Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
May 23, 2004

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

As at least most of you know, our church is a member of the United Church of Christ, the UCC. The UCC was formed only in 1957. The Fifties were, among many other things, a time of wide-spread optimism on our country. True, there was the nasty business of the Cold War and arms race with the Soviets; but in a sense the presence of a clearly identified and easily vilified enemy only contributed to our sense of optimism. We were the good guys, they were the bad guys, and in the end our goodness would prevail over Communist evil.

The Fifties were also the heyday of Christian ecumenism, the movement for Christian unity. There was in those days an optimistic hope if not an outright belief that the doctrinal differences and the institutional fragmentation within the Christian church could and should be overcome. This belief lies behind the institutional merger in 1957 of the Evangelical and Reformed Church and The Congregational Christian Churches to form the United Church of Christ. It explains the selection of the motto for the new denomination, taken from the John passage we just heard: "That They May All Be One." That motto is on our doors right behind you. If you’ve never noticed it, take a look after the service.

Things are very different today. We are not so optimistic any more. We won the Cold War, only to find ourselves facing a world that is far more complex and even more dangerous than the Cold War world ever was. In the ecumenical movement, the dream of institutional unity has died in the face of doctrinal intransigence and rigid institutional claims. If anything, the movement today is toward the further fragmentation of the institutional churches over issues such as the acceptance of gay people. That issue has caused churches to leave the UCC and threatens to fracture the United Methodist Church, the Presbyterian Church USA, and other Protestant denominations. We have experienced the deep divisions within the Christian communion right here in Monroe in the negative reaction of many Christians to our Open and Affirming stance. Our denomination’s motto, That They May All Be One, frankly seems like an idle wish in the deeply divided world of Christianity today.

The church is divided so deeply and in so many ways. There are the big divisions that are obvious to everyone and that nearly everyone knows exist even if they don’t really understand them, the divisions into the Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox traditions. These three big divisions are split over myriad issues of theology and, even more so, by differing ecclesiologies, that is, different understandings of what the church is and how it is to be organized. Within our Protestant tradition there are hundreds of denominations, including ours, that tenaciously cling to their individual theological and liturgical traditions.

And so we have to ask, I think, does our denomination’s motto, which after all is presented in the Gospel of John as Jesus’ wish for his followers, have any meaning today? It if does, what could that meaning possibly be? I have been struggling with that question all week as I worked on this sermon. I still don’t have a completely satisfactory answer. It is a very difficult question for me because of the depth and strength of my own faith commitments. I find such prominent facts of Christian reality as the Catholic claim of papal supremacy and infallibility and to be the only depository of the fullness of God’s grace, the refusal of most of Christianity to ordain women, and the hostility of most of the universal Christian church to gay and lesbian people unacceptable and theologically unjustifiable. I am not prepared to give up my beliefs on these and other important issues for the sake of an artificial and superficial Christian unity. I am sure that most of the people who hold different views from mine aren’t prepared to give up theirs either; nor should they, at least not simply for the sake of superficial unity. On this level, our reality is disunity not unity, and I think we have to be honest about that. So I struggle. For me "That They May All Be One" is, frankly, a problematic motto for our denomination.

Yet the question remains: Can we just ignore what Scripture tells us is Jesus’ wish for us? Does our motto have any meaning today? After much struggle I have answered that question for myself yes, it does have meaning, although it is probably not the meaning the UCC had in mind when it chose the motto in the first place. Its meaning is found, I believe, perhaps surprisingly given the way the world has changed since 1957, in the Constitution of the UCC itself. There we read: "The United Church of Christ acknowledges as its sole Head, Jesus Christ, Son of God and Savior. It acknowledges as kindred in Christ all who share this confession." There are in this statement, I think, ways of understanding Christian unity that salvage some meaning for our motto and, more importantly, that give some reality to Jesus’ prayer for unity among His followers. Let’s take a closer look.

Our Constitution confesses that only Jesus Christ is the head of the church. We recognize no earthly person or institution as our head but only the Lord Jesus Christ. In fact, this is a confession that we share with, as far as I know, all other Christians. To cite only the most obvious example, we usually think of the Pope as the head of the Roman Catholic Church. Actually, however, in Roman Catholic doctrine Christ is the head of the church. The Pope is just His "vicar" on earth, i.e., one appointed to serve in His stead and on His behalf. So, at a very high level of generality at least, the Catholics and we confess the same Head for our churches, namely Jesus Christ. As far as I know, every other Christian church confesses the same thing. At least in theory, at this high level of abstraction, there is unity among the Christian churches. At this level, we are all one.

The problem is that we are one at such an abstract level that in practice that unity doesn’t seem to mean much. Come down just one level of abstraction on the status of the Pope, for example, and immediately you’ve got not unity but vociferous disagreement. So what are we to say? Well, recall what the UCC Constitution that I just quoted says: "We recognize as kindred in Christ all who share this confession." What does that mean? The key word, I think, is "kindred." Kindred means family. In other words, our Constitution says that we are family with everyone who recognizes the ultimate sovereignty of the Lord Jesus Christ. Since, in theory at least, that’s all other Christians, we are saying that we recognize all other Christians as family.

I find that a helpful image. Although some members of the Christian family insist on defining family very narrowly, it is actually a very broad and fluid term. For example, I have relatives, members of my family in the broadest sense, whom I haven’t seen in years, decades even. There are others I’ve seen but don’t much like; and there certainly are those with whom I disagree on any number of things. Yet they are all family. They are all kin. They are all in some important sense mine, and I am theirs. We somehow belong together despite our separation and our differences.

That is how I am coming to understand Christian unity and diversity. Because we all acknowledge Jesus Christ as our Head, we are all family. At some deep level we belong together despite our separation and our differences. That doesn’t mean we like each other. It doesn’t even mean that we know each other. I mean, how much do most of you really know about Russian Orthodoxy? How much do I know about Pentecostalism or the Holiness tradition? Not much. I don’t even know much about the Church of the Brethren even though my fiancée serves a joint UCC/Church of the Brethren church. (She told me I could tell you she doesn’t know much about it yet either.) Still, we’re family. We belong to them and they to us. We often disagree. Sometimes we don’t like each other much; but at a deep level, like it or not, we are all one.

OK; but just what does that mean for our life together? It means, I think, that we strive to live together in disunity. That disunity is our reality, and I think it is underrated. There are so many Christian traditions within the Christian tradition that there is virtually something for everybody; and I would not change that even if I could. I want, however, to suggest a model of how we can live together in diversity that I don’t think has received much consideration in the ecumenical movement.

That model is the UCC itself. The UCC is a group of local churches each of which is fully autonomous. We so value our autonomy that our Constitution has a provision that basically says: Local church autonomy is our most sacred of sacred cows, and thou shalt not even think about meddling with in on pain of eternal damnation! Actually what it says is that each local church is free to determine its own structure, to formulate its own covenants and confessions of faith, and in general to run all its own affairs as it sees fit. We are held together not by institutional controls or mandatory doctrines of the faith but by covenant alone. The UCC Constitution provides that "the various expressions of the church relate to each other in a covenantal manner." That means that we are to listen to each other and consider each other, to honor and respect each other in all that we do even, or especially, when we disagree without being bound by the decisions of any other part of the church.

Imagine what the larger Christian church would look like if the denominations and other divisions within the body of Christ related to each other that way? Imagine what this church would look like if we all related to each other that way? We could all live together in covenantal disunity. The only claim anyone would have to drop is the claim to the exclusive possession of God’s truth. If we could do that, we could give greater reality to Christ’s prayer that we may all be one. Amen.