May 29, 2022 – First Sermon at Christ the King: The Lord’s Prayer of Unity

This week is my second sermon as pastor in my new call, but since we’re alternating worship services between buildings, this is my first sermon (other than a funeral a few days earlier) at Christ the King Lutheran Church in Port Washington, Wisconsin. 

This week’s Gospel text is John 17:20-26, and portions of this sermon are drawn from the last time I preached on this text back in 2019. Back then, I found the opening story on Jane Anne Ferguson’s Sermon Stories site and I also appreciated Anne Moman Brock’s commentary on this text at Modern Metanoia.

You can watch the video of the entire service, or listen to just the sermon audio: 

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and our risen Lord, Jesus Christ. Amen

There’s an old story, one of Aesop’s fables, about a man who had three sons. As he was dying, he called his three sons to him. Laying there on his deathbed, he asked each of the sons to go outside, find a stick from a tree, and bring it to him. They did as he asked, each son coming back with a stick.

In turn, from oldest to youngest, he asked each of his boys to break the stick. Each son did as his father asked, taking the stick he had found and easily snapping it in half.

Then the father instructed his sons to go back outside, find another stick, and bring it to him. When they all returned, the father asked the eldest son to bind all three sticks tightly together with twine. The eldest son did as his father asked.

The father asked his sons, starting with the youngest and ending with the eldest, who was the strongest, to try to break the bundle of sticks. Each tried in turn, but the bundle could not be broken.

The father said to his sons, “When I am gone, remember this bundle of sticks. Remember its strength as you build your families and your lives. When you are together, you cannot be broken. Unity is strength.”

In the night in which he was betrayed, Jesus prayed to God the Father for his disciples, saying: “The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one.”

Today, nearly 2,000 years after Jesus’ prayer, there are approximately 45,000 denominations of Christians in the world. Not 45,000 churches, 45,000 denominations – groups of churches.

What a tragedy it is that the church that started as one body of Christ has split over every issue you can possibly imagine, and lots of stuff you can’t imagine.

It’s hard to read this prayer from Jesus without being disappointed at how things have turned out. Unity is not what comes to mind when people look at the church today.

But instead of just lamenting how humans have messed up the body of Christ, though, I have two points I want to share with you to help manage our disappointment.

First, we need to realize the church has always been divided. Some of you were at Living Hope last week and heard Pastor Jerry talk with the confirmands about the familiar words Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 13 – love is patient, love is kind, love is not envious…love does not insist on its own way, etc.

People like those verses at weddings, and they are a great message to hear at the start of a marriage. Pastor Jerry used them to talk about the centrality of love in the Christian life. Again, a great message.

But when Paul originally wrote them, he was sending a message to a church divided by conflict, reminding them, practically begging the people of Corinth to treat each other with love. Basically, if you’re going to be the church, stop being envious and boastful, and rejoicing in other’s wrongdoing. So division in the church is not a new thing.

Sometimes I think we Lutherans are particularly open to division because of our history. Somewhere deep in our church DNA is this idea that when we disagree, we can just break off and start our own church, or join some other group—and even better if we can call it a reformation!

And sometimes it’s probably necessary; I’m just saying Lutherans in particular should pay attention when we jump to breaking unity as a solution to a problem. All churches are divided. It’s an unavoidable result of God choosing to work through broken, sinful people like us.

So first, as we look at the brokenness of the church today and lament our disunity, it’s important to keep the perspective that division is not new today—division starts as soon as Jesus establishes the church to be his witnesses.

And second, the unity Jesus is talking about—the unity Jesus is praying for—does not mean we need to agree on everything. The church is a gathering of unique individuals, with diverse experiences and perspectives. We have different gifts. That’s the point! God’s kingdom needs all of us in our diversity and uniqueness!

I don’t know your political positions or who you voted for, and I don’t really want to, but I’m guessing we have republicans and democrats in this room. Maybe we have some libertarians, or socialists, or greens. That’s ok—that’s good! Think about an issue like feeding people in need. By the way, the call committee heard me say this when I interviewed here, so blame them if you get nervous when I mention politics.

Nobody has a perfect answer to solving hunger, right? Some people are worried about creating dependency on handouts, and want to focus on individual responsibility.

Some people are worried about people falling through the cracks, and want to prioritize equal access for everyone. There are arguments on both sides (some better than others), but both sides can make a legitimate case.

Jesus simply says we ought to feed people.

The unity of the church is in our mission to reflect Christ, to be Jesus’ witnesses in the world. We don’t have to vote the same, or even focus on the same problems. Our job—our calling—is to love our neighbors in Jesus’ name. Listen to the first verse of the hymn we’re about to sing:

“We all are one in mission; we all are one in call, our varied gifts united by Christ, the Lord of all. A single great commission compels us from above to plan and work together that all may know Christ’s love.”

One of the hazards of being brand new here, by the way, is that I don’t know what hymns are familiar, and I’m told I get to pick the hymn of the day, so maybe you know this one or maybe it’s brand new, but pay attention to the words as we sing.

And maybe hymns aren’t your thing. Maybe you get nervous that the new pastor is wearing a robe, and you’d much prefer to have only guitar, drums, and keyboard. Or, maybe you’d be more comfortable in worship if we could do more of those good old Bach style chorale hymns and skip these more modern rock pop worship songs.

Personally, I appreciate variety in worship. Sometimes, maybe a song or something else we do in worship doesn’t connect with me, or it’s not done the way I think it should. But as long as we’re focused on worshiping God, those are personal issues, not the central thing.

Maybe you know the traditional Lutheran word for it: Adiophora. Adiophora means the things that are less important. As Lutherans we believe we can be unified, we can work together, we can pray and worship and recognize each other as sisters and brothers in Christ while still disagreeing on less important things.

We can worship differently, we can dress differently, we can serve different foods at potlucks, and yet still be unified as part of the same body of Christ. We can even faithfully disagree about the correct response to tragedies, and as long as the focus is on loving God and loving our neighbors, we can still be united.

Our Lutheran Augsburg Confession puts it like this: “It is enough for the true unity of the church to agree concerning the teaching of the gospel and the administration of the sacraments. It is not necessary that human traditions, rites, or ceremonies instituted by human beings be alike everywhere. As Paul says, ‘One faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all.’”

It can be difficult to accept that we are stronger when we are together, rather than when we choose sides. Choosing sides and dividing ourselves can make us sharper at pointing out our differences, but joining together makes us stronger.

Jesus’ call to us is to work for unity, to be the ones to reach across the table, to make the effort to both welcome others into our worship and to stretch out beyond where we’re comfortable. That applies to us as two ELCA Lutheran congregations, as well as to how we work with all the other churches around, and even other non-church groups.

Did you catch why it is that Jesus prays for the Church to be united? It’s so our witness may point to God. He says, “So that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.” The central thing is God’s love revealed in Jesus Christ. The central thing is our mission to share the good news of God’s love with the world.

One more thing to notice in this reading: Unity is not up to us alone. Jesus does more than just give instructions. He prays for the disciples.

Even more than that, he prays for us. Isn’t that powerful? Usually when Jesus talks to the disciples, we can read what he says as if it’s directed at us too, but in this case, he actually says it. “I ask not only on behalf of these, but also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word.” Siblings in Christ, that’s you and me!

We believe today because of the testimony of those disciples who were in the room hearing Jesus pray this prayer almost 2,000 years ago. Jesus was thinking of us! May the world know Jesus through our testimony as Christians and as Church together. Amen