when we remember to. If you are tempted to think that then remember the lesson from 1 Corinthians – there is one Body – with a rich diversity of gifts, yes – but one Body. But is that what the world sees when it looks at us? Is that what it is like for me when I can’t receive the sacrament of the Lord’s table with the Roman Catholic members of my family, or when we can’t even stay together in our own Anglican family and work through our differences over issues of sexuality, or the consecration of women as bishops, but seem to say so easily- ‘I have no need of you – I will go it alone’. Are we really faithful to the prayer of Jesus?

The most obvious outward signs of our failure is the fact that we don’t eat and drink together at the one table of the Lord, that there is not a common ministry, that we are not together wrestling with the problems of today’s world, moral, ethical, economic problems. Instead, our continuing divisions mean that we squander precious resources of manpower, buildings and money; we weaken our witness in the world. And worst of all, by our continuing divisions we fail to witness credibly to the God who, in Christ, broke down all dividing walls and reconciled all in one body on the cross. It’s hard to convince the world of the Christian message of reconciliation if we deny it by the way we live in separation, not sharing our insights and our gifts, not discovering that diversity of which St Paul speaks in Corinthians.

If we have understood the message of Paul in our first reading about the one Body, or been grasped by that prayer of Jesus, then how can we give up on the search for Christian unity, how can we fail to pray with Jesus, in the power of the Spirit, to the Father – ‘May we all be one…’ ?

When I get despondent – all the hard theological conversations, all this prayer and still we are not one, I remember a particular moment that was for me a moment of renewed conviction about the need for unity.

I was staying in a very large Roman Catholic Seminary, built when Ireland had many, many priestly vocations. Numerous doors led off wide long corridors, each one looked the same as the next. In one room a group of about twenty theologians from different countries and different churches were meeting to prepare a World Conference on the unity of the Church. An excitable French Canadian Roman Catholic theologian was in full flight explaining his vision of Church unity; everyone was concentrating on the picture he was painting. The door opened and in shuffled a dishevelled, unshaven man. The speaker continued without seeming to notice the stranger. The man sat down in an empty chair in the circle. He listened intently. Who was this strange man? - perhaps someone new to the group, from an eastern European country, just off a delayed flight.  When the speaker finished talking all eyes were on the stranger. No-one dared break the silence. It was the dishevelled stranger who broke the silence. He barked, ‘Do you know what’s happening out there’, he pointed to the window. ‘People get drunk, they take drugs, they fight in denominational gangs, they shoot to kill, and family is against family’. The stranger went on ‘He came to bring unity and peace. For God’s sake get on with it’. The stranger got up and shuffled out of the room. We asked at the reception desk who the man was, how did he know we were meeting in that room at that time.  But no-one could tell us. They hadn’t seen anyone come in or go out. For us our stranger was a messenger. Get on with it – get on with working for unity, that was what he, Jesus, wanted, what he died for, and that is what the world with all its brokenness and division, desperately needs, the sign that a better way of living together is possible, a way of living as one reconciled people, concerned for the needs of others, a way of unity.

‘Get on with it for Christ’s sake and for the worlds sake’ – for Gaza, for Iraq, for Zimbabwe, for Sudan, for Dafur, for Haiti, for all the broken places and all the broken people that need the message of reconciliation that we have been entrusted with. Get on with it, for Christ’s sake and the world’s sake’. Go on praying for unity as Jesus did. Go on working for unity as those who attended Edinburgh a hundred years ago did. This is what Jesus died for – the one Body made visible and audible, attentive and active – so that the world, through us, might believe.

Mary Tanner 
January 2010