A new and glorious body

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We tasted a couple of grains of coarse salt, a reminder that we are salt. We received light from the paschal candle, a call to be light of the world. We touched a drop of water to our foreheads, a reminder of our common Baptism. These experiences ended the Botkins Area Churches celebration of the 2016 Week of Prayer for Christian Unity ecumenical prayer service on January 24th.

While this service offered the members of three Botkins Churches opportunity to gather in unity to pray for Christian unity, and while such gatherings are important small steps toward the real work of ecumenism, true ecumenical work is so difficult, that many Christians say “no thanks.”

Indeed, most Christians do not make the ecumenical endeavor a priority. Even though most Christians follow Christ enough that they are not prejudiced or biased against a specific group of fellow Christians, many Christians are quite satisfied to believe that their current practice of the faith is best. The sense seems to be, that, since we worship the same God and since we all hope to end up in the same place, one church is as good as another. A similar erroneous approach calls us to believe we are already fully one, since we do share a high degree of essential faith and doctrine. After all, what would be the purpose of dredging up the past and exploring the sources of when Western Christianity was torn asunder, a division that continues in new ways by a most recent historical reality of mega-church congregations.

Ironically, at many Christian Churches who observe the Revised Common Lectionary, the Second Reading on that Sunday, Jan. 24 — which ended the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity and the day we gathered in Botkins — offers an image of true unity and why that unity is essential.

St. Paul, writing to the Corinthian Church, which is experiencing among other things, internal divisions, calls them to get over those divisions in Christ Jesus, for the good of his Body, the Church. In 1 Corinthians 12, Paul uses his familiar image of the human body as an example of the ridiculousness of division in the Church and as an argument for the importance of unity. Thankfully, we know that the Corinthians and the early Church in the West up unto the sixteenth century held it together.

Unfortunately, during the Reformation, the stubbornness, pettiness and sinfulness present in some leaders in the Catholic Church said to parts of its body, “you are no longer a part of the body.” For their part, reformers said to the body, “we do not need you.” Since that time all expressions of Christianity in the West have been, in a sense, lame and missing parts of itself.

For example, as one of cries of the reformers was “sola scriptura,” only scripture, the Catholic Church paralyzed itself in a way until the turn of the twentieth century by de-emphasizing scripture and over-emphasizing sacred tradition. For their part, reformers jettisoned realities like the real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist, expressed clearly in the sixth chapter of John’s Gospel and believed by the Church for 15 centuries.

Even today, the Catholic Church is struggling to re-kindle the evangelical zeal that we let our Protestant brothers and sisters take with them. De-emphasizing an essential part of the Christian identity to be evangelical, the Catholic Church, in a way, turned in on itself after the Reformation, overemphasizing some dimensions of law, authority and ritual. On the other hand, some Christian Churches worry not a bit about law, authority and ritual, when such realities were clearly a concern for the Apostles, St. Paul, their successors and the early Church as evidenced by the scriptures.

Therefore, if Christians are to be truly the Body of Christ, we all have some work to do…ecumenical work. In fact, ecumenism is the very hard work of picking up the cross of Jesus, where every church must embrace the dimensions of the Body of Christ that is lacks, present in our separated sisters and brothers. When churches and individual members embrace the cross of true ecumenism, a resurrection will occur, albeit one that will take far more than three days. The Body of Christ will find itself unified, a new and glorious body.

The ashes some of us wore yesterday are a sign of our brokenness as individuals and as churches. Perhaps this Lent will find us embracing the cross of ecumenism. May we consider what we are missing, appreciate our sisters and brothers in Christ better, and do the hard work of re-unifying Christianity!

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By Pat Sloneker

Your pastor speaks

The writer is the pastor for Immaculate Conception, Botkins, St. John, Fryburg, St. Joseph, Wapakoneta, and St. Lawrence, Rhine.

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