John 17:20-23
Galatians 3:26-28
By: Rev. Tyler Connoley
It was the middle part of the twentieth century. Those who had survived the second Great War were still shocked by the kinds of atrocities humans could do to one another. We had seen the horrors of the Nazi death camps. We had seen the destruction that could be unleashed by our own military with the atomic bomb. McArthyism was on the horizon and freedom riders were just beginning to integrate the interstate bus lines in the South.
In St. Louis, the pastor of Pilgrim Congregational Church, the Rev. Truman Douglass, had started a Bible Study where he and other men spent their time studying Christian Unity. Rev. Douglass invited a friend of his, the Dean of Eden Seminary, Rev. Dr. S.D. Press.
Douglass was a Congregational Christian, Press a leader in the Evangelical and Reform Church, but in the parlor of Pilgrim Congregational, they began to see themselves simply as Christians committed to the unity of Christ’s body. In the midst of a society committed to division — hardening divisions between the races, growing divisions between generations, and deep distrust between denominations — they began to imagine a path toward greater Christian unity.
It was out of these Bible studies that Dr. Press and Rev. Douglass began to dream of the United Church of Christ. And it was because of their dedication and commitment to Christian unity that the denomination we know and love as the United Church […] of Christ was formed in 1957.
When leaders of this new denomination began to plan for the first General Synod of the UCC, they worked on a Constitution and Bylaws that would guide the Congregational Christian Churches and the Evangelical and Reform Church in their identity as a United Church. The leaders decided that there were certain things they could agree on, and other things they need not insist on. Each local church would be able to set its own rules for governance and membership, but we would unite as one body in our commitment to follow Christ.
The Constitution they hammered out included a Preamble that laid out the areas of theological agreement. The preamble is the clearest document we have of what might be called a UCC theology. It’s short, because we didn’t feel a need to agree on everything, but it is powerful in its vision of one body, united in Christ.
Foremost among the areas of theological agreement was this:
The United Church of Christ acknowledges as its sole head, Jesus Christ, Son of God and Savior. It acknowledges as kindred in Christ all who share in this confession.
In the middle of the twentieth century, we came together and said, “Everyone who acknowledges Christ as their head is our kindred.” If you were a Congregationalist pacifist, and I was an Evangelical military chaplain, we were kindred in Christ. If you had been baptized as a baby, confirmed at fourteen, and loved the High-Church liturgy of your German Reform church, and I had been baptized as an adult in my Christian Church where we took the Gospel as our only rule and didn’t like pomp and circumstance, we were still kindred in Christ.
The United Church […] of Christ was an experiment in Christian Unity. In the parlor of Pilgrim Congregational Church, the Rev. Truman Douglass and the Rev. Dr. S.D. Press had become convinced that we were moving toward a time when Christians could begin to lay aside the things that separated us, and would focus instead on the good of the whole world. They realized that although there were beliefs and practices that they each held dear, those beliefs and practices could — and in fact should — be secondary to Christ’s desire that we may all be one.
The United Church of Christ acknowledges as its sole head, Jesus Christ, Son of God and Savior. It acknowledges as kindred in Christ all who share in this confession.
This is why those pioneers in the UCC chose as our motto a simple, five-word phrase from the Gospel of John: “That they may all be one.”
The Gospel lesson for today is taken from a section of the Gospel of John, in which the author recounts Jesus’ last words before he is taken away to be tried in a kangaroo court, sentenced to death, and brutally tortured and killed by the powers of Church and State that hate his vision of God’s inclusive community. Jesus knows what is ahead. He knows his followers will be left without him for a season, and will likely be scattered.
So, in John, Chapters Thirteen through Sixteen, Jesus imparts the wisdom he thinks his followers will need.
“This is my commandment: That you love one another,” he says.
“They will know you are Christians by your love,” he continues.
He offers them the hope of knowing they will have God’s Spirit with them when Jesus is no longer with them in body. And he warns them, “Soon you will not see me. After that you will see me.”
Then, having imparted all the wisdom he thinks his disciples can bear for the moment, Jesus turns to God and prays on their behalf, saying, “I’m not praying only for them, but also for those who believe in me because of their word.”
That means his prayer is for you and me.
And what does he pray?
Jesus’ prayer for his followers — for the disciples, for all Christians who will follow them, for you and me — his prayer is this: “That they may all be one, Father, just as you and I are one.”
When we think of Rev. Truman Douglass, Dr. S.D. Press, and the early leaders of the UCC, we might be tempted to think their vision of a United Church was a pipe dream. They were imagining impossible things in that parlor at Pilgrim Church. How can we possibly believe that Christ’s body could ever be a united body? There are so many things we disagree on. Even in this room, we are so different from one another. Outside this room, there are thousands of Christian denominations all of whom disagree with one another in fundamental ways. How can we say that everyone who follows Christ is my kindred? How can we ever achieve unity in the body of Christ?
But if those dreams are too grandiose, then we must say that Jesus was too grandiose, because this is not our dream, but his dream. Our motto in the UCC is not our words, but Christ’s words. Our motto is taken from the very prayer Jesus prayed immediately before his arrest and crucifixion. The thing he felt his disciples most needed to hear before he was taken from them.
This was his hope and his prayer: “That they may all be one.”
And so, we seek unity in the midst of our diversity. Each of us in this room has beliefs and practices we hold dear that other Christians find ridiculous or unhelpful, but we don’t let those differences get in the way. In the midst of a divided world, we still acknowledge as our kindred all who share in the confession that Jesus is their source. All of us together are his body, and he is our head.
Here, I’d like to tell you a little bit about my story, and how I came into the UCC.
My parents are missionaries in the Wesleyan Church, and I grew up in Zambia, Africa. The Wesleyans are a conservative branch of the Methodists. They originally split over slavery — they were abolitionists when most of the Methodist Bishops refused to take a stance — and then in the early twentieth century, the Wesleyans joined what is known as the “holiness movement,” which focuses on holy living as evidence of Christian faith.
However, even though my parents are fairly conservative themselves, they always taught me to be ecumenical in my orientation. On the mission field, some of my parents’ closest friends were a Priest in the Church of England and his wife. Some of my earliest memories are of my father gently ribbing his Seventh Day Adventist friends about their beliefs regarding pork and the Sabbath while also working alongside those same friends in the service of Christ. My father is a Wesleyan theologian, and he can tell you all the reasons why Wesleyan Armenianism is right and Baptist Calvinism is wrong, but he also follows John Wesley’s admonition to “walk in the light you’ve been given” and allow God to judge others’ souls. In our house, we recognized that some folks had deeply held convictions that other folks didn’t, and we allowed that God would have to be the judge. We couldn’t.
In my twenties, I came out as gay, spent two years in therapy to try to become straight, and lost my faith. I wandered as a self-professed atheist for a while, but I came back to Christianity after re-reading the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles, and realizing I couldn’t escape the Christ who was my Lord. I needed to follow Jesus in the same way Paul, Mary of Magdala, and the other Apostles did.
I joined a local church that reminded me a lot of the church described in Acts, where people could disagree vehemently about how to read the Bible, and still love one another as kindred in Christ. It was a Metropolitan Community Church called Jesus MCC. The pastor was a former fundamentalist Baptist, and the membership spanned the whole spectrum of Christian beliefs. Just like the believers described in Acts Chapter Fifteen, we had legalists who thought one must follow every letter of the Law to be a Christian, and we had people who believed the Law no longer applied. On Wednesday nights, the pastor led a study in which we would discuss the sermon from Sunday and were allowed to disagree with the pastor. And, like the earliest Jewish and Gentile Christians described in Acts Chapter Fifteen, we would always finish our dispute on the Law by agreeing to set aside our differences, confess Jesus as Lord, and care for the poor and the needy among us. This was a vision of Christian community I could believe in, and I thought I would never find such a community anywhere else.
After a few years at that church, I decided I wanted to go to seminary. In my first class, my first year, I met a friend who was a Member in Discernment in the UCC. She was discerning whether she was called to be ordained in this denomination, and she was struggling with the things she didn’t like about the UCC.
We were at a Quaker seminary, and my friend was a pacifist. She didn’t like that in the 1980s, the UCC had chosen to call itself a Just Peace Church, instead of declaring itself a pacifist denomination. She didn’t like that her denomination had military chaplains and people who think all war is wrong serving alongside one another as ordained ministers. She didn’t like that there were Open and Affirming UCC Churches and Biblical Witness UCC Churches. She wanted a denomination that was more pure in its theology and practice, and more importantly she wanted a denomination where people agreed with her.
The more she talked about this United Church […] of Christ, where people took seriously the prayer “That they may all be one,” the more I thought, “This seems like the church for me.” As she described an entire denomination committed to living in unity as one body with one head and many parts, I saw a vision of Christ’s kin-dom that I wanted to be a part of.
So, when my husband and I ended up moving to New Mexico and I left the Indianapolis church that I had thought was so unique, I sought out a church in this denomination committed to unity amidst diversity.
I truly believe we in the UCC are living out the dream Jesus had for his followers. The dream nearly achieved by those earliest followers in Acts. The dream articulated by Paul in today’s Epistle Lesson: ” In Christ there is no Jew or Greek, slave or citizen, male and female. All are one in Christ Jesus.”
And this brings me to my final word for today.
The vision of a United Church [..] of Christ is easy to articulate, but it is hard to achieve. If we are to live out the dream of Jesus, “that they may all be one,” then we must commit to it every day. Today, we read Paul’s letter to the Galatians, and we gloss over the deep divisions he articulates in that short sentence. “In Christ there is no Jew or Greek, slave or citizen, male and female.”
Paul was naming the most deeply divisive issues of his day, and saying, “Despite these divisions laid on you by society, in Christ you are all one.”
This week, I challenge you to read through the Acts of the Apostles, and look for all of the ways divisions between Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians led to hurt feelings — and hurt bodies. Our struggle to hold together conservative and progressive Christians bears a striking resemblance to the struggles those early biblical literalists in Jerusalem had with their law-breaking siblings in Corinth.
When I read about the Jerusalem Christians, I see the faces of my siblings in the Faithful and Welcoming Churches, a small group of conservative churches who have organized themselves around their response to LGBTQIA people — they are Faithful and Welcoming not Open and Affirming. When I read Paul’s responses as recorded in the Acts of the Apostles, I hear our General Minister and President, the Rev. John Dorhauer, who is bold in pointing out the ways God’s Spirit works through queer clergy he knows. I thought of the great debate of Acts Chapter Fifteen as we argued on the floor of General Synod in Milwaukee this year.
At this General Synod, we had emotionally wounding arguments over the use of the exhibition space. A resolution had been brought to the floor calling on the organizers of General Synod to no longer allow Faithful and Welcoming to have a table in the Exhibit Hall. As soon as debate started, some of our queer youth from Michigan spoke with tears streaming down their faces about the ways they had been harmed by the messages of the Faithful and Welcoming churches. In the midst of the controversy that ensued, the leader of Faithful and Welcoming had to confess that he was wrong about some things he had believed about gay people, and his organization changed their Web site. The delegates at Synod voted finally to table the resolution, and asked the United Church of Christ Board to create behavioral covenants for anyone holding booth space in the Exhibit Hall.
I personally am still tender from some of the things that went on in Milwaukee, and the conversations I had in the plenary hall. I also know these divisions are not new, and I’m grateful they didn’t lead to the literal beatings that were part of Paul’s story.
In the midst of a society steeped in division, Paul dared to say, “In Christ there is no Jew or Greek, no slave or citizen, no male and female. For all are one in Christ Jesus.”
This is not a Pollyanna view of the world, but a radical imagining of Christ’s body united in the midst of a deeply divided world. And it is an imagining we dare to dream today in the UCC.
This weekend, we claim once again that we are one body made of many parts. In the midst of a world that makes unity seem impossible, we are the United Church [..] of Christ.
Together we say: “The United Church of Christ acknowledges as its sole head, Jesus Christ, Son of God and Savior. It acknowledges as kindred in Christ all who share in this confession.”
We seek to live out Christ’s hope, “That they may all be one.”
And, with Paul, we do this even when it’s hard. When deep divisions stand between us, we name those divisions while stating boldly, “In Christ there is no Jew or Greek, slave or citizen, male and female. For all are one in Christ Jesus.”
As you go from this place today, I challenge you to seek out those places where you shrink from being the United Church […] of Christ. With Jesus, I remind you that his commandment is that we love one another. They will know we are Christians by our love. Sometimes love is hard. Sometimes love requires stating the truth of our humanity boldly. Sometimes it requires acknowledging the harm we’ve done and repenting.
However, if we keep working together, if we keep following Christ as our sole head, I know we will live into the dream Jesus had for us: “That they may all be one.”
Amen.