church unity

One Cross for a Divided Church: Sermon Preached on 21st July 2024 (Eighth Sunday After Trinity)

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A classic rood screen, late Victorian, with Mary and St John both facing the nave along with Christ, St Mary to the left.

Preached at Holy Cross, Seend and St Peter’s, Poulshot

Ephesians 2. 11-22; Mark 6. 30-34, 53-56

“Christ … that he might reconcile both unto God in one body by the cross…came and preached peace to you which were afar off, and to them that were nigh.”

The Church should be like one big family. We all agree with that, don’t we? It sounds very sweet and wholesome—until we remember what our own families are actually like in practice, and until we remember how we ourselves sometimes behave within them. As we all know, members of families don’t always see eye-to-eye on everything and they can sometimes fall out and start rowing. Don’t get me wrong—families are great. I wouldn’t be without mine. But they aren’t perfect.

A high modernist rood screen. St Mary and St John are squat and disordered, Mary buried deep in a headscarf; both are facing the congregation. Christ, in contrast, is lithe and sinewy, his contorted facial features hidden in shadow.
The rood in the Old Catholic Augustinerkirche in Zürich. This was executed by local sculptor Franz Fischer during the church’s reordering of 1958-9. © Gerry Lynch, 11 July 2019.

This morning’s epistle reading, from Ephesians, is written to a church that is clearly, like many families, struggling with divisions. There are two factions here—one Jewish, and very clear that followers of Jesus Christ should, like good Jews, be circumcised; the other faction come from Gentile backgrounds, and cannot see why circumcision should be required for those of true faith in Christ. In fact, although this has traditionally been thought of as a letter to the Church in the city of Ephesus, no specific city or congregation is named in the text, and it may have been a more general letter to churches at a time when the number of Christians from non-Jewish backgrounds was growing rapidly, and tensions were rising.

From our perspective, circumcision seems like an arcane reason for a church to be divided, but pause and think about it for a moment, and it soon becomes obvious that it is rooted in issues that still cause deep divisions today’s Church – one is identity; the other is whether Christians are called to engage with the world to transform it, or instead to maintain our purity as a people set apart from the world. These are precisely the reasons why we’ve ended up so divided over women’s ordination, or same-sex marriage. Most of us are also terribly sure that only our side of those debates really understands what Jesus Christ taught us.

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I Would Do Anything for Church Unity But I Won’t Do That: Sermon Preached on 22nd January 2023 (Third Sunday After Epiphany)

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Three men standing in front of a large banner saying "Homosexuality is Sin" with five other men behind them, two of them holding smaller placards saying "the precious blood of life" and "repent ye, and believe the gospel." In a very high ratio landscape format.

Preached at St John’s Devizes

1 Corinthians 1.10-18; Matthew 4.12-23

“…each of you says, “I belong to Paul,” or “I belong to Apollos,” or “I belong to Cephas,” …  Has Christ been divided? Was Paul crucified for you?”

The divisions between the churches are often given as a reason why people reject Christianity. Therefore it’s a pity that we Christians can’t put aside our divisions and reunite the whole universal Church into one body, so we can witness far more effectively for Christ.

Many a sermon during Church Unity Week has begun with a statement like this. I happen, however, to forcefully disagree with it. (That wasn’t the bland and pious exhortation to ecumenism you were expecting twenty seconds ago, was it?)

Institutional unity wouldn’t mean we all agreed on everything anyway. I mean, as you’ll have noticed in the news this week, even in the Church of England we don’t actually agree on everything. The Roman Catholic Church the one body of any size that regards itself as being the only true and universal Church, is as internally divided as any other. Some of you may have seen in The Spectator a few weeks ago the deathbed letter of George Pell, the former Primate of Australia and leading Roman Catholic conservative in the English-speaking world, excoriating Pope Francis and his papacy. Given how deep the divisions within existing churches are, I wonder why so many of us seem to think reuniting into one big worldwide church institution is an ideal we should all aspire to. We’d still be divided within it.

Three men standing in front of a large banner saying "Homosexuality is Sin" with five other men behind them, two of them holding smaller placards saying "the precious blood of life" and "repent ye, and believe the gospel." A large warehouse-style building, brick built and old, is behind.
Some protestors perhaps not so keen on rapid institutional reunion with the Church of England, © Gerry Lynch, 28 August 2010.

There’s a negative way of thinking about the persistence of divisions among Christians, which is that they reflect our sinfulness, our pride, our inability to humble ourselves to truly discerning the mind of Christ.

I prefer to look at it another way. I prefer to start by noting that unity in Christ cannot mean uniformity, for that is not the unity that Christ modelled with His disciples when He walked the Earth. In the Gospels, Christ gives the disciples the freedom to argue and fall out with one another, and to misinterpret what He had to say. A generation later, Peter and Paul fought like rats in a sack. The Church of their heyday was as divided over issues like circumcision and whether it was morally acceptable to eat food sacrificed to idols, as we are about same-sex marriage. Some of the issues that tormented the early Church seem obscure to us now, but if one takes time to understand their context they are about the same things that are most divisive in the Church today – identity, and the extent to which Christians should model a distinct way of life from the rest of society, or instead integrate within it to help it become more like the Kingdom of God.

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