That They May Be One – June 1, 2019 Sermon

No, the date in the title is not a mistake – this sermon was preached only on Saturday, June 1, 2019. On Sunday, we joined with our neighbors at First Presbyterian Church of Greene for a gospel music worship service with no sermon at Perrin Park – and how great of an illustration of the point of this sermon is an ecumenical worship service!

For the Saturday service (the one that included a sermon!), the Gospel text for this Seventh Sunday in Easter is John 17:20-26. The opening story comes from Jane Anne Ferguson’s Sermon Stories site. I also appreciated Anne Moman Brock’s commentary on this text at Modern Metanoia. Here’s the sermon:

There’s an old story about a father 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. Division is weakness.”

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 an estimated 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.

Of course, we Lutherans are part of that. The church had split before Martin Luther’s time, and groups had broken off before, but Luther’s reformation opened up the floodgates.

Just here in Greene, in a town of 1,100 people, we have five different churches. Six if you count the Brethren separately from the Methodists. Seven if you count Vilmar as part of Greene. That’s a lot of churches all believing slightly different things.

But, as we talked about last week and we’ll focus on more next week at Pentecost, the Holy Spirit is at work. There is unity in the church, even if we’re not very good at it.

Our congregation is part of the ELCA, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. Hopefully you know that. The ELCA has about 3.5 million members, mostly here in the United States.

As part of the ELCA, we’re also part of the Lutheran World Federation, which includes 178 churches and over 75 million members. We also participate in the World Council of Churches. That’s 590 million Christians.

Even here in the United States, we’re not as divided as we look. The ELCA seeks to follow Jesus’ command to be united by working with other church bodies. The ELCA has full communion partnerships with 6 other denominations, including the United Methodists and the Presbyterians. We have official formal dialogues and partnerships with lots of others, including the Roman Catholics.

And of course, more important than formal dialogues and denominational agreements, we actually work together right here in our town. One of the strengths of this community is the cooperation between the different churches. It shouldn’t be a surprise, because it’s what Jesus was praying for, but it’s a beautiful thing that we have four different denominations cooperating to do Vacation Bible School together in a few weeks. It’s fantastic that we have three different churches sharing Lent and Advent worship.

We’re having worship in the park tomorrow because the Presbyterians invited us to join in as brothers and sisters in Christ. They’re joining us in a few weeks on June 30 when New Legacy Project is here leading our Sunday worship. There are signs of unity in the body of Christ!

And there’s also still plenty of room for the Holy Spirit to keep working. Sometimes Christiains think unity means we have to believe all the exact same things. That’s why there are still churches that are not united with us, because they don’t believe quite what we believe, whether it’s about baptism, or communion, or grace, or sin, or whatever.

Don’t misunderstand: What we believe matters. I will never be a part of any church that compromises on Jesus being the son of God who died for our sins, or the Bible being God’s word, or the church being the body of Christ in the world. There is a baseline for being Christian.

But once we’ve agreed on the essentials of faith, there is room for a diversity of opinions and understandings on the rest.

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 vote differently, we can dress differently, we can serve different foods at potlucks, and still be part of the same body of Christ.

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.

Did you catch why Jesus prays for the Church to be united? It’s so our witness may point to God. He says, “So that may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.”

Unity is not always easy. But 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. 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.” That’s us. We believe because of the testimony of those disciples who were in the room hearing Jesus pray this prayer almost 2,000 years ago.

May the world know Jesus through our testimony as Christians and as Church together. Amen