We had just driven away from the small village when I saw a car speeding up behind us, flashing its headlights. This was a couple of months ago when I first went on sabbatical to England. When that car pulled up beside us, I realized it was someone we had just met in the village.
You see, on our way into Cornwall, I wanted to stop and see a famous old church in that particular village. It was Sunday evening when we arrived and they were finishing up evensong. After the service, we were invited to look around the building. One person graciously welcomed us and showed us around. His name is Peter. We just hit it off as we talked with him. And so it was Peter who had flashed his lights and got me to stop. He rolled his window down and said, “Since you are going this direction, may I invite you back to my house for a cup of tea?”
How do you say no to an invitation like that? Even though we really wanted to reach our destination before dark, we said, “Sure.” So we followed him down some narrow lanes in the countryside and finally arrived at his beautiful, large Cornish farmhouse that has spectacular views of the surrounding moor. We ended having a wonderful time listening to all his stories. And he made tea and poured it in our cups. And while he was off in the cupboard getting some cookies, which they call biscuits, Kerry and I poured some of the milk he brought over into our tea. And we took the fancy little spoon that was in the bowl of sugar on the table and stirred in lots of sugar, because you know, we’re Americans and we like lots of sugar.
But when we took our first sips of the tea, it was like a jolt of lightning went through our bodies. “Awful” would be to charitable of a word to describe how it tasted. I thought, “Maybe Cornish tea is just really, really disgusting.” But we kept on trying to politely sip it because we didn’t want to offend our host. And the more we drank, the worse it got. Finally, I realized what was going on when I noticed there was no salt shaker on the table. That bowl of sugar on the table with the fancy little spoon in it wasn’t sugar, it was a salt pot!
It tasted like we had been drinking big mugs full of the Atlantic ocean. It was so much sodium that after we left, it sent Kerry scrambling through her luggage for her blood pressure medicine. No matter what I did, I just couldn’t get that taste out of my mouth the rest of the evening.
I kept thinking: “It’s amazing how just one wrong ingredient can change everything!”
Now. I want you to keep that image in your mind for a minute, because in our Gospel reading today we hear Jesus praying not only for his immediate disciples, but also for those who will come to believe because of their witness to his life and message. It’s a wonderfully open-ended prayer that includes everyone who will become followers of Jesus. Christians throughout every era, in every place in the world, including us here this morning at St. James can say, “Jesus was praying for us.”
We could just camp out right there for a while and be present to the comfort that is to be found in that. Jesus was praying for you. Jesus was praying for me.
But then we get to the difficult part of this passage, which is: What Jesus was actually praying for when he was praying for all of us?. He says it three times in this passage: “That they may be one.” “That they may be one, as we are one.” “That they may be completely one.”
Sometimes there are Bible verses where things aren’t clear in translation, but there’s just no way of getting around what it is that Jesus actually wants for his followers in this passage: “That they may be one.”
Consequently, this has often been referred to as the “Prayer for Christian Unity.”
Now, you don’t have to be a student of history to know how far it often seems like we are from this prayer. All you have to do is pay attention to what’s going on in the world right now. Or read through the rest of the New Testament where a large portion of the letters which were written to those early Christian communities seem to spend a great deal of time addressing situations where Christians just couldn’t get along. Divideness among Christians communities isn’t anything new at all.
So, there seems to be this ideal of Christian unity that exists in John 17. And then there’s the reality which feels like that ideal has somehow continued to elude us for 2000 years.
If unity among his followers was what Jesus prayed for, why does it often appear to be so far beyond our reach?
And even more, why is it that so many efforts to achieve some kind of togetherness, some kind of cohesiveness, end up not feeling like kind of unity at all?
Perhaps it’s because we’re using the wrong ingredient.
So often when we hear people talk about “unity” what they mean is conformity—-perhaps even coerced conformity that goes like this: “Everyone should be on the same page—my page, and how I see the world—how I think.” Some of the worst chapters in the story of our faith have come about when people tried to force or enforce that kind of external, superficial uniformity
Now, on the surface, that might look like “one–ness”, but it sure doesn’t taste like the flavor of what Jesus was praying for here.
So, what is the right ingredient for Christian unity? Well, it’s not a secret ingredient, because, again, Jesus repeats it over and over in this passage: “So that [they] may know that you have…loved them even as you have loved me…because you loved me before the foundation of the world. I will make it known, so that the love with which you have loved me may be in them.”
At the center of the mystery of God’s one–ness that the Church names as the Holy Trinity, there is a Divine wholeness and togetherness that isn’t about coercion, conformity or erasing diversity. It’s about mutual, self-giving love.
That’s what Jesus is asking the Father to stir into his followers in every generation. Jesus wants the same love that exist at the heart of God, to be in the hearts of his followers.
So, if that’s the basis for true Christian unity, the question isn’t, “How can I get this person over here to be more like me?” It’s not, “How can I debate other Christians and change their minds?” It’s not, “Why can’t this person reflect back to me my preferences, my cherished opinions—and then we can all finally get along?”
The question becomes, “How can I become a more loving presence?” “In what ways can my life, my attitude, my actions, my way of being in this world more closely resemble the way Jesus demonstrated love?”
Living into what Jesus outlined in John 17 means pursuing something deeper and more enduring than theological or liturgical sameness. It means looking at people whose lives, whose ideas, whose personalities are different from our own, and trying to catch a glimpse of the same image of God that dwells in us, in them.
Love is what allows someone else’s life to become just a real to us as our own. That’s when we begin to find hidden connections that we didn’t were there all along.
It’s difficult. And it’s a challenge that requires intentional effort and ongoing attentiveness. But if it wasn’t possible, I don’t think Jesus would have prayed for it.
When we open our own hearts to let God’s love be in us, we try to meet others where they are, and as they are, in ways that, even if we don’t agree with them, still make them feel valued and seen—not for the external things about their roles, or accomplishments or ideas, but for who they are underneath all that.
When we open our own hearts to let God’s love be in us, we begin to listen to others without trying to fix, or correct them—we freely give our presence in ways that honor their stories and their struggles —even when we can’t fully understand them, especially when we can’t fully understand them.
When we open our own hearts to let God’s love be in us, we welcome them with a sense of belonging that isn’t somehow earned by performance or tied to having to assent to our ways of thinking.
If we’re willing to start there it’s amazing what can happen by using the right ingredients.
Because whatever we seek to build based on loving our neighbors as ourselves tastes like the like the kind of wholeness God intended.
According to John 17, it tastes like Jesus’ cup of tea.