There is an old joke about a person who dies and goes to heaven, where she is met by St. Peter, who welcomes her and gives her a tour of the place. They walk by beautiful vista after vista with happy people engaging with one another.
Peter gave a commentary as they walked — there are the Methodists, over there are the Lutherans, there are the Presbyterians, and next to them are the Episcopalians.
Then he put his finger to his lips as they walked past an area that was surrounded by a giant wall so that no one could see in or out. Once they were past, Peter explained it to her.
“Those are the Baptists,” he said. “They think they’re the only ones here.”
Today’s reading from Paul’s letter to the Christians in Ephesus brought that old joke to mind. Paul’s epistle is a call to Christian unity.
Paul uses the word “one” seven times in this brief passage. As Christians, he says, we share one body, one spirit, one hope, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God.
Those words should not be unfamiliar. Frequently our hymns, our scripture readings, and our prayers use the same language.
But the truth is that the Church, at least in this country, is far from unified. Sometimes even within a congregation there are schisms and fractures. We are fortunate that that is not the case here. We may not agree on everything but we don’t let those disagreements turn into division.
But the panorama of the larger Church is much different. I’m not talking about different denominations. God is too large to be captured by one denomination or one way of worship.
For example, I very rarely worship outside of the Episcopal Church. But last Sunday I went to my uncle’s funeral at a Presbyterian Church in South Carolina. I felt the same way there that I have felt at other times I’ve attended funerals or weddings in other denominations. The service was nice, the preacher was excellent and obviously knew my uncle well.
But to this life-long Episcopalian, who for decades has marinated in the words and liturgy of our prayer book, the service was lacking. There was no sense of liturgy, at least liturgy as I define it.
I also know people from other denominations who come to the Episcopal Church and are turned off by what they see as rigidity and formality in our worship.
That is not what Paul is talking about. We may find one way of worship speaks to us more than another. But differences in taste are not divisions.
Paul is talking about real divisions, conflicts over the very heart of faith.
Our own denomination is not immune to those conflicts. Last week we celebrated the 50th anniversary of the first 11 women to be ordained priests in the Episcopal Church. At the time that was not an occasion of celebration for everyone in the church.
The women themselves received death threats. It was difficult for them to find jobs. The bishops who ordained them were censured, and the few male rectors who would hire them were ostracized.
Those ordinations happened at about the same time the Book of Common Prayer was being revised. The double whammy of new prayers being led by women priests was too much for many people, who left the Episcopal Church and started new churches, using the 1928 Book of Common Prayer, led by men, just as God had ordained.
The same dynamics were at play as our denomination began to come to terms with the fact that for too long we had not treated our gay and lesbian siblings as equal children of God.
In 2003, when Gene Robinson was ordained as the first openly gay bishop, whole congregations and dioceses split from the denomination.
One body, one spirit, one hope, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God.
It sounds nice, but living it out can be difficult.
Sometimes it seems like we make it difficult on purpose. Fridays are my day off, and like many people I spent Friday afternoon a week ago watching the opening ceremonies of the Olympics in Paris.
I thought they were great, so I was surprised when I read a day or two later that some Christians were outraged at the mockery of the Last Supper. Even the Vatican weighed in. I wondered how I could have missed something so egregious.
It turns out that I had no memory of it because it didn’t happen. There was no depiction of the Last Supper, and no mockery of it. The scene was from the pagan Feast of Dionysus of Greek mythology. It seems as if some Christians are looking for ways to be offended.
Explanations of what the scene actually was made no difference. Those in the scene, and the director Thomas Jolly, received hate mail and death threats from offended Christians, who I’m sure do not see the irony of responding to something they saw as mockery of the prince of peace with hateful threats of violence.
It’s easy to hear something like that and roll our eyes at how ridiculous it is. And believe me, my eyes have rolled.
But there are much more serious divisions among those who profess one faith, one Lord, one baptism.
How do we respond to those who believe their faith tells them that gay or lesbian or trans people are an abomination? How do we respond to those who still believe that women have no place in leadership, that the main purpose of life for all women is to reproduce and be submissive to their husbands.
How do we respond to the growing embrace of Christian nationalism? To those who want this country to be a theocracy? Who want Christianity to be taught in public schools? Who denigrate Jews, Muslims, or those of no faith at all?
Who see the rich as being favored by God and who, in the name of Christ, make it harder for the poor to eat or find shelter?
How do we listen to Paul’s call for unity and respond to a form of Christianity that seems to be the antithesis of everything Jesus stood for or taught?
This is an issue that I struggle with, and maybe you do, too. I find it difficult to find any common ground, much less unity, with much of what is held up as Christianity today. And I’m aware that others may look at the beliefs of our church and feel the same way.
I don’t think Paul’s call for unity means that we swallow our very real divisions just so we can all get along. He himself says, “We must no longer be children, tossed to and fro and blown about by every wind of doctrine.”
But he adds that we must speak the truth in love.
To me that means we do stand up for the vision of Christianity that our church believes, that we do call out behavior and beliefs that we see an unChristian. But we do that without demonizing those with whom we disagree, even when those disagreements are profound. That’s not always easy to do.
It also means we never forget the possibility of reconciliation.
Going back to the people who left the Episcopal Church over the ordination of women. Among them were a couple who were the youth group advisors at the church I grew up in, people who I cared about, admired, and respected.
Not too long after I came to St. Dunstan’s Pat Berman, a faithful member here who died earlier this year, told me she had been to a party and met someone I knew.
“She was the most awful woman,” Pat said. “When I told her you were our priest she said what a nice person you had been as a teenager and it was a shame that you had gone in such a wrong direction.” I rolled my eyes.
Then some years later Charis Bowling was in rehab after a hospital stay and I went to take her communion after church one Sunday. I was walking down the hall looking for her room when I saw another familiar name on the door — the name of my former youth group advisor..
Hmm, I thought. I wonder if that is the same Sara that thinks I have gone so far astray. Probably not, I decided. There must be hundreds of people with that name. And so I kept walking until I reached Charis’ room.
As I was leaving I walked by the door with Sara’s name on it again. And without really thinking about it I walked in. I didn’t recognize the woman in bed there, but it had probably been at least four decades since I had seen her.
I asked if she was Sara, and she said yes. Then I asked if she had been a member of St. Martin’s, and she said yes again. With some real trepidation I told her my name. She gasped and reached for my hand.
Knowing how she felt about women priests, I took a deep breath and reminded her that’s what I was now, and asked if she would like communion. She burst into tears as she nodded yes.
I’m not telling you this story because Sara’s heart changed, although it did for at least that afternoon. I’m telling it because my heart changed.
Instead of seeing her as someone whose vision of Christianity hurt and offended me, I was given the grace to see her as a fellow child of God and follower of Jesus.
One body, one spirit, one hope, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God.
Amen.