That We May All Be One, Differently - A Kenotic Ecclesiology for the 21st century

In Jesus' final prayer at the Last Supper with his disciples, as recorded in John's Gospel, he offers the prayer "That they may all be one", which is the motto of the United Church of Christ.

What does this prayer for unity mean to you?

As Yoda might say, "To this sermon you may also listen"

“That We May All Be One, Differently”

Sermon for May 17, 2015

© 2015 Rev. David J. Huber

Easter 7 Year B, Scripture: John 17:6-19 and Acts 1:15-17, 21-26

So Jesus prays. He’s had this long after- or during-dinner discourse, speaking for pages and pages to his disciples. Finally, he’s done. He has been giving his disciples their final directions. It’s their last night together. He’ll be crucified the next day, so he gives his final instructions about what they are to do as disciples. Though he talks for a long time, everything keeps coming down to the command to love one another and to love neighbor. It’s all about love.

How to act, how to be, how to live in the world, and to do so through love. He’s not telling them theological truths, or scriptural truths, or things to believe. He’s showing them, and telling them, to remember “My ministry is about doing, especially doing in service to others.”

So he said all of those words and he’s done. But before he finishes, he offers a prayer. Before leaving that upper room together and fulfilling what needs to be done. It’s time for Jesus to leave and do his thing. It’s time to leave and go let Judas do his thing. This is an important night. A lot of things that have to get done on this evening. This is a fulcrum point. The cosmos hangs in the balance. Balancing on the question, “Is Jesus going to do what he is supposed to do? Will Judas do what he is supposed to do? Will the Romans? Will the Chief Priests? Will the mob of people? So that God can fulfil the divine plan.

All these important things about to happen. Things that need to happen. Everything has been set in motion. Dinner is done. Jesus is ready to go. But first, Jesus takes time to pray. Tonight is so important, time is so urgent, that we must stop, first, and spend time in prayer.

Martin Luther, the reformer of the 1500s, once said that the busier his day, the more stuff on his calendar, the more time he must take to spend in prayer.

Sounds paradoxical, but that’s what he said.

That’s a message I know I need to hear. So I’m preaching to me. Though I imagine all of us fall into this, not spending enough time in prayer. The busier the day, the more time ought to be spent in prayer. But I find, at least in my own life, that on a busy day it is the prayer time to get written off the schedule to free up time for something else. I’m terrible at it. I work on it, but wow. It can be so hard to carve out that time when it seems there are all these other things that have to be done.

But what I have found, on those occasional days that I make it work (and one would think that I would have learned this by now, but every time I do it, it feels like a brand new learning), I find that Luther was right. The busier the day, the more time needed to spend in prayer. Spending that extra time in prayer makes me more focused, more efficient, and as one might expect, I feel more connected to God.

A connection that reminds me that God has my back. Not just as a pastor, but as a person. It reminds me that God is with me in this journey. A connection makes me more aware that God is with me, and that what I am doing is not just about me and it’s not all up to me. We are doing God’s work. And God works through me better when I spend that time in prayer. It’s a self-emptying, to spend that time in prayer. To make room for God by letting go of my own will and letting God’s will be in control. Not because I get better so much, or work better or harder, but because I’m more willing to open a space in my head and heart that our divine creator needs to work through me, through all of us. It frees up that space in heads and hearts so that Allah, God, Yahweh, the Great Shalom, the Great Spirit, the Great Architect, whatever name we use to name or suggest the divine, can do the work. It’s not about me, or up to me and my own power, it’s about God.

So on this most important of nights, when Jesus has something very important to accomplish, something that has to be done, before he heads out to do what must be done, Jesus stops to pray. He does so in the room here where they have eaten, and he will also stop to pray in the garden. He prays for his disciples, he entrusts them to God’s care, and he prays that line that I mentioned earlier, “That they may all be one.” Our translation doesn’t use the word “all”, but that’s the phrase the way I know it. “That they may all be one.”   

In a strange way, that prayer was answered that night: Judas did what he was supposed to do. The Romans did. The Chief Priests did. The mob, the disciples, all following this plan. Everyone did what they were supposed to do that night, working together to fulfil the plan.

Now, that might be me taking a bit of a stretch, but there is something there of working together. And there is the truth that this all had to happen, because there is no resurrection without crucifixion, no Easter withtou Good Friday. There is no crucifixion, no Good Friday, without betrayal and trial and the will of the people.

“That they may all be one,” he prays.

If that phrase sounds familiar to you, good! It means you’ve paid attention in the past when scripture has been read, or that those who have had experience in the United Church of Christ might have recognized it. Because it is the motto of the UCC! Or even if you just read your bulletin cover this morning, which has the logo of the United Church of Christ, with the words “That they may all be one.” It is a wonderful phrase, a wonderful vision. It is the motto not just of us, but of many of the churches/denominations/unions that call themselves “United and Uniting Churches”. Which is not a denomination, but a thing to call a number of churches around the world that strive toward unity and union, that are willing to work ecumenically, all on behalf of following God’s vision.

If you want to do more, you can do a google search on “United and Uniting Churches” for more information. The World Council of Churches’ webpage is great, and the wikipedia entry is okay, though short.

From the World Council of Churches’ page (and this is more lecture than sermonic, but bear with me, please, because it is interesting to see how this vision “That they may all be one” has been lived out by the church. This started in the early 1800s in the United States and in Europe). From the WCC page:

United churches have taken Christ's prayer that Christians may be one (John 17:21) as an imperative for concrete action towards unity*. They have adopted a “kenotic ecclesiology”** whereby divided churches from different confessions are prepared to “die” to their former identities in order to "rise" together into a new, united church.

Church unions often make an important theological and social witness. For example, the unions in the southern hemisphere [where so many churches were begun by missionaries from America, Canada, and Europe] have been an important vehicle for the indigenization of the church as several mission-founded churches, funded largely from abroad, have yielded to a single, autonomous locally led and funded church. A different witness was made by the Uniting Presbyterian Church in Southern Africa (1999) as it brought together a predominantly white church and a black church in the context of immediate post-apartheid South Africa.

* Not necessarily structural unity, but unity in mission.

** We love to use strange words in the church, and then wonder why no one understands us. “Kenotic ecclesiology”, it rolls right off the tongue, doesn’t it? Use that some time this week. When you’re standing in line at the grocery store, ask the person next to you, “How’s your church about kenotic ecclesiology?” What it means is self-emptying. Kenotic comes from kenosis, which is a Greek word meaning self-emptying. What I was talking about when I was talking about prayer earlier. Emptying one’s own will to make room for God’s will. It is a word we apply to Jesus when he is in the garden and asks God to “take this cup away from me”, ending with the words, “But, not my will, but your will be done.” The incarnation itself is also a form of kenosis. God self-emptied in order to become a human, and be one of us in the person of Jesus. Ecclesiology is just a word meaning “the way a church is structured”, so a kenotic ecclesiology is a church structure that is built on self-emptying, a structure with a built-in humility. The humbleness of knowing that we don’t have all the truth, and cannot have all the truth.

“That they may all be one.”

There are about 50 of us around the world, including the United Church of Christ (ours), plus the United Church of Canada, the United Church of Christ of Japan, the United Church of Christ of the Philippines, Uniting Church in Australia, Church of North India, Church of South India, the Protestant Church in the Netherlands, and the Evangelical Church in Germany. Interesting fact, a number of German immigrants to the U.S. were part of the Evangelical Church in Germany, and created churches here - especially in the midwest - which then merged with the German Reformed Church here in 1947, and then they came together with the Congregational Christian Church (itself a merger) to form the United Church of Christ in 1957. So we are a merger of mergers of mergers.

Anyway, that’s maybe more lectury than you expected today, but it does show that we, along with many others, are very serious about what Jesus prayed here: That they may all be one. But in a way that respects our differences. Jesus did not pray for us all to be homogenous, or to be conformists, that we may all become exactly alike. He knew the disciples had different gifts, skills, personalities, hopes, dreams. So he wasn’t praying that they would become an indistinguishable mass but that they would work together. That they’d be able to self-empty enough to work for the vision of the realm of God. Not to be exactly alike in how they do it, but to be of one mind and spirit to the goal.

And so these united and uniting churches tend to be localized, within a single country or a region. The intent is not to form a worldwide denomination, but to be an affiliation of local church groups, or churches covenanted together to work toward this vision. Even though we worship in different ways, use different languages, are structured in different ways, and have varying ideas about what it means to be a minister or a lay person. Different ideas about HOW to do things, but united in the idea that Jesus wants us to love the world, to love all people, and that we are working toward the realm of God following Jesus’ command to love one another, feed the hungry, take care of the poor, shelter the homeless, to lift up those on the bottom, bring in those who are on the outside, and so on.

It is a sign that whatever our differences, we share the same Spirit of God. Whether we recognize that or not… well, that’s a different story. And there are plenty of churches that have no interest in being united or uniting, or of us “being one”, unless the rest conform to them. Unfortunate and sad, in my opinion. Does a disservice to the church, and a huge disservice to Jesus’ message of reconciliation, love, unity as a people…

There is a self-emptying to admit to not having all the truth. However we have organized ourselves, we know that we cannot contain all of God’s truth, so let us work together. Let us be unified in our mission and respect one another while we do it. That is not to say that we are the only ones who do this, or have this generosity of spirit, or are better than the churches that don’t do it. We have our failures as well and our blind spots. But this prayer, this vision, that they may all be one is in our bones. It is in our DNA as a church. The willingness and hope that we may all be one. That is a vision that would affect the entire world. Not to be unified under one denomination, or even one government, but to realize that we are all one people. We are all God’s people. It is a prayer that we may be united and bound to one another as Jesus’ church. As this congregation of Plymouth, and as the worldwide Church. To be bound to our neighbors, wherever the live, whoever they are, whatever their faith or lack of faith, whatever their position or station in life, that they may all be one.

So let us as a church and as individuals in our daily lives keep that prayer in front of us. Keep that prayer in front of us as we strive to do God’s will. And the busier we are, or the more anxious the day, let us pray it all the more. Be more ready to offer that prayer, to be in prayer. The more we can pray it, then the world become a more loving world because of it.

May it be so. May it be so.

Amen.