Unity

Philip Rademaker

Connection • Sermon • Submitted 3 months ago • Presented 4 months ago

Psalm 133

John 17

Acts 10:1–33

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Transcript

Intro

I learned this week that globally there are 45000 denominations. 45,000. That’s a lot of times when people went, you know what, this church that I’m part of, I’m so unhappy with it, I’m so over it, I can’t stand it anymore, I’m going to leave and not just start a new congregation, I’m going to start a new organisation! If you want to start a denomination, it’s a bit of work right!

On the face of it, Christians really seem to struggle with the whole unity thing. And

And of course, that’s before we get personal. No doubt if we’re honest with ourselves, sometimes there are Christians we would rather not see, not talk to, not be associated with.

Which is really awkward isn’t it? I mean, we’ve just read John 17, Jesus prays repeatedly, passionately and at length that we would be united.

That’s awkward right? Surely this is a passage that makes us squirm a bit.

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We’re beginning a new series today on the more practical aspects of our life as a church. I’ve called it Connection 2024 and we’re going to be thinking about the topics of Unity, Affection, Belonging and then Laura’s going to talk about hospitality.

They’re all practical, and they’re all things that make the gospel more plausible. That is, they don’t prove that Jesus is true in some scientific way, but they do show the world that he is credible.

Jesus says people will know that we are his disciples by our love for one another.

And here in John 17, Jesus says that when we live in unity, as one church, it makes the gospel more believable.

Context statement

The first thing that stands out when we read this prayer is just how much Jesus asks that we would be one.

I count times from verses 11-26 where Jesus is asking the Father to bring us together.

It really does seem like unity is top priority for Jesus.

But if it’s top priority, and yet history and our own experience tell us that it’s really hard, how on earth does Jesus’ propose we do it?

1. Unity can’t be faked

State

The temptation when we sense that we’re not as united as we need to be is to fake it a bit. To present our best selves to the world. Like when you’re having people over for dinner but the house is a mess and everyone’s stressed and you’ve just been yelling but the moment the doorbell rings its all smiles, we’re all a happy family here? No?

Maybe that’s just me.

Because people have so often fought over what the bible means and over theology, church governance some have suggested, that we need to stop stop talking so much about what we believe, stop focusing on our differences and start working harder at getting along. Maybe start by doing what everyone agrees Jesus told us to do - love people. Deeds, not creeds.

Now in one sense that’s right. We called to love God and love our neighbour as ourselves. Pretty simple right.

But look at what Jesus prays in verse 8

Show

John 17:8 NRSV

for the words that you gave to me I have given to them, and they have received them and know in truth that I came from you; and they have believed that you sent me.

Jesus prays that we would be united in the truth. In our shared commitment to the truth of the gospel, the story of what God has done.

It’s not just about love - love is a notoriously vague term. No, we’re united by the story of God’s love that led Jesus to lay down his life for the world as an atoning sacrifice for sin. That’s a very particular kind of love. Likewise, we’re not just invited to be spiritual, we’re united by receiving the Holy Spirit, the one who Jesus promises just a few chapters earlier in John’s gospel, would remind us of everything he said and did.

Illustration

The disney movie Encanto is all about a family with special gifts. Each member of the family has a unique ability like super strength, or super hearing or the being able to understand animals. They live in this magical house that can move and rearrange itself and everything seems really happy on the surface. But as the movie goes on, we see that their unity is fake, it’s cracking. It’s built on lies and avoiding talking about important things. They ‘we don’t talk about Bruno’ - the uncle who said awkard things and left 10 years ago. They tell the one granddaughter who didn’t get any super powers, ‘the best way for you to help is by staying out of the way’.

They act as if we can all be united, we can present a happy face to the world, if we just don’t talk about Bruno. Don’t mention the war.

Likewise, when we hear how significant our unity is, we may be tempted to paper over our differences, just don’t talk about what it is we believe and we can all live together.

Now we could achieve a form of unity if we don’t talk about Bruno - about any of the content of the story. We could stop talking about Jesus claims to be THE way to God. We could stop reading the Bible, God’s word and instead say ‘you do you.’ We could stop confessing our sin, repenting and seeking to live a new life obeying Jesus, and just talk about how we can claim God’s power and blessing.

But that would be faking it. It wouldn’t be the kind of unity that Jesus prays for here.

Apply

That’s why we don’t avoid talking about the details of what we believe. It’s why we say the creeds each week - we don’t say them just out of habit, we say them because they summarise the story that gives us our unity. Like a footy team singing the team song after a win - cheer, cheer the red and the white - we say the creeds because they remind us of our story. And they state clearly who Jesus is, who God is, and who we are. And anyone who can say the creeds and say amen at the end, is saying ‘this is my story, and if it’s your story too, we are united, we are one.”

We may not see eye to eye on everything. I know that in this room, there is a diversity of views on things like baptism, how often we should do communion, the end times, the relationship between the church and the state, and many other things. Some of these things don’t change the story much one way or the other. Some of them do.

While these things could threaten to divide us, Jesus insists that we cannot be united just by changing the subject. We need to talk about Bruno. We need to talk about what it is we believe. Otherwise we risk faking it.

Transition

But of course faking it isn’t the only way people try and get unity.

You can also try and force it.

Unity can’t be forced

State:

The Beatles famously claimed that love is all you need, but many people have pointed out that Jesus doesn’t say that. Jesus insists in his prayer here that you can’t have love and unity without truth and holiness.

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John 17:16–17 NRSV

They do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world. Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth.

Explain

Jesus’ prays that we would be holy, set apart and different from the world. Jesus groups everyone into one of either two camps - the world and the church.

And some people have said, well If that’s what Jesus prays, then we better make sure anyone claiming to be his follower actually believes the truth and lives it out. We don’t want people engaging in false advertising - claiming to be Jesus’ people but misrepresenting him with funny ideas or bad behaviour.

We can’t have unity with people who believe a different story about God.

Now again there’s something right about that. We do need to make a distinction between Christians and Muslims and Jews. We believe radically different things about who Jesus is. But it’s also why its right to make a distinciton between Christians and Jehovah’s witnesses, and Mormons. We believe very different things about who Jesus is.

But what about making a distinction between Protestant and Catholic. Or Anglican and Baptist. Or my kind of Anglican and the other (wrong) kinds?

It’s very easy for us to go from rightly wanting to hold to the truth - Jesus says we must, and locking everything down so tightly that we end up thinking that we’re the only ones who have the right theology!

Forced unity: authoritarianism

That was the Pharisees.

The pharisees took the law of God seriously. The wanted people to care about the truth. They heard God’s call for them to be a holy nation, guarding the truth of his word. And so they created laws around the law of God, to make sure no one even got close to breaking them. They policed the temple and the synagogues. They made sure anyone who wasn’t measuring up was kicked out.

And they didn’t do it just because they loved rules, they really wanted unity. And they knew that they were supposed to be making the claim that Yahweh is God of Gods plausible.

We could do that here. We can write out a 183 point statement of faith and I can ensure that each of you sign it. We could have parish council regularly come and visit you and question you about your life and make sure you still agree, and make sure you’re behaving. I could make you all sit doctrine exam before I give you communion. And we could hold public hearings into your behaviour.

That’s happened before. Not just under the Spanish inquisition, but also in New England with the Puritans, and to a lesser extent in some churches here in Australia right up to today. I’ve belonged to some of them.

If we really cared about the truth of the gospel and living holy lives, if we really cared about helping the world to see that Jesus is Lord, wouldn’t we be prepared to do that to achieve unity?

What does Jesus say to the Pharisees? With all their apparent concern for truth and holiness. You are whitewashed tombs. Clean on the outside, but inside full of death.

Policing everyone doesn’t create unity, it just creates uniformity. And there is nothing special about that. There is nothing beautiful about that. There’s nothing that gives the world a glimpse of God in that.

The only way that we can have the compelling, beautiful unity Jesus talks about is there in verse 23.

John 17:23 NRSV

I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.

Apply

Our unity comes when each of us focuses not on policing one another, but on Jesus. It’s like a triangle, where we start at the bottom and Jesus is at the top. So long as we’re moving towards him, we’re getting closer to our brothers and sisters.

The more focused we are on God, the more we are devoted to him, the more we are prepared to let Jesus’ speak to us and direct our lives and yes love our brothers and sisters, the more we will find ourselves drawn together. That’s what he prays for, that’s what he promises.

So can I encourage you, the next time you’re frustrated with another Christian, maybe you can’t believe how heretical they are, how outrageously liberal they are, how unbearably conservative they are, start praying this prayer. Seek the Father as Jesus does.

Next time you’re deflated by the disunity of the church, you can’t believe the petty squabbles start praying this prayer. Seek the Father, as Jesus does.

Next time you’re frustrated at how difficult another Christian is, start praying this prayer. Seek the Father, as Jesus does.

Because the more we do that, the more we’ll avoid the final way that we might be tempted to force unity - and that’s by sameness.

Forced unity: homogenaity

Show

Did you notice how Jesus prays specifically for you and me in John 17? He prays for himself in verse 1-5, then he prays for the first generation of disciples in verses 6-19, and then he prays for us, the ones who believed on account of what the other disciples said.

Jesus prayed for you and me. How cool is that.

And I think part of the reason Jesus prays specifically for us is because he knows the temptation of trying to create unity by keeping everything the same.

Explain

Think about it, every single one of the first disciples were Jews from Judea. That’s what we call a homogenous unit. They were all the same culture, same language, same ethnicity, and mostly the same level of wealth. It’s not always easy to keep people like that together, but it’s soooo much harder when you add different cultures, different languages, different ethnicities.

Which is exactly what the Holy Spirit did after Jesus’ resurrection, we read about it in Acts.

It’s hard to have a church full of different kinds of people. The apostle Peter, the rock of the church, the one Jesus’ chose to lead the church tried to create churches that were separated according to race. Despite the fact that Jesus told him clearly that anyone who trusts him is ‘clean’, Peter tried to create churches separated along racial lines.

Illustration

When I was a minister on the Northern Beaches of Sydney, just about all of the young adults in our area went to one church. A huge bunch of them, hundreds, all chose to go to one. But I can’t tell you which one because it kept changing. For a while it was Belrose Uniting church. Then it was a church called Manly Life. Then it was Northpoint. Then it was somewhere else. For some reason, one church would become cool, and everyone aged 18-24 would go there.

In a way, these young adults were an advertisement for church unity. They didn’t care about denominations, they didn’t fight about little things, they were really passionate about experiencing the presence and power of God. What more could you want?

Well, for one thing, maybe a place for someone outside of the 18-24 bracket.

Now, they wouldn’t deny that the church includes people over the hill like me. They just preferred the simplicity of being with people just like them.

But how is that any different from the world? How is that beautiful? How is that showing the power of the gospel?

Jesus insists that the world will sit up and take notice of him and see the beauty of the gospel if his disciples are united. Really united across all of the usual human boundary lines.

When you and I are willing to bear with the complexity and discomfort of doing life with people who aren’t the same age as we are, who aren’t the same class as we are, who don’t have the same level of education as we do, who aren’t the same culture as we are it shows the world that we have been captured by a love that is out of this world.

Illustration

In the book Growing Young, the authors talk about a church in urban LA. As you can probably guess, it was totally Latino, with everything conducted in Spanish. But by the early 2000s, most of the young people in the church only spoke Spanish as a second language. Like a lot of migrant kids, they could understand it, they got the gist, but it wasn’t what they preferred. Plenty of churches in this situation just hire an English speaking pastor to create a separate congregation. That way the older generation can continue as they had, and the young people could be themselves, do things in English and be more ‘American’.

The trouble is when that happens it’s a very short step to becoming two separate churches. It’s a very common way that two different communities form.

But this church - First Baptist Church of South Gate, especially the older members of the church we’re convinced that they needed to be united. They decided that they would switch everything from Spanish to English. Although it would be harder for them, they wanted to welcome second and third generation young people growing up in the area who didn’t speak Spanish. Language had the power to divide them. The migrants who struggled with English could’ve insisted on their own way. But they didn’t. And as a result, they not only stayed connected across generations, they began to grow connections across cultures. More and more non-latino people joined the church.

As the authors of Growing Young said, they found even stronger glue than language to bond them together. The found the self-sacrificial love of Christ.

Conclusion

How beautiful it is when brothers and sisters live together in unity. How can people not sit up and take notice of a church that is united like that. That is open and honest and authentic about what it believes, the story of God’s love for us in Jesus at the centre. That doesn’t fake unity by adopting ‘we don’t talk about Bruno’ as its motto, or by holding everything together by sameness.

How compelling and beautiful would it be for our church to be so focused on Jesus, so captivated by God’s love, that we are willing to lay down their lives in service of people that we would normally have nothing to do with.