On That Windy Mountain

I imagine the day was dark. Surely the sky was cloudy and ominous as Abraham and Isaac made their way up the mountain. I imagine Abraham fighting against the force of the wind and the weight of his own dread with every step. He was arguing inside himself the whole way up the mountain. Surely it took every bit of his strength to trudge up the mountain – step by step by step. I imagine the sinking feeling that settled in the pit of his stomach as they arrived at the place for the alter. There was no more stalling; all that was left was to build the alter and offer the sacrifice.

The story of “The Binding of Isaac” is not an easy one to digest. For most of us, it does not leave us uplifted in the way we might be after remembering the story of Daniel in the Lion’s Den or David and Goliath or Jesus feeding the 5,000. Naturally we like to focus on the ending where God sent the angel and a ram to spare Isaac. But, even with the happier ending, I contend with the nagging questions that ask:

Why was Abraham even taking Isaac up there in the first place?

What kind of terrible neglectful parent would think God would ask them to sacrifice their child?

We call this man the Father of many nations? He almost killed his son Isaac, after sending his other son to die in the desert.

On the surface it seems difficult to give Abraham much of a pass. We might gloss over the terrible parts in our sermons and Bible studies because everything worked out in the end, but the layers of this story are filled with darkness and despair. We cannot help but think Abraham found himself in a situation we would never dare to consider.

Of course there are some who will point to the beginning of the story and say, God did tell Abraham to sacrifice the child whom he loved. This line of thinking could lead us to believe that surely Abraham misunderstood God. After all, would God really ever ask a parent to sacrifice their child? This does not jive with our understanding of Jesus who stretched out his arms and welcomed all the little children. On the other hand, one might point to the theological argument that reminds us that God has bigger purposes and plans and since God spared Isaac, the point was probably just to test Abraham’s faithfulness. For all I know, this is the exact reason Abraham found himself placing his beloved child on an alter on top of a mountain. My only niggling question is, didn’t God already know the faithfulness and lack of faithfulness of Abraham? We believe that God sees and knows the depths of us, surely God saw into the depth of Abraham. Besides that, Abraham had been on this crazy journey with God for at least 30 years when God asked him to leave his home and family and everyone he knew and loved to go to a random place in the desert. Surely God had a full understanding of Abraham’s level of faith and obedience.

The context of this narrative offers the reminder that Abraham lived in a time and a place when it was perfectly acceptable to sacrifice one’s child to their deity. This was a part of religious service/devotion for many. No one was looking at those parents and calling CPS or even calling their decisions into question. These sacrifices were normal and lauded. I cannot help but wonder if one of the points God was making to Abraham was to offer him even more evidence of how God is different than the deities worship by surrounding peoples. God is the giver of good gifts, the keeper of promises, and one who values all life. God’s actions and interactions stem from deep love and goodness. Of course belief in God requires sacrifice but the sacrifices God requires are often different than what we expect or what seems normal.

Writer and speaker, Will Willimon tells a story about teaching this biblical narrative to children. He showed them an impressive video depiction of the account. When it was over he asked the children if they knew what sacrifice meant? One little girl raised her hand and said, “My mommy and daddy are doctors. They help sick people to be better. Every day they do operations to help people.”

Willimon was not quite sure the little girl grasped the concept of sacrifice and asked her to tell why she believed that was sacrifice.

The girl continued by explaining, “And I go to the day care center after school. Sometimes on Saturdays too. Mommy and Daddy want to take me home, but they are busy helping sick people -- so lots of times I stay at the center. Sometimes on Sunday mornings we have pancakes, though.”

He said that all the children in the room nodded their heads because they understood.

In his reflection on the conversation, Willimon remarked, “How odd that we who make our homes and plant our gardens under the shadow of the mushroom cloud, who regularly discard our innocents in sacrifices to far lesser gods than Yahweh, should look condescendingly upon Abraham. No stranger to the ways of the real God, Abraham would know that a mad, disordered, barbaric age needs more than a faith with no claim but that its god can be served without cost.”

I sometimes wonder if we get so caught up in pointing to God’s goodness that we forget that there is a cost that comes with faith. Our faith in God is not something that simply enriches our life in much the same way as exercise, or reading, or making sure to eat our veggies. Abraham was willing to pay a price but the payment his sacrifice also missed the point. In response to the question, what does God require?  We hear the echo of the prophet Micah who says: Do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with God.

We willingly make sacrifices for many other little gods: work, comfort, the perception of others, the list goes on and on but those are not the sacrifices of true faith.

Faith requires us to consider what is just for the world and the people who live in it?

Faith teaches us that if we want to say we possess any type of love we express it through kindness to all.

Faith reminds us that like Christ, we put on humility to walk with God. Like Christ we notice the needs of others instead of seeking to secure honor and garner favor. 

The sacrifice that is required is ourselves. Matthew reminds us of Jesus teaching, “If you want to save your life you will lose it but those who lose their lives in service to me will actually gain it.” (Matthew 16:25) 

Where are the places we willingly sacrifice?

Do they do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with God?

Is there one area where we are more comfortable in our sacrifice than others?

Sacrifice requires us to step out of ourselves and onto the windy mountain. Sacrifice can seem scary and ominous but, perhaps, like Abraham, on that dark and windy mountain we will also meet God.

I See You -

The story of Sarah and Abraham and Hagar and Ishmael is on that fills me with great sadness. It is a complicated story fraught with human emotion that reminds us how our understandings of life and cultural expectations and faith can become knotted up and lead to unnatural, unhealthy, and devastating situations. I suspect that we often read this story and immediately identify characters in this way:

Abraham = the great patriarch of faith

Sarah = the great matriarch of faith

Hagar = the pesky other woman

It isn’t much of a leap for us to arrive at these definitions…especially those of us who have grown up steeped in the stories of our faith. After all, Abraham and Sarah are the parents of Isaac, the promised and longed for child.

As I read this tale, my heart reaches out to Hagar. I want to weep on behalf of her situation. You see, as much as we want to paint her as “the other woman,” “the mistress,” “the whore of pre-Babylon” she did not have much say about her situation. She was a slave in a culture that did not recognize our cultural understandings of marriage, partnership, and fidelity. She was their property and they could do with her what they liked.

As a result of decisions made on her behalf, Hagar finds herself and her child alone in the wilderness without water or food. How does she protect her child from wild animals? How does she look into his hungry eyes and tell him there is nothing to eat or drink? What does a woman do in the midst of loneliness and desperation as her heart breaks with in her?

There are simply no words.

So, Hagar, hides her son under a bush. Maybe she is protecting him from the dehydrating effects of the sun…maybe she simply cannot bear to watch him die. In the midst of her despair, she sits watch over her child as she weeps and prays.

But, God breaks into her weeping – God speaks into her silence, “I see you… I see you….I see you.”  Then, God takes Hagar over to her son, looks into her eyes and says, “Do not be afraid. Hold him tight.” As the mother holds her child, her eyes are opened in a new way and she sees a fountain of life giving water.

We do not know much more about the story of Hagar and Ishmael but we do know that God saw them and they lived.

I know a woman who grew up attending church. Zoey was involved in summer camps and mission trips and youth group. She and her boyfriend were leaders – others saw them as super Christians. But, as often happens with high school relationships, they broke up. The dissolution of a long term relationship is difficult for a couple and even more difficult when it seems as if a church community is taking sides, making judgments, and casting blame. (These types of situations make for the best sorts of gossip) Anyway, Zoey bore the brunt of the blame. She was shunned by the community of people she once knew as friends and suddenly had no place inside the only church family she had ever known. Whether the community would have recognized it or not, Zoey was heart broken, cast out, and left alone.

Like the story of Hagar, Zoey’s story breaks my heart.

For those of us who might have readily identified with Sarah, we must ask ourselves, “Who we are casting out?” We must consider how our own actions (intentional and unintentional), judgments, jealousies, and false piety can result in another being left for dead in the wilderness. While we often look at Sarah as the matriarch of our faith, in Hagar’s story she (and Abraham) is the one who casts out. In Hagar’s story, Sarah (and Abraham) is the villain. Do our own insecurities make us into the villain? Do they keep us from reaching out the hand of love? And that’s the challenge, isn’t it?

The other truth is, many of us have been to the wilderness. We have run out of water and sat alone feeling utterly hopeless. The greatest challenge is to follow the finger of God to the life giving water. It is truly more difficult than it sounds. When we feel desperate and helpless, it is natural to close our eyes and hearts to anything except what is dying in front of us. It is natural to wrap ourselves in grief and hold tightly to it because it seems that our grief is all that remains. Yet, if you dare to open your ears, you might be able to hear the voice of God through God’s messenger saying, “I see you. I see you. I see you.” No matter how we might feel, no one is invisible to God.

I do not have easy answers about loneliness and suffering.  I have lived on both sides – I have been both Sarah and Hagar. I have been the cause of the loneliness of others and I have felt the sting of loneliness myself. The reality is that it is not as simple as just drawing a line and standing on one side or the other. I have walked in the shoes of both women. What I do know is that whether we find ourselves in the situation of Sarah or Hagar, we have been seen by God. If we understand what it means when God says, “I see you – all of you,” then we have a taste of how important it is for us to be God’s messenger who turns to see others.   

Worry and Rest

True Confessions: I am a list maker. Yes, I am one of those people. In fact, I probably fit into the category of one of those “sick” list makers since I derive great pleasure from scratching things off my to-do list. I actually put easy tasks on my list just so I can check them off. Who else includes “eat breakfast,” “make coffee,”  “get dressed” or “make bed” on their to-do lists? Me. I feel like the day gets off to a great start when I can immediately check several things off my list. Making a list helps me to feel organized, it helps my day to run more smoothly, and it helps my sometimes-forgetful nature. Of course, there is a shadow side to these seemingly helpful lists. This darker side involves creating tasks to add to my list so I will feel busy and important. Everyone knows that the busier one is, the more important and valuable they are.

There are several problems with this line of thinking. If one gains value from their ability to stay busy and accomplish, what happens when they are no longer able to go and do and be and accomplish? What happens when a person becomes physically limited by age or a medical condition? Is the woman who tears a ligament in her ankle and finds her movement limited for months and months of less value than one who is not injured? Is the man who finds his strength has been slowly eroded by time of less value than those who are young and strong? What about the woman who spends weeks and weeks in bed due to pregnancy complications? Is she a less capable mother than the women who paint her child’s nursery, assembles their furniture, organize their clothes, work and attend aerobics classes until that child pops out? This line of thinking points to our own self-evaluations, our own self-perceptions, our own ability to love appreciate and accept ourselves, but also to a broader cultural dynamic and sickness that places “value” on humans based upon productivity/or the lack there of instead recognizing one another as created in the Divine image.

This morning, our lectionary kicks off the season of Ordinary Time by remind us of two important truths. 1) Our value is derived because we are created by God - in the image of God. 2) God rested.

Have you read the creation accounts lately? Take a moment and read the poetic account that beautifully personifies God’s presence in the midst of creation and serves as a reminder of God’s love and care for all humans: Genesis 1:1-2:4.

And God created Humankind in God’s own image, in the image of God, God created them; male and female, God created them.[1]  As people, our value is solely derived from the fact that we are Godbearers, as Christians, we are little Christs. This means that our living and being and moving is the light of God in the darkness, together as community we are the bread and the cup which makes up the Body of Christ. There is nothing apart from this that gives us greater value. We only have to accept this is where our value comes from and then live. If the living part seems daunting to you, do not worry, the Spirit of God lives in the world and helps us, reminds us, and empowers us. Hello Pentecost!

If our value is no longer derived from our accomplishments then we are free to let out the breath we have been holding. We are free to cease from our busyness and rest. We rest inside community when we gather to worship. We rest in our homes or in the nature that surrounds us, and when we can bring stillness to our minds, we rest inside our selves. We can put aside our lists and worries and exhale. We rest because we are not ultimately in charge, no matter what we say and despite our actions to the contrary, we do not possess ultimate control. That is God’s job. We must not confuse our role of Godbearers for actually being the Divine who creates and sustains.

The other night, I woke up at 3:07a. It might have been earlier than that but it was 3:07 when I finally looked at  the clock on my phone. As I lay in bed, my mind raced from subject to subject worrying and fretting and trying to find solutions and answers to problems that I cannot solve and questions I cannot answer. My grandfather always offered the reminder that one should pray during middle of the night worries but it is quite difficult to pray when one is busy trying to do God’s job.

As people of God we are quick to talk about the Sabbath. We are quick to remember the commandment about remembering the Sabbath and keeping it Holy. Most of our school-aged children can even tell you that on the 7^th day of Creation, God rested. When it comes down to it, we all have our own little ways in which we wrest control from God. In doing this we heap untenable burdens onto our own lives and will eventually buckle under their weight.

Perhaps this week, we can practice resting. Perhaps we can let go of our needs to be and do and control and we can even speak back to that annoying little voice that pushes us into that unhealthy way of living. It isn’t easy to rest, it isn’t easy to quiet our minds when we have spend years practicing a different pattern of living. This is why rest is considered a Spiritual Practice. We practice it a little every day. We practice it a little every week and over time we find that our practicing has strengthened our resting muscles. As our resting muscles strengthen we just might find that our ability to trust God has increased. For when we practice rest we are also practicing trust, we are saying “God’s got this covered, God’s got me covered, and that is more than enough.”

---

[1] Genesis 1:27

A few thoughts on Trinity Sunday

Good Morning Friends,

This morning is Trinity Sunday. Some might say, it marks the ending of all that is fun and exciting in the Christian Calendar: Advent, Christmas, Lent, Easter, Pentecost. This Sunday ushers us into the period we call Ordinary Time and will carry us until the end of the Christian year. I will say more about  the beginning of Ordinary Time a little later today but stumbled across this passage written by NT Wright about Trinity Sunday and wanted to share it with you here. If you are interested, I have included a link below to the book from which this excerpt is taken.

Love and Peace,
Amy

“In the church’s year, Trinity Sunday is the day when we stand back from the extraordinary sequence of events that we’ve been celebrating for the previous five months—Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Good Friday, Easter, Ascension, Pentecost—and when we rub the sleep from our eyes and discover what the word ‘god’ might actually mean.  These events function as a sequence of well-aimed hammer-blows which knock at the clay jars of the gods we want, the gods who reinforce our own pride or prejudice, until they fall away and reveal instead a very different god, a dangerous god, a subversive god, a god who comes to us like a blind beggar with wounds in his hands, a god who comes to us in wind and fire, in bread and wine, in flesh and blood: a god who says to us, ‘You did not choose me; I chose you.’

You see, the doctrine of the Trinity, properly understood, is as much a way of saying ‘we don’t know’ as of saying ‘we do know.’ To say that the true God is Three and One is to recognize that if there is a God then of course we shouldn’t expect him to fit neatly into our little categories.  If he did, he wouldn’t be God at all, merely a god, a god we might perhaps have wanted.  The Trinity is not something that the clever theologian comes up with as a result of hours spent in the theological laboratory, after which he or she can return to announce that they’ve got God worked out now, the analysis is complete, and here is God neatly laid out on a slab.  The only time they laid God out on a slab he rose again three days afterwards. 

On the contrary: the doctrine of the Trinity is, if you like, a signpost pointing ahead into the dark, saying: ‘Trust me; follow me; my love will keep you safe.’ Or, perhaps better, the doctrine of the Trinity is a signpost pointing into a light which gets brighter and brighter until we are dazzled and blinded, but which says: ‘Come, and I will make you children of light.’  The doctrine of the Trinity affirms the rightness, the propriety, of speaking intelligently that the true God must always transcend our grasp of him, even our most intelligent grasp of him.”

~ N.T. Wright, in For All God’s Worth: True Worship and the Calling of the Church (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1997), p. 24. 

This week at Christian Union

Hi Everyone,

We have a busy Sunday heading our way! This Sunday at Christian Union:

Father's Day - We celebrate our Fathers, Grandfathers, and those who have been like Fathers in our lives. Their love and presence is a gift from God.

Graduation Sunday - We are honoring our High School and College Graduates. These students have worked hard in their studies and we celebrate them and their accomplishments!

Please join us in worship and celebration!

Pastor Amy

Pentecost Sunday

I did not grow up in a Christian tradition that made a big deal about Pentecost Sunday. In fact, my tradition did not even acknowledge Pentecost Sunday. Besides Christmas and Easter, the rest of the Christian calendar was largely forgotten. As an adult, I find this sad. For Christ followers, Pentecost is a HUGE holiday. We should throw parties and celebrate. In fact, it is one of our biggest holidays that has not been appropriated by culture. You see, on Christmas we celebrate Immanuel: God with us. On Pentecost, we celebrate the scorching tongue of fire, the Spirit: God in us. My friends, this is big news! God is not simply roaming among us and we are left to search for God’s presence, the Spirit of God is alive in each one us. For us, this arrive is amazing, wonderful, and terrible. Of course, I do not use terrible in the sense of Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day. I mean terrible in the sense of its literal meaning: inciting awe or great.

            Take a moment to read through the Pentecost Story in the second chapter of Acts. If we did not know it before, surely we know it now the God who appears in these pages of scripture is neither docile nor tame. This God is not a safe, predictable deity we might imagine. “No, this is the God whose loving sometimes takes the form of scorching.”[1] This is the God whose appearance takes the form of divided tongues, as of fire… and these tongues to not appear to the disciples as some sort of hallucination that comes after eating too much stale Chinese food. No, these tongues of fire rested on those followers of Jesus who hid out in a house together.

Before Jesus left them, He promised the Spirit of God would come to them. Jesus described the Spirit as a Comforter or an Advocate. I can only imagine what the disciples must have been expecting at the appearance of the Spirit of God. If it were me, my first thought of a coming Comforter might have thought of a gentle breeze or a babbling brook. I would not have imagined the Comforter as a rushing wind or a blazing fire. But, perhaps that is the point.

In his book, The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, C.S. Lewis writes a conversation between the children and Mr. and Mrs. Beaver. In this scene, the Beavers are taking the children to meet the great Lion, Aslan. Naturally, the children are a bit concerned about this revelation because they are sensible children and know enough to know that of all the animals one might choose as a helper or a companion, the Lion is at not at the top of the list.

Aslan is a Lion – the Lion, the Great Lion [explained Mrs. Beaver].

Ooh  said Susan  I’d thought he was a man. Is he – quite safe? I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion.

Safe? Said Mr. Beaver haven’t you been listening to what Mrs. Beaver has been saying> Who said anything about safe? Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good.

When the long expected Comforter appears, we are reminded that comfort is not necessarily comfortable. Instead, the Comforter comes to makes itself know in our lives and communities…in the places where we face the most difficult, most raw, most searing challenges. In the presence of the Comforter we find the deepest blessings we could ever imagine or know.

I leave you with this blessing from the dear writer, painter and pastor, Jan Richardson. I pray that as we celebrate Pentecost with the colors of fire: reds and pinks and yellows and oranges, we will dare to allow our minds and hearts to be opened, that we will dare to redefine comfort and allow ourselves to be wholly changed by that which seems uncomfortable.

This Grace that Scorches Us: A Blessing for Pentecost

By Jan Richardson

Here’s one thing
you must understand
about this blessing:
it is not
for you alone.

It is stubborn
about this;
do not even try
to lay hold of it
if you are by yourself,
thinking you can carry it
on your own.

To bear this blessing,
you must first take yourself
to a place where everyone
does not look like you
or think like you,
a place where they do not
believe precisely as you believe,
where their thoughts
and ideas and gestures
are not exact echoes
of your own.

Bring your sorrow. Bring your grief.
Bring your fear. Bring your weariness,
your pain, your disgust at how broken
the world is, how fractured,
how fragmented
by its fighting, its wars,
its hungers, its penchant for power,
its ceaseless repetition
of the history it refuses
to rise above.

I will not tell you
this blessing will fix all that.

But in the place
where you have gathered,
wait.
Watch.
Listen.
Lay aside your inability
to be surprised,
your resistance to what you
do not understand.

See then whether this blessing
turns to flame on your tongue,
sets you to speaking
what you cannot fathom

or opens your ear
to a language
beyond your imagining
that comes as a knowing
in your bones
a clarity
in your heart
that tells you

this is the reason
we were made,
for this ache
that finally opens us,

for this struggle, this grace
that scorches us
toward one another
and into
the blazing day.

---

[1] Jan Richardson, Painted Prayerbook: Pentecost, This Grace that Scorches us.

Pentecost - We're on Fire!!!

Hi Everyone,

I just wanted to send you a quick reminder that tomorrow is Pentecost Sunday!!! I can not believe we have passed through the Easter Season. (I can not believe I have missed the ENTIRE Easter season!)

Anyway, I wanted to send you a quick reminder to wear one of the colors of fire: Pink, Red, Orange, or Yellow tomorrow morning in honor of Pentecost. (I know some might say pink is not a fire color but I will spend the rest of my life believing that it is...Plus, I love the color pink.) Fire is a common symbol for the Holy Spirit... it is how Luke personifies the appearance of the Spirit with the to the disciples on Pentecost.

In fact, I will be wearing pink in solidarity tomorrow...even it it is from my bed.

I send you all my love and prayers!

Amy

Bind Us Together - Easter 7a

Spending the majority of the day in bed poses an obvious problem: What does one do to fill their time? Before bed rest, my days were filled with the normal activities of life but, all that was “normal” life has come to a halt over the past several weeks. A couple of weeks ago, I was trying to connect with the outside world by looking at twitter. While perusing twitter, I stumbled across Rachel H. Evan’s twitter feed. (Rachel is a writer and a blogger. She often tries to facilitate dialogue inside Evangelical Christian circles to help Christians understand one another.) As far as I could tell, it was exploding with accusations and statements of ‘faith’ from all sorts of people. I admit I was intrigued. I could not help but wonder what in the world she could have said to provoke so much ire. As I filtered through the many, many, many comments, it seemed as if some people had stumbled across a poem she had written several years ago. In this poem, Rachel used feminine imagery as a metaphorical description of God. I sat, scratching my head, thinking, “Is this it? Surely, she has said something else…something more objectionable…something more controversial.”

On the one hand, I thought, “What is the big deal…we (the people of God) have been using metaphorical language for God…well, since the beginning.” In fact if we step back into the pages of scripture it was not until Moses, that God identified God’s self with a name. “I am who I am” or, more literally, “I be who I be.” (We make alterations from Hebrew to English for the sake of grammar.) It is not the simplest name around. God did not identify is Jake or Bob or Sue or Ellen. God did not offer a middle initial or a last name. To be honest, I am not sure how we would monogram the name of God onto a tote sack or a handkerchief - if monogramming is your thing. If you are thinking God’s name does not offer a gender clue, you are correct. God stands beyond gender. Gendered language is based on our own limitations of language and understanding. It was never meant as an all-encompassing reflection or definition of God’s character. While our pronouns that reference God are dominantly masculine, our Sacred Text also employs feminine imagery and maternal imagery to describe God. In Hosea, God is described as a mother[1] and a mother bear[2]. Deuteronomy describes God as a mother eagle[3] and as a mother giving birth.[4] Similar imagery is used in Isaiah when God is described a woman in labor[5] and a nursing mother.[6] Jeremiah describes God as the Queen of Heaven[7]. In Matthew and Luke, Jesus describes God as a mother hen.[8] Luke also has Jesus describing God as a woman looking for her lost coin.[9] (The metaphorical imagery abounds but I think the point is clear.)

Just as all of these examples to do not make the case for God as a woman, conversely the masculine imagery used to describe God does not make God a man. God is quite simply God. God is not gendered. As people: man and woman we are both created in God’s image. We, in our gendered selves, are God bearers. This does not make us God and does not make God us. It simply means we, in our most faithful selves, are living metaphors for God in the world.

For many of us, this is not new news. We readily acknowledge the limits of our own language and the limitlessness of God. So, perhaps you might also think, “What is the big deal?” “Why is Rachel Evan’s character being attacked?” “Why on earth is she being named some sort of ‘goddess worshipper’?”

On the other side, the people who have offered stringent objections to Rachel’s metaphorical choice believe they are upholding an understanding that is necessary to their understanding of faith. A desire to defend one’s beliefs/understandings inside the Christians community is really not an Us/Them type of thing. If we are honest, we should probably admit that many of us become over-enthuiastic as we uphold/defend pieces of our faith inside the wider Christian community. In her memoir, Leaving Church, Barbara Brown Taylor offers the compelling and convicting reminder, “…human beings never behave more badly toward one another than when they believe they are protecting God.”

In today’s lectionary text (John 17:1-11), Jesus is praying for his disciples – Peter, James, and John but also those of us who would follow. He prays for those who will believe his teachings, those who are the beloved of God. And, Jesus’ prayer is not that we will all believe the same things, or that we will take it upon ourselves to strongly correct those amongst us with whom we find fault. The culmination of Jesus’ prayer is the unity of those who follow Jesus. It seems to me, that this unity find’s its root in the sure sense that first and last, we belong to God.[10]  

It strikes me that Jesus includes a vast multitude of people in his prayer…people who will not, for the life of them, see eye to eye – even though their deepest belief rests in the love of God and the fact that they are God’s beloved. This fact does not stop Jesus from laying claim to each of us: “All yours are mine, and mine are yours.”[11]

In the midst of this text about unity, this morning the church celebrates the Ascension of the Lord. We turn the pages of scripture to Acts and hear the words of Jesus which command us to go out into invite others into the community of people who believe the teachings of Jesus, into the community of the beloved of God. But, how can we do this if we spend so much of our time discussing and correcting the differences we find amongst the beloved of God? How can we tell others they are the beloved of God if we are focusing on our differences instead of God’s self-giving, life-giving, liberating love for others?

The truth is, that this side of God’s realm, Christians will not live in complete agreement. Perhaps, instead of looking for perceived flaws and seeking total agreement, we should spend our time looking at how we are the same, remembering that just as we are beloved by God – so is the one with whom we disagree. In fact, unity is not simply being the same, it is not even losing our differences; unity is a conscious joining together. Perhaps we should follow the lead of Jesus and pray for unity, and maybe…just maybe…we will find it easier to join hands with other Christians and walk forward in true unity.

As we consider those around us, what changes for ourselves and in our relationships when we look for our similarities instead of focusing on our difference?

---

[1] Hosea 11:3-4

[2] Hosea 13:8

[3] Deuteronomy 32:11-12

[4] Deuteronomy 32:18

[5] Isaiah 42:14

[6] Isaiah 49:15

[7] Jeremiah 44:25

[8] Luke 13:34 & Matthew 23:37

[9] Luke 15:8-10

[10] Rev. Dr. Janet H. Hunt, All are yours and yours are mine.  May 25, 2014. http://words.dancingwiththeword.com/

[11] John 17:10