A NEW POINT OF VIEW

October 6, 1991
8:30 and 11:00 a.m. Worship Services

John M. Buchanan
Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago

Scripture
2 Corinthians 5216-21
John 17:20-23
From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of

view...if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation."
-2 Corinthians 5:16-17 (NRSV)

It's not easy to say goodbye. Some people never do it.
Most of us overdo it. When the kids leave we try to get all the
important advice into one sentence: "drive carefully, go to bed

on time, brush your teeth, remember to eat vegetables, study,
call home."

---A "goodbye" is always a time to summarize in some way
what has transpired, and to give expression to hope for the
future.

"Do come back... let's do this again... Good luck... God
speed..."

The last time Jesus was with his friends, it's called "the
Farwell Discourses" and it's a rambling sequence of last minute
advice during the evening meal which will be their last supper -
although they do not know it at the time.

And at the end of these farwell discourses, Jesus prays for
his friends and by extension, prays for us.

This is what he said:

"I ask not only on behalf of these, but also on
~ behalf of those who will believe in me through
their word, that they may be all one. As you,
Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also
be in us, so that the world may believe that you
have sent me. ‘The glory that you have given me I
have given them, so that they may be one, as we
are one. I in them and you in me, that they may
become completely one, so that the world may know

that you have sent me and have loved them even as
you have loved me." [John 17:20-23 NRSV]

So when the topic is unity we are not dealing with some hair-
‘brained scheme cooked-up by a bunch of over-Zealous, ecclesiasti-
cal bureaucrats bent on creating a mammoth super church, with a
new Protestant Vatican in New York probably. When the topic is
unity, we are-talking about something so dear to the heart of
Jesus that he's praying for it literally hours before his own
death. And furthermore, just like the preacher whose pastoral
prayers wander into the political and social implications of the
particular petitions which are being laid before the throne of
grace... "Dear God, give us clarity and wisdom on election day so
that Senator so and so may continue his good works." (That's
prayer on the way to politics.) -..just like that, Jesus asks God
to make the disciples one, to keep them together, the disciples
and everyone who comes after - "so that the world may know that
you sent me." God didn't need that reminder. They did apparent-
ly. We do, obviously. The unity of the disciples of Jesus is the
best way to tell the world about God's love. And if you accept
that, you have a problem with disunity among Jesus! disciples, a
permanent case of heartache and shame because of what the world
sees when it looks at Christians and therefore what it is not
hearing about the love of God.

"...that they may be perfectly one so that the world
may believe."

In The Education of Little Tree, by Forrest Carter (a book I
read and loved this summer, but which yesterday's newspaper an-
nounced may be a hoax, and may be written by a pretty unsavory
character, but which remains a good book) a little boy is raised
by his Cherokee grandparents, in the mountains of Tennessee
during the Great Depression. They live in a cabin, far away from
the mainstream of life. They hunt and trap and farm a little -
corn mostly, for the purpose of Grandpa's business which is

producing the best corn liquor in the mountains. The story is
narrated by Little Tree. This is from a chapter on "church-
going": People are scattered in the mountains, so there is only

one church to serve them all.

"Grandpa said that preachers get so taken up with
themselves that they got the notion they personal
-held the door handle on the pearly gates and
wouldn't let nobody in without their say-so.
Granpa figgered the preachers thought God didn't
have nothin at all to do with it.

"All the Baptists believed in baptizing, that is,
getting total sunk under the waters in a creek,
They said you could not be saved without it. The
Methodists said that was wrong: that sprinkling on

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top of the head with water done the trick. They
would each whip out their Bibles in the church
yard to prove out what they said.

"It "peared like the Bible told it both ways; but
each time it told it,: it cautioned you had better
not do it the other way or you would go to hell.
Or that's what they said it said.

"T determined that I was not going to have any-
thing atall to do with water around religion. I
told Granpa it 'peared to be the safest thing to
do, as you could easy get shipped down to hell,

depending on how the Bible was thinking at the
time.

"Grandpa said if God was as narrer-headed as them
idjits that done the arguin' about piddlin' such,
then Heaven wouldn't be a fit place to live any-
how, which sounds reasonable.

"Grandpa said I had just as well forgit about the
water situation. He said he had totally give up

on it a long time ago and felt better since that
time.

"He said he, privately speaking, couldn't reason
as to what in the hell water had to do with it.

"IT felt the same way and so give up on the water."
[Forrest Carter, The Education of Little Tree,
p. 152-160, excerpts]

"T in them and you in me, that they may become.
completely one, so that the world may know that
you have sent me and have loved them..."
[John 17:23]

I suppose there are few Biblical ideas that have been more
thoroughly ignored, or worse yet, vigorously violated. Why do we
have such trouble with this simple little priority of Jesus -
that they all be one?

_+s,, Douglas John Hall who teaches on the faculty of McGill
University in Montreal, thinks that the problem is-that we have an

almost inherent difficulty in thinking wholistically about
anything.

Most of us, says Hall, whether we are in the supermarket or

voting booth, are still living on a "flat earth with nicely
segregated sections."

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Only partially facetiously, Hall says the most valuable
‘spin-off of the space program is.a simple picture of the earth, a
bright, fragile, incredibly beautiful Sphere against the black
background of infinity; no boundaries, no walls, no divisions.
There are no corners on the globe; there are no moats or oceans
broad enough to divide; there are no parts... To see that single
photograph is to know the absolute truth of Economist Barbara
Ward's famous warning: "You are one world. ‘You must learn how to

be one, or else you will not be at all." [See Douglas John Hall,
The Steward, p. 127-132]

Why can't we think globally? It may be the question. our
tradition suggests that it has to do with individual egotisn:
everybody in the world thinks in terms of me and mine first.
Christianity calls that sin and I continue to believe it is one of
the most politically and economically relevant ideas around. Hall
Says Westerners are addicted to an adolescent notion of individu-
alism that starts with the individual and never gets any further
than clan, tribe, ethnic group or nation. And I was reminded that
it wasn't that long ago that "one worlder" was regarded as a
subversive notion, that world organization, the United Nations,
the World Council of Churches, the World Court, UNICEF, were the
target of blistering polemics from the radical right.

Whatever the reason, it is no longer an academic matter
because all the separate parts are armed to the teeth... spending
precious resources as quickly as they can be generated to produce
more weapons — spending at a world-wide rate of 1.8 million dol-
lars a minute for armaments, sitting on 55,000 nuclear weapons
with a combined force of 16 billion tons of TNT. Whatever the
reason, the parts are not fighting one another, as they used to in
the good old days, through surrogate, mercenary armies engaged in
combat on a neutral field. In fact in modern warfare as it is
practiced this year 80% of the casualties are civilians. It is no
academic matter. There is a new world order emerging and in some
places like Yugoslavia, it is emerging within racial and ethnic
borders which have historically been more than willing to kill and
to die for the tribe, the race, the ethnic group: So when the
President of the United States, as he did two weeks ago, takes a
major step back and away from the nuclear nightmare, it is an
occasion for profound gratitude and for people who are ordinarily

lamenting the state of the world to give voice to their support
and encouragement.

What the global village needs more than anything else is a
new view of itself...that picture from space, for instance, and
what it further needs is individual men and women willing to take
a very different view of things.

"How good it is to be in unity," the Psalmist wrote. And

the Scriptures consistently hold up-a vision of the reconcilia-
tion of all the parts, the breaking down of walls of

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hostility... not just between individual believers, but the one-
.hess, the unity of all things, all people, all nations, all of
creation.

=. A few years after’ Jesus prayed. for: the: unity of his disci-
ples, St. Paul wrote some letters to the small groups of believ-
ers - churches - he had helped to establish. Those little

churches had two problems - internal. and external: how to get
along with one another inside the community and how to relate to
a huge and threatening and hostile world outside. To one of

those churches which was having a particularly difficult time with
both of those challenges, the church in Corinth, he wrote two
letters. And in the second ‘one he said something so good, so
provocative and breath-taking that we're still saying it, often
times right in that moment in worship when we have told the truth
about ourselves and are waiting to have a word of truth about God.

Paul wrote:

"From now on we regard no one from a human point
of view... if anyone is in Christ there is a new
creation - so we are ambassadors for Christ -
ambassadors of reconciliation."

I have a confession to make. I've been reading that passage
wrong. I heard it right for the first time this week.

"In Christ there is a new creation."

I always thought that meant the other guy, who when he or
she accepts Christ, gets "in Christ," becomes a new creation and
is now in the church, inside the tight little circle keeping us
safe inside and the world out. I always thought being an
ambassador for Christ meant getting everybody inside the circle.

That's not it. That's wrong. That's the opposite of what
Paul was trying to say. The new creation in Christ is you and
me. We are the ones who no longer see people from a human point
of view, as insiders/outsiders, them/us, Christians/Muslims,
Catholics/Protestants, blacks/whites, saved/damned. No more of
that! That's the old creation which, in Christ, died on a cross.
There is a new creation in Christ and in it there are no bound-
aries, no walls of hostility. The creation is wide open. Anyone
who wants to be in is welcome and, from God's point of view, in
“already, and the task for those of us who know about this new
creation is not to get everybody inside the circle or over the
wall, but to make sure that the circle is wide enough for all,
and that there is no barrier, no wall to divide God's holy crea-
tion, and to separate God's daughters and sons from one another.

I've always loved this day - World Communion Sunday. I
think it's because sometimes I know on this day the mystery of

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God's new creation. Sometimes on the first Sunday of October,

- with the. bread and wine-on the table -and with they reminders of: .

humankind's marvelous diversity in the liturgy, I know I am

actually standing in the presence of something new and glori-
ous.

It requires a conversion. It requires letting go of the
old point of view, the old way of defining people on the basis of
national and racial and religious differences. And it means
opening our hearts to the radical good news that in the new
creation of Jesus Christ we are a blessed unity. We are one. We

are, by his grace, brothers and sisters, part of one family of
humankind.

So do come and know this mystery. Come to his table and
eat bread and drink wine and hear again his words, his prayer for
us - "that they may all be one so that the world may believe."

Amen.

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