Epiphany 2, Year C -- Sunday Sermon

On the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity

This past Friday, on the Feast of the Confession of Saint Peter, the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity began. It concludes this coming Friday, on the Feast of the Conversion of Saint Paul. I don’t know if more was made of this in the past here in Rhode Island. But sadly, it seems possible these days for the Week of Prayer to go by without its being much noticed. So this morning I want take the opportunity to raise our awareness of the week and its themes.

The idea of a week of prayer for unity among the separated churches of Christendom was first proposed in 1908 by the Graymoor Franciscan Friar Paul Wattson, himself a convert from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism. Pope Pius X officially endorsed the idea; and the practice gained a following in the Roman Catholic Church in the first part of the twentieth century. Following the formation of the World Council of Churches in 1948, many other Churches – Protestant, Orthodox, and Anglican – started to observe it. In 1968 the Faith and Order Commission of the World Council of Churches, and the Roman Catholic Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity began issuing jointly prepared materials for the week – and have continued ever since.

To some extent, interest in the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity has waxed and waned with enthusiasm for the ecumenical movement in general. I’m old enough to recall that in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, following the Second Vatican Council, many people were optimistic and excited about the many ecumenical dialogues and projects of cooperation that had opened up in the midst of a new era of good will after centuries of mutual hostility and distrust among the different Christian bodies.

In more recent decades, that excitement cooled down as some of the differences among the churches proved more intractable than people had expected. Still, a number of surprising ecumenical developments have been taking place in recent years: notably the series of Agreed Statements of the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC) on a variety of doctrinal issues; the Lutheran-Roman Catholic Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification in 1999; and in this country the achievement of full communion between the Episcopal Church and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in 2001.

Yet, despite these developments at the level of high-flying commissions of theologians, bishops, and other national and international church leaders, relations among Christians of different denominations and communions at the level of local parishes and congregations, dioceses and judicatories, often have more the appearance of rivalry and competition than dialogue and cooperation.

In one of the diocesan committees on which I recently served, certain people repeatedly advocated a state-wide effort to reach out to and recruit disaffected Roman Catholics as a growth strategy for the Episcopal Diocese of Rhode Island. Almost every time they brought this up, however, I spoke out against it: “That’s no way to talk about our ecumenical partners!” I would say. “I have many former Roman Catholics in my congregation; and I’m always eager to welcome anyone who wants to join. But despite our disagreements with the Roman Catholic Church, nonetheless we’re in a formal ecumenical relationship with them, and we need to stop talking as though they’re the enemy.” But I usually felt like a voice crying in the wilderness.

The fact is, when we look at any Christian body besides our own, we’re likely to discover much that we agree with in what they teach and practice, and other things that we disagree with. The question is whether the agreements are more important than the disagreements, or vice versa. Here we encounter two possible extremes: at one end of the spectrum, a triumphalism that insists that unless your belief and practice matches ours exactly down to the last detail, you’re hopelessly mired in error and heresy; and, at the other end of the spectrum, a relativism that maintains that these differences are all humanly fabricated, whereas God doesn’t care where you go to church or what you believe and practice so long as you’re a nice person.

As an Anglo-Catholic, I don’t often quote Martin Luther, but he made a distinction that I find enormously helpful in thinking about these questions: namely, between the essentials of the faith, and what he called by the Greek word adiaphora, which means “things indifferent” or “inessentials.” Related to this distinction is a slogan often misattributed to Saint Augustine, but which actually comes from a seventeenth century Croatian Archbishop: in necessariis, unitas; in dubiis, libertas, in omnibus, caritas – “in essentials, unity; in inessentials, liberty; in all things, charity.”

Of course, that formula raises the question: How do we distinguish between essentials and inessentials? In particular, what are the essentials that mark a Christian body as a true Church of Jesus Christ? Here again, Luther comes to our aid. He proposes the following test: the true Church is to be found wherever the Gospel is truly preached, and the Sacraments rightly administered.

That answer admittedly raises still more questions. In what does the true preaching of the Gospel consist? And how do we recognize the right administration of valid Sacraments? But the important point is that those are the right questions to ask. The true preaching of the Gospel and the right administration of the Sacraments bring us into a saving relationship with God in Christ. And that is something that God cares about, deeply, for each one of us.

Moreover, these two tests, the true preaching of the Gospel and the right administration of the Sacraments, help us to distinguish between what is essential and what is inessential in our dialogues with Christians of other churches, communions, and denominations. Sometimes we discover that on the truly essential questions, we are in agreement after all; sometimes not. And sometimes we discover that our disagreements are over matters that are really inessential, no matter how important they seem to us.

For example, committed as I am to our style of liturgy and music here at S. Stephen’s, nonetheless I have to admit that it’s not essential to the existence of a true Church. If I were forced one Sunday to attend a parish where the music was guitars and tambourines, and the art burlap banners with felt butterflies and rainbows, I would certainly not like it, and I would be homesick for all that we have here. But I would not on that account dismiss it as not being a real church, because the answer to that question depends not on good taste but on sound preaching and valid Sacraments.

It follows that the quest for Christian unity does not seek uniformity in matters of style, but rather agreement in essentials. To varying degrees, Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholics, Lutherans, Methodists, Presbyterians, Baptists, and many other denominations do agree on many of these essentials. There are still many honest disagreements and differences to work out. But the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity celebrates the unity we’ve already discovered, while continuing to foster prayer, dialogue, and projects of mutual cooperation and community-building to achieve a unity that is yet to be realized, but into which Christ calls us. We need more ecumenical endeavor here in Rhode Island. And we do well to make our own the watchword: “in essentials, unity; in inessentials, liberty; in all things, charity.”