We Believe in the Communion of Saints

We Believe in the Communion of Saints:  The Marks of a Unified Church

2 Timothy 1:1-7

This is world communion Sunday. It is a day that I have looked forward to for a long time. As a person and your Pastor I have a strong conviction that the church, as an ideal, is meant to be a preview of heaven. A preview in all of its rich diversity, peoples, languages, nations, from around the entire world all coming together under one risen and ascended cosmic Jesus Christ. This is a present spiritual reality and a future material/spiritual reality.   I pray in the way of this morning that we would learn to become more and more like this in the years to come. If you were to ask anyone in

Seattle

how many churches there are, my guess is that the response would be, “Thousands!”  Further, if you were to ask the global community how many expressions of the Christian church there are, the answer would be the same.  However, I stand before you this morning and suggest with a great sense of certainty that if that question were asked of Jesus Christ himself, he would state categorically, “There is only one church, one body of Christ, forever and for all time!”  This reality is what we live in, play in, participate in this morning. Further this reality is not just limited to the churches on the planet today. We are further caught up with those who have gone before in the faith. People like Paul,

Timothy

,

Lydia

, Mother Theresa, Augustine, Luther, Calvin, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R Tolkien, Gustavo Gutierrez (liberation theologian of

Latin America

that lead the church to explore how to live out the Exodus story with praxis in our lifetime), Dorothy Sayers, Simone Weil, Frederick Buechner, Anne Lamott, Eugene Peterson, and you here as God uses you in your worlds.

In our Nicene Creed, we are unified by the one risen and ascended Christ who proclaims with us, “We believe in the communion of saints.”  This wonderful little phrase in Latin is communion sanctorum and means the “sharing between people who are seen and made holy by this cosmic, risen and ascended Jesus Christ.”  Isn’t that wonderful?  We share together because we are made perfect in and through Jesus Christ.  It is what it means to be unified as THE body of Jesus Christ on earth today.  We do not share a mere feeling that can be mis-interpreted, cheapened, or reduced to a quip or a slogan on a hallmark card, or fall prey to the hands of spin doctors in the vast landscape of American politics. Rather, it is breathing the air of Christ or allowing Jesus Christ to become the “atmosphere in which we live,” according to New Testament scholar, C.F.D. Moule.  This is not just about a state of being it is about being in a dynamic equilibrium.

This dynamic equilibrium issues forth in a number of unifying marks. I will mention three that flow from the first seven verses of this morning’s text.    The first mark is that this atmosphere and equilibrium allows us to move, breath, and have our very being from a PLACE of grace, mercy and peace of God. 

This is the first mark of a unified church.  We are wrapped up, not in personal agendas or hobby horses but in the very real presence of the body of Jesus Christ as it actually is, both spiritually and materially.  When we breathe that specific air of this Trinitarian dynamic equilibrium we find ourselves existing, not floating, within Grace, Mercy and Peace. First there is grace, the unmerited favor of God through Jesus, extending to all humankind. Second, there is mercy, the enduring and vigilant compassion of God that always hears the cry of God’s people. Third, there is peace, the state of being, not a feeling that can betray, that all is right and well and put in its right and proper place in God’s universe.

This dynamic equilibrium allows us to enter into a dance with THE Trinity and converse with God in PRAYER. This is the second mark of a unified church.  Prayer is that second mark. A praying church is a vibrant and alive church, because we are catapulted into the atmosphere of this dancing Trinity.  Many mistakenly think that prayer is when I start praying and saying things to God.  While there is a primary school type of truth to this, this does not do justice to the interior life of prayer of a person, a church or of the Trinity. I submit that the prayer the Apostle Paul is talking about here and encouraging his student, Timothy, to embark upon and therefore the church, is to enter into a conversation that God, as Trinity, is already having amongst God self—like for like.  This can only happen when we are caught up in the reality of the interior life of God through Christ.  This interior life of constant communication is extended to the church Like for others, through prayer. The ongoing communication between the three members of the Trinity becomes the oxygen that is available for the church. When the church and people breathes this Trinitarian air, it is called prayer. In prayer we are unified as a church because we are repositioned, reprioritized, re-empowered, re-purposed for the work that God is doing in the world. Many times this is in direct contradiction to what we might think that God ought to be doing in the world. Our work flows from the grace, mercy and peace of a God who allows us to enter into this dynamic equilibrium and become unified and live out the phrase communion sanctorium. 

The third mark of a unified church that flows from being united with God in Jesus is that we become people of POWER.  This is not a power from above or a power over. This is a Holy Spirit power that always uses the least politically correct method or person to accomplish the will of God.  Many times this power uses people on the margins to accomplish what one would have thought would be done by those at the center. This power, rather, is a soft, surprised by joy, grassroots, transformational power that turns the world upside down and inside out.  There is no access to this power apart from prayer. There is no authentic prayer apart from this dance and there is no communion sanctorium apart from a risen and ascended Christ.

So on this world communion Sunday let us remember that we connect not to our own preferences, biases, dogmas, feelings or even emotions, theological systems but to the God that is. When we connect to the God that is three in one, we are ushered into a dynamic equilibrium that access’s the deepest recesses of the soul of God where grace, mercy and peace reside. We live there in that place. We are repurposed in prayer from and for that place and we are mobilized from the power that flows from that place. Today let’s be the church united communion sanctorium in place, prayer and power….Praise be to the Lord!