Sunday, January 3, 2021

Mending and Rending: Eucharistic Homily on the Unity of the Church

Five hundred orbits around the sun. That's how many circuits the earth has traveled since that day. It was five centuries ago, the third day of January in the year of our Lord 1521, and in Rome, the most honorable bishop of the Church of Jesus Christ looked over a painful document. It awaited only his seal. Leo was forty-five years old – pudgy, stubbly, and spendthrift. Surrounded by gloriously fine art and equally striking piles of mounting debt. But today, the day when we find Leo, neither the art nor the debt caught his eye nearly so much as the ink on this page. The ink represented what he hoped would be the conclusion of the troubling activity of one monk – a 37-year-old incorrigible loudmouth of a monk, Leo might well have believed.

Three years ago, Leo first caught wind about a monk stirring up trouble. Reopening all the questions long ago settled, throwing people into confusion, picking fights and arguments all over town. And the monk's writings were spreading, printed to a gluttonous popular demand. Leo had ordered the monk's order to get the monk back in order – to get him under control and to keep him quiet instead of a scandal. But the monk was radicalized. In spite of having made solemn vows to God that he'd obey his order, obey Leo, he now refused to uphold those vows and listen. This monk had a boiling temper and a razor-sharp tongue, and the more people he cut, the more people he found to blame for what his tongue and pen did. Every man in Europe seemed more to blame for the monk's words than the monk himself, to hear the monk tell it. It became clear early on that this monk “fears the authority or rebuke of no one.” Oh, occasionally the monk swore to listen and be quiet, but it seemed like he talked out of both sides of his mouth. One moment, the monk would bow and say that Leo's voice was the very voice of Christ to him. But the second Leo had any word to say that the monk didn't like, the monk would start denouncing Leo as Antichrist!

It was exhausting. It was churning society into a fervor. Over and over, Leo tried – as he saw it – to lovingly correct this younger monk. Leo sent a variety of different messengers, once and again. Leo took time out of his busy schedule to write personal letters. Leo offered even to pay for the monk's travel expenses so that the monk could come visit Leo and talk through the issues face-to-face. But it seemed like the monk was insistent on disturbing the peace, breaking the unity, and denying the truth of God's Church.

Of course, the monk certainly didn't see it that way. When he looked around at the Christian world, he feared that almost all Christian teaching was a racket, a way to choke and distract people from a simple and sincere faith, which is all he thought really mattered. When he went into churches, he doubted that even a tenth of a percent of Christian worship was actually real. He censured it as faithless and empty. He suggested the whole church had been corrupted, falsified by lies. He said he was rebelling, not against legitimate authority, but against “the kingdom of Babylon and the tyranny of Nimrod the mighty hunter.” He said he aimed to shelter all his brothers and sisters from “the plagues of Rome.” In this monk's mind, the church had been infected with a hell-born plague, a contagious disease, and he was called by God to bleed it out with fire and fury.

Leo couldn't stand this cynicism, this misanthropy, this blasphemy. Last June, he decided to offer the monk one final chance. Leo sent out an official decree, calling on God to rise up and listing exactly, point-by-point, where the monk had gone so dangerously wrong. The decree gave the monk sixty days after hearing it to make up his mind, and the way back would be easy and gentle. It took a couple months, until September, to get the decree to the monk and his neighbors. But it only seemed to make the monk more ferocious and unruly. The monk doubled down. Now that Leo had decided against his ideas and behavior, the monk cursed Leo's decree as the very voice of Satan. When this past December ran down the clock on the monk's time, he tossed the decree into a fire in public and declared that he had the authority to kick Leo himself out of Jesus Christ's Church!

When Leo heard that, what real choice was left? This was out of hand! Both could no longer stand. This monk was rending and ripping the Redeemer's seamless robe. Leo looked at this monk as basically Patient Zero of an outbreak, as a theological and ecclesiological superspreader, the Typhoid Mary of the Church. This monk had “what amounts to a contagious disease,” Leo wrote. For the good of the rest of the flock, he'd have to be quarantined, along with those he had already infected, lest the greater crowds be contaminated unawares. Leo therefore ordered faithful Christians to avoid this stubbornly divisive monk and his supporters as heretics – to welcome them nowhere, to be as socially distant from them as could be. And in all of that, Leo professed to only be following what the Apostle Paul had commanded: “As for a heretical man: after warning him once and then twice, avoid him, knowing that such a person is warped and sinful – he is self-condemned” (Titus 3:10-11).

So five hundred years ago today, in that room in Rome, Pope Leo X sadly stamped a lead seal on that decree: his name was on one side, a picture of the Apostles Peter and Paul on the other. And so an aggrieved Leo cast that contagious monk out of the Church. That's how Leo saw it. That monk's name was Martin. Last name: Luther. We know his side of the story well enough. But in one way or the other, the break-up of the Western Christian world can be traced to that day, that decree: Decet Romanum Pontificem. Today is the five hundredth anniversary.

In retrospect, as most everyone now agrees, people on both sides carried blame in some form or fashion – but the issues remain hot and live. Our denomination would dispute many details of Leo's diagnosis and treatment, pleading that Luther “revitalized biblical concepts that had been losing ground.” Our denomination would echo at least some of Luther's furious diagnosis of the church, and since before our birth we've been either waiting for the larger church to take its medicine or else we've been giving them up for dead. Leo's heirs today, for their part, would naturally stand by his professional diagnosis of the protesters and would warn us that we're yet unwell, that the quarantine can't be lifted until we get serious about health and return for our medicine.

But we aren't here this morning to take sides. We're here to look at the consequence of the contagion. And that consequence has been division: the further rending of the Church. It used to be that Christians gathered always around one altar, one table. “Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, because we all share the one bread. … Aren't those who eat the sacrifices sharers in the altar?” (1 Corinthians 10:17-18). Paul, after all, talked about maintaining “unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace” (Ephesians 4:3) with “one faith” and “one hope” (Ephesians 4:4-5). But on that day five centuries ago, here in the West, this all ceased to be. Those who stand with Leo would say that those quarantined were cut off from the true altar, and that what stands here before us this morning is at best a reminder of where the Lord's Table could be. And Luther and his partisans, for their part, shouted that Leo's altar was a scene of sacrilege, a table of demons they were glad to leave behind – and we, historically, have followed them.

One thing has to be agreed: It's been five centuries since Christians in the West (let alone from the East) have been generally able to unite in one Body to feed on one Body. Separation prevents it. Now many altars are raised up, many tables built, many suppers spread. And we've adjusted to the fact of multiplicity. We accept it now as normal, matter-of-fact. That's just the way it is. We see it and shrug. We whistle and go our merry way.

But then we have to deal with Jesus. Because on the night when he first ordained what we aim soon to do, he prayed a grand prayer to God his Father. And in that prayer, Jesus emphatically sets the Church apart as his, and in being his, the Church is God's (John 17:5-10). And for this Church, one of Jesus' most burning expressed desires is simply this: “that they may be one, as we” – he and God his Father – “are one” (John 17:11). Not content with that, Jesus goes on to pray “that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me” (John 17:23). One measure of our attitude toward Jesus is how seriously we love what he loves, and he loves for his whole Church to be one Body in the truth of the faith.

And should it surprise us to hear Jesus praying so passionately for the unsullied unity of his Church? After all, long before Jesus gathered his disciples in the upper room, and even long before Joseph and Mary drew close to Bethlehem, Jesus – the eternal Word even before he became flesh – was God. Jesus was the God who chose twelve tribes and called them one nation. Jesus was the God who marked them with one sign of circumcision, who gave them one law and one sacrificial system and one priesthood, who appointed one central altar for the sacrifices of the whole people, and who commanded them to preserve that unity. And does Jesus expect any less of us under the new covenant than he did under the old? In fact, he calls us to more unity, not less; to better health, not worse. Disunity is a graver offense to the new sacrifice than to any of the old ones that blazed and smoldered before the tabernacle in the desert or in the temple courts of earthly Jerusalem.

The painful truth is that in the past five hundred years, we've all been so sinfully proud of our respective roles in the rending that we've been pitifully neglectful of the mending – that is, we've failed to be diligent about coming to agreement on the diagnosis, about treating the condition more effectively, about striving to achieve the conditions for full unity again, mending a common faith so we can return to the same altar together to feast on the same salvation for (and with) body and soul. This isn't merely a nice wish, a dream for sensitive hearts. It's an obligation. It's a commandment of Christ. We are told to “attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God” (Ephesians 4:13), and until we're fully united back together as one Body, we are – to that extent of disunity – too immature to follow Christ in the way he means it.

Some day, it will not be so. Some day, we will all grow up. Some day, we will all reach the full measure of Christ. In that day, you will search far and wide for a sign picking out the Lutheran church, and you will not find it. There will be no such thing as a Lutheran church. Or a Baptist church. Or a Methodist church. Or a Mennonite church. Or an Amish church. Or an Evangelical Congregational church. Or a 'non-denominational' church (but I think I already mentioned the Baptists). These denominations, these associations, these independencies are fated to either escape the gravity of grace altogether or else be pulled back into unity to journey as one body – a body pierced and bloodied, but with bones unbroken. In God's time, we know for certain that, unless we dare despair that the Father plans to forever deny his own Son's urgent prayer, all these old things must at last pass away into the fleshed-out unity into which one Lord calls us in one Spirit.

If Jesus prayed that we be one to show the world that he and his Father are one, that we be perfectly united so that the love of the Father and the mission of the Son and the embrace of the Spirit are evident to a waiting world, then our division – including the division cemented five centuries ago today – is a scandal that scars our witness and sickens all creation. Isn't five hundred years long enough to be resigned to the status quo? Isn't five hundred years long enough to treat Jesus' vision as expendable? Isn't five centuries long enough to agree to let contagion fester? Isn't five centuries long enough to waste around different altars?

We need to do our part to reach out in love across these divides, be they the divides of yesterday or the divides of five centuries past, and run our diagnostic tests again. We need to do our part to remember the faith we're meant to share, in all its purity – which is why next week, we'll begin a sermon series returning us to the Apostles' Creed, the faith once delivered to all, the bedrock we all must confess and cherish. We need to do our part to pray in hope, all together and across the divides, for the cause of Christian unity, until earth and heaven shake, until the obstacles give way, until at last the altar is one and the table is one. The Week of Prayer for Christian Unity is fast approaching this month. But this deserves more than a week. It's the passionate yearning of our Lord. We need only to catch flame with the Lord's love for unity.

As we gather at this table this morning, I hope we leave hungrier than we came – hungrier, because a longing has been awakened in us: a longing for more of Jesus, for all of Jesus: the God and the man, the body and the soul, the flesh and the blood. And this we'll taste all the more on the day when, in common, a cured Church can finally feast healthily and heartily on the completeness of Christ. But I hope we can taste this morning that life tastes a little funny. For many centuries, there has been a blight, a disease, a quarantine; and Jesus is calling us today, here on earth, to rebuild, to heal, to make right. That will take work. That will take relationships. That will take prayer. But even now, amidst the broken pieces of five centuries of fallout, the grace of Jesus abundantly drenches us in our separated places. He was crucified for us. He is risen from the dead. He will come again and gather all things together beautifully in himself. And as we wait, were the torn church to ask the Lord for just four words to carry with us to the table, he might well say this: “Get well. Get one.” Amen.

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