Gettysburg Seminary Sermon
March 18, 2011

Grace and peace to you in the name of our Lord, Jesus Christ!  And greetings on behalf of the Faith and Order Commission of the National Council of Churches.   

Faith and Order is not only a commission of the NCC, but also a global movement aimed at calling the churches to the goal of visible unity – not uniformity, but a communion in which Christians can break bread together and do mission together, while confessing our shared faith in the gracious, triune God.  There are Faith and Order commissions in councils around the world, most notably in the World Council of Churches, and there have been five world conferences on Faith and Order that I urge you to study during these years in seminary.  Reading the reports of these conferences can, at times, seem like eating shredded wheat without the milk – but worth the effort! 

I want to start with two quotations from these world conferences that, for me, express the heart of the vision that drives our work.   

The first comes from the great theologian and Anglican archbishop, William Temple, at the conference in Edinburgh in 1937: “The unity of the church of God is a perpetual fact; our task is not to create it but to exhibit it … [For] we could not seek union if we did not already possess unity.  Those who have nothing in common do not deplore their estrangement.  It is because we are one in allegiance to one Lord that we seek and hope for the way of manifesting that unity in our witness to him before the world.”  Our churches often seem to think that if they agree with one another, then they might be united; but how we get that from scripture is beyond me.  Paul doesn’t say, “If the head and the eye are in agreement, then they can be part of the body”!  Rather, because we are related like the parts of a body, we cannot say to one another, “I have no need of you.” As the Message from the WCC’s first assembly puts it, “Christ has made us his own, and he is not divided.”  Our task is to become what we are – the one body of Christ – by addressing those human divisions that obscure God’s gift of reconciliation. 

Of course, there are real differences among us, and dealing with them is hard work, as this commission knows very well.  But we stay at the table because we know that, at the most fundamental level, we belong to one another, thanks to what God has done in Christ.  To believe that unity is dependent on our agreement is, to use language familiar in these halls, works righteousness.   

Now, I don’t pretend this is easy.  All of us probably wish that God would be a bit more discriminating – but there it is, those other jerks are loved as well!  Somehow our obedience must include them.  We are related to one another by blood, not ours, but his.  And if we actually lived that way, what a witness it would make to a world fragmented by ideology and greed!  

That leads me to my second question, this one also from an Anglican archbishop, Desmond Tutu, at the Faith & Order conference in Santiago de Compostela, Spain in 1993.  In South Africa, said Bishop Tutu, we grew tired of the false alternative unity or justice, because we knew that “apartheid is too strong for a divided church.”   

You see his point.  The church participates in God’s mission of justice and peace not just by what we say or by what we do, but by what we are, by the way we live with one another.  Division obviously dissipates the church’s energy and resources.   But more than that, it undermines the very witness we are called to make.  Nietzsche once said that he could believe in their Redeemer if only Christ’s followers would look more redeemed. In the same way, Christians might be a powerful witness for reconciliation in the Middle East - or Sri Lanka or the United States - if only Christ’s followers there would look more reconciled.  Apartheid (racism, endemic violence, massive poverty) are too strong for a divided church.  All of this, by the way, was said very powerfully in this country by a former colleague of our ours in Faith and Order, the Presbyterian theologian, Letty Russell.  Faith and Order, I can hear her say, is not some sort of academic game. It is calling the church to be the church, for the sake of the world God so loves. 

There are numerous places in the Bible where we find basis for what I’ve been saying, but Ephesians 2 is high on the list.  The author (let’s call him Paul) has a favorite technique:  He recalls the past in order to help the readers feel the amazing privilege that is now theirs through faith in Christ, which itself is a gift.  The first ten verses are truly Good News!  You were once in bondage.  No, that’s not strong enough.  Once you were dead through your sins because your allegiance was to the things of this world!  But now you have been made alive with Christ, your offenses against God cancelled! But don’t boast about it, because this is entirely the work of God. 

It is the second part of the chapter, however, that names even more particularly our ecumenical vocation, our ecumenical identity.  Just as once we were in bondage but now are free, just as once we were dead but now are made alive, so once we were separated but now are made a single people.  Hear him saying it directly to us:  You, Gentiles, were once strangers to God’s promises made to Israel, and without hope.  But now even you (not only you or especially you, but even you) have been made part of this astonishing new community, this holy temple, this spiritual dwelling that God has fashioned!  Paul, you see, couldn’t conceive of a church that is only Jewish or only Gentile.  The whole point is that, thanks to Christ, the dividing wall of hostility is down, and we are one body made up of those whom the world calls enemies.  The focus here isn’t on personal blessedness in another world, but on incorporation into a blessed community that shows to this world God’s power to reconcile – blacks and whites, Iraqis and Americans (you fill in the blank).   And this isn’t just something we strive for, it is God’s gift, the very definition of what we are as church. 

You see how the two parts of the chapter fit together.  As humans, we long for acceptance, and so we seek identity by surrounding ourselves with people of “our kind,” by building walls to protect our boundaried sense of who we are.  But it is vanity.  It is idolatry.  It is living by the flesh.  The wall is down!  You are free not to fear those who are different.  The wall is down!  You are free to live by trust rather than suspicion.  The wall is down!  You are free to be no longer strangers with persons you think are strange. All things, says Paul in the first chapter of Ephesians, will be united (reconciled) in Christ, but we have heard the invitation to participate in such unity now. 

Earlier I quoted from two Anglicans, so it might be good to end by quoting a Lutheran.  Edmund Schlink was one of the great Faith and Order theologians on whose shoulders we stand.  At the third world conference on Faith and Order in 1952, Professor Schlink told the delegates, “We cannot declare again and again our unity in Christ and at the same time remain divided… Without effective progress toward reunion, the repeated proclamations of unity become untrustworthy before other Christians and before the world.  Indeed, if we do not manifest the unity which has been given to us, this act of God’s grace will become an accusation.  The blessed knowledge of unity itself will then place us under God’s judgment.”

That is the urgent calling we feel as the National Council of Churches’ Faith and Order Commission – to make visible, tangible, here and now, the unity that has been given us for the sake of the world.  We invite you to be partners with us in this sacred work.  And we give thanks for the opportunity to worship with you in this beautiful place. 

Michael Kinnamon
General Secretary
National Council of Churches