Sunday Sermon - 18 January

I often get asked the question: “If Jesus came back today, what do you think he’d say about the Church?”

This isn’t an easy question for me to answer (though I have been known to overthink things sometimes… okay, maybe a lot of the time).

You see, Jesus—our God—was not born of Mary, baptized by John, healing the sick, preaching and teaching in order to start a new religious order called Christianity. As John’s Gospel makes it clear from the very beginning, Jesus is “the Lamb of God who comes to take away the sin of the world”—not by standing apart from his people, but by standing squarely with them, within their story. Our story.

It is important for us, as today’s Christians, to acknowledge the fact that Jesus did not arrive on earth as a religious outsider. He came as a faithful Jew, steeped in Scripture, praying the prayers of Israel, fulfilling the visions of the prophets — especially Isaiah’s vision of a servant “called from the womb”, named and claimed by God before ever being sent.

Jesus came to renew Israel and to return his people—his Jewish people—to their sacred responsibility and relationship with God. Jesus did not place himself above or even against his people; he stood among them, he acknowledged himself as one of them. From the beginning of the Gospels, Jesus announces not a new religion, but an ancient hope renewed:  “The kingdom of God has come near.” That is Israel’s hope — the promise that God would finally set things right, heal what was broken, gather what was scattered, and restore God’s people to their calling as a light to the nations.

Jesus teaches in synagogues. He keeps the festivals. He argues Torah like a rabbi. He weeps over an oppressed Jerusalem.

These are not the actions of someone abandoning Israel for a new community of faith, but of someone who loves her deeply enough to be honest, to tell and teach the truth.  

When Jesus calls his twelve disciples, he is not forming a breakaway sect—he is symbolically re-gathering the twelve tribes, enacting Isaiah’s promise that God’s servant would not only restore Israel but be given “as a light to the nations.” When he eats with sinners, he is acting out the prophets’ vision of a restored people. When he cleanses the Temple, he is not rejecting worship, but calling it back to its true purpose—redirecting leaders who had confused authority with faithfulness.

And when Jesus says, “I will build my church,” he does not mean the institution as we know it today.

The original Greek word we translate as church — ekklēsia — means the “called-out” or “chosen assembly”. Simply put, a select group of people. Jesus is not speaking about an organization; he is speaking about a people called by God, much like Isaiah’s servant, called before they ever knew their own strength or weakness. Jesus is envisioning a renewed people of God, centered not on power or purity, but on himself — on the God, our God, that he reveals. In other words, Jesus came not to replace Israel’s Judaism with a new religion, but to fulfil Israel’s purpose as God’s chosen people.

His faithfulness had consequences.

Jesus’ obedience to God’s will and his refusal to align with violence, nationalism, or even religious authority and control leads him to the cross. Only after the resurrection, only as the Spirit is poured out at Pentecost, only as Gentiles are welcomed in through the good and graceful work of Paul, does this renewed people slowly become what we now call the Church.

As Paul reminds the Corinthians, this Church is not born of human wisdom or strength, but is called into being by God, sustained not by perfection but by grace, held together by God’s faithfulness even when it, when we, struggle to live as one body.  The Church is not something Jesus abandoned Israel to create. The Church is what happens when Jesus is raised, the Spirit is given, and the call to renewal is so powerful it cannot be contained.

So what does that mean for us?

It means the Church does not, and should not, exist to preserve itself. Christianity exists to live the renewed life Jesus came to bring. It exists to be continually re-formed, re-aligned, and re-called to faithfulness again and again by the One who calls us into fellowship with Himself.

I say all this today because today begins the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity.  I looked up its definition, and here is what I found:

The Week of Prayer for Christian Unity is an annual international ecumenical celebration, focusing on prayer, scripture reflection, and shared fellowship to promote unity among different Christian traditions. It acts as an “octave”—eight days of prayer for the reconciliation of churches.

That sounds lovely, doesn’t it?

But let’s listen to some of that again:  … to promote unity among different Christian traditions. It acts as an “octave”—eight days of prayer for the reconciliation of churches.

Promote unity? The reconciliation of churches?

If the Church — born of Christ’s resurrection, called into being by the Spirit, entrusted with the ministry of reconciliation — now stands in need of reconciliation itself, have we not failed our God?

I believe the honest answer is both a no and, sadly, a yes –  a tension held together by grace. I say no because we have not failed God in the sense that God’s purpose for us has been defeated. As Paul tells the Corinthians, God is faithful. The Church is God’s work before it is ours. Born at Pentecost, sustained by grace rather than human perfection, the Church has always been a community of forgiven sinners, not a society of the righteous. God is not surprised by our brokenness or our failure. God knows us. God loves us. God forgives us.

But yes — we have failed God when we have failed to live as the people we were created to be. When the Church needs reconciliation, within itself and with those it has harmed, and sadly, many have been harmed throughout the history of Christianity and the imperialism of Christendom.  

In those moments when we have chosen power over humility, conquest over compassion, self-preservation over self-sacrificing love. When the church places its quest for power and even survival over the care of others we are not being who God created us to be. So yes, we have failed God through history.

Yet the need for reconciliation is not the end of our story; it is the invitation. The beginning.

The Church’s brokenness does not disqualify us from God’s mission, it places us precisely where the gospel, The Good News, begins. The cross stands at the center of our faith because reconciliation always comes through truth, confession, repentance, and as the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer calls it, “costly grace”.

The truth is this: The real failure is not that the Church is broken. The real failure is denying it, defending it, or refusing to be healed.

The real failure happens when we allow ourselves to be blinded by arrogance and the temptations of a profane life — choosing institution over service, money over salvation, authority over humility.  

From the slaughters of the Crusades to the genocides of the residential schools to the sexual abuse committed by our clergy, our church is full of tragic examples of brokenness and we must own our history, acknowledge our failures and pray for God’s healing grace.

If the Church needs reconciliation, it does not mean that God has failed us or abandoned us. If anything, in those moments, it is we who have abandoned God. But it also means that God is still at work in us calling us to be truthful with ourselves, honest about who we are and the mistakes we have made. God is calling all of us, His Church, individually and collectively, back to Him who loves us most.

My friends, if Jesus came back today, he would likely recognize much and would likely grieve much. Above all, Jesus would remind the Church why it exists at all: not to preserve itself, not to defend its reputation but to bear witness, in the same manner as our beloved patron saint John the Baptist, “to the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.”

Not to point to ourselves, not to gather people to our traditions or our certainty that our form of Christianity, above all others, is right but to point together to the only One, to Jesus the Christ.

That matters today, as we begin the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity because Christian unity does not mean sameness. It does not erase differences or deny the wounds we have caused. As my favourite Christian mystic, Thomas Merton wrote: “The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, the resolution not to twist them to fit our own image.”

That is as true for the Church as it is for any human relationship. We are called as a church and as a people to love unconditionally. Before we are Anglican or Roman Catholic, Orthodox or Protestant, before we are conservative or progressive, we are Christ’s. The tragedy of our divisions is not simply that we disagree on the wrapping of our faith. It is that we allow our divisions to distort our capacity to witness for God. When the Church speaks with many voices but not with one love, the world struggles to hear the gospel at all.

So this week is not about fixing everything in eight days. It is about returning. Returning to prayer. Returning to humility. Returning to the One who loves us most.

Unity will not come through clever solutions or institutional decrees from on high.  It will come the way the Church was born in the first place: through prayer, through repentance, through costly grace, and through the Spirit of God who refuses to let brokenness have the final word.

So if Jesus came back today, I suspect He would say this to his divided Church: Remember who called you. Remember why you were sent. Come back to me. Then go back into the world together in my name. Not as rivals. Not as competitors. As one people — broken, forgiven, still being healed — bearing witness to the kingdom of God that has come near.

Amen.