Sermons

“The Challenge of Unity”

John 17:20-23; Genesis 25:19-34 – Rev. Rebecca Littlejohn

Vista La Mesa Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), La Mesa, California – July 16, 2017

Holy God, bless the speaking and the hearing of these words that we might open our hearts to the true meaning and challenge of unity in Christ. In the name of Jesus we pray, Amen.

Can you imagine? Can you even imagine the drama such an episode as we just read about would inject into a family? Obviously, Esau and Jacob were operating on two totally different levels: Jacob had apparently been preparing for just such a moment as this, when he could seize the advantage and wrest from his brother’s grasp all the things he felt he deserved. Esau, on the other hand, was just really, really hungry. When you’re that hungry, it’s hard to care about anything else. It must have been impossible to wrap his head around the idea that his brother – his own brother – would take advantage of his famished state to conduct serious business. Surely Jacob was just playing with him, right? But no. Jacob was deadly serious. He wanted that birthright, and he was going to do whatever it took to claim it.

The narrator, of course, reveals the bias of the story with the words, “Thus Esau despise his birthright.” Can’t you just hear him exclaiming, “I was starving! It wasn’t fair. I didn’t despise my birthright; I was tricked in a moment of weakness!” But that’s not the narrator’s concern. This tale, it turns out, is not just a story of family drama, but an origin myth explaining the ancient tribal antagonism between the Israelites and the Edomites. The drama here has lasting consequences.

Rebekah had been told that there were two nations struggling against one another in her womb. From before they were born, Jacob was after what Esau had. He emerged from the womb, with his little baby hand grabbing hold of Esau’s heel, trying but not succeeding, to arrive first in order to be the firstborn. Having failed in that attempt, Jacob spent the rest of his early life working to take what was rightfully Esau’s – his birthright and his blessing. These twins were symbols of two nations constantly fighting over territory. The struggle had gone on so long that an early truth was often forgotten: they were brothers.

When was the last time you were done wrong? Have you ever been tricked out of something that was rightfully yours? Have you ever been betrayed by someone you ought to have been able to trust? I’m guessing most of us haven’t experienced deceit of the world-changing magnitude of that which Jacob inflicted on Esau. Can you even imagine? What sort of revenge would you be plotting? What would you teach your children about their cousins? Would you have any interest in promoting family unity at all?

Some of us from VLM, along with 3,700 or so other Disciples just spent the last week in Indianapolis considering what it means to live in unity as God’s people. We heard this brief passage from the middle of Jesus’ prayer in John 17 many times over, as it was our theme scripture. And we talked a lot, as Disciples always have, about being ONE. But the further we get into the 21^st century, the more complicated we realize this project is becoming. As we open up the conversation to more and more diverse voices, the more we begin to see that unity is not a simple, harmonious peace, but rather a challenging, often discordant struggle. There is an older approach to unity that says we will agree to disagree. But newer voices are prodding us to go deeper, beyond cordial disagreement into the depths of reconciliation and justice.

If I am standing on your foot, we could agree to disagree – you believing that toes are painful things and me seeing them as useful appendages for standing up straight. But is that really unity? Would you feel as though you and I were truly united, if I continued standing on your foot, while giving you the grace to freely believe your toes hurt? Of course not! Unity, in this case, requires that as I am one with you, I not only recognize your pain, but do what I can to alleviate it. I should, for instance, remove my foot from atop yours and apologize for having it there in the first place, even if I hadn’t realized I’d stepped on you or if something outside myself pushed me into placing my foot there.

Sadly, the real life circumstances of our broken world mean that building unity is never so simple as removing our feet from atop others’ toes. Can you imagine what sorts of reconciliation and reparations would be required to truly restore the unity of Isaac’s sons? Everything that should have been Esau’s and his descendants was taken by Jacob and built upon by his descendants. How do you fix that? The story gives no sense that this is even possible. Though there is later a making-nice of sorts, overall, there is a sense of inevitability that these two tribes, fathered by these estranged brothers, are going to remain separate peoples forever. There is no prophet wandering through the story insisting that the Israelites and the Edomites are children of the same parents and should, thus, reconcile themselves one to another and do whatever is necessary to make things right between them.

We, on the other hand, do have such a prophet. As Disciples of Christ, we have long claimed that our unity in Christ is central to our identity. As with Esau and Jacob, we have recognized that our unity precedes our division; we were siblings before we stepped on each other’s toes and deprived one another of our rightful inheritance. By virtue of our baptism, we both are united already and called to work to restore that unity where it has been damaged. And lately, we begun to see the point of this unity-restoring work in a new light: as Paul Tche of the Council on Christian Unity stated repeatedly in the workshop we led together on Tuesday morning, our unity in Christ is “for the sake of the world.” You can see it right there in Jesus’ prayer from John 17: “so that the world may know.” Jesus is praying that the church will be one, so that the world may see that unity is possible because of the eternal, reconciling love of God. This is the good news of wholeness that our fragmented world so desperately needs!

My experience this past week in Indianapolis has led me to the conclusion that part of what our church is wrestling with right now is the difference between a unity achieved as simply as me removing my foot from atop your toes and a unity that is re-constructed through the long, challenging process of alleviating the impact of generations of injustice wrought by circumstances akin to Jacob’s theft of Esau’s birthright. For many the first is obvious and simple, but the second can seem like meddling; it’s where people start accusing the pastor of bringing politics into church, because it requires systemic changes that accuse us of wrongs we didn’t commit though we’ve benefitted from them for centuries.

After the workshop I led with Paul Tche on Tuesday morning, a woman came up to me in tears. She thanked me for the workshop, because it helped her feel like she belonged at the Assembly after all. It seems the sermon the night before, which was by most accounts the most pointed in its critique of our current global circumstances, had alienated her. “I felt condemned,” she told me, “like she said I am a sinner and I am a racist. And I’m not a sinner and I’m not a racist.” “Oh my,” I thought, “this is getting complicated.” She told me of the many beautiful ways in which she and her church had lived out their faith, sharing the love of Christ with so many different kinds of people. They had done a lot of removing feet from other’s toes. But she couldn’t see how that would translate into a broader dimension, where the impact of her grandfather’s grandmother’s grandfather’s grandmother’s grandfather’s foot on someone else’s toes had created ripples of injustice that multiplied down through the decades. Because she couldn’t claim her responsibility for addressing those injustices as well, all she could hear was condemnation. It took me a minute to discern why our workshop had felt different to her, but I soon realized it was because we were talking about actions any congregation could take on a local level to engage in just peacemaking within their community. That level of sharing Jesus’ love connected for her and she felt reflected in what we were lifting up. And I was glad that she felt included. But I had to tell her the difficult truth before I could let her go. With apologies because I knew it was probably too soon for her to hear what I was going to say next, I continued.

“This is why I’m so glad we do this here at church,” I said to her. “Because grace abounds here. The truth is that you are a sinner and a racist, and so am I. And it’s okay. We don’t have to get paralyzed in that place of defensiveness, because we’re at church, where God’s mercy in Christ flows like a fountain. We’re forgiven! And we’ll go out and mess it up again next week, but we can come back and repent and be forgiven again and keep trying to do better.”

As Disciples of Christ, we have been seeking unity since the days of our founding. We have not done that well, as evidenced by the many splits and factions that make up our movement. But we’ve also leveled up throughout the years, as we come to deeper and deeper understandings of what unity truly means. It’s not just some abstract, mystical reality; it’s about righting wrongs both immediate and generational. It’s about facing with unflinching courage the ways in which some of us have been enjoying the benefits of stolen birthrights for centuries and figuring out how to make that right. The unity we are called to will invite many of us to make sacrifices we didn’t realize would be required. Not for our own sake, but for the sake of the world. Can you imagine what a witness that would be? May we have faith strong enough to join in the journey! Alleluia and Amen!