Reflections...

A sermon preached by David Gill and broadcast on Hong Kong's RTHK, on 26 January 2003, marking the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity.

 
My friends, churches throughout the world have just concluded their annual Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. Here in Hong Kong there were several special events, and many congregations paused to reflect on how Christians have been rediscovering one another as brothers and sisters within the one family of Christian faith.

What an amazing rediscovery it is proving to be! When future historians go to work on the Church of our time, they will surely marvel at this astonishing saga of transformation we call the modern ecumenical movement.

You and I have the enormous privilege of participating in what must be, by any measure, one of the most dramatic, rapid and far-reaching movements of renewal the Church of Jesus Christ has ever known.

So much has happened.

Long centuries of silence separating churches of the Orthodox east from those of the Catholic/Protestant west have ended.

Deep disagreements over issues like baptism and the eucharist (or the Lord’s supper) – disagreements that once saw Christians literally shedding each other’s blood – have given way to mutual learning, deepening understanding, indeed something close to consensus.

Churches of Asia, Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, the Caribbean and the Pacific have established new relationships with those of Europe and North America and become major players on the world stage.

And how the atmosphere has changed.

Willem Visser ‘t Hooft, the first general secretary of the World Council of Churches, told in his Memoirs of his first nervous encounter with Cardinal Bea, who had just been appointed head of the Vatican’s new secretariat for promoting Christian unity. It was September 1960. Visser ‘t Hooft dared not even tell his wife where he was going for the weekend. The concierge of the Milan convent where they met was under strictest orders on no account to ask the name of the mysterious visitor from Geneva. It was all very hush hush, very delicate, very risky.

Today, only four short decades later, the Roman Catholic Church is an enthusiastic member of more than half of the world’s 103 national councils of churches, and three (Pacific, Caribbean and Middle East) of the six regional ecumenical bodies, as well as cooperating closely with the World Council. And it feels not risky, but wonderfully right, to all of us.

That, however, is only the tip of the iceberg. More important than such structural developments is the qualitative change we have witnessed in relationships between Christians. Remember the bad old days of prejudice and bigotry? They weren’t so long ago.

“We have become a community of trust,” a Lutheran leader told me in Brisbane a few years back, commenting on what his friendship with other heads of churches had come to mean to him. It’s a statement many of us could echo, for the miracle of ecumenism is not, thank God, restricted to the ranks of church leaders.

How far we have come.

But we’re not there yet.

Disagreements over some major issues still block the way to mutual recognition and full communion. Indeed, new points of contention, within as well as between the churches, are now complicating their relationships.

Inevitably, some feel frustrated. They want progress to come faster. So many of their dreams are yet to be fulfilled. Councils of churches, always underfunded, find themselves in some places struggling. Patience wears thin. “The winter of the ecumenical movement” is how one of my friends describes the present climate.

I know how he feels, but I think he is wrong. Things may not move fast enough, but they do move. Organisations may have their problems, but the movement itself, within and between the churches, continues apace. The climate today is not bleak. By the same token, the climate in years past was not always one of untroubled sunshine.

It would be more accurate to label this a continuing springtime of the ecumenical movement – with occasional clouds, to be sure, and every so often a thunderstorm to make life interesting!

Of course there are frustrations. And there will be failures. Indeed, at times the churches may be tempted to wonder whether the ecumenical movement is worth the effort, whether the benefits really outweigh the costs.

When that question arises, we must be ready to question the question, to restate quite clearly what motivates the churches’ shared quest to become, visibly, the one, holy, catholic, apostolic Church of which the creed speaks.

We did not set out on this journey because of some vague notion that it is nice to be nice to other Christians. We are not driven by the merger mentality of big business. We are not in the game because of a desire to see the more efficient use of ecclesiastical resources, for the sake of a better public image or even because of what it might do for our shared mission.

We have taken this road simply because the logic of the gospel demands it. As Bishop Lesslie Newbigin once remarked, a divided Christianity has about as much credibility as a temperance society the members of which are perpetually drunk. The good news of God’s reconciling power in Christ requires a manifestly reconciled community of faith, nothing less, to embody it.

Indeed, the gospel demands not just a united faith community, but a renewed one. That’s why ecumenism is not just an exercise in ecclesiastical joinery, trying to glue together the various bits of the churches as they are, or a takeover bid by one denomination of another. It is the churches wrestling with the call to renewal – aggiornamento, Vatican II called it -- as they ask: what is it we must together become in order to be faithful to Christ’s call today?

The churches set out on this ecumenical pilgrimage because they became convinced that renewal in unity is God’s will. It would be ridiculous for a Christian’s faith, hope and love to rest on some calculation as to whether or not such qualities are worth the effort. It is no less ridiculous to attempt a cost/benefit analysis of the merits or otherwise of seeking the visible reconciliation of Christ’s fractious people.

Obedience transcends calculation.

And what inspires our journey is far stronger, far more enduring, than any obstacles we may encounter.

Ecumenism’s driving power is God’s amazing grace, nothing less.

For the good news of the gospel is that God accepts us – not because of the precision of our doctrines, the elegance of our liturgies, the enthusiasm of our commitment, the vintage of our histories, the scope of our programs, the good works of our community services, or the zest of our assorted varieties of religious experience. Under the cross, all our churches stand empty-handed.

No, the good news is that God accepts us – fullstop. Warts and all. Notwithstanding the inadequacies that mar our mission, the failures that warp our witness, the infidelities that litter the centuries. We are accepted! Forgiven! Loved! We are, against all the odds, embraced by the amazing mystery of grace.

It is that gospel of divine acceptance that inspires us to pray, to think, to dream, to work like mad, to find a way towards the full acceptance of each another as brothers and sisters within one family of faith gathered around the one cross of the world’s one redeemer.

For so great a gift of grace, so great a calling set before us, thanks be to God.

 

 

_____The Revd David Gill is pastor of Kowloon Union Church. Previously he was general secretary of the National Council of Churches in Australia (1988-2001) and the Uniting Church in Australia (1980-88), and served on the staff of the World Council of Churches in Geneva.