24 Jan 2010 - "The unity and joy of the Spirit"

Stephen Fielding - St Mary’s Welwyn and at Ayot St Peter

One of the joys of my role as a curate is to go every week to Tewin School and to take the assembly. I love it. In those children there is an extraordinary openness to God, and I believe it is so vital to nurture their spiritual growth. Every Wednesday it is the greatest delight to talk to and to worship with the children. Last term we learnt together a prayer that Jesus would have prayed, like a good Jew, every morning and every evening. It is the prayer that begins ‘Hear O Israel the Lord our God is one Lord’ - the prayer that we know from the book of Deuteronomy. We learnt it in the Hebrew – the Shema - and the children learnt to sing it in Hebrew. And if you would like me to sing it to you now I will be very happy to do so. To hear those children sing this great declaration from the book of Deuteronomy was one of the most moving experiences I can remember, and when they sang it spontaneously at the Christingle service their parents were caught up in the emotion of it as it took each child back to the prayer that Jesus would have prayed every morning and every evening.

There is one God and the Lord is one. That was the greatest of all the insights of the Jewish faith. No longer was the sun a god and the moon a goddess and the stars lesser gods. No longer were there gods at war with one another on Mount Olympus. No. There were not many gods as the pagans believed. There was only one God, and He is one. He is not a divided person; he is single, undivided, indivisible, and alone. He has no warring instincts inside himself. He does not think one thing and do another. He cannot be a hypocrite. He is utterly at one with himself. That is the starting point for our understanding of the great God of all. He is one. And from that idea stems every other idea about how we should be.

This idea of the unity of God must have been very present to St Paul. Like Jesus he would have said the Shema morning and evening. And would have gone on to say that you must love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your mind and all your strength; and you must love your neighbour as yourself. Surely in this repetition he would have developed his idea of the primacy of our unity together.  Anything that damages our sense of being members of one body, anything that puts one part of the body at war with another, grieves the Holy Spirit. All the imagery of the different parts of the body that we heard in the letter to the Corinthians this morning is about Christians working together to preserve the unity of the spirit. It is so appropriate at the end of this week of prayer for Christian Unity.

Division in the church is alas all too familiar. In one parish I knew, I remember the churchwarden telling me that they would soon ‘knock the new rector into shape’. I could hardly believe my ears and I recall asking whether that was the proper role of any of us! But in some places they do indeed try to ‘knock the rector into shape’. Happily there is no fear of that in this parish.  Later this year I will be giving a lecture in Lincoln's Inn on conflict resolution in the church. The Ecclesiastical Law Society is sponsoring it. We will be very keen to place conflict resolution in the context of the unity of the Church, under the proposition that the unity of the Christian church is of fundamental importance and that every breach of our unity is a breach of the body of Christ, a breach of the unity of the spirit.

So God is one, and the spirit is one, and we are to be one.

As I say these words, I am aware that they may seem rather dry and descriptive and that they miss something of the delight in God and the delight in each other that as Christians we ought properly to have. For we know joy, do we not? We saw it on the faces of those pulling a woman out of the rubble in Haiti after 7 days. Or the joy at the first cry of a newborn child.  Or our joy at realising that we are truly known by God and that he delights in us. ‘What me?’ ‘Yes, you’. And the praise of God, and gratitude for our many blessings, may lighten the load that we bear as we go through life, and I can well understand what Nehemiah meant when he said that ‘The joy of the Lord will be your strength’. And then finally there is the joy of our worship together - when we offer heart and mind and spirit to the great God above and unite ourselves with the Lord who is present to make us all one.

Amen