“One”

Sermon delivered May 16^th, 2010 at Belleville Presbyterian Church.

 Scriptural basis: Acts 16:16-34, John 17:20-26

 Last Monday, when I read the Scriptures for today and began to think and pray about what the message should be, a word stood out from all the rest and began to percolate in the back of my mind. That word was “one.” It’s repeated in the Gospel lesson four times in fairly rapid succession, and it seemed to me that there was something profound, something powerful in this simple word that must contain the key to my sermon for today. As I sat thinking, letting ideas come and go, a song came into my head, a song from the 1960’s that featured the word “one.” Aha, I thought, there’s something in that old song that’s important for me to hear or read, perhaps a guidepost on the path to understanding! Since I’m hardly an aficionado of 60’s rock tunes, after all I was but a babe in my mother’s arms at the beginning of the 60’s and rock music wasn’t exactly a staple of the Zurakowski household in those days (my parents being fans of Glenn Miller and Lawrence Welk), I wondered if this song had been placed in my mind by the Holy Spirit. Remember last week we talked about how the Spirit can move us and guide us in unexpected ways, maybe through a book falling open to a particular page or through a phone call to a long-absent friend, so why not through the lyrics of a song? I’ve heard “One” by Three Dog Night many times on the oldies stations, and frankly thought it be somewhat nonsensical but with a good tune and some really great guitar work, however I couldn’t clearly remember the lyrics so I went to the Internet and found them. You can imagine the scene: once the search engine produced its results, I clicked on the first entry and up popped the Three Dog Night fan page, and then the lyrics appeared on my screen. I quickly scanned them for some deep and inspirational theme, some meaning beyond myself that simply hearing the words couldn’t reveal and I found… nothing. This song didn’t make any more sense to me than the rest of the 1960’s. But I dutifully printed the lyrics out and studied them for a bit and then set them aside. Maybe the Holy Spirit had sent me off on a wild goose chase, or more likely I wasn’t listening with my whole self when the song popped into my head. There is truth in the words, “one is the loneliest number that you’ll ever do,” being alone, being one is a lonely place to be. Buried in the middle of the song is the thesis statement; the writer’s girlfriend has left him and he’s crying the blues but other than that the words “one is the loneliest” repeat over and over again. The longer I pondered these lyrics, it struck me that I hadn’t been misled; I had indeed been given a guidepost on the path to understanding! One, a simple three-letter word, in the often unfathomable way of the English language can have as many meanings as there are contexts for its application. The lyricist uses one to denote solitude, aloneness. For this songwriter, it’s a pseudonym for sorrow. One is a quantifier, as in one box of cereal, it’s an indicator of position as in “we’re number one,” an enumerator of value as in one dollar, a measure of time as in one second or one hour, and it’s also a theological concept, as in one with the Father. Another way of saying unity.

Ah, yes. Unity. I think a lot of native-born citizens of the United States struggle with the idea of unity. After all, we’re the nation of John Wayne, of rugged individualism, the land of the free and home of the brave, Don’t Tread on Me, essentially the nation of “leave me alone.” And guess what, I’m one of ‘em! One who doesn’t want to be reigned in or controlled by an outside entity, whether it be my parents when I was younger or by government today. Yet our nation’s motto is “E Pluribus Unum,” “out of many, one.” As a people of faith, we’re called to be in community with one another, to care for one another as extensions of our families, to treat all around us as our neighbors and to be of service to them. We’re called to subordinate our desires to the will of God, the teachings of Jesus Christ and the guidance of the Holy Spirit. As a nation, we rail against collectivism. As a church, we’re called into communion. As a nation, we’re divided into states. As a church, we’re divided into denominations. As a nation, we went to war to preserve the Union. As a church, we went to war (several times) to split apart.

The Gospel lesson for today is all about unity. This passage is at the end of what theologians refer to as Jesus’ Farewell Discourse, and are the last words he speaks before his betrayal and arrest. These words end Jesus’ high priestly prayer that started at the beginning of Chapter 17, in which he declares what he has accomplished on earth, intercedes for his disciples and then in today’s passage intercedes for those who will believe based only on the words of the disciples, in other words for us. No one else is around when Jesus offers this prayer; he’s gone away from his disciples and is alone with his Father and his last words are not an impassioned plea to save him from the cross but are for us that we may be one with him as he is one with God. A fitting end to the Easter season, don’t you think? A season of the church year that started with Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross comes to a close by telling us of one final self-giving act, an act of unbridled love for his disciples who were near to him and for his disciples not yet born. While not as well-known and ultimately not as powerful a symbol of his divinity as the crucifixion and Resurrection, this intercession on behalf of generations yet to come is a beautiful reminder of the life we are called to live as followers of the Risen Christ.

We are called to love, and from that love will flow unity. Unity of purpose, unity of mission, unity of faith, not necessarily unity of thought or method. This love is reciprocal in its nature, that is we are to love one another as we love ourselves and as we love we will be loved by others. This love is at the heart of the Triune God, all three persons of the Trinity having the same essence and possessing a healthy self-love that isn’t boastful or proud but is confident and sure. The end result of this is that God wants all of us to be in a relationship that can be summarized as one.

In our reading from the Acts of the Apostles, we have a couple of concrete examples of “I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one.” When Paul frees the slave girl of the gift, or curse, of divination, even though he acts out of frustration the end result is wholeness for her by being freed from her torment. She can no longer be exploited for the financial gain of her owners. Through the power of Jesus Christ as expressed by Paul her torment was turned to health, her slavery to freedom – she is now free to be one with others, no longer separated by her affliction. The result of this intervention is a severe beating for Paul and Silas and a night in prison, from which comes another example of unity and conversion from brokenness to wholeness. Paul and Silas are put into stocks in the innermost cell of the prison, and are singing and praying together – unified in their circumstances and their objective of witnessing to the Gospel wherever they might be – when a great earthquake shakes the foundations of the prison and all the doors spring open and shackles fall away and all the prisoners are free. But none of them leave until the jailer wakes up and, much to his surprise he hears a voice from the depths of his prison telling him not to commit suicide as a good Roman officer should when faced with disaster because none of the prisoners have left. When he asks Paul and Silas what he must do to be saved, he could be thinking about saving his career but given what follows he’s more interested in saving his soul and those of his household. What results from this is a manifestation of love and healing that culminates in unity. The jailer treats Paul and Silas’ wounds from their flogging, washing them and bandaging them, and they in turn baptize the jailer and his entire household, which is a form of ritual cleansing that heals their souls. They are now a part of the community of faith, believers in God and followers of the Risen Christ. They are now one with us.

The unity of the early house churches, like those planted by Paul in Philippi, has been battered and bruised from very nearly the beginning. As early as the fourth century, John Chrysostom, the bishop of Constantinople said that if the disciples would but keep the peace among themselves that they had learned form Jesus, the people would know the teacher by his disciples. From the dozens of heresies that consumed the early Catholic Church that led to abuses of power both political and religious, to the Great Schism of 1054 over the primacy of the bishop of Rome who we now call the Pope, among other things that resulted in the Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church, to the further splintering of the Roman Catholic Church during the period between 1378 and 1417 when there was a Pope in Avignon, France and one in Rome, to Martin Luther’s Ninety Five Theses of 1517 that launched the Protestant Reformation and then on to Henry the Eighth’s establishing the Anglican Church in 1533 to John Calvin’s rise to power in Geneva in 1536 that ultimately led to the Presbyterian Church, unity in the name of Jesus Christ has been a scarce commodity. Our own denomination split over and over again, first in 1741 and again in 1837 over Old School/New School issues and then in 1861 into Northern and Southern branches over the evil of slavery. We didn’t come back together until 1983, and even then we couldn’t quite get it straight and the Evangelical Presbyterian Church spun away from the newly-united Presbyterian Church (USA) which we belong to here in Belleville. Somewhere along the line, we lost track of the teachings of today’s Gospel lesson that call for unity.

It seems to me that this should be a whole lot easier than we’ve made it. The direction we’re given in Scripture is pretty clear – we are to be one, as God and Jesus are one. We are to love one another, so that the love with which God loved Jesus may be in us, and so that Jesus may live in us. Please understand that I am not saying, nor will I ever say, that we have to be religious Stepford Wives, doing everything in the same way as others in other churches for the sake of a veneer of unity. For all their flaws, denominations have evolved over the centuries for well and good reasons: like-minded people gathered together in smaller groups under the broad umbrella of Christianity to worship and share the Good News with their own particular style of worship that may have been the result of cultural or economic pressures. Some folks love the pageantry of a high mass, others like to sit in a circle and discuss Scripture. The people in New England sing hymns; in Texas they have praise bands. Differences over the role of clergy, or whether or not to ordain women as ministers have led to denominational splits. And really, that’s OK. I’m very happy to be a Presbyterian Christian; my sister is a happy Episcopalian Christian. The key here is that we’re both Christians! On so many levels, for so many silly reasons, many of our brothers and sisters have forgotten that important detail. We’re all Christians. We don’t have to do everything in worship the same way and interpret the subtleties of the Scriptures in the same way or have the same organizational structure. As far as I’m concerned that’s window dressing. What we do have to do is love one another, and allow the unity that Christ desires for his church to flow from that love. As long as we’re all seeking the same ultimate goal, spreading the Good News of the Gospel to the corners of the earth, the differences between our churches don’t really matter all that much.

For us here at Belleville Presbyterian Church, unity of purpose is something that I think we’ve got a lock on. Love for one another is something we know how to do really well. Reaching out into the community to work with other churches to be of service to those in need is a part of who we are, and we are justified in being proud of that without patting ourselves on the back too hard. We’ve got to get better at evangelism in order to grow, but we’ll get there. As individuals, well, I know I have to take a look in the mirror and ask if I’m doing all that I can to promote unity in the wider community. I dislike many of things that are happening in Washington D.C. and Lansing, and I’m not particularly good at keeping my displeasure to myself and that doesn’t promote unity of purpose in the community or the country. I need to be better about engaging those with whom I disagree in a respectful way, in a Christian way so we can discuss our differences instead of beat each other up with them. How about you? Disagree all you want on any subject at all, it’s a free country but remember who you ultimately answer to for the way you disagree and whether or not you’re promoting the unity God longs for.

One, if you take it to mean alone, apart from those who love you and support you, truly is the loneliest number, and it’s not the application of the word we should choose as followers of Christ Jesus. We should choose communion, togetherness. We should choose unity. Not uniformity. Unity, as in oneness with God.

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