2017-05-30
Brooke Strong
Scripture: John 17:1-11
On Monday, Mary and I took a slow walk at Holden Arboretum. Some of you know how beautiful a place it is. The sun shone. The rhododendrons and azaleas were in full bloom. And as we strolled past one of the many ponds there, we saw what looked like a scuffle in the water. Curious, we stopped to see what was going on. Another couple was also watching this commotion, and when we looked perplexed, they said, “It’s two snapping turtles mating.” I confess what may not seem surprising to you, that this odd dance seemed not the slightest bit seductive or appealing. Making whoopee perhaps, but it was hardly the sort of becoming-one-flesh that inspires amorousness in the observer!
Nevertheless, even that ham-handed love-making is part of the vital, renewing ways of God. In even far more charming and fulfilling ways than that, we are made, as human beings, to join together, to become one, to live out our highest calling, which is to exercise the same sort of love and connection lived out in the relationship of God and Jesus. As God and Jesus are one, so that’s what you and I are invited to be.
And of course, we know how that call to unity has gone. In more ways than we can say, we have missed that singular and crucial goal. We have let God down in nearly every setting of our lives. Maybe the most banal, pedestrian, oft-repeated observation we can make today is that we are as divided as we’ve ever been. Name the setting and division is what we most know. Politically, red and blue live in different universes. In business, the competition is fierce and sometimes ruthless. Churches have vastly conflicting ideas about what constitutes faith. Religions have entirely different notions of truth. Within families, tensions sometimes boil over or just simmer. Marriages are too often plagued by the five different languages of love, one partner expressing and receiving love one way, the other partner in a different way entirely. And that’s to say nothing of local churches, this one not excepted, in which different visions of faithfulness, different hopes and dreams, make their presence known. It’s enough to make any hopeful dreamer throw up their hands in despair! What we hope might be our unity is sometimes as inelegant and unappealing as two snapping turtles mating. What are we to do? What hope is there for us to embody the unity God asks and expects?
Well, I was hoping you’d ask! In our passage of scripture this morning, with all that’s on the line, what is it Jesus does? He prays. He knows he will die the next day. The disciples are extremely anxious about what will become of them in Jesus’ absence. And what’s the last thing Jesus does on this penultimate day of his life? He doesn’t directly soothe the disciples. He doesn’t get his will in order. He doesn’t arrange a legal team to get him off the hook. No, he prays.
The very last thing Jesus does before the drama of his final day plays out is to put his life in God’s hands. It’s to say, “God, I am about to die. I need you to watch over my people. I need you to care for them and make sure they’re OK. And if I could ask you for one special thing, it’s this: could you please unify them? Could you make sure they know that they are one?” (John 17:11, 21)
We understand this plea, don’t we? If we were dying and our children were fighting, we might well pray the same prayer. If we were retiring from the business we had founded, and the staff were at each other’s throats, we’d want them to reconcile. Jesus is yearning for what we’d all yearn: unity.
The thing about Jesus is that he trusts God will bring it about. He knows we can’t do it ourselves. He knows it’s not a matter of will-power alone, or even primarily. Unity, real togetherness, comes as a gift from God. If you and a partner or neighbor are at swords’ points, almost invariably it takes more than your own efforts to reconcile. It takes a gift from beyond us. When Jesus prays for unity, he knows that it’s first of all God who will give it.
In our churches and families, in our nation, in our world, I suspect we think it’s all up to us. And most of us are at our wits’ ends about what we should do to make things right. What am I supposed to do to find a deep unity with someone on the other side of the political aisle from me? What am I supposed to do to erase the disdain and the vitriol that are rife, not just here in our culture, but around the globe?
What Jesus indirectly reminds us is that, when we have an apparently insoluble problem, the one to go to is God. Pray. Say: ‘God, I’m in over my head here. I so desperately want peace, want reconciliation. I’ve tried everything, and nothing seems to work. Please, I give myself into your hands. Help.’ And then, having said that or something similar, breathe. And trust. And look for the signs of God’s unifying presence. It’s not that this is some magic formula that will get God to do something. It’s rather a recognition that there’s only so much you and I can do. It’s an acknowledgement that the big questions of life are so often not in our hands. It’s a ceding of control. ‘God, I haven’t the wherewithal or the resources to do this alone. Please, make unity possible.’
We know, of course, because even Jesus’ prayer didn’t right every wrong and unify every brokenness, that such prayers are not guaranteed immediate success. All we know is that we can’t do it by ourselves, and that the incremental moves toward unity are accomplished by One beyond us. It’s God who first enables us to unite and connect. So we’re invited to pray. First, pray.
At the same time that we know it’s God who makes true unity possible, though, we also know that we have to show up at the dance. God makes the music and we dance the steps. Unity is ours to practice.
My friend and colleague Tony Robinson, whose fine book, Changing the Conversation, our Church Council read several years ago, recently wrote a short piece extolling the virtues of really listening to each other. He knows how often we talk over each other and seek to impose our own agenda. So he describes how, in church settings, he will often get people together and invoke a “no cross-talk” rule in their conversations. “No cross-talk” means this: when you’re in a group—church or otherwise—and you’re discussing a matter of importance, stop the normal free flow of back-and-forth conversation—that popcorn style of discussing—and instead encourage people to talk about the issue without interruption. “Only the person who has the floor speaks . . . Others listen.” As a speaker, you don’t purport to speak for anyone else—you don’t say, “People are saying . . .”—and you don’t comment on what anyone else has said; you speak only for yourself. As a listener, you don’t disagree with what another person says, nor do you commend it. You just take it in. So there’s no judging what someone else says. There’s not even any taking care of another speaker who may be struggling or weeping or trying to find the words. There is only listening.
As Tony says, “If there is no advice given, no fixing or judging, and no caretaking, what is it that the group does offer? Listening. Deep listening. Someone is heard—without comment, without rebuttal, without affirmation or applause. It turns out that this is [an enormous] gift. As [someone once said], ‘Being heard is so close to being loved that for the average person they are almost indistinguishable.’”
Tony says that often at church gatherings he will ask simply these two questions: “Where do you sense God’s presence in the life of our church today?” and “Where do you think God is calling us to go in the future?” And then people listen. Carefully. It’s safe. It’s inclusive. And above all, it gives room for the Spirit to move. It’s not arguing. It’s not cajoling. It’s not an attempt to convince. It’s listening for the radiance of God to shine through what may have been a stalemate or a seemingly intractable logjam. No cross-talk. Just listening (Christian Century, May 10, 2017, pp. 10-11).
So sometimes unity involves simply listening and paying attention to each other. Sometimes, though, the unity of God takes on a different tack, maybe an edgier tack, one that entails a kind of courageous resistance. One of the places that unity has struggled to find its footing is in a dispute that has roiled the nation in recent years, the question of what to do with the commemoration of historical figures whose views now seem reprehensible. Yale University, for example, recently decided to change the name of Calhoun College because the man for whom the college was named, John C. Calhoun, had been a staunch advocate of slavery. After the church murders in Charleston, SC, two years ago, the state, under the leadership of then-Gov. Nikki Haley, decided to remove confederate flags from official display. Both at Yale and in South Carolina, feelings have been fiery on both sides of the matter.
Another more recent setting for the same sort of dispute has been the city of New Orleans. After lengthy debate and an extended process, the city has just, in the last several weeks, removed four monuments from public land. Three of those monuments commended Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and P.G.T. Beauregard, prominent leaders of the Confederacy. How do we find unity in the midst of such passionate disagreements? In what ways can we follow God’s lead into oneness?
New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu last week addressed the matter straight on and persuasively, and he did so by invoking the nation’s motto, e pluribus unum: “out of many, one.” As a city, he said, New Orleans is “a bubbling caldron of many cultures.” That is one of the city’s great strengths. At the same time, he said, “there are also other truths about our city that we must confront. New Orleans was America’s largest slave market. . . . America was the place where nearly 4000 of our fellow citizens were lynched, 540 alone in Louisiana; where the courts enshrined ‘separate but equal’; where Freedom riders coming to New Orleans were beaten to a bloody pulp. So when people say to me that the monuments in question are history, well what I just described is real history as well, and it is a searing truth.
“And it immediately begs the questions, why there are no slave ship monuments, no prominent markers on public land to remember the lynchings or the slave blocks; nothing to remember this long chapter of our lives; the pain, the sacrifice, the shame . . . So for those self-appointed defenders of history and the monuments, they are eerily silent on what amounts to this historical malfeasance, a lie by omission.”
It is abundantly clear to Landrieu that “we cannot be afraid of our truth.” This is part of what it is to find real unity: we have to face, head-on, the real truth of our past and to tell the stories of those whose stories have been silenced. He quotes President George W. Bush as saying, “A great nation does not hide its history. It faces its flaws and corrects them.” As Landrieu so eloquently says, “These statues are not just stone and metal. They are not just innocent remembrances of a benign history. These monuments purposefully celebrate a fictional, sanitized Confederacy; ignoring the death, ignoring the enslavement, and the terror that it actually stood for.” They conveyed who was really in charge in New Orleans. They reminded those who passed by “that the Confederate cause was about maintaining slavery and white supremacy.”
Taking down those monuments, while hard, says Landrieu, “is about showing the whole world that we as a city and as a people are able to acknowledge, understand, reconcile and most importantly choose a better future for ourselves, making straight what has been crooked and making right what was wrong.” He goes on to say that “Here is the essential truth. We are better together than we are apart.”
His speech hits its high point when he says, “Indivisibility is our essence. . . . All we hold dear is created by throwing everything in the pot; creating, producing something better; everything a product of our historic diversity. We are proof that out of many we are one—and better for it! Out of many we are one—and we really do love it!” (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/23/opinion/mitch-landrieus-speech-transcript.html?_r=0).
These are riveting words for this Memorial Day weekend. They put into perspective why our friends and ancestors and so many that we don’t know have died in battle: they died to preserve a way in which all are welcomed and included; in which everyone is to be regarded as fully human; in which a wide and generous unity opens its arms to all people.
As people of faith, this is what we proclaim: we are one as we give ourselves into the hands of the God who makes us one. We are one as we really hear each other tell the real stories of our lives. We are one as we rise above the divisive and hateful stories that have, in part, shaped us. As disciples of Jesus Christ, we boldly declare that God’s love for each of us is infinitely strong and it never ends. So may we live out our unity with grace and love, taking strength and direction from the God who makes it all possible.