“If you have any encouragement from being united with Christ, if any fellowship with the Holy Spirit, if any tenderness and compassion…” Dearly beloved of the Lord, hear St. Paul’s entreaty:
“If you have any encouragement from being united with Christ,
if any fellowship with the Holy Spirit,
if any tenderness and compassion…”
Do you have any of these? Do you aspire to have them in increasing measure? I hope that I have some amount of them, and I pray that I grow in them. Through them, St. Paul is pointing us to a difficult truth. It’s not difficult to understand; it’s actually quite simple. But, as Jesus’ disciples grumbled, “This is a hard teaching. Who can accept it?” (Jn. 6:60). Here’s the difficult part—I held it back, just to be sure you were sufficiently forewarned. We must, if we are to receive our reward,
“be like-minded,
having the same love,
being one in spirit and purpose.”
If we are to come into the inheritance of our salvation, we must be united to Christ, but we also must be united to each other. Again, in order to receive our heavenly treasure, we must have unity with each other, and not allow selfishness and vanity to break our fellowship.
If we aren’t like-minded, then we are individualistic. And if we are nothing more than a bunch of independent religious contractors, how then can we have any encouragement from being united with Christ? Unity with Christ requires that we be one, one with Him and one with the members of His Body. One. One, that is what unity means. If we are separated from one another, then we dismember and mutilate the Body of Christ.
If we don’t have the same love, then how can we have fellowship with the Holy Spirit? The Spirit is love itself. And each of us receives the same Spirit in baptism. So when we do not have the same love, then we own a love that is not godly, love that is not divine, love that is not from the Holy Spirit. True fellowship with the Holy Spirit allows us to participate in the very love of God. So we share of the same love. It’s not that the love is mine and the love is yours; rather, the love is His, given to us, and we share it with one another.
If we are not one in spirit and purpose, then we lack tenderness and compassion. When we are separated in spirit, then I can see you in trouble, hardship, and failure, and simply congratulate myself on avoiding them or mock you for falling into them—the very antithesis of compassion. And when we are divided in purpose, then what concern is it to you when I stumble?
But we are one in spirit. Your dangers are of concern to me and your wounds I desire to bind up. We work diligently to be in harmony with one another, and we handle each other gently when we fall. And we are one in purpose. My setbacks are of concern to you, and you realize that they injure this, our fellowship together. When one of the members of the Body falls away or is harmed, all the members feel the loss. Our goal is that the holy people of God, particularly at St. Thomas, should arrive together before the throne of God to offer to Him a sacrifice of thanksgiving.
This all points to a great truth: we are members—cells, organs, limbs, organs—of the body of Christ. God, the great Architect, could have drawn up the plans of salvation however He wanted. In His perfect wisdom, He chose to create a community, a family. This very decision reveals a facet of God Himself. The Trinity is community. The Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit are like-minded; they have the same love; they are one in spirit and one in purpose.
We, in our baptism are grafted into the stump of Jesse; we are shoots notched into the wood of the cross. We receive salvation by joining the community of the blessed, and abandoning the drifting, individual souls of the lost. The saved are God’s flock, watched over and protected, while the condemned are the solitary, lost, vulnerable sheep.
Life apart from the people of God is no more possible than being reborn into eternal life is possible apart from baptism. Christianity separated from the fellowship of believers is unachievable. St. Cyprian of Carthage puts forth explicitly how fundamental this is, saying,
“He who forsakes the Church of Christ cannot attain to the rewards of Christ. He is a stranger; he is profane; he is an enemy. He can no longer have God for his Father, who has not the Church for his mother. If any one could escape who was outside the ark of Noah, then he also may escape who shall be outside of the Church.”
Whoa! Let’s take a moment and breathe. As I said, this is a hard teaching. Are we ready to go on?
In last’s week epistle reading, St. Paul tells us that our unity does not come without hardship. “For it has been granted to you on behalf of Christ not only to believe on him, but also to suffer for him, since you are going through the same struggle you saw that I had, and now hear that I still have” (Ph. 1:29,30). Our unity comes about because of hardship. The greatest suffering in all of history, Jesus Christ bore on the cross, but out of it sprang reconciliation between God an man—a family reunion with unbreakable ties of unity. Of those whom I consider my closest friends, I can think of at least one difficult time that we together endured.
Just as tensions naturally arise in human families, struggles are part of our Christian life together. But, just as we cannot—or at least should not—try to domineer and batter our families into submission to our own desires, so too we should not try to crush our fellow members of the Church.
Are you mad at me? Not yet? Well, get ready. My mother had a saying that we heard it a lot when we were teenagers: || “The purpose of this family is not to meet your needs.” || Rather shocking, and not well received by my brother, sister, and me. But mom was right! The purpose of our family wasn’t to meet my needs, much less my wants. It was to help meet our needs. As a family, we rose or we fell together. When my father was called to move to Hawaii, it affected me. When my parents chose to leave ECUSA, it affected me. When I chose to study architecture, it affected the rest of my family. When my brother married Sonia, it changed my life too! And when Sara and Matt had little baby Steven, I was changed.
We are not our own. In our earthly families, we belong—by nature, not by will—to something greater than ourselves. And in the Church we belong—not by nature, but by our acceptance of the grace of God, who then revives our nature—not to ourselves alone, but to each other. “You are not your own; you were bought at a price” (1 Cor. 6:19,20).
“Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility consider others better than yourselves” (Php. 2:3). When we are united with Christ and His Body, what need do we have to pursue our own, individual welfare? Only one thing fills our mind; one thing fills our actions, one thing fills our deeds—only one thing in our hope—to be united with our God, and made one with His people. Nothing in creation can impede us from this goal when we have received to God’s grace—not the Taliban, not Washington DC, not even Oprah!
Nothing (save for our own rebellion) can separate us from the love of Christ. With knowledge that we are God’s treasured possession, selfish ambition is pointless—what could we possibly achieve that would surpass the gift of God? And vain conceit is also pointless—what could we become that would surpass the inheritance of sonship, that is, being made like Christ? There’s nothing more that we need to grasp after, there’s nothing more that we need try to become, than what God has promised us.
Humility, as St. Paul puts it, is nothing less than the acceptance of our glorious inheritance…our acceptance of it as a gift of grace. “How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God” (Jn. 3:1). This is not of ourselves, but by God’s grace. I can’t earn it; Fr. Hughie can’t earn it; even Mrs. Jeannie’s years can’t earn it. So we ought not to behave as if we ourselves are the source of God’s favor, because, Hon, we ain’t no prize. Humility is accepting the most glorious of all callings, and not letting it go to our heads, but remembering how we got it.
Do you want to receive your treasure in heaven? Well, we get a foretaste, all that we can possibly handle of it, in a few moments. We partake together of one bread. We share together in Holy Communion, sacred koinonia. We receive Christ’s body and we are joined to His mystical Body. The exchange of the Peace of the Lord we made this day, let it be real! Come not to the fellowship of this table and let us unite to one another.
