Unity, honesty, integrity and relationship - a sermon

 

Unity is a word which – in church circles at least – should come with a health warning. It’s a word that has been weaponised, that has been used to silence the oppressed, that has been rather grandly – rather grandiosely, perhaps – been adopted by many bishops as the centre piece of their ministry. Unity has been wheeled out as the ultimate answer to disagreement – as a smokescreen, something which, when all is said and done, trumps truth, trumps honesty in disagreement, trumps listening to the marginalised and those who face the systematic oppression of church and society. Because unity is the will of God for God’s church – that they may all be one, ut unum sint, as St John’s Gospel says.

 

The idea of – and the desire for – unity is something which we must surely draw our attention to this Sunday morning, for at least two reasons. We find ourselves, today, slap bang in the middle of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, a week that comes around year by year, and yet a week that reminds us of our disunity more, perhaps, than our unity. For on the Sunday of Christian Unity week, the great majority of the churches of God cannot meet together around the same altar. We cannot share in the ministerial priesthood. We cannot – perhaps we will not – see a way through in so many of the disagreements that divide us. We remain a fractured body of Christ, and in being fractured, we fail to live as the one body that Christ calls us to be.

 

Unity, too, has been on lips of many who have commented on the Church of England finally – praise God – finally recognising that there is some good in same-sex relationships. For many, myself included, this decision did not go far enough, and I long for the day we can recognise these relationships as sacramental marriage. I long for the day when Piotr and I can get married in front of you all, and Daddy John can crack out the Beijan rum, the Ray and Nephew will be flowing, and Miss Anne show us her dance moves. Yet lurking behind so much of the discussion of this topic – for years and years – has been that word, unity, and its ultimate frailty, its precariousness. Unity is ours to break. We simply can’t do anything that might risk that.

 

For no sooner had an announcement been made – an announcement that respects conscience but which finally allows us to bless that which God has so abundantly shown to be good – we were immediately told that our fundamental unity was at stake. In a bewildering doublespeak, the Archbishop of Canterbury told us that he rejoiced that same sex couples could now be blessed, but that for the sake of ‘unity’ he would refuse to do so. There’s incoherence and vainglory there, certainly, but there is also a deep dishonesty – a willingness to accept the lie that you can do one thing and say another, a lie that has plagued humanity for millennia. Yet here – and in so many other discussions about unity in the church – we see that human lie dressed up in theological language. We see the sacrifice of truth on the altar of unity presented as a necessary evil, in order to somehow create unity.

 

But surely, that is the wrong way to see things, entirely. When Jesus prays to the Father for unity, he does not do so by invoking human ability to create or even enforce unity. He does so, instead, by demonstrating exactly what unity is – a gift from God the Father, a call that speaks to us about what it means to be human beings, what it means to be created in the image of God. Unity is what happens when we recognise that the church is in God’s hands, and not our own. Unity is what happens to us, not because of us. Unity is not a human invention. Unity is what might happen if we learnt to stop trying to create it. Unity is not a goal – it is a gift.

 

In today’s Epistle, we hear St Paul making just this point. The Corinthians have – it appears – been misbehaving again, and this time they have been dividing themselves up into groups who find their definition not in Jesus Christ but in human leaders. I belong to Paul. I belong to Apollos, I belong to Cephas. It’s Paul’s Christianity, it’s Apollos’s Christianity, it’s Cephas’s Christianity. I have unity in Paul; I have unity in Apollos; I have unity in Cephas. Indeed, one of the groups of Corinthians seems to have done what so many Christians are tempted to do even to this day – ‘I belong to Christ’, they say, with the implicit suggestion that all those other Christians don’t. And whilst they might say ‘I belong to Christ’, what they’re really saying is the opposite – ‘Christ belongs to me’. And none of this helps the Corinthians – or us, today – to ‘be united in the same mind and the same purpose’ whatsoever. Unity is gift, not possession.

 

And as Christians we are also called to unity within ourselves as individuals – a unity that is surely the most important building block of all. As Christ walks by the sea of Galilee, He calls each of his disciples by name to follow Him. The radical reality at the heart of the Gospel message is that each of us are called by name, each of us are bestowed with the dignity of the image of God, whether we recognise it in ourselves – or others. Our unity in Christ is not uniformity – none of us are exactly the same, none of us could ever be.

 

Our unity in Christ must surely start from the simple truth that the diversity we find in human life is itself a gift of God, and we cannot begin to build unity in community if we have not recognised and opened ourselves up to that unity within ourselves. Until we face ourselves in the mirror, until we are willing to truly learn about and seek to understand what it is that makes us the person that we are, then we cannot possibly join in with the dance of unity with others that Christ calls us to. Until we are willing to own – to embody – what we honestly believe to be true, then how can we possibly engage with others with integrity? Unity is not built on lies – about ourselves, or other people – however well intentioned. Unity is not built on oppression – of ourselves, or of other people – however necessary we convince ourselves it is.

 

Which is why the idea of unity at all costs simply cannot be the way of Christ – or, perhaps, that the thing we call unity which demands we cast everything aside, trample on the oppressed, refuse to hear the cries of those who are in anguish, cannot truly be what God calls unity. Unity is surely that which increases joy, which breaks the yoke of the burden, the bar across the shoulders, the rod of the oppressor – it is not something which is worn as a hated burden. Unity is not a simplistic sticking plaster on the open wound of division and anger and hate and warfare, build on a willingness to engage in half-truths and smokescreens. We must surely start to fully own the truth we believe to be true, even if we are wrong.

 

Unity not something that this world can ever hope to truly achieve, however much we might long for it, might pray for it. Unity is ultimately the drawing together of all people, all of creation, in its glorious diversity into the wideness of the embrace of Jesus Christ at the end of time. Real unity is not frail, is not precarious, is not ours to break, because it is of God. Unity is ours to recognise, to see revealed, and not to own.

 

Let us pray, then, for that unity, but let us not pretend that it belongs to us. Let us stop saying I belong to Paul, I belong to Apollos, I belong to Cephas. Let us stop, in fact, saying ‘I’ at all.

 

For there is one truth we can all – must all – agree on. ‘We’ belong – to Christ. We belong to Christ.

 

Amen.