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VisitWeek of Prayer for Christian Unity
May I speak in the name of God who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
Our New Testament lesson this afternoon was from Ephesians 4. In that passage we find Paul moving on from his explanation in the first three chapters of what the gospel is all about. We often refer to that teaching as “doctrine”. It has been three action packed chapters full of wonderful stuff. But now he moves on to practical Christian living – in other words he starts to spell out what the effect of all that doctrine should be in our day to day lives.
In short, he says we are called to “walk the talk” – to lead a life worthy of our calling to follow Jesus Christ.
What is the talk? Well, he has been explaining that.
We were dead but have now been made alive – we have been given spiritual life.
We were identified as Gentiles far off, separate from God and his people. But we have now been brought near and are part of one body alongside those previous strangers – into this new humanity that God is creating.
So what is this walk that should follow that talk? The worthy life Paul says will be marked by humility, gentleness, patience, bearing with one another, and making every effort to maintain unity.
It is down to earth but it is counter intuitive – our natural habits are to divide, to see people as different from us, as others, and to dig in behind our own trenches. We can see that across the world between nations, tribes, peoples, classes, social groupings and so it goes on.
And isn’t that a picture of the church as well? We look at the church around the world and then turn to focus on this country, and then zoom in on the Church of England, and we see difference, division, and sometimes it seems like there’s a war going on. Certainly, currently there is no shortage of wars of words.
And it has become particularly unpleasant with the rise of social media and as people pour out their hearts onto a screen and press a post or send button without reflecting on whether you would do that if Jesus was sitting alongside you.
We have just begun the annual week of prayer for Christian unity, but after many years of such weeks nothing seems to have changed very much.
Bishops and archbishops ask us to learn to live with difference, but we don’t seem able to find a way of doing that.
In three weeks’ time the Church of England General Synod will meet in London. I expect many of us are aware of the things that are currently dividing that Synod – division about how we deal with our safeguarding failures and ensure that safeguarding is independently operated and overseen in the future; division about the prayers of love and faith; division about whether the church’s assets should be used to fund the parish or the centre and wider mission initiatives and so it goes on. If you believe what you read in the press even our bishops are sharply divided among themselves on these issues.
So in these times and in this atmosphere how do we walk the talk?
How can we work hard to maintain the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace?
Paul says – you have all received the same call from the one God; and then he goes on to say: there is one baptism. Baptism is the very visible response to God’s call to follow Jesus. And whether others made that decision for us in expectation and faith when we were infants, or whether we have come to that faith ourselves in later life, it matters not. The outward sign of joining up to follow Jesus is baptism. That is a picture of being washed clean from sin; it is also a picture of being buried and raised up with Jesus Christ. And note this well – you can’t baptise yourself, someone else has to do it to you. So both pictures – cleansing and burial – are pictures of what happens to us externally and visibly, and what God is doing in and to us internally.
So that means that whether you are a baptised gun toting republican MAGA warrior in the USA, or a baptised Just Stop Oil warrior for peace and climate change in the UK, or even if you are a bishop in the Church of England, if you have been baptised in the name of Jesus Christ, then the exactly the same thing has happened outwardly to you, and exactly the same thing has happened and is happening inwardly to you. God does all that stuff. The stuff that Paul has been describing in chapters 1 to 3. God has given us new life; God has brought us near to the others we were estranged from. Paul says that the previous dividing walls of hostility have been broken down and we are now part of the one new humanity he is creating in Jesus Christ.
And then Paul sets out in a series of staccato almost bullet points or headings – the words “there is” are not in the original, there is no verb, it’s not a sentence – he simply says: “one body, one spirit, one hope, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father”. If we have all those things in common there can be no divisions among us, and that’s why our relationships should be marked by humility, gentleness, patience, toleration, as we work hard to maintain and live out that unity we have through all that God has done.
And that is the point – if we focus on what God has done in Jesus Christ for us – then everything else should fall into perspective.
So when we hear people say “I am not in communion with bishop x because he said this …” or “… she did that”, there has been a forgetting of that basis of our communion which is our common baptism. And if we share a baptism, we are in communion with all the other baptised people as we are part of the same body, part of that same new humanity. In another letter Paul again picks up the theme of being part of the same body. He says you cannot say I don’t need some of the other parts, because we are all parts of one body and we need each other to be complete.
I’m not pretending this is an easy road to take, but it is the road we are called to walk down as we walk the talk. We are to work hard at maintaining the unity which we have through our baptism, and we are to do it by being humble. And that means looking at our attitude to ourselves. By being gentle. That means looking at our attitude and approach to others. And patient. That means looking at our attitude to our circumstances.
And we are to do all of that with a tolerant love.
I like the Message translation of this passage; which says this: “In light of all this, here’s what I want you to do. While I’m locked up here, a prisoner for the Master, I want you to get out there and walk – better yet, run! – on the road God called you to travel. I don’t want any of you sitting around on your hands. I don’t want anyone strolling off, down some path that goes nowhere. And mark that you do this with humility and discipline – not in fits and starts, but steadily, pouring yourselves out for each other in acts of love, alert at noticing differences and quick at mending fences.”
Amen
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