Introduction

          There is a story told that when Christ had finished his work on earth, and had ascended into heaven, the angel Gabriel met him. ‘Lord,’ said Gabriel, ‘is it permitted to ask what plans you have made for carrying on your work on earth?’ 

‘I have chosen a few men and women’ said Christ, ‘They will pass on my message to the whole world’.

‘But’, said the angel, What if these people fail you- do you have another plan? 

Jesus smiled ‘I have no other plan’. I love and trust them.

Now some of us might find Christ’s answer to Gabriel lacked a little detail.  When you read the Gospels, you see that Jesus did not give exactly a lot of specific advice to his Disciples about how they should share the love of Christ with the rest of the community.  Yes, Jesus told them to love God, each other and their enemies. However, he left the details about how to do this on a daily basis to his Disciples to figure out. 

          I don’t know about you, but Jesus’ approach frustrates me sometimes. It reminds me of how consultants work. Consultants tell you what your problem is and they suggest in broad terms what you need to do to fix them.  However, they stop short of giving you specific solutions about how to fix the problem in order to make your organization more efficient.  Now I am not picking on consultants. They are not responsible for solving our problems; we are.  But if you’re a person like me who likes order and solutions and does not like to live in the tension of chaos or uncertainty for very long then the message in today’s Epistle is for you.  It invites us to reflect on the essence and meaning of Church unity in our lives today.  When we get all wound up and spun around every issue under the sun, it reminds us to pause, take a deep breath and remember that the Holy Spirit is like a compass needle who always points the church due North to Christ. 

Trouble in the Text: The Jews and Gentile Christians are divided

          When Paul was inspired to compare the church as a human body, he gave us an image of ourselves that is still in the maturing process.  The infant begins life helplessly dependent on the parents to meet all of its needs for survival.  As the body grows and matures, the person learns to co-ordinate all of the parts of the body to obey the minds command.

As individuals, we tend to take our bodies for granted. We do not think about how the various parts of the human body are interdependent- that is they work together and allow us through our senses to experience the joy of life. If you could only see a play and not hear the dialogue, would you not have missed a huge part of the experience?  Few of us get up in the morning thinking about how are circulation system works. It just does and we are grateful. We only begin to think about our individual bodies when they begin to break down on us and we need to adjust to restrictions these new physical limitations place on our freedom to act.

It is the same for families and larger communities like towns or countries.  As individuals we smell, talk, think, look and act differently to each other.  Our trouble begins when more then one of us has to share the same room.   This might be a husband and wife who are sharing a lifelong covenant with each other- for better or worse. It could be a young brother and sister who really had no choice in the selection of their parents or siblings for that matter. It might be two nations like Canada and the US, who must share the abundance of the Great Lakes.  When you become a community of individuals, all of whom think and respond differently, your bound to run into tension between members about how to share that room, be it a kitchen, country, or idea.

It was the same in the early Church.  The early Christian converts heard the message of Jesus’ Gospel spoken by Paul and they struggled to live its truth in unity with each other’s diversity.  We hear Paul addressing congregations of Gentile and Jewish Christians throughout his epistles, from Rome to Jerusalem who never did agree on how to live as the Church. Many Jewish converts to Christianity insisted that Gentile Christians become circumcised and obey all the Hebrew food laws, which were part of Moses covenant agreement with God. Most of us would not think twice about eating bacon everyday but this was a sign of disobedience and disrespect to a faithful first century Jew. Of course the Gentiles were horrified at the thought of self-mutilation and could not understand what the big deal was about eating pork.  However, it might be a big deal for us if someone told us that we should celebrate the Eucharist with hotdogs and beer instead of wine or grape juice and bread.  Food is food, right.

Paul was constantly moving from one place to another trying to address these disputes by telling people that their diversity was a gift from God through Jesus Christ.  However, someone always seemed to sneak into town behind him to preach a different message.  He would then have to send a new letter or disciple to reaffirm the Gospel.  It must have been confusing to the individual members of the congregations who were struggling to live the Gospel amid all their individual differences. 

Trouble in our World: The Christian Church remains divided today.

          If you thought Paul was frustrated in his attempts of trying to achieve Christian Unity within the diverse congregations of his time, he probably would roll over in his grave if he could see the situation in the Christian Church today.

I read this prayer in a book called ‘Children’s Letters to God’.   Arnold, a seven or eight year old expresses his confusion and wonderment over the diversity of the Christian Church when he prays:  ‘God, Its OK that you made different religions but don’t you get mixed up sometimes?  Well we know God is not mixed. 

Did you know that that there are some 1000 denominations of Christians in the world today?  They have far ranging views of what Christians believe.  At one end of the spectrum are those who believe that the only path to God and salvation is an explicit confession of faith in Jesus Christ.  If you do not confess this, you may be excluded from salvation.   At the other end are those Christians who believe that there are many paths to God and that Jesus is not necessarily the path for all.  For them, Christianity may be changed by encounters with other religions. 

Many Christians of all beliefs also think that the Church serves no practical purpose today.  According to Statistics Canada there are over 3,000,000 professed Christians who consider themselves, part of the United Church of Canada, yet our church roles show a membership of only 669,000 or 22% of this number. Of this 22% who are official members, less then half attend worship on a weekly basis.

It seems that there is a contemporary belief among many Christians that being part of the Church is an individual matter and is not essentially bound to life with others.  These people are unwilling to commit their individual gifts. This is too bad because the Holy Spirit graces our personalities and urges us to share our gifts and talents with those around us.

Well, there are statistics, then there are lies, and you are probably sitting out there getting a little bored or irritated with these numbers by now.  I do not blame you, but if they challenge you to ask questions like ‘Who is the Church’, and why are we here, then they probably serve the Spirit’s purpose.  Paul’s situation and our situation are similiar because they show us a Christian Church that has struggled with the meaning of identity and mission as one body unified in Christ since Pentecost.  This is not a bad thing, it puts our uncertainty in perspective; we take comfort and encouragement because our own situation has been faced by others who survived and matured through chaos and diversity. 

Paul’s situation and ours also show that many Christians then and now believe that you can be a Christian without the Church. However, that is like being an author with no one to read your book, being a singer like Celion Dion who has no one to sing her love songs to, being a parent without children to love, or being a hockey player without a team. You see the church is not a building; it is not a program; it is not an institutional bureaucracy. The church is people in relationship, you and I struggling to live in community with each other, empowered by the Holy Spirit to live the Gospel of Christ.  If this building or our institution were to disappear tomorrow, the living Body of Jesus Christ, his church would carry on. You and I would be there striving to do our part because we know that our Unity in Christ is enough to sustain all of our human failings and predicaments. It is not a fickle, faddish, or popular. It gives us the strength to share our talents and carry on the work of Christ.

Grace in the Text: The Holy Spirit Unites the Jews and Gentiles to God through Christ

Paul and the other 12 Apostles knew this truth about the church and preached its message tirelessly despite their own differences.  When the Holy Spirit descended on the crowd at Pentecost, the miracle was not that everyone spoke the same language, the miracle was that every one of different nationalities and language heard and understood the same Gospel truth of Jesus Christ.  The Holy Spirit was the universal translator of God’s love for us.  God, who withheld the Spirit from the people at Babel in the Old Testament by taking away their common language and preventing them from thinking they could be God through the human effort of building a tower, now restored the meaning of God’s love when the Holy Spirit entered their hearts and they understood the love of Christ.

The Spirit fills them with the joy that God came to humanity in Jesus Christ so that they might know through the humanity of Christ that God forever loves them. Paul affirmed the right of individuals to be different. God created differences among God’s creatures, God did not clone humans or any thing else in God’s grand creation.  And when God came to us in Christ, Christ removed forever all the barriers that prevent us from living in the inevitable tension of our differences. Christ gave us the potential to realise the freedom of our full personalities through the love of others. Christ’s love is the energizing current that courses through the Christian Body.  Paul knew that this love was the only grace that would sustain the community when chaos and doubt engulfed them.  When everything else human blows away, when others hurt us, when our love is betrayed, when we hurt others, the love of Christ for us will endure.

Paul preached that the grace of Jesus Christ is not based on any concept of human institutions or human power.  The grace of Jesus Christ, which eliminates all boundaries between Jew and Gentile is based on the mystery of a powerless Christ on the cross whose selfless acts of love invite us to live and love each other in our diversity.

Paul never wavered from the belief that God’s gift of God’s self in Jesus Christ was not a problem solved by circumcision.  It was a celebration of grace shared among all peoples of the earth. Christ’s love for all creation was the bond that reconciled creation to God. Paul knew that the love of God and the unity of the Church is a celebration of the communion of the different. 

Grace in our World: The Holy Spirit unites us in Christ

We should not deny the divisions that exist among ourselves within the Body of Christ. To hide from such differences creates suspicion and indifference.  It covers the light of truth in Christ- that he came to reconcile all creation to God. We are the Church, all of us. Not the building in which we worship or the basement in which we conduct Sunday school. We are God’s people coming together. The Holy Spirit binds us to Christ. We live the love of Christ in community with each other.  We offer our diverse talents to each other with compassion and patience for the other. Whatever our beliefs, the idea of a self-sufficient isolated Christian was inconceivable to the first-century Christian and it is inconceivable to us today.

We only have to reflect on our own intimate relationships to know that love is a dynamic process.  It never stops maturing or growing when the participants involved in the relationship confront and struggle with the truth together in compassion, mercy and forgiveness. What is the good news of this Gospel today?  Relationships that love like this mature and grow in diversity and overcome the chaos and uncertainty of the human condition. The Church is a relationship of love for each other that is set free in the Unity with Christ.

Conclusion

We the church live in a garden meadow of many types of wonderful flowers and choking weeds that are sometimes beyond our human power to separate. The lover of good order and conformity will be disappointed in the Christian church whose Holy Spirit blows where it will amid prophets and sinners. Whether you are one who aches for order, or who lives comfortably in an untidy house, the church will defy our individual tendency to control it. 

The Good news is that it has the easiest membership rules of any organization.  The Holy Spirit calls all sinners to be the people of God united in Christ.  Christ has no second plan; he trusts us and sends us out to love others. The Holy Spirit calls you and I together to be the Church. Christ continues to reveal himself in human flesh, the human flesh of His living Church.  Our United Church Creed invites us,

to be Christ’s eyes,

To be his hands,

To be his feet,

To walk his path in justice and mercy for all

To serve God’s creation, because God loves us.

          We are the church sustained by Jesus Christ.  Unity is already Christ’s gift to us.  So long as we set our course by the compass of the Holy Spirit, we shall always find our direction to Christ.

Thanks be to God. Amen