November 21, 2004                            Susan J. Barnes

Luke 23                         St. Matthew’s Church, Austin

Next Sunday Advent begins—the season when we prepare for the coming of the Christ Child—the season of new beginnings. In today’s gospel we face the tragic end of Jesus’ earthly journey. Only a week after Jesus had ridden into Jerusalem in triumph—as the hymn Ride On reminds us--Jesus was brutally executed by a conspiracy of Jewish and Roman authorities. And I find myself asking—as the disciples must have—WHY?

The truth is that Jesus died because he had lived out a new vision of society. Jesus’ ministry had reached far beyond the Jewish establishment. He had welcomed and healed Samaritans, lepers, women, and others that were excluded as ritually unclean. Jesus treated everyone he met equally. Every one was a child of God.

But that ideal was very messy in practice. It was controversial. It was threatening. It shook the bedrock of the Jewish social order and the stability of Roman rule in Palestine. That’s why the Jewish and Roman authorities killed him.

Jesus didn’t live to see his vision of God’s kingdom: a fellowship of all sorts and conditions of people united in faith at the table of the eucharist.

But the Risen Christ empowered the disciples—particularly Paul--to carry out that vision. Paul, who never walked with the living Jesus, received Jesus’ Kingdom vision as a blinding revelation shortly after Jesus’ Resurrection. Paul was transformed by the Risen Christ, and he spent the rest of his life founding and nurturing communities based on that vision all around the Eastern Mediterranean.

How did it work? It was messy! Slave and free, Jew and Greek, men and women meeting in private houses—they were surely the most diverse communities of Christians that ever existed. People who normally would not even see each other suddenly were called by God to break bread and to minister together in the name of Christ. Meeting together, they had violent clashes of culture, they had power struggles, factions, jealousies, quarrels. After all, they were people. Paul’s letters—particularly to the Corinthians--give us a glimpse of the issues that arose and his response to them.

But, then, even the apostles disagreed. The Acts of the Apostles includes the conflict over the mission to the Gentiles—just for starters. Peter and Paul didn’t agree at all—they weren’t in harmony until they came to sing with Mary in the 1960s. In short, there never was a golden age of Christian unity; there never was a moment when all the followers of Jesus held hands and agreed on everything.

They did not always agree. But disagreement didn’t always mean division. At times they transcended those disagreements and they came together to share in the mission of the church, united in their purpose, united in the Eucharistic meal. To the quarreling Corinthians, Paul wrote (I Cor10: 16-17): "The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a sharing in the blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not a sharing in the body of Christ? Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body for we all partake of the one bread."

The Christian community in Corinth was a mess. In the midst of it, the Holy Spirit gave Paul the vision that he needed to bring them together. Their very weakness was also their strength. The great potential of the church lay in its God-given diversity: "There are a variety of gifts, but the same Spirit," he wrote (1 Cor. 12:4). God called the members of the early church together--as God calls us--because our varieties complement each other. If we surrender our individual agendas to God’s purpose, we can become a holy unity, the body of Christ, empowered for mission. In the poetic passage from I Corinthians13—the hymn to love that we cherish--Paul celebrated the supreme unifying power of Love. As you know, the Greek word for this love is not eros--romantic love--but agape, the love grounded in compassion, the love that puts the other first. This vision was the truth in the first century and it is the truth today: when the church’s members are bound and knit together in self-sacrificial love, she can transcend divisions to live in the Spirit and in mission.

We live, as we all know, in painfully divided times: there are divisions in our own society—red states, blue states--and in the Episcopal church. The Episcopal church is not an entirely independent entity We are part of the Anglican Communion, a world-wide union of churches linked by bonds of affection and by their common roots in the church of England, with the Archbishop of Canterbury as its head.

The election of Gene Robinson as Bishop of New Hampshire eighteen months ago brought the Episcopal Church into conflict with member churches of the Anglican Communion and created painful division. In response the Archbishop of Canterbury created a commission charged to study "the ways in which communion and understanding could be enhanced where serious differences threatened the life of a diverse worldwide church". That commission’s work culminated in The Windsor Report, issued a month ago.

Bishop Wimberly called the clergy of the diocese together on Monday to share his favorable response to the report. Merrill and I have studied the report and we commend it to you as a model of sober, reasoned reflection, grounded in the authority of scripture and infused with compassion. It is an affirmation of the Pauline spirit of agape and a challenge to revive that spirit among us.

As the authors wrote: The "Report is not a judgment. It is part of a process. It is part of a pilgrimage towards healing and reconciliation". According to the report, the hope is that "the Anglican Communion can continue our work together to minister to a suffering and bewildered world…confronted by poverty, violence, HIV/AIDS, famine and injustice".

The Report urges us to engage in Bible study and discussion, to listen to each other in respect and love. In the coming weeks Merrill and I will offer an overview of the report and organize discussions for those who are interested in being part of the process.

The truth is that we live in a time of division in the church. The truth is that the apostles did, too. The good news is that for 2,000 years God has empowered the church in its frailty, in its divisions. God has empowered the Body of Christ to come together through the power of the Holy Spirit to bring comfort and healing to a broken world.

    In the best of times, in the worst of times, Jesus calls us to reach out to one another in love. That is the heart of Christianity. That is the way that—even as we struggle with the messiness of our lives on earth—we can glimpse God’s kingdom among us.