He Prayed for the Unity of the Church

This is an excerpt from a sermon preached May 8 by
Randy Riggs
Pastor
First Presbyterian Church
Lancaster, PA

We claim to be brothers and sisters in Christ, but we continue to demonize those who do not agree with our own point of view.

In John 17:11 Jesus prays for the unity of his followers: That they may be one even as he is one with the Father.  Unity in the midst of our diversity is the prayer that Jesus still prays for his church today. 

I cannot remember a period in recent history when we were more divided as a nation or as a church.   I lived through the Viet Nam era and the protests that took place in that period of history, but what we are going through today seems even more vicious. It used to be hard enough to believe in the unity of the church’s witness when it was just Roman Catholic and Protestant.  Today we seem more fractured than ever with political conservatives and liberals squaring off one another and baptizing their political points of view with their own interpretation of the faith.  The recent eruptions in Congress around the end of life issues raised by the death of Terri Schaivo and the appearance of the Majority Leader of the Senate on a program sponsored by the Christian Right have made it all the more difficult to find common ground on which we stand. 

Our own denomination is not without its divisiveness.  We claim to be brothers and sisters in Christ, but we continue to demonize those who do not agree with our own point of view.  In spite of it all, Jesus prays that we might be one even as he is one with the Father. 

...since the beginning of the year the Session of this church has been involved in a continuing dialogue with other brothers and sisters in our denomination who are close to pulling out of the church...

You may have been unaware of this, but since the beginning of the year the Session of this church has been involved in a continuing dialogue with other brothers and sisters in our denomination who are close to pulling out of the church because they are upset about the way the church has dealt with some fairly major issues which have come before us as a church in the last 25 years.  We have been struggling to hold together this denomination which is based on unity in the midst of our diversity. 

In that dialogue there are those who would label First Presbyterian Church as a “liberal church,” and they would view us as an enemy to their cause, but you can be proud that your Session has not taken an “us versus them” stand.  However, we have insisted that we are accountable to each other.

At one Presbytery meeting one of my colleagues, who is both politically and theologically much more conservative than I am, took the microphone and suggested that we get together, just the two of us, to make a recommendation to solve a dispute the Presbytery was having because we represented opposing points of view.  On the floor of the Presbytery he defined my point of view as “liberal” which is a kind of name calling and it is not usually done in public debate.  In truth, in the Presbytery from which I came nine years ago, I was considered pretty much middle of the road, but here in Donegal Presbytery I seemed to have moved to the left without changing many of my positions. 

The Presbytery, in its wisdom, decided not to let its future rest in the hands of two men who were pretty clearly at opposite ends of the issue before us, so they appointed a task force.  I was given the chance to serve on that task force along with my antagonist on the floor of Presbytery, but it was our Session for whom I was speaking.  So I declined and suggested that our Clerk of our Session represent us on that task force along with the man who had challenged me. 

If the truth be told, in my own mind I was grateful I did not have to deal with someone whose politics and theology I did not find uplifting.  My antagonist probably felt the same way about me, and we might have avoided each other had it not been for the Clerk of Session here at First Presbyterian Church.  The clerk called me one day and said, “I think you need to give the pastor of _______ Church a call.”   

My antagonist asked me to forgive him as the very first item of our discussion.

Now I have great respect for our clerk of Session.  When he tells me I need to do something, I listen carefully because he has served us well as a church.  His advice is always appreciated.  So with great reluctance and a sense of duty, I picked up the phone, which felt like it weighed at least 50 pounds, and I called my colleague and suggested we meet before the March meeting of Presbytery to address our differences. 

All the way to the restaurant where we had agreed to meet I was kicking myself wondering why I had agreed to this meeting.  “Why did you let yourself get talked into this?” I kept asking.  However, when I got there, I was taken by surprise.  My antagonist asked me to forgive him as the very first item of our discussion.  It seems he was filled with guilt because he had not called me as he promised he would, and that, in fact, he had for years defined me as an enemy because I held a different point of view.  Instead of seeing me as a brother in Christ with a different point of view than his, he had defined me as the enemy and dismissed me, and for this he asked my forgiveness. 

We spent the next hour and a half talking about a lot of different things: our families, our calls to the ministry, the places where we had served.  We also talked about where we were the same and where we differed on some pretty significant issues, and in the end we agreed that we would probably never share the same point of view on some fairly major issues before the church.  However, we also agreed that this should not keep us from honoring each other’s faith and working together on the things we could agree upon.  And we agreed that this should not keep us from acknowledging the fact that though we held different points of view, we were still brothers in Christ. 

As we went forward, my colleague turned and asked if he could anoint me...

The story does not end there.  In the parking lot we prayed together, and we agreed to sit next to each other at the meeting.  Now this man and I never sit next to each other.  Until that day we assumed we really didn’t have much to say to one another, so to sit next to each other would simply make a long meeting longer.  However, that day we did, and wouldn’t you know it was a day when we were asked to renew our baptismal vows and be anointed for healing of any divisions in the body of Christ. 

As we went forward, my colleague turned and asked if he could anoint me, and I responded, “Sure, if I can return the same for you.”  So he anointed me, and I anointed him, and we prayed to honor each other as brothers in Christ in spite of our differences of opinion on the issues.  Then we were to reach into a bowl of water and pull out a little glass bead, the kind they use in flower arrangements, as a reminder of our baptism.  I gave mine to him, and he gave his to me.  When you hold it on your hand, it looks like a bead of water, and for the remainder of Lent until this day I have used it as a reminder of our common baptism, and as a reminder to pray for him.  Likewise, he has used his as a reminder to pray for me. 

My colleague and I will probably never see eye to eye on certain controversial issues before the church, but we can fulfill the prayer of Jesus in the way we treat each other around those issues.  We can be one in faith, one in hope and one in love even though we remain different in points of view and in doing so we fulfill the prayer of Jesus—that all may be one.