Sermon Ecumenical Sunday Week of Prayer for christian Unity

Following Jesus: Ecumenism Crisis and Leaving Our Nets

• Jonah 3:1-5, 10  • 
 
• Psalm 62:5-12  • 
 
• 1 Corinthians 7:29-31  • 
 
• Mark 1:14-20

There is a tone of urgency in all the Scriptures we have just read.  Something looms, it obscures all other activity. The future overturns the present.  We all have moments like this in our lives.  The moments where we can’t see beyond the present situation and what that situation will bring.  In these moments we know that this moment of turmoil and conflict will change something and could possibly change everything, nothing will be the same after the moment has passed.  Sometimes we may anticipate this as a good, most of the time it brings dread: fear of the unknown and of what lies beyond the horizon.  We know something is coming we know it will be here soon, and we can’t think about anything else, and our stomach is in knots, and yet life forces us to continue on.  A term for this is crisis. 

Crisis Theology was one of the names given to the theologies of a group of 20^th century German Theologians, Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, Rudolf Bultmann, who sought to recapture something of this Biblical urgency for the modern period sot that modern people could recapture this sense of urgency as they encounter the Word of God again in Scripture and in their lives. They, and their followers, were unable to keep this sense of urgency.  And understandably we can’t live in the constant state of crisis.  Crisis must come to a resolve of one kind or another.

Revivalist Christianity and its American heirs in Evangelicalism also emphasize the role of urgency in Christian spirituality. This crisis can be summed up by the questions “Are you  saved!” and “ If you were to die tonight would you go to heaven?”  The crisis is resolved for the individual when she or he says the prayer of repentance entrusting one’s soul to Christ.  However, the urgency is also maintained because there are many other individuals in the world, probably several this particular individual knows, who may have never said the prayer of repentance and been saved!  Our Gospel text is one of those used to show that this urgency is biblical.  The revivalists amongst the Swedish Lutheran Pietist of my childhood knew that we were all to be fishers of people, (or "men' as I learnt it as a child).   There was even a song that I will not attempt to sing for you but you may know it yourself and want to sing out in nostalgia for Sunday school.

What are we to make of all this sense of a need the need for Spiritual crisis and urgency on this Ecumenical Sunday in the midst of the Week of prayer for Christian unity?  There was a time when there was great energy and sense of urgency and crisis around repairing and reuniting the fractured fragmented reality of Christianity.  This urgency has borne fruit that some of us experienced this past week.  At the Bible study this past Wednesday, as Catholics and various Protestants gathered together to prayer and read and discuss Scripture together, we were reminded that in the memory of many of those present the very thing we were doing would have been impossible and seen as undesirable.  In some sense the lack of urgency is a good thing, it means that followers of Jesus Christ have let down some of the walls that were between us and while we are still divided we can reach out to each other across dividing lines. And so there was no crisis for any of us in being there, or so it seemed.

This question was asked at the Bible Study: What kind of change would have to occur among denominations, church bodies, Christian communities to bring about the unity Jesus prayed for in John 17:10-11.” I found difficult to answer. I felt our group sidestepped the question.  We were too enamored by what the ecumenical movement, over the past 100 years, had achieved in bringing about more or less good will between many Christian Groups.  We wouldn’t allow our continued differences and visible division to be or remain a crisis.  Rather we said that we were one in Christ even if there were differences, and still divisions and separate worship.  Now I don’t want to deny a truth we were affirming that the unity and oneness of the church is not synonymous with uniformity and sameness. Even so there is still a crisis.  Our disunity isn't simply about difference but that we value and prefer our particular difference over that of others and don’t think much of the organization or theology of that other Christian group.  We stay apart because its fine to briefly do things with those who are different as long as we don’t need to change anything about our group and we can continue to view aspects of some other Christian group (Fundamentalist, Roman Catholic) as less Christian than our way of being and doing things.  In other words our division is in part symptomatic that as a group we retain the sense that our ways is better and retain the right to have a negative view of the different functioning of the other groups.

Now you may be asking what does this have to do with Jonah’s proclamation and Nineveh’s response, Paul’s exhortation to live in crisis for the time is far gone, and Jesus’ proclamation of the Kingdom of God being at hand and calling on some men who fish to drop everything and follow him?  I’ll get that in a moment. First I need to point out that all three passages the crisis is in part the experience of being confronted with the need to turn away from something, needing to let go.  It is this leaving of the nets, living as if we are not in mourning or having possessions or married that I find relevant to our current ecumenical and Christian situation. It is in being asked to leave and let go that gives us a clue as to what it means to be part of Christ as his Body the church.

A noteworthy thing about this letting go and turning away is that, with the exception of Nineveh, what is turned away from isn’t bad or evil or sin.  Paul even indicates that behaving as though we are not has anything to do with those things or activities, rather the needing to let go has to do with the moment of crisis we are in.  Jesus isn’t calling Peter, Andrew, James, and John from fishing because it’s a wrong for them to fish but because of the moment, and they can't both be Jesus’ disciples and fish.  It seems to me that the ecumenical question is then the question of faith in Christ and thus about our crisis.  There is an historical moment to our experience of this crisis.  Christianity no longer has the sway it has; all of our denominations were formed in or were heavily influenced by a time where Christianity was an unquestioned force in culture and society.   It is likely that our current crisis has less to do about the truths of our faith and more to do with the habits differing groups each formed depending on the position we had taken in those Christian societies, or Christendom.  These Christian societies have passed on or are passing away (while others may be forming in other parts of the World).

The reality is that our differences have meaning; our differences may even exist for good reasons.  Our differences may even be good things.  Even so we may be called to lay them aside to follow Christ and be the Church!  But here comes the rub in our relations to other Christians: who can tell us what we must leave behind to follow Christ and be members of the body of Christ, the Church.  What of that which we already hold and do that is essential to our following Jesus and being the Church? Of course in this there are claims and counter claims!  For Roman Catholicism they aren’t a denomination but simply the Church, the Pope is the successor of Peter, the First among the apostles on whom the church was built and is established according to Jesus’ words in Matthew.   For many Baptists and other free church types it is the local body of believers that is properly the church, bishops, popes, priest, pastors may be all well and good but they are the nets that can and often should be laid down in order to follow Jesus.  Who is correct?   And that is merely among the thornier and obvious issues.  I could probably spend hours even days listing all the ways Christians would come to differing conclusions on what they could drop and walk away from in following Jesus and being the church, and those things that must be retained.  Perhaps at this moment what is asked of us to let go that I or my group has a clue.  Perhaps we are asked to let go of the assertion that all we need to agree on is that Jesus is Lord as the basis of our unity!  After all if that assertion is to be anything more than an empty net full of holes it needs to give us a way of being in the world, both personally and corporately?  Surely Jesus is Lord has practical content and will have consequences in the world: tell us how we should live, even speak to our ritual lives.  “Jesus is Lord” should tell us about our way of being together as community, even our form of worship.  Or at least that is possible.  Just as it is possible that there is a certain variety of ways to live our  "Jesus is Lord", but it would seem then that those ways should be recognizable upon examination.

So yes I think we are on the edge of something on the Sea of Galilee, and were all attempting to mend the nets of Christendom.  And Christ is wandering in our midst calling us back to following and being church, that is fishing for people.

But what is this that the church is about?  It’s about gathering and proclaiming.  Jesus tends to use the gathering metaphors for God’s activity in the world and the activity of God’s people.  God harvests, God fishes, God Gahters. We as the body of Christ harvest, we fish with nets, we are to gather.   This might be painful to hear in a time when in the US, we followers of Christ can barely keep the people we have let alone gather those outside our walls.  But I don’t think this is a church growth or evangelism passage, these fishers of people.  Or at least it isn’t about them but us, and what we are willing to do?

 We gather if and when we follow, if and when we accept that we are in a state of crisis, and then can respond in trust.  This is perhaps where Crisis Theology and Evangelicalism miss the point about the urgency of God: God’s urgency is about coming to rest and gaining peace and wholeness.  We tend to face crisis and the urgent with frantic activity; by contrast there is a detachment and attentiveness to Jesus actions and Paul’s exhortation. To accept the crisis and the urgency is to let go, to drop everything and trust, trust God with it all.  Even dropping that thing you think is all important for being a follower of Christ, which ensures that you are in the right place.

As Christians, as followers of Jesus surely there is only one thing to cling to, and that is Christ. That one thing means much more than simply one thing.  The body of Christ is singular and multiple, as we as bodies are made up of many parts but one being that moves together and exist as unified parts for the whole body. 

Our anxiety about unity being uniformity, our anxiety about losing our distinctive, our anxiety about loosing our identity in Christ shows us that we are still on the shore with our nets.  We have returned to Gallilee.  We have returned to our nets uncertain what to do?  We return in our anxiety.  The grace and the truth is God doesn’t tire of coming to the Sea of Galilee. So God calls out to each of us and to all Christian groups “Come follow me.”  Will you let go of everything and trust and follow?  Only then will you gather people, only then will you be on the way to knowing where you should be and what it means to be the church, and a follower of Christ. Amen

Sermon Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, Third Sunday after the Epiphany

Jeremiah 1:4-10 * Psalm 71:1-6 * 1 Corinthians 13:1-13 * Luke 4:21-30

This week of prayer for Christian unity has been unsettling time of prayer for me. I do not know what has been stirred in you by God this week or if you . For me I was unsettled by having this years theme of this years Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, "You are witnesses of these things" came into conversation with Paul on the Spirit and the nature of the body of Christ. What follows is my own attempt to articulate how I have been unsettled, and hope to invite your own reflections and offerings of your own experiences of prayer for Christian unity to come in conversation with my own experience, the theme, and these text before us today.

The beginning of my discomfort is in the very fact of praying for Christian unity, for in so doing we admit that we remain in a state of disunion. Then In speaking of being witnesses, we speak of our desire and our sense that although we are divided as Christians we have something in common at our core, and that our witness to these things we hold together is compromised by this disunity. Paul uses the metaphor of the Body, to give us an understanding of the nature of the church, the nature of Christ. Through Baptism and the life of the Spirit we are one body, Christ’s body. Yet, this whole passage as an exhortation means that we can live in contradiction to the unity we are given through baptism and the Spirit. In the unity of baptism and the Spirit we are empowered to witness to the things of Christ: his life death and resurrection. And yet this week of prayer for Christian unity should give us pause, in terms of our own spiritual health, and our being formed by the nature of the Church Paul explicates for us in Corinthians. If we are willing to remain content with our own particular witness, whether of our own individual journeys of faith, or as journey tied to a particular denomination, are we not in a sense giving priority to our own “giftedness”? And doesn’t even the various schemes for seeking unity and understanding between Christians keep us divided, if it stops at merely seeking to understand each other and work together? In our attempt to find ways to work together across institutional barriers and barriers of belief, or to work towards convergence in the area of doctrine and belief, and even to work towards ecumenical congregation are we assuming the need to get along rather than assuming we need to be conformed to the Spirit and our Baptism. Yet this week isn’t the week of focus on the work of ecumenism but of prayer. In this we admit that the unity of being witnesses of the life death and Resurrection of Christ, of truly being the church is Spirit directed and Spirit gifted reality into which we must be formed by God. I want to suggest that this sort of prayer should open ourselves up to God showing us the ways in which we all uphold the state of disunity, and the ways we abandon the Church. For our disunity is a sign that we have walked away from the truth of our Baptism and our Spirit filled lives in the Church. This is the urgency of Paul’s address to the Corinthians. We must not remain in the sense of sufficiency of our separate witness and distinctive ways of proclaiming Christ, for to do so is to walk the path of schism. But the hope of this week and of our texts is that we don’t have to work harder Rather we must be opened up to the reality of the church as Spiritual institution and organism.

Our Corinthians passage challenges any notion that Christian unity is coexistence, or acceptance that we all truly believe in Jesus even though we differ and at times contradict one another in our beliefs and actions. What is imaged for us of Christ, the Church, is a great symmetry and an organism made up of parts that cannot survive or even exist apart from the whole. Thus our unity as Christians as based upon the preceding reality: the unity of the Body of Christ, the Church. Granted we could miss this mystical reading of the Body imagery and read Paul’s words as exhortation to just get along for one must not overlook that Paul’s teaching is also about diversity. However I think in following the diversity path we miss that the difference Paul speaks of is not of human origin but of divine origin, of the Spirit. Paul’s use of the metaphor of the Body challenges our current language of diversity that is for the most part a tolerance of separate coexistence. A body isn't a confederation of interrelated differentiated sovereignty's, but an organism that is dependent on the right functioning of every part and member of the organism that has no possible existence outside that organism. For a body to functioning fully and properly each and every member not only needs the others but an integration in the whole.. We aren't to view our giftedness as a reason to separate from others, rather we are to see that we all equally need the other.

I feel that the force of Paul’s indictment against us in his language of the body of Christ, is reinforced if we think along side this metaphor the reality of what is needed to truly be witness of Christ. When we receive gifts from the Spirit, whatever they may be, we are so gifted for a purpose of bearing witness to Christ. Thus in speaking of the Spiritual reality of the church as organism and institution we must not for get that we exist for and as Christ. Thus the unity of our witness is that we witness to the singular work of God through Christ in the world. My own denomination will often speak of our contribution to the building of the Kingdom of God which also goes on beyond our borders. Yet, this in practice means that we celebrate and witness to the ways we believe according to our denominational distinctive we are accomplishing the work of God in Jesus Christ. This way of speaking and thinking fails to question how our identity may stand in the way of the work of Christ and the Spirit and may impair the witness to the life Death and Resurrection of Christ as that which establishes the Kingdom of God in the world; bringing release to the captives, bringing sight, and hearing and healing to all in need. Are we in our separation whether based in denomination or personal identity, or race or class truly joined to the work of Christ and the coming Kingdom of God? It is one thing to claim this, it is another for it to actually be. The challenge of our being called to be witnesses when Christians are divided and content to remain in separation, is that it is very possible we aren't witnessing to the work of God in Christ in the world. In our current states of separation we are perhaps at best witnessing to our own pet projects within the larger work of God, and at worst witnessing to our own agenda with little or no relation the God’s reign and work. Given the force of the metaphor of the body and the need to not witness to our opinions or positions, I am challenged that we need make our hearts ready to receive and be formed into the church, the Body of Christ. Hopefully that is what this week of prayer of Christian unity is doing and has done in we who have so prayed. This is a challenge because I am unsure this is what I want.

I will admit that I am challenged by my own words, and it is a challenge to my self as an ecumenist and those of us here who are members of this ecumenical congregation as much to anyone here who identifies strongly or in part with a particular denomination. We are Christians but more important than our being of the same religion is that we are part of the Body of Christ, the Church. If we cling to a certain distinctive, or find ourselves separated by our opinions how then are we the Body of Christ? True we all may be baptized into Christ and able to claim some form of faith in Jesus Christ, faith and the sacrament of Baptism cannot be belittled, but are we in our current life and way of being Christian truly living into the fullness of our baptism and faith? Am I? In what ways do I resist the unifying work of the Spirit, and mistake what I have been given as the defining fact of my spiritual life? Am I, are we, living into our baptism or contradicting our baptism? And are we perhaps doing both at once? These are hard questions that this time of prayer set aside to seek God for Christian unity has brought up for me. I wonder if I, and we really desire to be the people of God, members of Christ's body or if in the end other identities prove more important in our day to day lives of faith? Are we going to truly allow the Spirit to bind us together to form us as the Body of Christ, or do we in fact in subtle ways resist? Does the fear of needing to get it right or the fear that we may have missed it keep us from truly seeking God in this matter? Are we praying for Christian unity in truth? Are we asking God to reveal to us our separation from Christ? Finally I can’t but see that all our separations (not just denominational or doctrinal) separate us not only from each other but from our head, Jesus Christ, and thus from the Church. This is why we seek God in prayer, for we must confess our known and unknown participation in divisions from the Body of Christ. Such division inevitably means that we have hidden from ourselves the fullness of Christ and the Spirit in our lives and the world. Even so the Spirit gives to us; Christ binds himself to us, and beckons us to live into the unity of our faith and baptism. We are continually invited by our baptism to allow the Spirit to form us into the Church, into Christ. Amen

Update

In the past few weeks we have been looking at call and discipleship and observed the Week of prayer for Christian Unity. We began an ended the week with additions to our usual liturgy and adapting the Lima liturgy to our regular Reconciler liturgy. I wanted to take a moment to reflect on the connection between our worship of the last few weeks, ecumenism and discipleship. Our liturgical worship and especially the liturgies we have been using the past few weeks, subordinate individual expression of faith and worship to something else. This subordination of individual response or expression can run counter to many images of discipleship and living faith as usually found in American contexts. In general in American Christianity tends to see discipleship as an individual endeavor. Discipleship is primarily about my relationship to Jesus, and only secondarily about the kingdom of God or being a member of the body of Christ. I see our lectionary texts for the Season after Epiphany as challenging this American conception of discipleship. Or at least the confluence of these texts asks us to make a major corrective in our understanding of the relationship between our life of faith and our individuality.

Implicit in the Gospel's sense of being a follower of Jesus, a disciple, is that while our individuality is respected it is not the primary focus of a life of discipleship. Discipleship forms our individuality into something better and it does it by emphasizing community, and by calling us to be conformed to the Mind of Christ. If we move our sense of being a Christian and following Christ away from a focus on our individual beliefs, feelings, doubts etc., and realize that the life of faith is seeing all of our individuality being formed by God in Christ into Christ and being built into the the temple of God the Church then ecumenism simply takes on the tinge of discipleship. Also, our worship on Sundays becomes less about whether or not I can come and feel certain feelings or express certain things about myself and my faith and more about being formed and molded and built into something as the person I am. All of this is meant to happen with others who also are also followers and disciples of Jesus.

This formation is not only supposed to happen to us individually but corporately and across space and time. In some sense we might say this is what Church is the site where this happens. If we are cut off from those who are disciples of Jesus either in space or time we then lack something in our discipleship and following of Jesus. This is the place of ecumenism in our lives of discipleship and following Jesus. So, our worship our actions, our vision as a congregation, our lives in the world with friends family and coworkers are also a piece, not because I can individually make it all fit together but because I with others am seeking after Christ and we together can be formed by our worship and fellowship together, which then allows us to go out into the world and witness to the presence and absence of the Kingdom of God in the world. But we are hindered in this ability to witness as long as we are separated from other disciples who can help us be formed together as the Body of Christ.

Announcements:
We are continuing to meet together as a congregation to share and reflect and plan as we take stock of various changes and seek to move into this coming year together. Our next gathering will be February 9 6:30 PM at Beth, Jorge and Hank's house 5419 North Glenwood Ave, Apt. 3. A light supper will be provided. If you would like to augment the soup and bread feel free to bring something to share. Please RSVP to Beth Wetmore by friday February 6th. E-mail her at emwetmore@yahoo.com or call her at 773-275-1918.

Sunday February 15th Bishop Jeffrey Lee of the Episcopal Diocese of Chicago will be visiting us for worship. There will be a time to meet him after the service.

Wednesday Evenings on the Immanuel Campus:
Community meal 6 pm. Following the meal at 7 pm there is a prayer service. For January and February it will be a service of Lectio Devina (prayerful reading and discussion of Scripture for the coming Sunday) During Lent there will be a sung Vespers service.

Sermon, Second Sunday after Epiphany, Year B

Tuning Our Souls
Jorge Sanchez
18 January 2008

In September of 2008, I went to Saint Gregory's Abbey for the first time. I was picked up at the train station in Kalamazoo in the midst of a bunch of errands. Father William, one of the monks, had to go to a bunch of different places before returning to the monastery. The recycling center, a grocery store, an office supply store, even a wholesale food store. Suffice it to say I became very familiar with many and various Kalamazoo institutions that day. It was no-one's fault, but the errands just took longer than anticipated, and we didn't get to the Abbey until after four.

I was hungry for quiet and a respite from busy-ness, but at first I didn't get it. The whole time I kept thinking, “You're the guest, Jorge; be gracious, don't get impatient. This guy's a monk, he probably feels bad already that we're still driving around out here.” The first psalm appointed for Vesper that night was Psalm 139. The knitting metaphor hit me hard, and something about it pulled me deep into the quiet I needed. It was as if I was in a state of hyper-readiness and this psalm struck just the right chord to thrust me into what that retreat was all about.

And so it as the psalm that hit me first when I looked over these lessons. And the knitting metaphor, as always, stuck out to me. Whether I preach or not, I am always tempted to try to understand the weave, the knit, that the various threads of the lectionary present to us.

Tonight, we have the psalm, the calling of Samuel, the call of Nathanael, and Paul's exhortations to the Corinthians.

The readings from First Samuel and John both seem to set vocation within a quiet or at least non-sensational context.

I don't hear voices in the middle of the night nor did Philip ever tell me to come and see, but what strikes me here is the seeming ordinariness of vocation. When Samuel is called, it is by a voice unremarkable enough to make him this it was Eli's. Nathanael balks at the hometown of the Messiah. It couldn't be God; it's all too ordinary.

Vocation here is simultaneously extraordinary and ordinary. To us, meeting Jesus in the flesh, face-to-face, would be unbelievable, but to the disciples, he was just some dude, amongst many, preaching and teaching at the time.

Important too, is that both of these callings are not to one specific thing, at least not in the context of these passages.

Too often, we think of calln as an either/or, as a series of discernments that have in hone in on a particular mission that excludes all others. The calling Samuel seems to be a call that helps others see who he is. The call of Nathanael seems to be a calling that helps Nathanael recognize a truth about himself.

God is bigger and more complicated, God's will is bigger and more complicated, than a single particular mission. We are called, like Samuel, to listen. Like Nathanael, we are called to be open to God coming from dinky ol' Nazareth.

It is safe to say that none of us here is called to be a prophet and judge like Samuel, and almost as safe that none of us is called to be a capital-A Apostle like Nathanael, but we are called through our Christian profession to lives of discipleship.

Last week, we celebrated the Baptism of our Lord, which prefigured every Christian baptism that followed. Now we are called to living out that baptism —our baptisms, our professions of faith— in lives of faithful discipleship.

Discipleship can mean many different things, but le me suggest that Paul's letter to the Corinthians established a very particular way of understanding discipleship.

Many of us struggle with sexual discipline and chastity. Whether it is a lack of control over how we look at others or a difficulty with other aspects of our sexuality, most of us struggle with this kind of intergrity at some point.

The passage, however, is taken out of context somewhat, and let me read the three verses which precede it:
Do you not know that wrongdoers will not inherit the Kingdom of God? Do not be deceived! Fornicators, idolaters, adulterers, male prostitutes, sodomites, the greedy, drunkards, revilers, robbers—none of these will inherit the Kingdom of God. And this is what some of you used to be. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God.


Suddenly, I seems that Paul is really picking a particular sin and using it to stand in for this whole list. Honor God in your whole person, by living with the kind of integrity you are called to.

Christian holiness is about respect for the proper uses of all creation. We are called to this very kind of holy discipleship, a vocation of holiness.

And yet, that's really scary. Really unattractive. This is fear rooted in a misconception that holiness will destroy who we are.

“I don't want to be a saint,” a friend said to me recently, which I understood to mean, “I don't want to lose my personality, who I am.” And yet we —my friend, you, me— we are called to holiness.

Xunzi, a Confucian philosopher of the Third Century, makes the unsettling assertion that human nature is uh or evil. And when he describes how to fix human nature he resorts to a great number of carpentry metaphors to describe what must be done to the soul. “A warped soul must await the press frame,” “a soul may be carved as craftsman carves a vessel,” and so on, but he never uses one familiar image from carpentry: the saw. Xunzi describes many ways to shape, bend, carve, and craft the human character, but never advocates we saw any of it off.

Lately, I've been using the metaphor of tuning to describe the effects of my spiritual disciplines. When I achieve a healthy, productive rhythm in my spiritual practice, I feel as if I am better tuned tobe who I am.

As we leave Christmas behind, move further into Epiphanytide, and gradually approach Lent, we need to ask ourselves what form shall our discipleship take.

What tunes you? What tunes us, as a church, as a neighborhood, as a nation, as a world to better play the melody which is the Will of God.

Paul's exhortations, which make us justifiably uncomfortable as we identify those disfiguring, distorting, disordered accretions that we deal with, are essentially a call to be properly tuned, properly knit, properly ready to answer the call to holiness.

Hear the Psalmist's words: “God formed my inward parts; God knit me together in my mother's womb.” How is God knitting us still? What is God casting onto the weave that is our life, the work that is our soul?

Holiness —discipleship— is not an end state, but a state of readiness, a state of internal and external harmony, or proper relationship that allows us to answer God's call.

We are not all called to be tuned in the same way. Some tunings, some spiritual practices will leave us useless, strings snapped, unable to sound a single note. But we are all called to this kind of spiritual self-examination and work.

What tunes us? How do we need to be tuned? What figure or metaphor helps you understand how God is continuing to sanctify you with grace? How can you help prepare yourself for the great work God has in mind for you?

Today the begins the Octave of Prayer for Christian Unity. I think it is safe to say that many Christians are out of tune with each other. In a few minutes we will pray a special litany for Christian unity together. Please keep the intentions of Christian unity in your prayers this week, either by incorporating this litany, or some other resource, or by simply holding the Universal Church in prayer.

We are each members of the Mystical Body of Christ, instruments in a huge orchestra; may the Communion we share tonight prepare us —tune us— to play the powerful majestic melody which is the Will of God and create the profound harmony which is the Kingdom of God. Amen.

Next week is the Octave of Prayer for Christian Unity, or the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. The week of prayer begins this Sunday January 18th The feast of St. Peter and ends on Sunday the 25th the Feast of St Paul. The theme for this years observance is from Ezekiel 37:15-19, 22-24a “That they may become one in your hand”. I encourage us to take the time to pray for Christian Unity in our daily prayers and to meditate on the Ezekiel passage over the course of the week. As a congregation with an ecumenical vision and actuality although in the past we have failed to give a great deal of emphasis to this but I believe that this could be an important aspect of living out our vision. A way to remind ourselves why we gather each Sunday as those from a variety of denominational backgrounds and journeys. Reminding ourselves why we join in regular worship with Immanuel Lutheran Church and St Elias Christian Church. We do these things because we are seeking and praying for the unity of the Church

This years theme and resource materials were prepared by Christians in Korea, who not only face the divisions between Christians but the division between North and South Korea, and the loss and hostility on both sides that has remained since the Korean War. Christians in Korea see the prayer for Christian unity to not stop only at creed or denominational divisions but the political and ideological divisions as well as of wealth and class. I encourage each of us during the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity to also take time to reflect how Reconciler can deepen its ecumenical calling and reflect on what Christian unity may mean for us. We too in this country and this city of Chicago face various divisions that are also divisions between Christians: race, ethnicity, class etc. In this week we are praying for reconciliation and seeking to repent of all ways we praying for forgiveness for the scandal of our disunity and our inability to be ambassadors of reconciliation in the world. What paths of personal and ecclesial conversion must we take to arrive at full communion in Christ?

If you would like a guide for your prayers and mediation over the week the Graymoor Ecumenical and Interreligious Institute has resources that can be going here . The Graymoor Institutes website also has an explanation of the theme of this years Week of Prayer for Christian Unity as well as a brief history of the Week of Payer. Do take the time to read some of this.

Announcements:
Tomorrow, Thursday January 15 we have a congregational meeting at the Nidge, 7:30 pm. If you consider Reconciler your church home or attend Reconciler on a some what regular basis, you are encouraged to come and join in reflecting on how God is at work and leading Reconciler.

This Sunday, January 18th begins the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity.

We now have childcare and a Children's Sunday School program during our 5 pm service. Spread the word!

Wednesday Evenings on the Immanuel Campus:
Community meal 6 pm members of Immanuel, the Community of the Holy Trinity and Reconciler join with the youth who take part in Immanuel's after school program for a meal together.
Following the meal at 7 pm there is a prayer service. For January and February it will be a service of Lectio Devina (prayerful reading and discussion of Scripture for the coming Sunday) During Lent there will be a sung Vespers service.