I. A Servant to All 00:08
Let’s pray. Lord, we come before you looking for your insight, your wisdom, your guidance in our life this morning. I pray that as I speak the words of your Scripture and teach out of your Scripture, our hearts would be awakened to the transformation that you want to take place in our lives and in the lives of our families. In Jesus’ name we pray, amen.
So today we’re going to continue in our Faith, Unity and Joy series, and today we’re talking about unity. We just had three weeks on faith. And I wrote this whole sermon on unity, and then we read this New Testament lesson from Corinthians, and I’m like, “Oh my gosh, that’s so good.” So I’m going to stop for a second. We’ll come back to the regularly scheduled programming, but we’re going to jump into Corinthians here, and I just want to look at what Paul said, because he writes:
19 For though I am free from all men, I have made myself a servant to all, that I might win the more. 1 Cor 9.19
So, on a day when you’re talking about unity, and then you look at how Paul lived towards people… And then he goes on, and what he does is he calls out all of the various fighting tribes within the Christian movement, the Jewish and Christian movement at the time. And that’s what he’s saying here. He’s saying, “I made myself a servant to all of them, that I might win the more. To the Jews I became as a Jew, to those who were under the law as under the law, to those who are without the law as without the law, to the weak I became weak. I have become all things to all men” (1 Cor 9.20–22).
And as we talk about unity, you can hear Paul’s heart. His job was in probably the most contentious time in the church’s history, right when they were trying to figure out… because nobody really knew what Christianity was. They were figuring it out, by God’s grace, by looking at what Jesus said, by looking at what Jesus did. And so throughout the entire New Testament you can see, especially in the book of Acts (it talks a lot about this), they have these factions in the church that are at each other’s throats because “we should sing hymns and not contemporary music.” Or maybe they’re at each other’s throats because “you shouldn’t be doing the Eucharist by a priest or a bishop, but you should just be a pastor on the street handing out wafers and grape juice.” They have all this division in the early church, and they’re trying to figure out what is right and what is good. And Paul’s message is, “I will go and I will be as a Jew to the Jews, if I can bring them the knowledge of Jesus Christ. I will be under the law, if I must, to bring some people into the knowledge of Jesus Christ.”
I want us to keep this in mind as we talk about unity, because we can be so sure of ourselves, our opinions, our thoughts, and our beliefs, that we can be at odds with what God wants to do on earth in our midst. Because we’re so convinced we’re right and they’re wrong, we will sacrifice love and unity to get our way. And so that was what struck me out of this. And in the last verse he says, “Now I do this for the gospel’s sake, that I may be a partaker of it with you” (1 Cor 9.23). As long as we are oriented around the gospel, Christ Jesus coming and saving us, we don’t have to fight about all the other stuff.
Now, let me say this: the other stuff matters. I’m not saying it doesn’t. You actually do have to make decisions, especially in the early church. I mean, we’re talking about some massive problems in the early church, where the Jews were turning over Christians to the Romans because they thought they were heretics to be stoned and imprisoned, or where some people were saying to everyone who came in, “If you want to be a part of us, you have to be circumcised. You have to be under the Jewish law. You can’t eat bacon.” There were serious things on the line here. And so they did have to work out their differences. But the heart of Paul, to say, “I want to be a servant to all of them”: that’s the heart of unity. All for the gospel. He never sacrificed the gospel, but for the sake of the gospel he was willing to be a servant to those who probably wanted to kill him, or at least have him imprisoned and shut up. That is our story as we jump into this message about unity.
II. Nothing Will Be Impossible for Them 04:30
And so I wanted to talk about… We’ve had these past three weeks, these great words on faith. And what faith does especially well is it orients you towards God and his purposes. Now, what unity is about is this horizontal dimension: how do we both be oriented towards God and love one another? And, looking around this room, it can be hard. We have had our differences. And yet we are called to do it anyway. So let’s get our faith in line. Let’s hear and obey. Let’s trust that God is going to provide for all of our needs. And let’s move into how we live that with one another.
How do we do that? Well, when God gave us this word, it was clear at the rector’s council level that the reason he wanted us to focus on faith, unity, and joy is because he had something for Saint Michael’s to do. He had a plan for us, and we would need faith, unity, and joy to accomplish the plan that he was setting before us. The faith that moves mountains: guess what that means? There are mountains coming. That’s part of the word, mountains that we are called by faith to move.
And unity. Let’s talk about what unity does for us. In Genesis 11:6, God is looking at the people of the earth, and they’ve come together to build the Tower of Babel. Now, I don’t think they named it the Tower of Babel. In fact, that was after. They thought it was the tower of their success. They thought it was the tower that was going to lead them to heaven. And God’s response to a bunch of people saying, “We’re going to build a tower to heaven,” wasn’t to laugh at them. He didn’t look at them and say, “Oh gosh, those silly humans.” No, he said this:
6 “Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language, and this is only the beginning of what they will do. And nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them.” Gen 11.6
That’s incredible. God looked at them and said they could do it. They could build a tower to heaven. Now, of course, I don’t know what that would mean, because heaven is not spatially limited to the heights. Heaven’s an alternate dimension, you know. But I do know that God was emphasizing unity and its power in that moment. They can do it. They are of one mind and one language, one purpose. What else can they not do?
So if God is telling us we’re going to need faith to move mountains, he’s telling us we’re going to need unity, because we’re going to be doing stuff that’s impossible by ourselves. We’re going to need one another. It’s going to matter whether you are nice to the person sitting next to you in the pew. And I don’t just mean nice, because I’ve seen people be nice, and that can be pretty mean, when you’re being nice to somebody. I’ve met some people who are just really good at being awful to you while being so kind. But I’m talking about something deeper. I’m talking about: even when you disagree vehemently, even when you’re able to say, “Look, I think you’re wrong on this,” you can remain in unity. Believe it or not, Paul’s showing us that way, because his heart was to serve for the sake of the gospel.
III. A Divided Culture 07:57
Let’s talk a little bit more about how this works. Now, in our culture we’re facing what many have termed some of the most divided times in the history of our country. I would argue that we’ve seen more divided. Imagine the Civil War. We’ve seen worse. So at one level I want to say the pundits and the people who are telling you that this is the worst time in history are absolutely wrong, 100 percent. They are wrong. There have been worse times. But nobody can argue that division is not a problem in our culture and in our society, specifically division in families.
The tragedy that so many people are growing up fatherless in this world is maybe the greatest cultural problem of our life. Because God had a plan for the world. It was: a man shall leave his father and his mother and be joined with his wife (Gen 2.24), and they will be fruitful and multiply (Gen 1.28). And when that breaks, especially on the level of our culture, you see the negative repercussions. We’re so blessed in our community to have so many strong and wonderful fathers who are standing by, raising their children, who are building families. That is not the norm in our culture.
And so I want to emphasize the fact that this unity conversation… I want to focus here, but it has such far-reaching implications for our world. Unity, the way Christ teaches unity, will change the world, and has changed the world. There’s a reason why a couple of hundred Christians have now become billions of Christians. Because by God’s grace, by their ability to remain unified, as they stayed unified around the gospel, they were able to overcome even torture and death at the hands of persecution.
IV. That They May All Be One 10:30
If you didn’t think unity was important yet, I want to visit one more passage that I think spells it out a little bit more for us. And this is Jesus, and he’s praying for his disciples, aware of the fact that he’s going to be leaving them. He’s going to be ascending, and while he will never be separated from them in the Spirit, they’re going to have to live out the plan that he set before them, accomplish the work of redemption. And so he’s praying for them, and he gets to this part in John 17, where he says this paragraph that is a little dense. But we’re going to unpack it just a little bit. It’s pretty clear what he’s after.
20 “I do not ask for these only, but also for those who will believe in me through their word…” John 17.20
“These” are his twelve disciples. “But also for those who will believe in me through their word”: that’s us. We are the people who believe in Christ because of the word of the apostles that has been handed down, codified in the Bible and through tradition. We have heard about who Jesus is because of these men. So we are the people who believe in him through their word. He’s praying:
21 “…that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. 22 The glory that you have given me I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are one, 23 I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me.” John 17.21–23
Now, maybe there are parts in there where you got lost in the language, because the language is absolutely dense and it refers back to itself. But there’s something really clear. Jesus wants us to be as unified as he and the Father are unified, as the Trinity. I mean, that’s pretty intense. Because Jesus says things like, “I don’t do anything I don’t see the Father doing. I don’t say anything I don’t hear the Father saying” (John 5.19). There’s a relationship between Jesus and the Father that is a unity that is unbreakable. And he wants that for his church. Now, he’s praying for it because he knows how hard it’s going to be. The only way that will happen is by the grace of God. And so he’s praying for these things.
So there are two things I’m pulling out of here. First of all, Jesus wants us to be as unified as he and his Father. And secondly, this part: it says, “so that the world may know.” He says that twice.
V. Unity Is Not Sameness 12:35
So let’s break it down a little further. There are two great pictures of what unity is supposed to look like among us, and we’re getting to the practicals here. There are two pictures: it’s Jesus and his Father, and it’s the mystery of marriage. We have an awesome wedding coming up this coming weekend, and we get to see that mystery in the sacrament of holy matrimony. It says, when husband and wife become one flesh… “but I’m speaking of Christ and the church” (Ephes 5.31–32). The mystery of the union in marriage is the same mystery as the union of Christ and us. It’s the same image that Jesus is talking about when he says, “I want them to be one with us, as I am one with you,” as a wife is one with her husband. These are all talking about the same mystery of union and unity.
But it gives us a little bit of a road to see: well, maybe unity doesn’t mean sameness. Because you only have to meet one married couple to know that they’re not the same. The husband is different than the wife, and the wife’s different than the husband. One example, the way I wrote it in my notes: Haley and I face this challenge every day. Every day we are unified in our commitment to God’s will for our life and for the life of our children, and that is where our unity generally ends. We have to work really hard on all the other stuff that we disagree about. Now, granted, she’s come over to my side on a few issues, and so she’s starting to… I’m educating her along the way. No, I’m just kidding. I’ll pay for that one later.
But we will have these arguments, and maintaining unity in an argument is not easy to do. We’ll go to a park, and my job as the father, the way that I view it, is to make sure that my children go to the highest point of the park and find a way to jump off. That is the goal at a park. And Haley’s goal at a park is for the kids to remain out of the emergency room. And those odds, you know, sometimes can feel like there’s some tension in here. We really are unified. I want my kids to be strong and safe. She wants our kids to be safe and strong. There’s a little different emphasis here. I want them to go to the edge of their ability and beyond it. And she also wants that, but she wants it to remain safe. And I do too; it’s just a little less safe, you know. And so what I’m saying is, we really are unified, but we’ve got to work that out. And in the moment, what I hear is, “You’re dumb. I don’t like what you’re doing.” And what she hears is… not, “This is the thing that we both care about; let’s find a way to do it well.”
This is just one example of the type of unity we have to figure out in the church. You’ve probably been in that meeting with somebody where you’re trying to do the same thing, and yet you hate each other in the moment: “Why do you keep contradicting me?” But you’re really aiming at the same goal from different directions. Unity is about remembering the center, like what Paul was saying: for the sake of the gospel. If you look at his list of people, the people under the law, the people not under law, he’s talking about the Christians who feel that the law has been superseded in the covenant of Christ, and the other Christians are like, “No, you can’t eat bacon.” This was a big thing. But they all agreed on Jesus. And so that’s the point. When we’re talking about unity, you keep the central things central. That’s what faith helps you do. And then you stop thinking, “Man, this idiot,” and you start thinking, “Oh, we just have different ways of trying to get to the same place.” If you can get there in an argument, then unity can be maintained.
But I’m going to go one step further. Sometimes you also just have to let go. Sometimes I just have to say, “You know what? Today might not be the day that Rowan jumps off the highest part of the park.” Maybe today, even if she’s wrong (which maybe she is, maybe she isn’t), it might just not be the day, because unity is more important. I’ve been telling my son lately… and he is quite the lawyer, as you might suspect. And so we have lots of arguments about what to do and what’s important and what’s right, and he’ll explain to me the rules: “But Dad, these are the rules.” And sometimes I just have to tell him, “Rowan, sometimes it’s better to be good than it is to be right.” Sometimes it’s better to be good than to be right. And of course goodness, the idea of goodness, is integrally linked with truth. You can’t separate them. But there’s something where everyone knows what that means. Sometimes it’s less important that you’re right in a moment than that you’re good to the person you’re with.
We’ll get into this a lot more next week, because next week is the enemies of our unity, which I’m really excited about, because we get to talk about all the nitty-gritty of the stuff that comes between you and I. I get to air all the dirty laundry. No, I get to talk about all the ways that you might feel towards one another. And we’ll talk about Paul; he has a great story about this. But I just want to stop here and say: the picture of a marriage as a picture of unity should show us that unity is something you have to fight for.
VI. One Body, One Team 18:08
I’ve got one more example for us today. When we talk about Jesus, he starts saying, you know, “You should be one as I and the Father are one.” You might get confused and think that Jesus is leaning towards this Eastern idea that you are to subsume, to give up your identity and join with the divine. I’ve heard literal people really fervently believing this, that that’s the goal of life, that nirvana is when you let go of yourself and you join back with some divine consciousness. That is not Jesus’ picture of unity at all. If you didn’t get it from the husbands and wives, you can look at the role of the Father and the Son. The Son obeys the Father, but he doesn’t stop being the Son. He doesn’t lose his identity. It’s actually our very distinctiveness that allows us to join together in Christian unity. Sameness is not unity.
You can imagine it in the picture that we’re given, that we are Christ’s body. That’s what it means to be joined with Christ: that we actually are Christ’s body together, the church. Imagine a body made up of just hands, or just eyes, or just ears. Besides fuel for nightmares, it also just doesn’t work. That’s not unity. Whatever that is, we are called to actually have our own distinctive ways of acting.
And I apologize to like 50 percent of the room, depending on who you are, but I’m going to use football as an analogy here. Imagine you are Dakota Rayne Prescott. That’s the quarterback of the Cowboys. And your job as the quarterback is to throw the ball to the right place at the right time. Well, guess what? Your hands have to be in sync with your mind, your feet, your body, your hips, your eyes. I mean, you hear the announcers take apart a quarterback’s stance, and they can find it to the millisecond: “Oh, he was off rhythm. He was out of sync. His hand held on just a little too long,” or, “His foot dropped; he stepped back at a different angle, and that changed the rotation of his hips.” His body has to be unified to be a quarterback. That’s the difference between a completion and an interception (for those of you not football people, between something really good and really bad). The difference is unity.
But he also has to be in unity with the team of people. There are blockers, and they’ve got to block. And there are receivers, and they’ve got to run their routes, and the timing and the precision… And the best part of football is when you see that play where every single person did their job so well that it’s a miracle the ball ended up where it was supposed to be. And just like us: if any one of those people was like, “I don’t like that guy, so I’m not going to do my job,” the whole thing falls apart. And yet in the church we’re like, “Yeah, but that stinking receiver,” or, “That dumb quarterback,” or, “Man, that running back’s awful.” And we just don’t do our job, because we fall out of unity. We allow the devil to push our buttons and separate us.
And just like in the church, there’s a whole team of people on the other side that you’re fighting against as we do our job. Think about a football team: the job of the defense is to make sure that unity does not happen, that things don’t come together. You blow up an assignment… I’m not going to get down the rabbit hole. But you stop somebody from doing their job, and the whole thing falls apart. And every day you’re fighting a battle, a battle for unity. You’re like, “Well, I’m alone all day.” Sometimes I will get in a car at 4:00 a.m., and I will drive for 12 hours, and I will get out of the car and I will go into a hotel room, and then I’ll be in a hotel room for five hours before I go to sleep. I’m alone for 17 hours. And yet all day I’m fighting for unity: in my mind, in the conversations I have on the phone, in the way that I serve the people on the job site when I drop off the material, in the way I interact with the hotel receptionists. Everything we do should be done in love. That’s the secret formula for unity. You love people. Not like, “Oh, I love you.” No, like, “I will die for you.” That’s the love. “I will wash your feet. I will serve you.” That’s what unity is about.
So every day, just imagine there’s a defender lining up against you, and his job is to break your unity, to get your eyes off the prize. Faith will keep you focused, and we’ve got to fight for that unity.
VII. So That the World May Know 23:45
Now, on the other side, this prayer that Jesus said was all so that the world may know. And earlier in John, Jesus says, in John 13:34 and 35:
34 “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. 35 By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” John 13.34–35
The most devastating critiques of the church today are that we don’t love each other. They say things like, they’re hypocritical, they’re squabbling. Actually, I wrote a fun paragraph here: Christians are hypocritical, judgmental, squabbling, egotistical tribes who worship the God of love but practice the same fighting as everyone else. That’s what many people think we are. And, to be honest, we could all get on our knees and say the confession again, if we think real hard on that. We’ve all done it. Now, I need to clarify: you’ve said the confession, God has forgiven you. I’m not saying we ever need to do that again. I am saying, be aware of the fact that love is what binds us together. And all this other stuff not only distracts from what we’re doing as a church, but it makes the whole world unaware of where that city on a hill is (Matt 5.14–15). It’s like, no one lights a lamp and puts it under a bucket. What’s the bucket? The hypocritical, judgmental squabbling. That’s the bucket that will hide your light. “It’s so important that I let this person know I’m not going to let them walk all over me. I’m going to just be…” You’ve got all these things that you can get offended by. And yet the person walking down the street is like, “Man, I would go to church, but I don’t trust them. Why would I want to go be a part of another political body?”
Now, I do want to say, I think we here at Saint Michael’s Church are awesome. There’s no place I would rather be on a Sunday morning. I mean that very, very seriously. I mean, somebody could say, “Hey, you want to go to the Vatican?” I’d rather be with you guys. I might go to the Vatican just to see what they’re doing over there. But I’m just saying, there is no place I would rather bring my family to, no place I’d rather build with you guys. We did the church men’s workday yesterday. Our job during workday, if you guys don’t know, is to scrub bathrooms and fix fences. It’s not glamorous. It’s the stuff my wife can hardly get me to do in my house. But I love being here with you and doing these things with you. That’s what unity is about. And we’re told all these things: Gentiles shall come to the light of your brightness (Isa 60.3). Yes, as long as you are unified, as long as you love one another.
VIII. We Few, We Happy Few 25:59
Let’s end by talking about a couple of phrases that shaped Saint Michael’s culture. Some of this is coming from stories I’ve heard, but I’ve been here for 31 years, so I’ve been here a good amount of time. One of them is “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.” You might have heard somebody say that. It comes from this play, Henry V, that was made into a great movie. Everybody should watch it. But from the beginning, Saint Michael’s, and Faith Community Church, Stone Mountain Church, had this persona, this identity: yes, we might be a small church, but we’re together on this, and that matters. That togetherness, that united front. And this church, a lot of the people in this room, started an international denomination with thousands of churches. People don’t write books like that. What they say is, “We had a thousand people, and then this great donor came in and gave us a billion dollars, and we were able to start a million churches.” That sounds logical. But instead, this little church, united around the vision of where God was telling them to go, spawned an international denomination. Unity matters.
At Saint Michael’s, what do we unite around? We unite around Jesus. What does Jesus do? He tells us to do things. How do you know that you love Christ? You keep his commands (John 14.15). And so the unity has always been: we are on a mission for Christ. And that’s something that I think God wants to reignite in us. It’s a generational thing. There are a lot of people who have heard this message before. There are a lot of people here who are like, “This sounds familiar.” And there are some people here who are the children or grandchildren of those people. And we’re called to step up, and we are stepping up. I can already see it happening.
IX. Non Nobis, Domine 28:14
And the key cry that goes along with “We few, we happy few,” the one that brings it all together, is Non nobis: not to us be the glory, but to God be the glory. You know what? I’m not going to talk a ton about pride next week, but I’m going to talk a little right now. There are very few things that will divide you more than selfish ambition and conceit. I’m using “selfish ambition and conceit” because it’s in the Scripture, but that just means selfishness and pride. There are very few things that people fight over more than when you are out for yourself and not for your brother. If we make it Non nobis, Domine, and actually God gets the glory from all this, that’s something you can unite on. If it’s “I get the glory,” or “She gets the glory,” or “He gets the glory,” that will divide you. It’s about God getting the glory.
And so, as we talk about unity: the secret to unity is love. The practical: we all have a role to play. We’re all facing an enemy. I want to end with this passage from Philippians chapter 2. And, like I said, you should come next week, because we’re going to get into the enemies of our unity. But Philippians 2 gives us the secret here:
2 Complete my joy by being of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. Phil 2.2
That echoes that passage from the Tower of Babel: one language, one mind.
3 Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. 4 Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others. Phil 2.3–4
If we have a church of people who followed those two verses, three verses, then we can change the world. We already have. Saint Michael’s has already changed the world. And we’re called again to remember our unity, our love, to give up selfish ambition and conceit, and to love one another. Amen.