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During my second summer in seminary, I ended up serving Holy Comforter Episcopal Church in Atlanta, GA. One of their claims to fame was having a program, the Friendship Center, founded during the 1996 Olympic Games to help serve people living with various mental illnesses and disabilities. Thanks to the church, the program has been able to continue long past the Olympics, and many of the parishioners at Holy Comforter attend this program.
When I started serving at Holy Comforter, the director of the Friendship Center was the one to take me under his wing and help train me to serve there. Shortly after I began, he was given an amazing job offer doing similar work and left his service at the Friendship Center.
This put me directly under the purview of the vicar at Holy Comforter. At the time I didn’t know her that well. All I knew was that she had attended a very different seminary from me, known for, at times, different approaches to theology. Knowing that, I didn’t know how we would get along or what to expect.
Then she got up to speak to the parish about the director of the Friendship Center’s departure. She said that this was a tough situation and that change is hard. She also said that they had weathered these changes before and they would make it through this one with Jesus’ help.
It wasn’t just how well and open she was able to communicate with a congregation full of people living with mental illnesses and disabilities that struck me. It was her focus on our Lord Jesus Christ in doing so that made a huge impact on me. At that point I knew that whatever our differences, perceived or otherwise, might be, we shared the same mission. I knew with that in mind, we could get along and do the work God had given us to do, and we did just that.
Unity is important in the church, especially because of what makes us different. Unity is so important that we hear about it from all the early leaders of the church. Most of Paul’s letters concern our unity as followers of Christ Jesus. Unity is so important that even Jesus talks about it in the Gospel this morning.
Unity is so important to Jesus, in fact, that it is a major talking point in His Final Discourse with His Disciples before dying on the Cross. His prayer is that the Disciples will be so united that they will be one, just as Jesus and the Father are one.
As I learned at Holy Comforter, that sort of unity only comes about when we have a common goal, which for us as Christians in centered in our Lord Jesus Christ.
Specifically, our unity is in evangelism. It is in going out and telling the Gospel, the Good News, of our Lord Jesus Christ. That is how Jesus ends this section of His Final Discourse with the Disciples, by calling on them to make God’s name known to the world as Jesus has made it known to them. We see the call to evangelize in Paul’s work in Acts and in his jailer’s response in having his entire family baptized. We see it in the majesty of God declared in the Psalm, and the light of God which goes out and is seen by all the world. We see it in Revelation with Jesus beckoning all to come to Him.
As Christians we are united in our task to make Christ Jesus known to all people in the world. We are united in our identity as followers of our Lord Jesus Christ which makes this shared task possible. Even though we may differ, we are united in this work of showing God’s love to the world with the same love God first showed us.
I was able to be united with the vicar at Holy Comforter in spite of our differences because we shared a common bond and a common goal: our Lord Jesus Christ. My hope is that we can do the same here at St. Luke’s. As we move forward with our search process, we are coming to learn more about our identity as a parish. There is still a great deal of work to be done in this area, of learning who we really are as a parish in the Diocese of Pennsylvania, a part of The Episcopal Church, and a member of The Anglican Communion worldwide. My hope is that whatever we discover about ourselves in this time, we will find our identity rooted in Christ Jesus and spreading His Word to all the world. Only then can we truly be united. Only then can we be free. Only then can we truly be followers of our Lord Jesus Christ in this world and the next.