That We All May Be One

We celebrate the Feast of St. Ignatius of Antioch today. He is really one of the genuine heroes of the early Church. The second bishop of Antioch in Syria, he was martyred in the year 115 and yet his primary teaching comes down to us in the form of seven letters he wrote while under arrest and journeying toward his own death. I think he wrote six of them to churches and a seventh to Polycarp, another martyr-bishop.

Ignatius fulfilled quite literally both our Lessons from Scripture today: St. Paul’s powerful words in Romans about nothing being able to separate us from the love of Christ – even “death nor life, nor angels, nor rulers…nor anything else.”  And Jesus’ image of the grain of wheat falling into the ground and dying…only later to bear much fruit. Surely Ignatius’ life and death are testimonies to that!

Some of his words sound a bit over the top to modern ears, even though we would still embrace the underlying theology: “You should all follow the bishop as Jesus Christ did the Father,” he says, “Follow, too, the presbyters as you would the apostles; and respect the deacons as you would God’s law.” We would probably want to add something about the laity in all that richness….something about the community of the baptized and the Body of Christ being made up of many members with a diversity of gifts but the same Spirit.

Yet some of Ignatius’ other comments have a strikingly contemporary ring. In speaking against a kind of mindless fundamentalism he writes: “When I hear some people say, if I don’t find it in the ancient documents, I don’t believe it…To my mind, it is Jesus Christ who is the ancient documents.” An early way of saying that, while the Bible is the Word of God derivatively, Jesus Christ is the Word of God incarnate – the Word made Flesh! 

And while today some biblical scholars may have a tendency to overemphasize the humanity of Jesus at the expense of his divinity, it was the other way around in some parts of the 2^nd century Church. To the Gnostics, who were all about Jesus’ divine nature, Ignatius writes that Jesus was “…of David’s lineage, of Mary; who was really born, ate, and drank; was really persecuted under Pontius Pilate; was really crucified and died in the sight of heaven and earth and the underworld…” He wanted the Gnostics to know that this Jesus was both God and Man!

You and I may not be able to imagine bearing the kind of heroic witness to Christ that this man bore. But at this very moment, we are heeding one of Ignatius’ chief commands. “Try to gather more frequently,” he wrote to his people, “to celebrate God’s Eucharist and to praise him,” And so we do this, Sunday by Sunday, and day by day.

And – in doing so — we pray, in the words of today’s Collect, that God may “…Accept…the willing tribute of our lives and give us a share in the pure and spotless offering of your Son Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns…for ever and ever.” Amen.

I write this from the Maritime Center in the Baltimore-Washington Corridor where I am participating in a Coordinating Council meeting of Churches Uniting in Christ (CUIC). This group is the successor to the old Consultation on Church Union (COCU) and is made up of ten denominations representing some 20 million Christians:

The African Methodist Episcopal Church; the African American Episcopal Zion Church; The Christian Church (Disciples of Christ); the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church; The Episcopal Church; the International Council of Community Churches; the Moravian Church; the United Methodist Church;  the Presbyterian Church (USA);  and the United Church of Christ. The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America is a partner in mission and dialogue and the Roman Catholic Church are observers.

This conversation and relationship has been going on for more than 40 years — its twin goals being to forge a full communion relationship for joint mission including interchangeability of ministers and ministries and to stand together for racial justice in this country. Whenever The Episcopal Church would come close to pulling out of this difficult ecclesial arrangement, the argument would be that it was the only place we are able to dialogue, interact and cooperate with the Historically Black Methodist Churches — and this was seen as so important for us!

Now, even that is in jeopardy. Two of these Black churches — the AME and the AMEZ — have suspended their participation in CUIC. There are a variety of reasons too complex to go into here. But a core reason is that they have become frustrated that so much energy has gone into the “ministry task force” dealing with ecclesiological issues like ordination and sacraments and the historic episcopate and so little has gone into combatting racism — in the world, in the Church, and even within the CUIC family.

So, the Coordinating Council is working with two anti-racism consultants, taking a hard look at our common life, seeing whether or not this relationship is able to be salvaged, and if so how we might proceed. All this in preparation for a CUIC Plenary meeting to be held in January and attended by the ten Heads of Communion and seven delegates from each communion.

This is very hard work. And one of the great learnings (or reminders) in all this is that there are many “church dividing” issues out there today. We all know the ecclesial ones — like views of the papacy and bishops in historic succession, approaches to worship and especially the sacraments, interpretation and use of scripture, etc. Anglicans have learned that, whether it “should” be so or not, different understandings of human sexuality (and especially homosexuality) can be a church dividing issue.

But, particularly in the US context — where race relations have been so difficult over the centuries, complicated as it is by the horrifying history of slavery — personal and institutional racism is also a church dividing issue. If we cannot acknowledge and pay attention to that — perhaps by some kind of “truth and reconcilation commission” approach — not only will Churches Uniting in Christ prove to be a noble but failed experiement, but the entire ecumenical movement will be hampered.  

May we find a way to reclaim our original vision which states, among other things, that  “…we commit ourselves to the task of becoming a Beloved Community…(and to)…engage in a process of overcoming racism as we seek to demolish the institutional barriers which keep us from being a united Christian community that is truly catholic, truly reformed, and truly evangelical.”