Hilton Head Island, SC – August 25, 2024
The Chapel Without Walls
Matthew 16:13-20; John 17:20-24
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text - "The glory which thou hast given me I have given to them, so that they may be one, as we are one." - John 17:22 (RSV)
(Introductory Note) – Initially I thought of having a communion service today, which would would be our last communion service. I wanted to do this in order to emphasize the first of the six words in summary, the word Church. Holy communion is a sacrament of the Church. It is also called (depending on the denomination) the Lord’s Supper, the mass, the eucharist, and the love feast. But I decided to skip communion today and to emphasize the concept of “The Church.” Besides, in my old age I have developed some historical reservations about what the Gospels say happened at the Last Supper of Jesus with his disciples.
If there is a groundswell or tidal wave of enthusiasm to celebrate a last Lord’s Supper, we can do that on another Sunday. We have observed this sacrament very infrequently in our 20-plus years of existence, and only a small number of people have even asked why. Today I will briefly touch on why I have been so reticent to celebrate communion frequently.
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The word “church” appears in the Gospels only twice, and both times it is in the Gospel of Matthew. You heard the first usage of the word in the first scripture reading this morning. The word “church” means “fellowship” or “assembly.” In Greek it is ekklesia. The same concept is found in the Old Testament, where, in Hebrew, the word is qahal. All three of these words, qahal, ekklesia, and church suggest the notion of community or assembly, either as individual congregations or as the entire body of Jewish or Christian believers.
There could be no Christianity if there were nothing like the Church. For a religion to thrive through the passage of centuries, it must create an institutional framework or frameworks of some kind or another, such as Orthodox, Conservative or Reform Judaism or Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, or Protestant Christianity.
Having lived for eight and a half decades, I have come to question whether Jesus ever used the word “church” in anything he said. I think Matthew chose to edit that into his account of Jesus’ life and teachings. I believe Jesus intended to be a reformer of Judaism, but he had no intention of starting a new religion. It was the apostle Paul who caused that to happen, as we can see in the Book of the Acts of the Apostles and the letters of Paul to various churches throughout the Roman empire and to various individuals in the New Testament Church.
To reiterate, it is impossible that we would here today or that anyone else in Christendom would be worshiping anyplace else if there was no Church of Jesus Christ. Jesus didn’t institute the Church, but Paul, other New Testament Christians, and billions of other Christians eventually did, and so this small congregation of eclectic Christians are gathered in worship and praise of Jesus of Nazareth and the God who sent Jesus of Nazareth into a needy and broken world, that sadly remains far too needy and broken.
However, the Church is a means to an end; it is not an end in itself. The Church exists to lead people to God; God does not exist to lead people to the Church. God can do without the Church, but church people can’t do without it. The Church has a mission, but in itself, it is not The Mission. The Church is a vehicle, it is not a final destination; it is conduit of truth, but it is not truth in itself; it is an earthly agent for God, but it is not the ultimate agent of God. God is His own final agency and destination and truth. That is why Jesus will be the next to last “word” in this sermon series of six words in summary, and the last word will be “God.” God, and not Jesus, is the first, last, and most essential word in all of Christian theology.
Nevertheless, for all its foibles and fallacies, the Church has been the most important means of God for reaching the so-called western world. It is not His only means by any means, thank God, but perhaps it is His Number One institutional instrument for evangelization to the west of the eastern Mediterranean and to the western edge of the Western Hemisphere. However, Judaism and Islam have been and are major divine instruments as well. As far as I am concerned, all of us Christians and Muslims are really just non-genetic Jews who have never quite figured that out. That is one of the unorthodoxies I wrote about in a book I wrote over thirty years ago and to whose thesis I am returning today.
In Matthew, chapter 16, it is reported that Jesus asked the disciples how they had heard other people describe Jesus, and they told him some of the things they had heard. “But who do you say that I am?” Jesus asked. Peter said, “You are the Christ” (the Messiah) “the Son of the living God!” Jesus enthusiastically responded (according to Matthew), “Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jona! …You are Peter” (the Greek name Petros literally means “Rock”) “and upon this rock I will build my Church.”
That verse is immensely important to Roman Catholics, and it is easy to understand why. Roman Catholic tradition declares Peter to be the first pope of the Church. That is extra-rational, a “beyond-or-outside-reason” article of faith, as every article of faith ultimately is. The Roman Catholic Church has insisted for at least eighteen centuries that Peter was the first pope, and for Catholics he is, although not for most Protestants, although most Protestants have probably never thought about it, nor are they likely to do so without some outside prompting.
In the Gospel of John, the Last Supper did not also include what the Church has always called "the Lord's Supper," meaning holy communion. This is another example of why the Fourth Gospel is so unique, and, one might even say, peculiar. There is no “Lord’s Supper” in the Fourth Gospel’s Last Supper, according to John. Nonetheless, in John's account of the Last Supper (which takes five chapters to describe, far and away the longest reporting about it in any of the four Gospels, even if there is no Lord's Supper with it), Jesus gives what Church scholars have called "The Great High Priestly Prayer," which is Chapter 17 in its entirety.
In seminary, we were taught never to preach when you are praying in public. I would guess every member of the clergy, including yours truly, has ignored that advice on more than a few occasions, even if we recognized that we were doing it. In the “great high priestly prayer,” found only in the Gospel of John, almost everything in the prayer as recorded by John is preaching, and from my perspective, much of it is what often is called not just preaching but “meddling.”
It seems to me that in the entire 17th chapter of John, Jesus is not praying to God. Instead he is preaching to the disciples, except that I don’t believe Jesus said what John said he said. It was John who was saying those things, and John was doing the theological and Christological meddling, whoever “John” was. No one knows for certain the answer to that question. In any event, in the words of Jesus in the earlier-written synoptic Gospels, Jesus never once says that Jesus and God are the same essence, or that people cannot come to the Father unless they do so through Jesus, or that Jesus alone is the bread of life or the light of the world. To study the Bible is a grand and glorious lifelong exercise, but if you really do it, and really think about it, you may break some of the Church’s many ironclad rules. Individuals cannot make rules for everyone. Only institutions can make rules for everyone, and the Church therefore makes the rules that all of us are supposed to live by, except that some of us, who are even more obstinate than those who long ago met together to make the rules, are so obstinate that we become Shakespearian Cassiuses. “Such men are dangerous; they think too much.”
Part of the high priestly prayer is that section where Jesus talked about the unity he felt between himself and God, and in that momentous and historic occasion, the unity he desired for his followers, the Church. Jesus prayed, "I ask not only on behalf of these" (the twelve disciples) "but also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one" (John 17:20). That is such a future-oriented-by-looking-back statement that Jesus could not possibly have said it. It would be devoid of meaning to the bewildered twelve. Then later, according to John, Jesus prayed to God, "The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, even as we are one" (17:22). Jesus probably never said that, but it’s true anyway, despite John.
The Church of Jesus Christ is united, Christian people; we are one! Whatever anybody thinks about the Gospel of John, we are one! In many painfully obvious ways we are not united as one, because we are Catholics and Orthodox and Protestants, and among the Protestants there are Lutherans and Episcopalians and Baptists and Methodists and Presbyterians and Non-Denominationals. Among all of them there are predestinarians and universalists, determinists and free-willists, evangelicals and ecumenists, exclusivists and inclusivists, conservatives and liberals. Nonetheless, in Jesus we are united; in him we miraculously, almost magically, become one!
To become united in God and Jesus Christ, we don't all need to believe the same things. And in point of fact, all of us don't believe the same things. We never have, and we never will. And when I say "we," I mean all Christians through all time as well as the small conglomeration of Christians in The Chapel Without Walls, There have always been differences over doctrine and tenets of the faith in the Church, as well as perpetual brouhahas over Church structure. Despite all that, the Church is One, not because we make it One, but because God makes the Church One. If God says we are a unity, then we're a unity, even if, to us, it may not look that way.
Agreement is not what creates the unity of the Church; it is God who unifies us. And that unity can be observed most persuasively every Sunday where Christians gather in any kind of church (ekklesia) to worship the God whose spirit within them leads them to gather together, rather than merely to worship individually through individual prayer, meditation, and contemplation.
This congregation is part of the Church of Jesus Christ, the One Holy Catholic Apostolic Church. It is not a denominational church, but it is a very small speck in the enormous circle of humanity that is The Church of Jesus Christ. Our congregation is not this group's church or that group's church or his church or her church or their church, and it most assuredly is not, has never been, and never will be John Miller's church. No two people here are exactly alike. Though we have always been united in many ways, we still are individually diffuse and diverse, which is one of the things which I have found to be the most rewarding and stimulating aspects of being here for the past twenty years. What a marvelously motley mob we are!
The Church isn't everything. Compared to faith, grace, eternity, Jesus, or God, in certain respects it is hardly anything. But compared to whatever other options there are either in or beyond this world, the Church is really something. And here is where "church" happens for us, here is where our unity is made most manifest, in our being in communion with one another every Sunday. To gather here in the Island Funeral Home, of all inappropriate-and-appropriate places, we again exhibit ourselves to be a tiny corpuscle in the worldwide Church of Jesus Christ. And we shall continue to be that beyond January 5, 2025, and until the last of us makes our earthly exit, presumably via the Island Funeral Home. About all that more in the final five words in summary.
The Church is a fallible, crusty, moss-backed inevitably human-created and operated institution. Through the grace of God, it is a major vehicle God has providentially used to connect Himself to billions of lonely and lost people for the past two thousand years. Praise God, from whom all blessings flow!