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[Note: this sermon is part of a series of lessons entitled "The Jesus Project" that are being edited for publication. Thus, a full manuscript is not being placed on the website. A tape of the sermon can be ordered through the Woodmont Hills website.]
The Apostle Paul’s exhortation to the Philippian church seems so simple and straightforward: “If then there is any encouragement in Christ, any consolation from love, any sharing in the Spirit, any compassion and sympathy, make my joy complete: be of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others. Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 2:1-5). Likewise, his words of instruction to the Ephesians calling them to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace are not difficult to comprehend. Equipping the saints for ministry, “building up the body of Christ, until all of us come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ” (Ephesians 4:12-13)—there are no textual or translation issues clouding the meaning of the text. There is some comfort, I suppose in realizing that these words were written in the first place precisely because unity among believers was not a given, “having the same mind” was not easy nor was it the common outcome among believers even in the earliest days of belief in Jesus Messiah.
In our own time we are painfully aware of Christianity in America, complete not only with stories of religious freedom and toleration but stories of religious intolerance, stories of prejudice and abuse, stories of division and isolation, all of the denominations, that sectarian spirit that Rubel discussed early in this series. There is the story of our heritage in the so-called Restoration Movement of the 19th century, with its early focus on unity dissolving into a wide spectrum of churches and practices by our own life times. So what makes this unity business so difficult? Why didn’t that lofty goal of speaking where the Bible speaks and being silent where the Bible is silent produce something other than more division? Why did Paul’s exhortation to unity become a doctrinal demand for uniformity, where “my way” is the right way and there will be unity just as soon as you see Scripture and Church and Worship—especially worship—my way?
At the beginning of the 21st century, we seem to be faced with a difficult dichotomy. If we choose unity, we must sacrifice the need to be right, which in the end is experienced as a violation of conscience. If we choose unity we must sacrifice our commitments to the Lord’s Supper or to a cappella music or to baptism. On the other hand, if we choose our need to be right on every point of doctrine, we sacrifice unity and are accused of being sectarian.
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