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.
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.