Sermon on Unity Week

Longton

26 January 1986

In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.

In the course of 35 years that I attend meetings in the Week of Prayer for Unity I have been increasingly struck by the way in which gradually, step by step enmity, then estrangement have died away. And we are now in a new period already several years when we feel how much we have in common, how one we are basically. And we may well ask ourselves, what more, what more should be done, what more can be done. We can be content with what we possess – human friendliness, openness, the death of suspicion, readiness to listen to one another, to see in each other Christians, true Christians, whether we agree with them as far as tenets of their faith is concerned or not, but is that enough? The Lord says to us in St. John’s Gospel that we should be one that the world may believe. And isn’t it clear, painfully clear that the world is loosing faith and not gaining faith and that our presence in this world does not seem to transform a pagan city of men into the city of God, a city of men so vast, so deep and so holy that one of its citizen, its first citizen could be the Lord Jesus Christ Himself, God become man.

So we must ask ourselves what else is to be done in this work for unity. It is not enough to long and indeed it is not enough to pray because what we pray for we must be prepared to do. It is not enough to say, “Lord, grant us peace,” we must work for it within ourselves and only if we are at peace with God, with our own conscience, with our neighbour, with the circumstances of our life, if there is serenity and peace within us, can peace spread from us. It is similar to light: light spreads and we must be a light in the world, we must be the salt that prevents corruption, we must be heralds and messengers of God’s Kingdom already, incipiently, germinally present in the world.

But then how to set about it? Mutual friendliness does not do it, we see it day in, day out. There was a moment when it was customary to say, “We trust one another enough, we respect one another sufficiently for us to be able to speak the truth in charity and indeed, to hear it in charity, that we are now in a position to challenge our neighbour or to present our neighbour with what we believe to be true or truer than what he believes and thinks.” It is so, we can now say to one another without offence, without breaking the bond of love such things as we could not say in the past. We would have been rejected together with our message. Now a Christian can listen to another Christian and say, “What amount of truth is there in his testimony? What does he reveal to me which the Lord God, the Holy Spirit has revealed to him and to his denomination in the years, in the centuries of separation?”

And yet this is not enough. There must be something else, and when we turn to today’s reading of the Gospel, we may have an inkling of what that is. The Lord Jesus Christ appeared to ten of his disciples. One of them Thomas was not there and one of them, Judas, had betrayed Christ and hanged himself. He appeared to His disciples and ascertained his Resurrection, they knew for sure that He was the Risen Christ, yet, when Thomas came into their company and they told him that Christ had appeared to them and that therefore He who had died on Calvary was risen and that therefore all was true that they had hoped for and that Christ had foretold. And Thomas could not believe. Why? We are so accustomed to say, “Thomas, o yes, the doubter.” It is such calumny in a way. He was a challenger more than a doubter. Isn’t there a passage just a few pages earlier in the Gospel in which Christ says to His disciples that he will return to Jerusalem because Lazarus, His friend, has died. And all the Apostles are terrified, “Don’t go weren’t the Jews about to kill You, why are You returning?” Only Thomas says, “Let’s go with Him and die with Him.” That is not the word of a doubter, it’s the word of one who has got a very deep certainty and an unshakable loyalty but no credulity. He looked at the other disciples and asked himself, probably, what has happened to them? In what way are they changed by the Resurrection? O yes, they look happy, they rejoice, yet they are the same men whom I knew before. If Christ was risen, if eternal life had rushed into the world victorious of death, if God had conquered, could they still be the same ten whom I have known year after year? And he said, “No, I must probe myself the Resurrection.”

Isn’t the world that surrounds us in the same situation? We go round saying, “God has become man in order that we, human beings should become divine. Christ is risen and has given us life eternal. Christ has proclaimed the Good News of the Kingdom and He told us that He is the way and the truth and life”. And they look at us and say to one another and to themselves, “The way? In what manner is their life different from mine – greedy, fearful, inimical, cold as much as others are? Is that the way?” And we speak of the truth and what truth? The Lord Jesus Christ said about himself, “I am the Truth,” and we present people with intellectual, logical truths, statements that to them, if not to us, sound like articles of associations, conventional decisions expressing, well, a world outlook perhaps, but one of the many. In what way are we different? How can we be convincing to people? And it is also true what the General Secretary of the World Council of Churches, the first one, Visser’t Hooft said once that one can be a heretic not only by proclaiming an erroneous, a false teaching contrary to the Gospel, to God’s truth but also by the way in which we live and we give the lie to the message, which we proclaim.

In the Orthodox Church before we sing together the Creed, the priest turns to the congregation and says, “Let us have love one to another that so with one mind we may acknowledge the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, the undivided Trinity.” Let us have love one for another because what we are going to proclaim is the God of love, we are going to proclaim the one God in Three Persons, who is love not a sentiment, not an emotion but life triumphant and pouring Itself out for others to live, life sacrificial, love crucified. And if we have no love for one another, then proclaiming that our God is the God of love is a lie and everyone can see that. (?) our words hit the ears of people, our deeds hit their hearts, their minds, their bodies, their lives. We may well proclaim that God is the God of love but we proclaim at the same time that we betray this God of love.

And so our problem is one of becoming, of being what we are called to be, what indeed we are by the grace of God – children of the Kingdom. How can we? What is there which is unfulfilled in us? One of our Russian saints, St. Seraphim, said once to a visitor that difference there is between a sinner that perishes and a saint that gives glory to God lies in determination, a determination which begins with a choice: whom do I choose – myself in order to build everything round myself, to gather all things towards myself, or is it God, the Lord Jesus Christ, His Father and His Spirit? Whom do I choose? Am I going to build a world around myself, those whom I love, my friends, excluding others, fencing in a small kingdom of human affection and friendliness or am I prepared to do the first thing, which the Lord Jesus Christ commands when He says, “If you want to be follows of Mine, renounce yourself”. “Renounce yourself” means first, if you turn to the original text, “turn away from yourself,” turn away. You spend your life, He says to us, as though you are looking at yourself in a mirror and seeing nothing else. If you want another image nearer to English literature, the Lady of Shallot, who spent all her life sitting in front of a mirror and seeing the world only reflected but never, never looking at reality. That is the way in which we live so often. And the word “repentance”, the first words which the Lord Jesus Christ proclaims in His first preaching at the beginning of His ministry are “repent”. And again “repent” does not mean “bewail you sinful condition”, “feel miserable”, “cry”. It’s a Greek word that means “change your mind”, turn Godwards, instead of looking at yourself in the mirror turn away, break the mirror, ignore yourself and look Godwards.

And when we look Godwards, we discover something very-very wonderful, we discover also that each one of our neighbours, every person, good or bad, a sinner or a saint, are images of the Lord Jesus Christ because we are all created in His image. If we only knew that – not in our intellect but in our heart, if whenever meet a person, whomever it may be, friend or foe, we looked at this person and said to ourselves, “I am face to face with an image of God. How can I reverence it, how can I serve him or her?” We remember Christ’s words, “What you have done to one of these little ones, you have done to Me.” That is what it means.

And so our first problem is to turn away from ourselves and look Godwards, and it is only in God that we can discover one another as our true selves, not as an inconvenient neighbour but as our brother in Christ and as a revelation of God. This is essential. And that means that if we want to go, if we want to go further and further into this mystery of unity, we must discover in each other the divine presence, reverence it, serve it, I was about to say, worship it, not as an idol but treat it as something sacred, holy. It is from within our experience of God, from our experience of man, from within God’s own vision of himself, men and the world, from within that only, that the statements, the proclamation of faith were born. And if we are divided in the tenets of our faith, if we think of one another as being separated from us in terms of truth or error, the only way of recapturing unity is by growing in such oneness with Christ, to such degree of openness to the Holy Spirit that we should know God similarly and be led into all truth, the one and only truth by the Spirit of God. That means, to put it perhaps in less confused terms, than I have used so far, it means that unless we become truly Christian, each of us singly and all of us collectively, there is no Christian unity of which we can speak of. There will be fellowship, friendship, closeness, there will be good relationships but not that unity, which Christ has willed for us when He said that He wishes us to be one as He is one with the Father, that the Church should be a reflection, more than a reflection, – a revelation, an unveiling before the eyes of all men of God One in the Trinity. Short of this, less than this, it is not Christian unity, it is human fellowship and good will that we can achieve, and that means that we must be prepared to renounce ourselves, not to compromise with our neighbour, not to compromise with the truth, not to minimise things, the only truth, which we can accept, is that which the Lord Jesus Christ has proclaimed in all integrity. St. Paul said, “If anyone preaches another Gospel than that, which I have preached, let he be anathema.” Yes, nothing less than the truth of God, and we are responsible to Him and for it. We are the heralds, we are the people whom God has sent into the world to reveal it in our lives and then in our words, because it is our lives and not our words that should be a challenge to the surrounding world.

I belong to a country, which now for 65 years and more is in the throes of persecution. There are people there who proclaim the truth only by what they are because they can not speak to crowds but they can be light in the darkness, – we should be this. In the ancient days someone said, “No-one can believe in life eternal who has not seen it shining, its radiance, its splendour in the eyes or on the face of at least one Christian.” We should be the kind of people whom others meet and are arrested by what they see.

You remember the story of Moses coming down from Mount Sinai. His face shone in such a way that people could not endure this shining. Each of us should have a ray of this shining, shining through everything that we are, everything that we do, everything that we say. And if we grow into that measure, if we become Christian so earnestly, if we are prepared to shed our blood in order to receive the Spirit, if we are prepared to reject ourselves that every turn for the sake of God, of the God of love, of love crucified, of sacrificial love, then we will become Christian in a way in which we are not yet, in the way in which saints were Christian, some were completely uneducated, and they could proclaim words of wisdom.

I remember the story of one Roman Catholic saint of France, a parish priest, ignorant, badly trained, the object of the contempt of his more educated and learned colleagues. One of them complained to the bishop of his ignorance, and the bishop answered, “I don’t know whether he is learned, but I know that he is enlightened.” This is what we should be – enlightened; and then unity will be that of Christians, we will not be in need of making it, of creating it, of fighting for it, it will be our unity because each of us will be at one within himself, without this dividedness, which we all can observe, of wavering will, our conflicting thoughts, the discrepancy between our good feelings and our bad actions. When we will be at one and at peace with God then we will discover that we are one, but this is a challenge to each of us, it is not something that can be done by hierarchies, by theologians or anyone, it can be done only by striving to saintliness, radical, ruthlessly, without any mercy to ourselves for the sake of God, martyrdom indeed, because martyrdom means shedding one’s own blood but also being witnesses. That is our vocation, this is, I believe, the only true way to Christian unity.