That We All May Be One

Until recently,  I have been based in our national offices in New York, but thanks to the hospitality of the Diocese of Nebraska and Trinity Cathedral in particular, I am now back living in Iowa (just in time for the floods!) and relating to one of our new regional offices which will be housed right here at Trinity Cathedral!   

The other regional offices are slated for Los Angeles, Seattle, Atlanta and Washington DC. The Presiding Bishop of our church, Katharine Jefferts Schori, has cast a vision for our national offices to be more collaborative in working together, and more connected to the needs of our people in the pews, our bishops, priests and deacons in dioceses and congregations across the country and beyond.  Our hope is to learn from the many fine ministries going on here in Nebraska and throughout Province 6. And also to help interpret The Episcopal Church’s ecumenical and interfaith work on the local level.

Today’s Gospel is all about hospitality as our Lord tells his disciples that “whoever welcomes you welcomes me…and whoever welcomes me… welcomes the one who sent me.” (Matthew 10:40) If the welcome and hospitality we have already received from Bishop Burnett, Deans Hurley and Medina, and Canon Tim Anderson are any indication, you are fulfilling that Gospel mandate to the fullest! We feel welcomed indeed.

In many ways, the ministry in which I am engaged is all about hospitality. When the Presiding Bishop, then Frank Griswold, asked me to leave my diocese and come to work for him in ecumenical relations, my counterpart in the Church of England, Dr. Mary Tanner, said, “Congratulations, Chris. You and I have the best jobs in the Church. They pay us to make friends!”

And there’s some truth in that. The ecumenical movement is all about building friendships and relationships between separated Christian communities and working for the unity of the one Church.

Jesus prayed on the night before he died that his followers might be one as he and the Father were one so “that the world might believe!” For me, ecumenism is all about that mission. Trying to be united as Christians “so that the world might believe!

In an age when the Gospel message is often muted because of our divisions, within churches and between churches, I believe it is important to build bridges and mend the tears in our fabric so that our witness is clearer, more united, and therefore more compelling. I often get frustrated with the slow pace of Church unity. But then I have to think back over my lifetime, even to World War II, to see how far we’ve come.

Sixty years ago, Roman Catholics and Protestants barely entered one another’s churches, and there was much misunderstanding and even animosity between us. Even Protestant churches were content to live largely within themselves, and often characterized other churches as heretical or at least misguided.

But after WWII, in the great move toward international cooperation that led to the founding of the United Nations and the World Health Organization and the World Bank, The Episcopal Church became a founding member, along with others, of the World Council of Churches based in Geneva Switzerland, and the National Council of Churches based in New York City.

Those organizations – through something called the Faith and Order Movement – fostered, first, cooperation and then dialogue between the churches which have today led to many full communion relationships such as we have with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the Old Catholic Churches in Europe, the Churches of North and South India and a number of others.

With the advent of Vatican II in the 1960s the Roman Catholic Church ended its long opposition to the ecumenical movement, entered into the dialogue with gusto, and has changed the face of the search for Christian unity. Our Anglican – Roman Catholic dialogues, both on the international and national levels, are some of our oldest and  have led to amazing convergences in our understanding of baptism, the Eucharist, ordained ministry, and many – if not all – social issues as well. 

“Whoever welcomes you welcomes me,” Jesus said, and that welcome even extends beyond the churches to other great world religions. The purpose of interfaith, or inter-religious, dialogue is, of course, different from ecumenical dialogue. We are not seeking to create one world religion or to blur the distinctions between, say Judaism, Christianity and Islam. What we are seeking is deeper understanding, moving even beyond tolerance to appreciation of each other, and cooperation, when we can, for the sake of the common good.

The amazing interfaith project your diocese is engaged in, seeking a common campus to be shared with a Jewish synagogue, an Episcopal Church, and an Islamic Center is a model for the country! And I hope to be involved in whatever way is helpful and certainly to share your story with the wider Church as well. I think interfaith dialogue is best done ecumenically – with other Christians — and I have discovered that our Jewish and Muslim sisters and brothers respect us more when we are as deeply committed to our Christian faith as they are to their faiths…and yet find a way to seek common purpose under the One, True God.

“Whoever welcomes you welcomes me,” Jesus said but he did not stop there. He went on to add, “…and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me.” I have found that welcome in dialogue and mutual ministry with fellow Christians, and even at interfaith tables with other believers in the One God who are people of good will. I hope to share some of that journey with you as time goes on.

I hope this will not be the last time I have the privilege of being invited into this pulpit and I pledge to you the support, the encouragement, and the cooperation of The Presiding Bishop, her whole staff, and of your brother and sister Episcopalians here in the United States and abroad. Let me close by offering once again our Collect for this Sunday. It is my constant prayer for my work…the work I hope increasingly to share with you. Let us pray…

“Almighty God, you have built your Church upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief cornerstone:  Grant us so to be joined together in unity of spirit by their teaching, that we may be made a holy temple acceptable to you; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.”  

The preacher made a couple of interesting points in his Pentecost sermon: One was that, while we often hear that the “Parthians, Medes, Elamites, residents of Mesopotamia, etc.” who were in the crowd and recipients of the Holy Spirit were representative of the universal salvation proclaimed by the Gospel message, actually they were in town for the Jewish festival of Pentecost, most of them would have been Jews!

And his second point was that that — contrary to the message of corporate identity the Jewish people had always majored in — one of the messages that Jesus brought was that God was interested in the individual as well…in establishing a relationship with humankind as individuals, not merely as a race or nation of people.

Well, of course, like all such observations, these are too simplistic. There were surely Gentile “believers”, God-fearers in the Pentecost crowd who also received the gift of the Holy Spirit. And, in any case, even if the “Parthians, Medes, etc” were representatives of the Jewish Diaspora, there is still a universal message sent by that pentecostal Gift.

And, while Jesus certainly was interested in individuals, his message of the Kingdom of God surely had something to do with nations and peoples as well. And, even though St. Paul does talk about the Holy Spirit’s gifts being “inspired by one and the same Spirit, who apportions to each one individually as he wills” (I Cor. 12:11), isn’t the whole point of this chapter and section of First Corinthians that “the body does not consist of one member but many” (I Cor. 12:14)?

So…I might want to enter into conversation with the preacher about all this. Because…I’ve been thinking about what he said.        

And isn’t that what good preaching is supposed to make us do?

Surprising as it may be to you, the Church has never been free of controversy! Our First Lesson today from the Acts of the Apostles (15:1-6) sets up the first big hurdle the early Church had to overcome. It was, of course, the question of admitting Gentiles into the Christian fellowship without their having to become Jews first!

Peter was a bit slow in coming to that conviction. It took a vision from heaven to get his attention on the matter. St. Paul, on the other hand, had always believed (or rather, since his own conversion had believed) that Gentiles had been made fellow heirs with the Jews in relation to God. In fact, he “adapts” the branch and vine image that Jesus uses in today’s Gospel (John 15) to make his position clear to the Church in Rome:

“Now I am speaking to you Gentiles,” he writes in his Letter to the Romans, “Inasmuch then as I am an apostle to the Gentiles, I glorify my ministry in order to make my own people jealous, and thus save some of them.  For if their rejection is the reconciliation of the world, what will their acceptance be but life from the dead…if the root is holy then the branches also are holy.”

“But if some of the branches were broken off, and you, a wild olive shoot, were grafted in their place to share the rich root of the olive tree, do not boast over the branches.  If you do boast, remember that it is not you that support the root, but the root than supports you.” (Romans 11)

When I was in the Holy Land in March with the Presiding Bishop, we prayed – with representatives of the diocese – on the Mount of Olives on Maundy Thursday evening. The tradition is that the roots of some of the olive trees there go back to the time of Jesus. Certainly, they are very ancient. And some of them look almost misshapen because the trunk and roots are so large and the upper branches are quite small because some of them have been grafted on to replace old branches perhaps damaged by cold weather over the years.

…Remember, Paul says to the boastful Roman Gentiles, it is not you that support the root, but the root that supports you! You see, by the time Paul wrote to the Romans, Gentiles had come full circle. After being marginalized in the first decade of the Church’s life and then accepted, now they were on the verge of marginalizing their Jewish forebears. But Paul won’t let them get away with that!  

It’s a sad part of human nature that too often the oppressed become the oppressor. Some of us think that’s part of what’s going on in the Holy Land right now! When the world turns and those on the bottom find themselves on top, it takes a Christ-like attitude to avoid retaliation and vengeance. Let us pray that such persons may always be guided by Jesus’ words in our Gospel today:

“Abide in me as I abide in you.  Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me. I am the vine, you are the branches.  Those who abide in me bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing…My Father in glorified by this, that you bear much fruit and become my disciples,” (John 15:4-5,8).

May we always bear such Christ-like fruit in our lives – and be neither the oppressed nor the oppressor!