Sermon preached by the Rev. Fredrick A. Robinson
The 7th Sunday of Easter
Have you ever thought about how connected we are to one another? John Donne thought about it, when he wrote “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”
We are connected to one another. Take for example how we communicate with one another. We couldn’t begin to express our thoughts, our feelings, our needs if it were not for language. Where did that language come from? It developed over hundreds of years, even thousands. As people discern a need to describe something they affix a word to it; then they let others know, and we are able to communicate. The language is refined over the generations, and rules of grammar are devised to make our communication ever more precise.
If two adults had to come up with a language all by themselves, without any prior knowledge of how a language is developed, it would take them a long, long time to come up with what the average third grader knows and takes for granted. But what that third grader knows he or she knows because of the interconnectedness of the human family. “No man is an island.” Language is just one example of how dependent we are on one another.
God made the creation that way, so that every part of creation needs every other part. He could have created things differently, if he had desired to do so. God could have created every individual element to be totally self-sufficient. I can’t even imagine what that would look like. Our science would certainly look entirely different, if God had made his creation in such a way.
As it is, creation mirrors how God is in himself—in relationship. The Father abides in the Son and the Son abides in the Father, and the Holy proceeds from the Father and the Son. The three persons of the Trinity are in perfect relationship with one another, so perfect that while there are three persons, the unity resulting is such that there is one God.
The unity of God’s creation, however, is not so perfect, especially with respect to humanity. God gave us free will at the same time that he created us to live in unity with him, with one another, and with the rest of the created order. He intended for all people to live in the bonds of love, yet as we are painfully aware in the particularity of our own lives, that goal of God was not achieved. The history of salvation that is recounted in Holy Scripture is a history of how God has been actively working to bring about the unity that he intends for all people. How he chose Abraham and his descendents to be his people, that they might mirror that unity that he desires; how he never gave up on the Hebrew people, as they continued to live in ways that thwarted that unity, by calling the prophets to speak for him; and finally how he sent his Son to suffer and die in order to effect reconciliation between his people and himself is the drama that we reenact throughout the Christian year, and in fact, in a very abbreviated form, at every eucharist. The Church was brought into being in order not only to bring members of the Church into unity with him, but also to be a sign to the entire world of the kind of life God intends for every human being.
In the Gospel for today we heard part of Jesus’ High Priestly Prayer. As he is preparing to die on the cross, to reconcile us with God, he prays for unity. “Holy Father, keep them in thy name,… that they may be one, even as we are one.” Jesus is praying that his sacrifice may bear the fruit it was intended to produce to effect the reconciliation of the world to God. We often think of salvation in very individualistic terms, especially those of us in the United States, where we have such a strong tradition of rugged individualism. Yet Jesus’ High Priestly Prayer paints a much different picture, pulling us back to our interconnectedness. I’m reminded of one writer who said, “He who goes to God without his brother, is likely to find not God, but the devil, who will bear an embarrassing resemblance to himself.”
I have just finished a book titled The Sistine Secrets, by Benjamin Blech and Roy Doliner. It’s about Michelangelo’s painting of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Painted in the 16th century, it reflects both the terrible and the wonderful things that were going on in the Church. During that time, Jews in Italy were undergoing tremendous persecution by the Church, the papacy was corrupt, and there were many who wanted to bring about massive reforms in the Church. It was during this time, of course, that Martin Luther and others were trying to effect reform.
Pope Julius II commissioned the famous sculptor Michelangelo to do a painting that would glorify his papacy. Amazingly, he gave Michelangelo a great deal of freedom in designing the frescoes for the ceiling. Michelangelo, who was thoroughly schooled by Florentine free-thinkers, was sympathetic to the Jews as well as to much of Reformation thought. Nevertheless, his ideas of toleration and brotherhood had to be cleverly disguised or they would never be allowed to remain. The writers of the book claim that the disguises were so effective that they weren’t discovered until the cleaning of the ceiling in preparation for the Jubilee in the Year 2000.
Michelangelo and others of like mind were not successful in their goals. The Jews continued to be persecuted. The reformers ended up splitting the Church, rather than reforming it. We have lived with the split so long that it seems like the way things ought to be, rather than the scandal that it is. In our own Southwest Florida territory, we have an Episcopal bishop, a Roman Catholic bishop, a Methodist bishop, and a Lutheran bishop. A bishop is supposed to be a symbol of the unity of the Church. And we have far more churches that don’t recognize the office of bishop than those four represent. The Church is called to be the sign to the world of the unity God desires for the whole human family.
Yet our Lord’s prayer for his Church remains that we all may be one. Every time we celebrate the Holy Eucharist we acknowledge that fact as we pray for unity. And there are signs of hope. The ecumenical movement continues. There are numerous documents between Church bodies concerning what we really can agree upon. There is even interfaith dialogue among Christians and Jews and even Muslims, which are extremely important.
But the issue of unity is not just for religious bodies, but for individuals as well. Our Lord wills for us to be reconciled to one another. True reconciliation comes only through him, and through his grace. The best way that we can celebrate the resurrection is by acknowledging that Christ indeed makes us one and by living into that reality through our words and deeds, for truly, no one is an island.