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in the World for the World Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis October 6, 2003, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Genesis 25:7-12,19 "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." On this crisp October Sunday, when Christians throughout the world have come to the table set for us as if we were "one," I wonder what God must think as God beholds the church and the world today, beholds what we are doing in God's name. "That they may become completely one," Jesus prayed, and the "one" Christ's followers have become, even within our various broken Christian parts, is "one" that just may have the effect of betraying the God Christ came to reveal among us, rather than bearing witness to the one God who, in him, so loved the world. But what was the world presumed in John's gospel? In the verse we all memorized as children-the verse often held up as the camera turns on the crowd at an Eagle's game, "For God so loved the world"-world has two contradictory interpretations. One is that the world Christ came to reconcile to God is a world of the elect, those chosen from the beginning to be with God in the end. Calvinists are the most outspoken proponents of this misunderstood doctrine, emphasizing as much God's judgment upon those not chosen as God's grace toward the elect. No doubt Calvin's double predestination is why the other understanding of "world" has always been suspect in orthodox circles. It is, nevertheless, the surmise of theologians like Karl Barth who, when he was featured on the cover of Time Magazine in April of 1962, tells the reporter that his reading of scripture leads him to believe Christ died for all and so came to reconcile all the world to God. "I do not preach universal salvation," he is quoted as saying, "What I say is that I cannot exclude the possibility that God would save all…at the Judgment." Or as Barbara Grizzuti Harrison put it, "I cannot believe in a God who is less merciful than I am." But by the time we reach the passion narrative in John's gospel, world had come to mean something quite different from either the elect or the whole of humanity. The "world" in these verses is understood to be those who are hostile to God and hostile to those who claim Jesus as the Messiah. Therefore, the "one" that the disciples and the church are to be in the world is "one" bound together in their opposition to a hostile world filled with evil and darkness. When Jesus prays for the disciples to be completely one so that the world will believe that he had come from God and loved them, the "them" refers not to the world, nor is the "believing" a hoped-for belief by the world in God. John's Jesus wants the hostile world to make no mistake, but to hear the sharp demarcation of the claim: Jesus was "one" with the Father, and those who believe this are to be "one" in the midst of an evil world, thereby increasing the hostility of the world against them and against God's only begotten Son. It is a chilling perspective, these days. So I find myself back in this world of hostile believer drawn back to the world of John 3:16, throwing in with Barth's inability to exclude the possibility that, in Christ's death, God was reconciling himself to the widest possible understanding of "world" we can imagine. From this it would follow that the "one" we are to be in the world Christ came to save must be "one" to the end that the world might believe God has come to be with them and for them too! In other words, with the "world" defined not by present hostilities but by the reconciliation God has already effected in Jesus Christ, we may hear the "them" in Jesus' prayer as referring not to us who profess believe in Christ, but literally referring to "them," to the "other," to the many who do not believe as we believe. What would lead "them" to believe that God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself? Well, for starters, if the community that exists in the world to re-present Christ to the world is a community that has to do with reconciliation of differences among peoples and nations and faiths, might that not invite the world to wonder after the cause? Or as Paul Lehmann characterized the body of believers, are we not to be the "fellowship creating reality of Christ's presence in the world?" But how? What would 'that look like? "What would be the result," asks Barth, "if [Christ's] real presence as the living and speaking Lord was genuinely accepted, if it was not merely maintained but allowed to become an event in the form in which it is earnestly believed?" A question would be asked of the church, he says, "not from without, not by those who believe otherwise, but from its own heart, by the Lord whom it believes and knows and confesses…: to what extent…it really serves Him, it really proclaims Him, it is really faithful to Him…." The first question on the table is, "Are we in this congregation "one" in him, here to serve him and not our own need or cause or ego or misplaced loyalty?" Oddly, world communion begins at home, begins among believers like us who realize that we are as much in need of his grace as any infidel we would oppose in the world he came to save. The church is only useful to God as we are in Christ and reconciled to one another. Hence the peace we share before we come to his table. Hence the prayer wherein we ask to be forgiven as we forgive. The second question pushes at the boundaries of the "one" we are to be with other Christians. "If we are seriously to hear Jesus Christ," says Barth, "then we must hear [other Churches] even if they for their part give no sign that they are willing and able to hear us. They are perhaps harder of hearing than we are. But all the same," he says, "it may be that they can say something to us which we have to hear for our own sake. And perhaps the only way to call them out of their isolation, to cause them to hear us, is first of all to hear them…. A prudent guest at the Lord's table will seat himself with the other guests whatever proud looks he may have to face." In order to be the "one" body Christ has already prayed us into being, we have at least to sit at the same table and hear what other followers of Jesus Christ have to say. Mostly they may say we are going to hell in a hand basket because we would ordain women or seek to include gay and lesbian Christians as full members of Christ's body or would allow for the complexities and sometimes heart-breaking necessity of abortion, or accept the decision to divorce in the face of a marriage's carnage. But these are the obvious flashpoints of division in our common life. The more subtle and insidious theological divisions cut deeper, making it entirely reasonable for the world to miss the reality of Christ's presence because of his church. It is as though we offer them the piece of Christ's body we believe is ours alone to possess, and claim the piece to be the whole of Christ. How could they believe? And if they do, how often they merely become baptized into some distortion of the truth they now may use to judge all others? No, when I think of what such a hearing of the other and so a being "one" with the other in Christ would be, I always return to the image of the monks in the Dominican Cloister of San Marco, who were assigned a cell on whose wall was painted a fresco of Christ's life. "How might it change one's life to live, day after day," asks Barbara Grizzuti Harrison, "in close white quarters with a fresco of a crucified Christ, blood spurting out of His side…or with the placid infant in the manger, the animals alert and knowing, the angels rejoicing…or with the risen Christ extending a benediction, His radiant blessing casting out all fear?" Yet no one depiction of Christ was true, it always has seemed to me, until the doors of the cells were opened and each came out into the common courtyard with the part of Christ he was given to see for the sake of the whole. Only in the common life did Christ's body take shape and form and reality. So too it is for us, in the cells we call our part of the church. Only as we find one another in a common courtyard, and bear witness to the picture of Christ formed in our minds and hearts by the tradition to which we belong, will the One we have promised to follow appear on the road ahead. Though finally there is a question few dare to ask, but a question we must ask if the bounds of the "one" we are to be in Christ is really for the sake of the world he came to save. That is the question of other believers in the one God, specifically those who share with us a common beginning as Muslims and Jews. "Can God still be manifest in the world?" asks Bruce Feiler in his much discussed new book, Abraham. "You could not have written a script," replies the man he meets at the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, "that would say that today, after thousands of years, with all our technology and sophistication, we would still be fighting a war over this place…. But the reason is that this is the place of relationship. This is not only the spot where it is possible to connect with God, it's the spot where you can connect with God only if you understand what it means to connect with one another. The relationship between a person and another human being is what creates and allows for a relationship with God." Instead of the cause of the world's warring madness, how is it that we who believe in one God are to be the occasion for the world's healing? For our part, Jesus prays that we be one in him and, in relation to people of other faiths, I take this to mean nothing about the Christian religion and everything about Jesus Christ. Says our teacher Shirley Guthrie, "He is the expression of God's love not just for Christian believers but for all humanity, the one in whom God was at work to reconcile the whole world to himself. He came not to give his followers everything they wanted to be happy, successful and secure now and forever, but to announce and usher in the worldwide reign of God's justice and compassion for everyone. He was the friend not just of law-abiding, God-fearing insiders, but of sinful, unbelieving, or different-believing outsiders. He believed that caring for suffering and needy human beings was more important than conformity to the moral and theological requirements of religious orthodoxy. He came not to condemn, defeat and lord it over those who rejected him, but to give his life for them, to restore to them their own true humanity, and to reconcile them to God and their fellow human beings." One in him that the world may believe: one in the person God raised from the dead whose real presence continues to heal, reconcile, liberate, and save those who know him not, who do not call his name, but whose lives-sometimes more than the lives of those wearing him on their sleeves-proclaim the God who has come near as love trumps hate, trust trumps fear, hope trumps despair, reconciliation trumps division. For Christ's sake, may his real presence be known, throughout the world for the sake of the world, beginning here, beginning now, around his table and in his church today. Amen. |