May 12, 2013

Linda Murphy

Easter 7     John 17:20-26

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Mothers come in many different forms and today we celebrate them all. We all have mothers and it is an overwhelming responsibility being a mother! There is no manual or guide book! Little wonder that we make mistakes.

Happy Mother’s Day to all mothers those present and to those who have passed.

The prayer we have just listened to reminds me of prayers I have frequently uttered and continue to utter as a mother- please care and guide our precious sons as they face each challenge be it a school exam, sporting event or musical contest, in fact all of life’s challenges. The last advice is important, Jesus knew he was leaving his friends and he needed to prepare them and the believers in the future such as us. The central concern of the prayer is oneness or unity: oneness with God, oneness with others. John uses the imagery that Jesus was God’s envoy and ambassador. His life and ministry is to be seen as an offer of relationship, a hand stretched out from God. This relationship is not any kind of relationship, it is one characterized by love, God’s unconditional love. When this prayer was written there was a split in the community of followers, Christian Jews no longer used the synagogues, they were establishing their own separate faith groups. Jesus is praying that the community will hold together, that they will live from the unity, and that they celebrate in his life and his relationship with God. They failed and that failure repeats itself when Christians write each other off. When love degenerates into apathy or worse hate. The Christian Church’s journey through the millennia is littered with example of this hate and apathy; the crusades being one such example.

Unity is not an extra. It is the essence of what it means to be Christian. The focus on unity assumes inclusiveness in which no one and nothing is left out. Unity does not translate as conformity we are not required to be the same as each other, our difference is to be celebrated. Unity with integrity does require that we can articulate not only what we affirm together but what we do not affirm.

Our Events Manager and fellow parishioner, Geno Sisneros, his partner Michael and his supporters have this last week been in the media. Geno took Bishop Ross, Bishop of the Auckland Diocese, to the Human Rights Review Tribunal on the grounds of discrimination due to his sexual orientation. Geno has studied since 2006 and completed his Bachelor of Theology in anticipation of being discerned for the priesthood. Bishop Ross denied Geno the discernment process. Geno and I studied together. Several decades ago I would have been in a similar situation as Geno, but the Church changed the rules regarding the ordination of women and I was not denied the discernment process due to my gender and after training I was ordained as a vocational deacon in 2010.

The church has over the centuries has been guilty of not walking this path of ‘being one’ in complete contradiction to the Gospels. The church has used Scripture to support exclusion. Slavery was once condoned and supported by Scripture. The first slave freed by a court of law was in England in 1772. It was not until 1833 that the Slavery Abolition Act was passed in the United Kingdom. However there are still an estimated 27 million children, men and women in slavery today worldwide.

The Anglican Church in Aotearoa New Zealand and Polynesia first ordained women priests in 1977. Penny Jamieson was ordained Bishop of Dunedin in 1989. There are still parts of the Anglican Communion that prohibit women from the priesthood. The Diocese of Sydney being one that is very close to home. The Church of England voted last year that women could not be Bishops! According to the ‘Vicar of Dibley’, it was the Dibley parish’s fault with her parish council’s vote where a “no, no, no, no, yes” counted for four against and one for, that achieved this ignominious outcome. Women have fought a long and exhausting battle to be ordained in our church and in many parts of the Anglican Communion and other denominations this battle continues.

One of my favourite films is Chocolat. Vianne the main character arrives in a small French village, with a daughter and no husband. She opens a chocolate shop during lent. She quietly challenges the religious establishment’s power over the people, by the generously hospitable way in which she lives and by her welcoming of outcasts. Pere Henri, the young priest, in his Easter sermon challenged the establishment by talking of Jesus’ humanity, how he lived his life on earth, his kindness and tolerance. He continued to say…” We must measure our goodness, not by what we don’t do, what we deny ourselves, what we resist or who we exclude. Instead we should measure ourselves by what we embrace, what we create and who we include. Vianne changed that village with her difference and her sense of unity with everyone and by doing so a community of inclusion resulted.

We separate ourselves from each other according to theology. We separate ourselves from each other according to race. We separate ourselves from each other according to social class. We separate ourselves from each other according to geography. We separate ourselves from each other according to gender, sexual orientation, appearance, age, politics… The list goes on and on. With so much out there that divides us, how are we ever likely to achieve the kind of unity that Jesus requests of us?

I think it helps to understand that the unity for which Jesus asks is not based on who we are, but on what God is. The unity for which Jesus prays is not dependent upon our ability to overcome division but God’s constant love for us in spite of it. There is a ‘we’ of faith precisely because of the way in which God relates to each and every one of us, not because of the way in which we relate to each other. Jesus was not praying for some monolithic expression of faith in which all believers believe the same things without variance. The unity here is not the absence of our disagreements; it is loving others in spite of them.

Wherever there is division, discord or disunity, the all-encompassing love of God is forever wearing away the walls that separate us. We have allowed women to be ordained; we are challenging our church to allow gay men and women with partners to be ordained.

We can celebrate our uniqueness, and be grateful for our difference, but at the same time we must never lose sight of the fact that all of us, to paraphrase Paul in Galatians: slave and free, female and male; old and young; rich and poor; educated and uneducated; healthy and ill; are made one in Christ and that unity is greater than anything that distinguishes us.

Jesus is not asking for foundational cognitive unity as much as he is asking for a relational one. The prayer is about relationship with God and one another rather than getting everyone to agree with us. Glory shines through when the Church is humble, doing quiet things to serve others those who are outsiders. Like Vianne creating community with love and respect for difference.

Amen.