(Note: This blog entry
is based on the text for “Receiving Oneness”, originally shared on May 23, 2022.
It was the 217th video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living
Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)
There are lots of different kinds of churches, but they are all one Church. The Christian Church is divided, but that could be a good thing. Jesus calls for Church unity as a means, not as an end. How can those things be? Today, we’re going to find out.
But first, we have an announcement.
I’m Pastor David Berkedal and my wife, Rev.
Sally Welch and I began
co-producing these videos, Streams of Living Water, at the beginning
of this global pandemic, now becoming an endemic, and as we began to emerge
into the New Normal to share a sense of connection and encouragement and an
opportunity to reflect about what it means to be a Christian. Sally and I
are retired clergy with over 80 years of ordained ministry between us.
Now the isolation we all experienced at the
height of the pandemic is loosening up.
We are all living under fewer pandemic
restrictions, though rising covid cases in L.A. County are a concern and we must
be vigilant.
Most churches have now gone back to some
provisions for physically present worship and Christian community life, along
with the necessary restrictions in place for the sake of others.
I’ve been leading worship and preaching at
different churches on Sundays. I will be preaching every Sunday at the same
church, St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in Monterey Park, plus I will be
working there a few hours every week starting on June 1st. Sally
will be taking up a more active schedule as a docent at the Simon Wiesenthal
Center’s Museum of Tolerance in L.A. at the same time.
Therefore, we will go from two videos,
podcasts and blogs each week to one starting in June. The one video will be
moving to Wednesdays, still at the same times: 11:15 a.m. on the “Streams of
Living Water” Facebook page, at 11:30 a.m. on the David Berkedal Facebook page,
and at 12 noon on our YouTube channel, “Streams of Living Water”, with the
podcast and blog to follow.
We hope that videos, podcasts and/or blogs
have been helpful to you, and we look forward to continuing our service to you
as we move forward into whatever comes.
Now back to being one Church with all its
diversity of denominations.
I imagine that you pass lots of other
churches on your way to the one where you worship. There’s a Presbyterian one,
and a Baptist one, and a Methodist one, and a generic one, and a Pentecostal
one, and a Roman Catholic one, and a Lutheran one, and a Christian Church
(Disciples of Christ)/United Church of Christ one, and a Nazarene one, and lots
of different kinds of Orthodox ones and lots and lots of other ones.
We may know members of other churches. Our
friends, family members, co-workers and neighbors may be members of other
churches, but we usually pass like ships in the night, barely acknowledging one
another’s existence. We are competing for shrinking resources. Well, we don’t
think of ourselves as being competitive, but people considering Christian
church membership do.
And we compete with lots of other competing
religions like personal improvement, video games, “new age” practices, camping,
entertainment, shopping, working-out, hiking, and our number one competitor in
Southern California: youth sports, and more.
The thing that unites us as Christians of
different denominations could be our common competition.
But we who are Christians have many more
things in common than things that divide us. Sally and I found this in each
other when we met after being assigned from our two denominations to an
ecumenical group helping churches work together in common ministries.
What does Jesus say about this? The text
often pointed to is from the end of what is called Jesus’ “High Priestly
Prayer” at the Last Supper. It is John 17:20-26. Let’s start with verses
20-21.
20 “I ask not only on behalf of these but also on behalf
of those who believe in me through their word, 21 that they may all be one. As you, Father,
are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may
believe that you have sent me.
Jesus, in his final hours, prays for us. He
prays for those who believe in him through the witness of his first disciples.
That’s us.
And what does he pray for? He prays for more
than cooperation. He prays that we be one.
How can this happen? Jesus says that is
comes by recognizing the common relationship, we have as a result of our common
experience of the presence of the Holy Spirit. It comes by a relationship of
presence, just as God the Father is in Jesus the Son, and as Jesus the Son is
in God the Father.
Why does Jesus pray that this might happen?
It’s not so that we can sing songs of unity around the campfire. It’s
pragmatic. It’s so that our witness is credible, so that the world may believe
that Jesus is God.
The world sees our disunity and conflict and
it diminishes our credibility. Nowhere is this seen more plainly today than in
Ukraine, where the Russian Orthodox patriarch declared the Russian invasion to
be a holy war against unwanted Western influence, bringing disaster to the
Russian Orthodox living in Ukraine. How can we overcome this? Jesus continues
in verses 22-23.
22 The glory that you have given me I have given them,
so that they may be one, as we are one, 23 I in
them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may
know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.
This unity among Christians of which Jesus
speaks is not something we can achieve by ourselves. It’s something that we can
only receive from God.
The irony of these words of Jesus, calling
for unity among his disciples, is that they were the last words said to his
disciples before they went to the Mount of Olives and Judas betrayed him.
We cannot achieve unity. It can only come as
a gift from God, and we have been given everything we need to be completely
one. Jesus has given us the same glory that he first received from God the
Father. Why? Again, a pragmatic reason: so that the world may know that God the
Father has sent God the Son, God’s self, and has loved us even as Jesus Christ,
the Son, has loved us. Sacrificially.
No love can be purer. Jesus explains this in
verse 24,
24 Father, I desire that those also, whom you have given
me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory, which you have given me because
you loved me before the foundation of the world.
The glory of God has been known in the world
since its foundation. Jesus is God and Jesus has revealed his glory to us and
we are to reveal it to the world. How does this happen? We see in verses 25-26,
25 “Righteous Father, the world does not know you, but I
know you, and these know that you have sent me. 26 I made your name known to them, and I
will make it known, so that the love with which you have loved me may be in
them and I in them.”
The name, in Bible times, was believed to
carry the true self of the person or thing that is named. When Jesus speaks of
making the name of God known, he is speaking of having made God’s true self
known. It is seen in everything Jesus does and says and is. He adds that he
also will make it known, which I believe is in his coming torture and death on
the cross.
Why was this done? So that the love with
which God the Father has loved Jesus, the Son, may be in us.
That is the nature of our Unity. God’s true
self is seen in God’s essence: sacrificial love seen most clearly at the cross.
It is that transformational love of God at
work in all of us. Roman Catholics, Orthodox, and Protestants.
It doesn’t require visible unity for this
unity to exist. We may only understand our unity in Christ in the world to
come.
When I was just starting in my first parish,
Christ Lutheran Church in Compton, I was feeling overwhelmed. One day, during
that time, I read an article in the Christian Century Magazine by a doctor.
He wrote about how his first job out of
medical school was opening a new free clinic on the South Side of Chicago. His
supervisor, another Dr., came by with a file folder under his arm and a book.
He laid the file folder on the new Dr’s desk, opened it, and said, “These are
the people I want you to hire for the clinic.
The new Dr. looked through the papers and
said, “These people aren’t qualified, and I know we can do better.” “Maybe,”
said the supervising Dr., “but I owe people favors, and you will hire them.
That’s how it works in this neighborhood.”
The new Dr. countered that he would not be
hiring them, that he would be interviewing and selecting his own staff, and he
knew he could do that because he knew the law.
The supervising Dr. took the book he
brought with him, laid it on the new Dr.’s desk, and opened it. The book had
been hollowed out and a .45 automatic pistol was nested inside. He said, “Dr.
in this neighborhood, this is the law. Now hire these people.”
The new Dr. wrote that he became discouraged
in his work, believing that the good he was doing was being overcome by the
evil in the system itself.
One day, someone gave him a book on the
monastic hours of prayer. He read it and began to observe the hours, stopping
to pray five times a day.
He wrote that it didn’t happen right away,
but that he began to feel that he was connected to something larger than
himself. That he was like a thread in a tapestry, the individual meaning of
which would not be apparent, but that someday God would weave it together with
lots of other threads into a beautiful tapestry, whose meaning would be clear
for all to see.
I believe that the churches and the
denominations may be like that as well, like threads that will one day be woven
together and the big pictured received by all. It takes all kinds of churches
to reach all kinds of people.
“The Body of Christ” is the Bible’s main
metaphor for the Church. Christ is the head of the Church and each member
contributes to the whole. Paul writes, in 1 Corinthians 12:12-14,
12 For just as
the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though
many, are one body, so it is with Christ. 13 For in the one Spirit we were all
baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and we were all made to
drink of one Spirit.
14 Indeed, the
body does not consist of one member but of many.
In fact, the many Christian denominations
have produced a religious vitality in the United States. There are many places
in the world where there is one State church, and your choice is take it or
leave it. And, guess what? Many people have left it.
Your choice in the United States is take it
or go to another church. Or start your own church. This has provided a rich
diversity of Christian life.
In part, as a result, we aren’t as parochial
as we used to be. One of my best friends growing up also became a Lutheran
pastor. When he was in seminary, he met and fell in love with a Roman Catholic
young woman who had been in a convent and, in the turbulent 60’s, left to marry
him. When they were dating, he said, they alternated going to each other’s churches,
Lutheran and Roman Catholic.
The first thing he noticed was the
differences in how people justified being late for worship. In the Roman
Catholic church, people would say, “Well, yes, I was late. But I was there in
time for the Eucharist (Holy Communion).” In the Lutheran Church, people would
say, “Well, yes, I was late. But I was there in time for the Sermon.
We have differences, but in the midst of our
visible diversity, we have the unity that comes as a gift of the Holy Spirit.
No comments:
Post a Comment