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Scripture: The Third Sunday after the Epiphany, A.D. 2016 C

Homily:

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

  

A student in Russia enters the cathedral and asks to be baptized. Her parents were Communist, but she remembers the hymns that her grandmother sang to her when she was little. The incense in the sanctuary seems to lift her up into another world. She is the Body of Christ.

A man in Kenya sharpens his long spear. A rogue lion has been killing livestock near his village and must be hunted down, but he is not afraid. He has been hunting lions since his youth. Even so, he offers a prayer to the archangel Michael, guardian of guardians. He is the Body of Christ.

A mother in Jerusalem comforts her children, who witnessed a knife attack on the bus that afternoon. She reads to them from a Hebrew New Testament, given to her by Messianic Jews. “Blessed are the peacemakers,” promises Jesus to her little ones. She is the Body of Christ.

All over the world, men and women of every age and race and background are being called forth from the nations to become the hands and feet of Jesus Christ at work in this world. Some of them, in India and Egypt, have been Christian for nearly 2,000 years. Some of them, in China and Iran, are part of a fresh blossoming of faith under the most unlikely of circumstances. They are Lutheran and Catholic and Orthodox and Pentecostal. They are Anglican and Evangelical. They are young and old, rich and poor, male and female, slave and free. There are well over two billion of them, and they are all Christian.

We live in a momentous time, brothers and sisters, an age of remembrance, an age of reawakening. All over the world Christians are overcoming ancient divisions and misunderstandings. We are downplaying our differences and recalling what truly makes us one—who truly makes us one. Only a few days ago, during this Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, Pope Francis gathered Catholics and Lutherans and Orthodox Christians together in a Latvian cathedral, and he pointed to the baptismal font in the center of the sanctuary, a font that predates the divisions in our Church. “This,” he said, “this is what unites us: our Baptism into the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.”

It is true that we are many, separated by confessions and denominations. But at heart we are one. Such was the prayer of Jesus, that we might all be one as He and the Father are One. And that prayer is even now being answered in wondrous and unexpected ways. At the same time as the Pope’s address, the Anglican church emerged from conference with Catholic and Orthodox and Coptic Christians to proclaim their joint hope that in 10 years all Christians might at long last celebrate Easter on the same day. That may not seem like a terribly huge deal, but imagine, just imagine, twenty-two hundred million baptized faithful proclaiming in a single voice, in a single global celebration, “Alleluia! Christ is Risen! He is Risen indeed! Alleluia!” As one. As one.

We’re coming up on the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation in 2017—that great schism in the Church when Rome said to Wittenberg, “You are departing from the catholic faith with heretical innovation!” and Wittenberg retorted right back, “No we aren’t; you are!” So went the next half a thousand years of bitterness and blood. Yet as we come upon this milestone, this great scar gashed in the Body of Christ, both sides are reaching out to embrace the other as sisters. This week, Pope Francis shared the Eucharist with Lutherans; he is in fact the third Pope in a row to do so publically. A service of joint celebration has been published for next year, to be led by a Lutheran pastor and a Catholic priest in tandem. These developments would have been unthinkable even 50 years ago.

We aren’t home yet. We’re a long way from being a monolith, and disagreements still abound. But the days of denouncing one another as heretics and apostates are behind us. We long to reconcile with our wayward brothers. We long to be one. Yet beneath it all—beneath the denominations and the bureaucracy and the conflicting authorities we all cite back at one another—the true Church, the hidden Church, remains one, holy, catholic and apostolic.

While the visible Body of Christ has been shattered by politics and schism, the invisible Body is still whole, still one, still bound together by the same Lord Jesus Christ in the same sacrament of Holy Baptism. And when we gather at this Table for the Lord’s Supper, we are all joined in the same foretaste of the feast to come: the Wedding Feast of the Lamb promised to all who call upon the Name of the Lord. Yes, we are broken, but we are still one in Christ Jesus. Yes, we are fallen into fratricide and fanaticism, but Christ will raise us from our graves to new and eternal life together.

All throughout the Middle East, Christians are being persecuted for confessing Christ as Lord, assaulted to the point of extinction. And when the foes of our faith attack, they make no distinction between Baptist or Coptic or Tewahedo or Presbyterian. For them, Christians are all the same, one Lord, one Baptism, one Church. We are united in the blood of the martyrs.

At the same time, in China, in Iran, in communities of Middle Eastern refugees throughout Europe, people are coming in droves to hear the Good News, to be baptized, to enter into the Body of Christ. Some hail from Muslim backgrounds, some Communist, some pagan. And when they come seeking Baptism, when they come answering the call of Christ, they do not distinguish between Catholic or Lutheran or Orthodox. For them, Christians are all the same, one Lord, one Baptism, one Church. We are united in the power of the Holy Spirit.

Ours is an age of wonders, of ancient promises fulfilled, when the hopes and prayers and dreams of 100 generations seem at last to be nearing fruition. I cannot say what the Body of Christ will look like for our children’s children’s children. I cannot say what challenges yet undreamt of they will face. But I know that they will face them together with the Church of every time and place, with all those who have gone before us and all those yet to be; for whatever else may divide us, we shall ever be one in Baptism, one in the Holy Spirit, one in Christ Jesus our Lord.

We are all of us the Body of Christ. And through us, He will do marvelous things.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.