Servicefor the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity

January20, 2008

The Rev. Thomas William Blake

Abouta month ago, I spent a week in Washington, DC, studying at the College ofPreachers. The college is on theclose of the Cathedral of St. Peter and St. Paul, the saints whose feast days markthe beginning and end of this Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. Perhaps you know the cathedral by itsmore common name: the Washington National Cathedral, or as it is sometimescalled: a House of Prayer for All People. I think it is that last name that I like best.

TheNational Cathedral is on the one hand a thoroughly Episcopal Cathedral: theceremonial seat not only of the Episcopal Bishop of Washington, but also of thePresiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church. On the other hand, it really does strive to live up to its identity as aHouse of Prayer for all people, not just Episcopalians. State services, for example, are held there, such as whenPresidents are inaugurated or former presidents die, or in response to nationalcrises.

Ihave always experienced the National Cathedral, in fact, to be an ecumenicalplace. Prominent preachers frommany different denominations regularly preach from its pulpit. It even has the distinction of beingthe last church pulpit from which Martin Luther King preached before being shot.  I regard it as somehow fitting thatMartin Luther King’s national remembrance happens to be within the week ofChristian Unity.

Sowhenever I participate in a conference at the College of Preachers on theNational Cathedral close, I spend time in an Episcopal setting, but most of thepeople I encounter there are not Episcopalians; they are from other traditions,and I cherish the opportunity to get to know them. This latest conference I attended was limited to clergyunder forty, and I must admit, part of the reason I went was to see if, infact, there areother clergy under forty! Thereare a few of us.

Allkidding aside, it was a wonderful opportunity to build collegial relationships withclergy of my and younger generations and beyond the bounds ofdenominationalism. In the courseof the week it happened that we spent little if no time talking aboutdifferences among our respective traditions. We spent a lot of time talking about the church’s changingrelationship with the world, and of our need to think outside the box to reachpeople who have never set foot inside any church, let alone one of ourparticular denominations.

Oneyoung Episcopal priest, not me, put it this way. He said, “those of us who have grown up in the InformationAge, with such ready access to so many media forms: broadcast, internet, andotherwise, have been shaped in a completely different way from previousgenerations and we have a unique perspective as a result. The world to us is smaller; theboundaries separating us have narrowed and are breaking down.  Denominationalism,” said my colleague “willmake no sense to future generations.”

Ihope he is right, but I also know that human nature is not always so accommodating. The world is still a divided place,maybe more so than ever, and it is far too easy to separate ourselves intogroups: we’re right and they’re wrong, or we’re enlightened and they’re not, or“if only they would see it our way, then all would be well.”  And if we thought the church was abovesuch statements, it is not. Readchurch history. Go to churchmeetings. Read about contentioussituations in the Bible. We don’talways practice what we preach.

Paul’sadvice to the Thessalonians, “Pray without ceasing,” has been designated thetheme of this year’s Week for Christian Unity. On the one hand it seems an obvious piece of advice to thechurch: prayer being the expression of our trust in a God living, present, and unceasinglyinvolved in the life of creation. Suchprayerful trust in God is supposed to be the very core of our identity. It makes us the church and notjust another secular institution with good intentions.

Onthe other hand, our prayer too often and too easily gets lost amid our fearsand anxieties, and our human brokenness takes over. Numerous gospel accounts portray deeply religiouspeople nevertheless intent on discrediting Jesus and his followers, whiledistinguishing themselves alone as pure. The people of Jesus’ home town, otherwise good and faithful people whosupposedly loved him as one of their own, nevertheless ran him out of town andnearly drove him to his demise off a cliff.

Writingto the Thessalonians, Paul, too, was intimately aware of the human distractionsinevitably to be faced by communities of faith. The Thessalonians were enduring persecution and hardship,they were realizing that living and proclaiming the gospel is not always easy,and some were even tempted to water down their faith or perhaps even torenounce it all together. Paul’sletter to the Thessalonians was a letter of encouragement, with the intent ofhelping the community experience again that sense of fullness and wholenessthat comes from God alone.

Paulwrote as someone who had himself persecuted the earliest Christians, and afterhis conversion had come face to face with contention among Christians. He had been one of the leaders of adisputed faction considered by some to have pushed the boundaries within thechurch too far, incorporating Gentiles traditionally deemed to be unclean.  And good and faithful people sincerely decriedsuch actions as flagrant violations of the Hebrew Scriptures.

Weprobably all know how that dispute turned out; Paul happened to be on thewinning side, so to speak, and consequently we are here today. But the taking of sides, striving to beon the winning side, one group declaring itself alone pure and holy, simply do notconstitute Paul’s wisdom to the Thessalonians. Rather, he writes, “Be at peaceamong yourselves….Admonish the idlers, encourage the faint hearted, help theweak, be patient with all of them. See that none of you repays evil for evil, but always seek to do good toone another and to all.”

Perhapsin these statements Paul was bringing wisdom from his experience at the Councilof Jerusalem, as described in the Acts of the Apostles, by which the churchworked its way through that first divisive issue through a process of prayerand listening and holy conversation. To pray without ceasing, then, would be to open our hearts to God’stransforming grace—to allow our own prejudices to be supplanted by God’swill, carefully discerned. Or saidanother way, to pray without ceasing is a call for the unleashing of God’sSpirit to mold us, to shape us anew.

Ofcourse, that perspective begs the question of skeptics, “couldn’t you justifyanything by claiming it to be God’s will?” The answer is, of course, yes. So-called Christians over the centuries regrettably havecommitted numerous atrocities in the name of God. The crusades, the Inquisition, religious wars, witch hunts,burnings at the stake, and the justification of slavery are but a few examples,and they seem rather more like the broken kingdoms of this world than they doour espoused kingdom of God and the example and teachings of Jesus.

Buteven so, there is such a thing as legitimately discerning God’s will. My own experience has been to encountera profound sense of peace when I follow God’s path for me, and to struggle withinternal restlessness when I stubbornly insist on following my own path.  The same is true with our corporateexperience as the church. What isof God will endure, and what is not of God will wither away.  Our task in the meantime is not to beateach other up, but to pray without ceasing for patience, compassion, andunderstanding, and for God to show us the way.

Ibegan this sermon by speaking of my ecumenical experiences at the NationalCathedral and its College of Preachers. Fittingly I want to conclude by recounting a story recently shared fromthe pulpit of that cathedral by the Episcopal Bishop of Washington.

Herecalled the experience of one of his colleagues, a bishop in some war-tornregion in Africa. One day, asoldier who happened to be nine years old, came into the bishop’s church andordered him down on his knees. Thenine year old proceeded to hold an AK-47 to the bishop’s head, and asked him ifhe had any last words before he died. The bishop said yes, and he calmly proceeded to pray aloud. “God,” he said, “I pray for youto have mercy on this boy who is about to shoot me, and to forgive him andbless him with peace and love and prosperity throughout his life.”

Andjust then, there was a chilling silence, after which the soldier set down his gun,knelt beside the bishop and said to him, “I want what you have.” The boy’s heart had been transformed,and the bishop lived to tell the story. I was stunned when I heard this. “I want what you have.” Itis a profound testament of the reconciling power of God transforming even as Ispeak the broken kingdoms of this world into holy and heavenly ones.  We divide ourselves sometimes athorrible costs, even as God seeks to bring us together.  It is an insight for the church as wellas the world.

Whatif we all said to one another, “I want what you have?” What if Catholics and Anglicans andProtestants and Evangelicals and in course even the various nations andkingdoms of the world were willing to turn to one another and say, “I want whatyou have.”  Maybe the barriers would fall, the powerof the Spirit so longing to be released would be at last, and there for theworld to see would be the church in all its glory: a visible symbol of God’skingdom fulfilled.

Andthat, I believe, is what Paul has in mind when he advises the Thessalonians topray without ceasing. In a worldweighed down with skepticism amidst bad news every day, here is our gift to theworld: not skepticism but hope, not bad news but good news, not war or strifeor conflict or division but a peace from God transcending us all and making uswhole again.

Amen.