So, I had a sermon all ready to go on Thursday, about how God blesses us with joy, and that enjoyment and laughter are part of the Christian life, and we should never think that being sacred and holy means being serious and somber all the time. And I was going to talk about Jesus at the wedding, and how about how he made wine, which is specifically a sign of God’s kingdom and also very specifically something that you drink at a party when you want to be joyful, and so we can see the connection between God’s kingdom and God blessing us with joyfulness. It was a good sermon.
But then on Friday, some news came out of the Anglican Communion. The Anglican Communion is the worldwide body of Anglican and Episcopalian churches, similar to the Lutheran World Federation for us Lutherans. This week, the Primates of the Anglican Communion, the 38 bishops or archbishops of each of the national churches all got together, as they regularly do, to talk about various issues concerning the relationships of one Anglican church, or province, to another. This gathering does not determine policies or doctrine in the world-wide Anglican church, but it does help the various Anglican bishops come to a consensus on a wide range of issues.
At this year’s meeting, the Primates made news because during the meeting, the bishops voted that the Episcopal Church, which is the Anglican body in the United States, will no longer be permitted to represent the Anglican Communion on any ecumenical or interfaith bodies, or be allowed to vote on any issues related to doctrine or polity for a period of three years. In other words, the Episcopal Church - the American Anglicans - are no longer considered Anglican enough to fully take part in worldwide Anglican events for the next three years.
Now it’s hard for us at the Lutheran congregational level to understand the pain that this resolution is causing right now. But imagine you are at some family occasion, a big family reunion, for instance, and all of the oldest generation in the family gets together and decides that one particular member of the family - you, for example - and all of your children and grandchildren, no longer get to use the family’s last name in public for the next three years or help decide any of the important family matters. How would you feel about that? Most of us are pretty proud of our last name and of our family, it defines who we are, and what we value, and what the world thinks of us. Suspending us from using our last name takes away our identity, and it tells us that we’re no longer worthy to be a real part of that family. No longer allowing us to take part in family decisions relegates us to the position of children. I think you can imagine the pain that our Anglican brothers and sisters in the United States are going through right now. Imagine if someone said to us, “You don’t get to represent the Lutherans at church events anymore. You can go to the National Convention but you don’t actually get to vote.”
Now this is upsetting for two reasons. The first is that this coming week is the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. Starting tomorrow, the day of the feast of St Peter, and until next Sunday when we celebrate St Paul, all Christians around the world have agreed to pray for the unity of the Christian church. We have agreed to recognize that we all belong to the same family - Christ’s family. So there’s some irony that the Anglican Communion, which has the most number of Christians in the world after the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches, wants to suspend someone from their part of the family right at the beginning of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity.
But it’s also upsetting in light of our New Testament reading for this week. In our reading from 1 Corinthians, we have Paul very directly telling the first Christians that God gives different gifts and assigns different activities to everyone in the church, for the common good. And he immediately follows that up with the passage for next week: “For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. ... Indeed the body does not consist of one member but of many. ... The eye cannot say to the hand, “I have no need of you,” nor again the head to the feet, “I have no need of you.” ... Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it.” Paul argues that God very deliberately gives us different gifts, and make us different parts of the body, in order for the body as a whole to be strengthened. God gives difference for the common good, and we cannot say that we have no need of any other part.
We are constantly setting up these barriers in Christ’s body, though, and we have for centuries. The fact that there are exclusions between and within denominations is evidence that somewhere along the way we have come to believe that the unity and oneness of the body of Christ is synonymous with sameness. We somehow got this idea that if we want to live as one body, we all have to be exactly the same. We have to act the same, think the same, be the same. Somehow we ended up believing that we all need to be feet - for instance - and those who don’t want to be feet, or don’t think feet are good, or just like hands better, should not be part of the body.
But this is very clearly the opposite of what Scripture actually tells us. Paul says that God makes us different members. In the letter to the Colossians and in this same letter to the Corinthians, Paul talks about the unity of the Church as being “a perfect harmony.” Now those of you who are musicians will know that you can’t have harmony unless you have different parts. Five people singing exactly the same notes are not singing in harmony. You need different notes at the same time in order to have beautiful, perfect, harmonious music. And that’s what Paul says about unity in Christ. That it is a *harmony.* So in order for us to be a harmonious body, we have to have difference. God does not tell us to be the same, God actually blesses us with difference. It’s just that somehow, we end up thinking that *our* difference is the most important, and that everybody should be different the way we are, which means everybody really should be the same.
And this is what’s going on in the Anglican Communion right now. And it is incredibly sad to see, not the least because we are in full communion with the Anglican Church of Canada, who is a member of the Anglican Communion. They are our brothers and sisters, and it is sad when another branch of the family is acting dysfunctionally.
Now you might be wondering what it is that the Episcopal Church in the States did that was so bad that they were sidelined by the Anglican Communion. And I’ve hesitated to bring it up so far because it’s about an issue that has caused a lot of pain and division in our own Lutheran denomination in Canada, and in this congregation in particular. In 2003, the Episcopal Church - both lay people and clergy - voted to approve the ordination of Gene Robinson to the position of bishop. And Bishop Robinson happens to be gay, and was indeed married to his husband Mark at the time of his ordination. So the issue of difference around the opinion on gay marriage is at the heart of the fracture in the Anglican Communion. And I am very sensitive to the painful discussion that occurred around this same issue here in Canada not so long ago. I know that this congregation voted not to call any pastors in homosexual relationships, and not to allow same-sex marriages to take place in this sanctuary. And I think at this point that you all have guessed that I have the very opposite view. My point in bringing this up is not to open the issue back up for debate or to convince you to change your mind, but to point to how the unity of Christ continues to be possible even in the midst of this difference. Last week I mentioned that Pastor Ted Becker baptized me, and that you never know how the baptized person is going to turn out. I said that because Pastor Becker and I are on completely opposite sides of the issue of same-sex marriage, and we both know that. And yet I continue to visit him and offer him Holy Communion, and he continues to welcome it from me. The fact that we are completely different when it comes this issue does not prevent either one of us from coming together in the unity of Christ to take Holy Communion together. He has a different interpretation of the Bible than I do, as do many other Christians I know, including my grandparents whom I continue to love dearly and who love me. And, contrary to what we fear, these differences have not weakened the body of Christ. We all come to Holy Communion together, and the altar has yet to shatter into a million pieces. It is a sin of pride, actually, to think that the holy and God-given body of Christ can be weakened by something like human difference. *We,* mere humans created and redeemed and sanctified by *God,* do not have the capacity to weaken the body of Christ simply because we don’t agree.
When our Scriptures call us to unity, they are not calling us to homogeneity - to sameness. They are not calling us to be identical in thought, word, or deed. The call to unity is, instead, the call to be with one another in our differences, honouring that God has made us each individuals, and being together in the love of Christ. The call to unity is to be one body with different parts, held together because the Spirit of Christ moves us to love one another. As Paul say, “clothes yourselves with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony.” It’s no big feat to love people who are the same as you. The challenge comes in loving those who are different, and that’s why it is such a witness to the power of Christ and to God’s love for us that we, too, embrace difference within our midst. *That’s* why we are called to be united in the body of Christ and in the Spirit. Because we *are* different, and we are *created* different, and this love-in-difference is how Christians show the world how wonderful and glorious our God is. I do not love the Catholic members of my extended family any less because they believe differently about the ordination of women. I do not love the community of Calvary Grace any less because they do not allow women to be pastors in their church. It’s not easy for me to love them, but God calls us to live in the unity of Christ, and gives us the Holy Spirit so that we might love those who disagree with us, and claim them as part of the same family, and so I do.
The news coming from the Primates’ meeting in the Anglican Communion is important for us, in part because they are our brothers and sisters, but also because it cautions us against our own tendencies to think that differences harm the body of Christ, and because it causes us to go back to Scripture to see what God really says about difference and unity. And what we find is that God blesses us with difference and yet calls us together - to unity - in love. As we heard from Paul today, and as we celebrate in this coming week of Christian Unity, “All these are activated by one and the same Spirit, who allots to each one individually just as the Spirit chooses.” For God’s incomparable graciousness and love of us in this regard, we say thanks be to God. Amen.
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