Sermon: Unity of the Church

Below is the text for a sermon I gave for preaching class.

Lesson: Ephesians 4:1-16

One. The number is perhaps unmatched in its rhetorical and conceptual power.
One. Mathematically speaking, it is the root of all we can know or surmise, existing as a numerical concept even before “0”.

One. Were we to survey the poetic ponderings, musical musings, and philosophical reflections on this expression of singularity, I would imagine we would find an enormous wealth of speculation as to its nature, its potency, its essence.
One.

And here, in our Scripture passage, the author of Ephesians, seeks to do that which is mathematically paradoxical: through a strikingly eloquent exhortation--“…one body, one Spirit, one hope, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God…”—he seeks to superimpose this one-ness, this singularity, upon that which is, by its very nature, pluralistic: he claims that the Church of Jesus Christ, is meant, ideologically, to be a unity. And this unifying vision saturates the remainder of the epistle.
But many factors war against this vision of unity in the Church. In the first century Near East, factions were manifold: some political, some religious, some ethnic. Embodying all three was the well-known division of Jew and Gentile. Those who bore such labels, even those who were members of the Church in Ephesus, were nonetheless more susceptible, from a human perspective, to division than to unity.
Today, we face challenges similar in poignancy, if not in kind. Our society lauds a spirit of independence and individualism. Differences of race, gender, ethnicity, political affiliation, and yes, even sexual orientation tear at the seams of the Church. We see profound expressions of disunity in the worldwide Church, in our own Anglican Communion, and even very close to home.
And it bears mentioning that our own theology can affect our understanding and practice of unity. Consider carefully the misleading, even if unintentional, emphases embedded within the standard evangelical approach to the Christian life: YOU become a Christian when YOU invite Jesus into YOUR heart, accept him as YOUR Saviour, and make him Lord of YOUR life, thus beginning a PERSONAL relationship with Jesus, and thus YOU are saved. Discipleship, too, is often centred about a PERSONAL “walk with the Lord” and “quiet time”. What is troubling about these emphases is not so much that they are misplaced, but that they are seen as ends, rather than means.
And it is here that Ephesians offers a wider perspective, a farther-reaching theology. While not seeking to minimize the substantial differences between Jew and Gentile, the author of Ephesians works diligently—as we see in chapters 2 and 3—to outline an ecclesiology, a Christology that surpasses these significant schisms in view of a transcendent unity. For he seems desperate not to allow the Ephesian church to remain in the individualistic infancy of their faith.
“Yes, it is true,” he writes, “that Christ has apportioned grace in certain amounts to each of us…and yes, each of us has been given differing gifts but this favour of Christ is operative, meant to be utilized to accomplish God’s purposes: to equip the saints for ministry, to build up the body of Christ in love, to bring the church to maturity, attaining to the fullness of Christ.”
The fullness of Christ: these words cast an astounding eschatological vision. But it is not merely one which is granted to us at the consummation of all things, rather the vision is also an ecclesial vision for the here and now. The author unleashes this vision from his chains, whence he begs the churches of Asia Minor to live a life worthy of the calling they have received. A calling that seems as preposterous and paradoxical as it is profound: that the many should become One.
But if the concept of “One” is poignant in philosophical and mathematical reflection, it is all the more saturated with meaning in theology. “Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God, the Lord is One.” Arguably, what the author of this epistle envisages for the Church is nothing less than this: the indissoluble intimacy of Triune God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, to which he alludes in his “one” rhetoric: One Spirit (v. 4), One Lord (that is, Jesus, v. 5), One God and Father of all (v. 6). And hence, the Church is called to the task
- of reflecting, yet not merely reflecting,
- of portraying, yet not merely portraying,
- indeed, of embodying, of actualizing the mystery of hypostatic union to the world.
And this, this is why the Church in Ephesus is exhorted to live in humility, gentleness, patience, and love. This is why, in the latter half of chapter four, the Church is admonished for living in the old ways of darkened understanding, in futility of mind. This is also why today we must be wary of making our soteriology purely individualistic and moral, for we are, through our election by God the Father before the foundation of the world, through our seal of the promised Holy Spirit, and through our baptism into the death and resurrection of Christ—through all these things—we are inextricably bound to one another in the indissoluble intimacy of the Triune God.

We are One.

And this call to move from individualistic infancy to indissoluble intimacy is the calling we, as the Church, have received. This is the unity of the faith, the knowledge of the Son of God. This is the whole measure of the fullness of Christ.