Into one communion: A sermon preached at S. Bernadette, Whitchurch, Bristol
23 January 2009
During the Christmas vacation recently past, I read a novel set in my native North East, set in Newcastle upon Tyne: as you can tell from my accent, I am a Geordie. In that book one of the characters, the head of an Anglican Theological College says this:
“What we do is disagree. Almost by definition. Ever since the Greeks and Latins. The Great Schism of the West. Martin Luther. It’s just split after split, isn’t it? We talk about holding the centre together, it’s a lovely notion. But a pipe dream, really. It defies our history. What would it take? Fiat after fiat. Endless Acts of Supremacy … No, the more we try to unite, the sharper our differences seem.”
It struck me with the force of an epiphany, a manifestation of the truth. How desperately and horribly true it is. It seems to me that we live in an age of inter-denominational co-operation, and relative tolerance, rather than an age impressed with the urgency of Christian unity. And, whereas that may all be well and good as far as it goes, is it what ecumenism should be about? We can support causes together. We might march together against world poverty: but who would march in favour of world poverty? Not even the Franciscans nowadays. At least now we pray together and join in services like this to worship God together but they inevitably and necessarily are the lowest common denominator, or the highest common factor: nice, genteel, gently pious, careful to balance the demands of our traditions with those of others, inoffensive, sensitive, non-threatening. None of these is unworthy. Have we, however, created a new comfort zone where we do not have to face too sharply or immediately the demands of the Gospel? What were once challenging concepts have become little more than canting clichés. What were once innovative ventures in worship have settled into inter-denominational spiritual soirées.
What are we saying tonight about the unity that Christ demands? How is this tolerant denominational federalism furthering the ecumenical ideal of convergence towards full communion, full doctrinal reconciliation, to the coming together of all those who profess Christ into one flock, one Church, one Body, with one shepherd? There it is in the reading from the Gospel of S. John: “one flock, one shepherd.” Nothing could be clearer; nothing could be closer to the heart of that great shepherd of the sheep, Jesus Christ himself.
Later in S. John’s Gospel, the words are, if anything, even more explicit: “Holy Father, keep them in thy name, which thou hast given me, that they may be one, even as we are one.” That inseparable unity between God and Christ and the Holy Spirit in the indivisible Trinity: that God-Man-Spirit of perfect relationship speaks of the unity that is to be achieved and stands as a reproach for the present state of things. And it cannot be denied that the disunity of the Christian family is a barrier to the missionary possibilities that are open to us. Jesus prayed “for those who believe in me through their word, that they may be one; even as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be in us, so the world may believe that thou hast sent me.” There it is: our mission that the world might believe is contingent on our unity. Why should the world believe in the unique revelation of God in Christ Jesus and his message of reconciliation of man and God when we speak with such a babble of voices and have been, and in some cases still are, so disobliging about one another?
Certainly from the communion to which I belong, there is talk about unity as we legislate for disunity and increased schism. What basis is that for furthering the reunification of God’s Kingdom and Christ’s Body? The divisions of the past, from the great schism between East and West, down to the protestant Reformation, and numberless doctrinal refinements thereafter have become so institutionalised, so demarcated as to have created a series of doctrinally discrete citadels from which troops come out from time to time to meet and to share in some common cause and then return to their redoubts feeling suitably virtuous. But this is not really what ecumenism is or should be about.
What John Donne said of individuals is also true of denominations. “No man is an island, entire of itself ... any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee." While the Christian religions values the worth of each individual soul, we live and die in relationship, in relationship with God and in relationship one to another. As in baptism, when the Church baptises a child, that sacramental action concerns each of us because that child is by that action connected to Christ, the head of the Body, is engrafted into that Body which is his and becomes a member of that Body of which we are all parts and members. And did Jesus not himself say, “I am the vine, you are the braches. He who abides in me, and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing.”
We who have not witnessed the perfect unity of the Church to which we are summoned, can only pray with S. Paul “that we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.” Patience is not, perhaps, the first virtue we think of in relation to S. Paul. There is an urgency, not to say a degree of hectoring, about that remarkable series of letters and those restless journeys that he took, in his fervent desire to spread the Gospel of Jesus and to instill a sense of unity in what was already, even in the Early Church, a divided communion. By turns polemical and poetical, theological and prophetic, didactic and beguiling, egocentric and universal but never less than passionate for truth, we might look to him in this particular year of celebration. A constant leitmotif is that all followers of Christ comprise his mystical Body, the Church, of which Christ is the head and we its members. In his Letter to the Ephesians he speaks of giving gifts to people “for the perfecting of the saints” for building that solidarity of purpose and unity of confession. “You are no longer strangers and sojourners, but are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ himself being the cornerstone, in whom the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord.”
By saints is meant not only those who have died and have gone to the glories of heaven, the Church triumphant, but those who still plough their furrow on earth, who seek to be good and to do good. As the baptism of a child touches me, as the death of a fellow pilgrim diminishes me, so any good done by a member of the mystical Body of Christ profits me and you. As a contemporary writer has put it, “We are here to add to the sum of human goodness. To prove the thing exists. And however futile each individual act of courage or generosity, self-sacrifice or grace – it still proves the thing exists. Each act adds to the fund.” What binds us all in the solidarity of Christ is caritas, love. Caritas, charity, love is one of the theological virtues. Unlike the human and cardinal virtues which require a degree of human will to effect them, the theological virtues of faith, hope and charity are directly related to God, coming as a divine gift. It is a love that can be expressed in a variety of ways. Tonight is one such expression. The charitable work in which many of you will be engaged across denominational boundaries, is another expression. That love binds saints in heaven, binds saints on earth to God in a common union. But communio sanctorum, the communion of saints that we recite in the Creed can only be fully and completely realised when we can participate in the communion that Christ instituted on the night that he was betrayed.
The communion of saints brings before us that principle of unity that we do not see reflected in the visible Church in the world and although we can perfectly well acknowledge that we believe there to be only one Church, we cannot always be unanimous when we point to it. We can believe and we can accept that our solidarity in Christ, our membership of the Church through baptism, connects us in common acknowledgement of Christ. Despite a degree of confessional disunity, we can believe that our prayers avail one for another. But is it enough? Is it facing the challenge of putting back the pieces of the jigsaw into an organic, complete picture? Is it facing the tragedies of history and overcoming them? Have we found an entrenched ecumenical comfort zone where we have gone as far as we think necessary or possible? Are we Christians together but going no further? Or do we think that Christ’s high-priestly prayer places greater and greater demands on us, demands of letting go, demands of giving up, demands of facing a future where we shape history rather than feel its burdens?
There are no easy answers, and I certainly do not have them. I struggle with the past, the present and the future as we all do and all must. I can see the value of incremental steps: “I do not ask to see the distant scene, one step enough for me,” but I would feel less frustrated if I thought that there was a real willingness to progress towards that distant scene, that marvellous vision of one Lord, one Church and one communion. But we are all engaged on a search for truth, the truth that will set us free: not the cynical response of jesting Pilate, “What is truth?” But we should engage in that search with humility and penitence looking with contrition on the divisions of the past and looking forward for reconciliation under the mercy of God for unity in one communion and fellowship, sharing one bread and one cup of salvation which will only come when “Mercy and truth are met together : and righteousness and peace have kissed each other.”
Father William Davage Custodian of Dr Pusey's Library