Scripture: 1 Corinthians 12:1-11; John 2:1-11

“There is a variety of gifts but always the same Spirit; there are all sorts of service to be done, but always the same Lord; working in all sorts of different ways in different people, it is the same God who is working in all of them.”

-- 1 Corinthians 12:4-6 (JB)

Today we begin the week of prayer for Christian Unity, and today we remember the work and witness of Martin Luther King Jr. I think both commemorations are covered by our quotation from the Apostle Paul, so let’s analyze it briefly. Note how it is Trinitarian in structure: the Spirit gives the gifts, the Lord Jesus gives the tasks, and God the Father provides the diversity of people to receive the Spirit and to perform the tasks. Spirit, Son and Father deployed as gift, task and people, that is a good way to describe a real church, or rather on this unity Sunday, the real church.

It is no doubt a scandal that we Christians cannot live together in one church, especially since we make love for one another the chief sign of the truth of our faith. Our breach of that love has been very destructive of the credibility of the message about Jesus that we represent. Historically speaking, the religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, between Protestants and Catholics in Western Europe, did much to discredit Christian theology and put science in its place as the authoritative guide to the truth in our Western culture. The Thirty Years War in the German lands, from 1618 to 1648, left much of Europe a starving, smoking ruin, and precisely at this time emerged the critically influential philosopher of science, Rene Descartes, who demonstrated to most people’s satisfaction that the only incontrovertible truth is not what the churches teach but the fact that I am at present thinking about the truth and since I think, therefore I am, and that I think I am thinking is beyond doubt. All other knowledge is doubtful, and especially the teaching of the churches.

This intellectual move, made as much for reasons of reaction against the destructive power of claims to knowledge that could be adjudicated only by the sword, claims to knowledge that were really claims to power, has put theological thinking on the defensive ever since. The world has broken apart into the outer world that is known by observation and experiment and the inner world that is known by private introspection. The shared assumptions in our culture no longer include assumptions about God, and so there is no intellectual alternative to the many sects warranted by inward, personal experience alone, and the scandal of lovers who cannot live together.

These religious wars are the watershed for our Western experience of disunity arising from the loss of a common conviction in religion, but they are not the absolute cause of it. Disunity has been with us since the beginning of the faith. Elaine Pagels’ recent book, Beyond Belief, which we studied together here last fall, tells of how Irenaeus the bishop of Lyons in the 2nd century argued with groups in his diocese who formed little churches within the church, around the personalities of charismatic and prophetic persons, and thus broke the unity of the congregation, and the church. He argued that whatever our personal experience of the Spirit might be we belong together, with all our fellow Christians, in the one fold of the one shepherd Jesus Christ. The bishop represents Jesus Christ symbolically and so loyalty to the bishop ensures the unity of the church. There are many gifts and many tasks and many different kinds of people, but there is only one Spirit, one Lord Jesus, and one Creator God and Father! Since the bishop symbolized unity, this position came to be known as Orthodox, and the groups that separated themselves from the bishop were the heretics, that is the splitters, and they are with us to this day.

In fact, we are most of us here splitters ourselves and so clearly do not agree that the problem of unity and diversity is so easily solved by asserting the power of a bishop. I have given this historical account not because I think we can solve our problems of unity and diversity by returning to the remote past, but because history gives us useful perspectives on our present situation, and the most useful insight is that the struggle for unity began with the faith itself. Many of us assume that in NT times things were idyllic, love prevailed and the followers of Jesus enjoyed the sweet fruits of unity. Not so! There were twelve disciples and so probably more than one account of who Jesus is. Today in Israel they say, “Two Jews, three views,” and the disciples were all Jews, which by my probably faulty math makes a possible 18 positions among twelve disciples. Paul’s letter from which we quoted was written to a church struggling to maintain unity in the face of members who claimed that because they had extraordinary gifts of the Spirit, like speaking in tongues and prophesying the future, they were the true Christians and the others who did not have these gifts had to change and become like them. It’s good to look at the list of competencies Paul itemizes as gifts of the Spirit, “...preaching with wisdom, preaching to instruct, especially strong faith, power to heal, power to work miracles, power to prophesy, power to discern the nature of spirits, power to speak in strange tongues, power to interpret these tongues when spoken (12:8-11).” This historical perspective helps us see how the problems repeat themselves. For instance, we still experience people who believe the have special spiritual gifts that qualify them to badger others. Furthermore, just as Irenaeus experienced in 180AD, we still follow charismatic individuals, giving our loyalty not to the church but to a pastor, not to the church but to our personal convictions. If the simple insistence on obedience to a bishop will not serve us any more, what will in our present struggle for unity?

Let me try to give you an example of the clash between private convictions and the church’s public theology from a church currently involved in struggle. The Episcopal Church in the US recently endorsed the ordination of a practicing, gay man as bishop. This act, along with a general approval of the blessing of same sex unions by some parts of that church caused divisions in the international fellowship of Anglican churches – the Anglican primate of Nigeria, for instance, said that this event was the invasion of the church by Satan. A powerful reason for this internal clash is that groups within the same church read the Scriptures differently, some literally (The Bible condemns homosexuality) some historically and symbolically (The Bible also supports slavery, silences women, promotes hat wearing, prohibits the wearing of mixed fabrics, the cooking of meat in milk, the eating of shell-fish and working on the Sabbath – something Jesus did often and thus provoked the Pharisees). And in this particular case the bishops disagree with each other, so there is no help there. The issue of the status of homosexuals in the church troubles virtually every Christian group these days, and it cannot be theologically adjudicated because of the absence of a shared method for interpreting the Bible, and agreement among bishops. So what shall we do?

Our colleague at Christ Church Episcopal in Portola Valley faces this issue everyday and so I find his advice compelling. Father Hayashi says that the best strategy for the church in this situation is to look to the horizon where our faith meets the world and get on with serving others there. Take your gaze off yourself, off your own convictions, your own idea of how our church should be and do the work of the Gospel in the world. Look at the persecution and oppression of gay people, rather than at their theological status and serve them in love. In this common service, love will enfold us all and bear us beyond our misgivings and misunderstandings. One thing is completely clear and beyond question: people must not be victimized for their sexual orientation.

This is our segue to Martin Luther King Jr. I confess that I am not sure to which Christian denomination he belonged; I believe it was one of the many Baptist groups, but I may be wrong. I certainly do not know what his group believed about homosexuality in those days, or even if they were as strong for justice as he was. We really don’t care about his denominational affiliation because we all know that his Christianity stood for the freeing of the slaves, for a fair deal for every human being, for compassion, mercy, courage and above all, justice. In Martin Luther King Jr. the energies of the Christian Gospel   overflowed the limits of his church and all churches and flooded out into the world where they prefer  to be. Those energies changed America! No doubt! I have lived through the 40 years since he lived and died and I know this country is another country now. Despite our remaining injustices, and they are many, the rule of racism is much diminished, and slavery is clearly over, something which could not have been said in 1960.

So I call us to a week of prayer for Christian unity, not primarily a unity of institutions, although that would be grand, but a unity of action, in service to the people of our nation and the world. Let the world say of the church, not “See how these Christians love one another,” but simply, “See how they love and serve everyone who is in need.”  In the end we Christians shall all be one in the Kingdom of God, and in the mean time we can be one in our service to the world.

Amen.