Unity and Diversity

by Robert Hamerton-Kelly

All the major Christian denominations have agreed to observe a week of prayer for Christian unity each year. This year the week runs from the 18th, yesterday, to the 25th, next Saturday. I ask you to include in your daily prayers the petition for the unity of all Christians. In this geographical area we used to exchange lay readers among the denominations on this Sunday but that custom gradually disappeared, and we were not organized enough to get it going again in time for this year. So we have no guest readers this Sunday, but we do have a joint Lenten series this year. On five of the six Wednesdays of Lent we shall itinerate from local church to local church for a soup and bread supper and a presentation on the theme of the Passion of Christ and its interpretation through the various arts, visual, literary, and musical. Please plan to reserve these evenings and to attend at our sister churches as well as our own. Ash Wednesday is on March the 5th and the first joint supper will be on March the 12th and every Wednesday thereafter through April the 9th. In addition you should know that each week on Tuesday at noon the clergy and some laity of all the local churches meet for a half hour of prayer for peace. Currently we are meeting here and you are all welcome to a small group and an inspiring time. These prayers are having a very good effect on the unity among our local clergy and churches, and I invite all of you to participate. We are discovering the riches and strengths of each of our local churches separately and the potential for a united ministry of challenge and comfort to all the people of these remarkable local communities. So when you pray for Christian unity keep in mind the six Christian communities of Woodside and Portola Valley and resolve also to participate as you can in our joint activities.

Our Gospel for today is part of John’s version of the calling of the first disciples. Jesus calling the disciples might plausibly be regarded as the founding of the church and so might be helpful as we reflect on the nature of the church in the context of the challenge to unity. John the Baptist first draws attention to Jesus when he says to two of his disciples, “Behold the Lamb of God (1:35).” One of those two was Andrew, who when he had approached Jesus and spent time with him, went and fetched his brother Peter and brought him to Jesus. The next day Jesus called Philip and Philip went and found Nathanael, and thus we get a picture of how the first Christian community came into being, by word of mouth and the influence of friends. Even Jesus himself depended on the recommendation of another for his first disciples. It was John the Baptist who first pointed him out. “Behold the Lamb of God,” he said to Andrew and the other disciple, and we might imagine him pointing.

We note John’s unselfishness in telling his own disciples to leave him and follow Jesus, - (This passage might be an historical indication that Jesus’ first disciples came from the group of disciples around John, or even that Jesus himself had once been a disciple of John’s who became greater than his teacher and led away a group of the teacher’s disciples with him) - and we note the sarcastic remark of Nathanael when he heard that Jesus was from Nazareth, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” For understanding the challenge of Christian unity these two incidents are instructive. The first shows a spirit of generosity that cares more for the truth than for the size of one’s own group, and the latter a spirit of meanness that dismisses those who are not part of our group, or members of other groups, with contempt. We are warned by the fact that the one Nathanael dismissed turned out to be God’s Messiah, - (That is, we could be “dissing” God’s messiah when we “diss” other Christian groups) - but there was a happy ending for Nathanael, because he was more curious than prejudiced, went to meet Jesus, and ended up confessing, “Rabbi, you are the Son of God, you are the King of Israel!” (1:49). It was to him Jesus made the promise, “Truly, truly I say to you, you will see heaven opened, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man (1:51).” We might summarize the message of our Gospel passage positively as, ‘Come to Jesus, become his disciple, and you will see the heavens open,’ and negatively as ‘Don’t dismiss others out of ambition or prejudice.’ 

We also notice how all these first disciples went to meet Jesus, how they responded to his invitation “Come and see (1:39),” how they spent time with him, that is, how they entered into a relationship with him. Our passage in 1 Corinthians picks up this theme of the relationship with Jesus. The Apostle is dealing with a group in the Corinthian church that claims, “All things are lawful for me,” as Paul quotes them in verse 12.  They are what we call in the trade, “antinomians” and in this case they have taken Paul’s teaching that salvation comes not by observance of the Mosaic Law but by faith in Jesus Christ to an antinomian extreme. Basically they argue that since the guide to conduct for a Christian is not the Law but the Spirit, potentially no conduct is unlawful because the Spirit could warrant even the most unusual activities. Predictably their lawlessness focuses on sex and they claim a divine warrant for sexual freedom. Apparently some even justified prostitution on these grounds. Paul replies that while it is true that conduct is no longer to be regulated by Law but by the Spirit of Christ, that Spirit operates only in the context of the most intimate relationship with Jesus and has as its central claim that we belong exclusively to Jesus, like a man belongs to his wife and a wife to her husband. So Paul uses the act of sexual intercourse as an image of the relationship with Christ. It is as close and as exclusive as that, and therefore, not every behavior is potentially lawful because our conduct is constrained at its center by our relationship with Christ. Consequently he can summarize his argument by saying, “So you are not your own; you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body (verses 19-20).”

This reference to the body is startling. It is easy to see sexual intercourse as a physical metaphor of the most intimate spiritual relationship we can think of, but Paul believes that it is more than mere metaphor. Listen, “Do you not know that he who joins himself with a prostitute becomes one body with her…but he who is united to the Lord becomes one spirit with him. Shun immorality… the immoral man sins against his own body. Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God (16-19). “ We cannot sort out the whole logic of his thinking here but we can accept that for Paul human physicality is the bearer of the spirit, that is we exercise our spiritual life by means of our physical actions, and our physical relations with one another do directly involve our spiritual relation with Christ. “Do you not know that your bodies are limbs of Christ? Shall I therefore take the limbs of Christ and make them limbs of a prostitute? Never! (15).”

Forgive me for having to leave this immensely important subject of the intimate relationship between the physical and the spiritual in Paul’s thought after barely touching it, but today I want only to note how this idea affects the understanding of Christian unity. Clearly the physical cannot be regarded as unimportant to the spiritual; physical acts have spiritual significance, are indeed so closely related to each other as to be virtually the same thing. Therefore, the physical, the historical and actual fragmentation of the Church of Jesus Christ is a terrible spiritual burden on the Gospel. One might say that we have taken the limbs of Christ and made them the limbs of politicians, hucksters, ideologues, charlatans and megalomaniacs. The metastasis of the disintegration disease within the Body of Christ is a direct result of our sin against the Holy Spirit who is in each one of us. If each one would live the fact that we are temples of the Spirit it is conceivable the one true church will emerge. That is the church we all say we believe in when we recite the Creed.

Amen.