St. Paul’s United Church Sunday, August 2, 2009

Getting Along in Christ – Rev. David Mundy

Ephesians 4:1-16 John 6:24-35

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Many of you have heard that the first pastoral charge I served after ordination nearly thirty years ago was in outport Newfoundland. There were five preaching points in five communities which all had their own character. One of them , called Frederickton – with a k – was a fishing community of about 500 very industrious people with well-kept homes and a thriving United Church congregation. One of the noteworthy and curious things about Frederickton was that about eighty percent of the population had the same last name, which was Wheaton. Everyone who served on the church board was a Wheaton and if I said “good morning Mr. or Mrs. Wheaton” at the door my odds were really good.

One winter the home of a Frederickton family burned to the ground and we heard that they didn’t have insurance. At least they didn’t have insurance through an insurance company. The community leapt into action providing food and clothing. The men headed into the woods and cut logs which they traded to the area sawmill for finished lumber. I was amazed by how quickly the rubble was cleared away and reconstruction began. Of course there were still purchases which required money and a community collection was started.

The following Sunday I stood in the pulpit and invited our folk to make contributions through the offering plate, for which they would get tax credit. After the service a member – yes, he was a Wheaton – took me aside. He was a gruff and rather opinionated man, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. He actually congratulated me effusively for what I had done. He told me that there had been many collections taken through the years to benefit people, but this was the first time he could remember the United Church congregation being asked in worship to help out “Pentecost people” as he called them. The Pentecostal church in Frederickton was a stone’s throw from the United Church and many people from the same extended families attended one or the other. But there was lots of bad blood between the congregations and rarely did they cooperate.

It honestly hadn’t occurred to me that people might not have wanted to help out on the basis of their worshipping community, but I ended up being a trailblazer through sheer ignorance about how religion worked in Newfoundland. And how strange that folk who were so generous with one another, and kin to just about everybody, didn’t extend that notion of compassion past the door of the church, going in rather than out.

Again this Sunday we heard from one of the New Testament letters called Ephesians. Last week I mentioned that Ephesus was one of the great cities of Asia Minor – what is modern-day Turkey. I heard from some of you afterward who have recently been there, or are about to go there.

While Ephesians is what is considered a general letter written to be shared amongst a number of congregations in different communities, there is still a very specific and personal character to many of the passages, including the one which we heard today, in which the author “begs” the readers to get along:

I therefore, the prisoner in the Lord, beg you to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all.

What a powerful statement about the importance of unity in Christ. And we hear those intriguing words, I beg you. Not just “it would be helpful if you cooperated” or “in my opinion it would be helpful if you put aside differences.” There is an urgency to that word which we all “get.” In other versions, it says I implore you or I urge you or I beseech you, but I beg you is as good or better than any of those words. We really have to wonder what the “back story” is here that leads to such a forceful plea.

Why is it that Christians getting along with Christians appears to be so difficult? Forget about whether we are able to coexist with other religions. We really have a lousy record of maintaining unity with others who are followers of Jesus.

Not getting along started early, if we believe the gospels. Remember the story of the disciples squabbling with one another as they walked along the road, each claiming that he was going to have the choicest spot in heaven? When Jesus asks what they are arguing about, they all shut up because they know that their teacher and friend will not be impressed.

For some reason this doesn’t stop us from accentuating our differences rather than the essential truth that we are all grafted into Christ – what part of “one Lord, one faith, one baptism” don’t we understand?

Now, in our United Church, we like to pride ourselves on being very inclusive and accepting and we just know how wonderful we are – after all we are the United Church and we celebrate our history of bringing denominations together.

Of course, we aren’t sure what to do with those Anglicans, praying on their knees -up and down, up and down! And the Roman Catholics with the whole pope thing. And those Pentecostals with their arms waving around in the air – what’s that about? Really, we often have an extensive checklist of what we consider to be the curious practices and theologies of other denominations. And to tell the truth, we aren’t all that great within our own denomination. Those people from down the street at Trinity . . . what can we say! Maybe we aren’t quite as all-embracing as we would like to believe. Maybe some of those Christian groups which come out and say “I don’t want to be like you!” are just more honest.

Why don’t we get along better? Sometimes it is just hard work to sift through our differences and get to the heart of the gospel. It’s a little bit like families. We grow up in a certain family with its own traditions and practices and peculiarities and we just assume that every family is like ours. We are surprised or even shocked when we discover that other households take an entirely different approach to just about everything. Sometimes when married couples break up they cite the weirdness of their ex-partner’s family. Hardly ever do individuals say, my family is so odd it drove my partner away.

In churches we live with a great deal of suspicion that the trickery and deceitful scheming we heard about in the passage is anything others do that isn’t like what we do. Why doesn’t it occur to us that the winds of doctrine which blow us around are those which whisk us away from meaningful dialogue with our brothers and sisters in Christ – because whether we want to admit it or not, that’s who we are? Our starting point and ending point, our alpha and omega, is always Christ.

Why bother listening to what we heard from Ephesians today? Why not just turn up the volume a little to drown out the noise of someone begging us live in unity? Why not just let good fences make good neighbours and leave it at that?

For starters, the bible tells to get along in Christ, to which we should pay attention. I will offer three other reasons to do so. We learn from one another and grow together when we are in open and prayerful dialogue. Back in April we hosted an event here at St. Paul’s on the care of creation. I worked with leaders from several different denominations and the principal of one of the Christian schools in town. Not only did the event itself go well, one of the highlights of my year was working with this leadership group of dedicated people. They were and are as passionate about caring for God’s good Earth as I am, and that was an important discovery.

We can’t afford not to get along, figuratively and literally. We are in a day when our resources are precious and spending massive amounts of money to repair aging buildings or to fund ministries that are no longer effective just doesn’t make spiritual sense, or dollars and cents.

One of my many sisters-in-law is the music director for a United Church congregation in Kingston. For the past year they have worshipped jointly with the congregation of another United Church with the prospect of amalgamating. The other congregation discovered that they needed to do more than a million dollars worth of repair to their aging downtown building and while they actually had the money to do the work, they came to the conclusion that it would not be well spent. This past year has been a courtship rather than a shotgun wedding. While it has required a lot of soul-searching, and some people have been uncomfortable, on Pentecost Sunday, the birthday of the Christian church, they voted to become one congregation. There is a great deal of work left to do, including finding a new name for the joint congregation but they have been open to the work of the Holy Spirit and deserve praise.

The most important reason of all is our public witness to the Christ who lived and died and rose again to overcome division and who gives us the hope of abundant life. I don’t need to tell you that many people in our culture, who don’t want anything to do with the church or organized religion of any kind, point to our inability to live together in harmony even though we say we are followers of Jesus. In my opinion it is an entirely valid criticism, and our history in the church has often been nothing short of shameful.

In June nine congregations here in Bowmanville worshipped in a downtown park as a way of saying that despite our differences. Our Rev. Cathy coordinated that service, and again, she worked with a dedicated team to make that event successful. Simply by joining together in Christ’s name, we made an important statement to one another and to the community. It’s important to note that members of the various congregations wanted this worship experience to happen.

In our other reading today Jesus says “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.” None of us has an exclusive claim on whose hunger will be satisfied and whose thirst will be quenched. We are called simply to be Christ’s humble, gentle, and patient agents in the world. The least we can do is get along for the sake of the gospel.