Dear friends,
I was waiting to use a pay phone, when a young man came up to me, handed me some change and a slip of paper and said, "Take this money and dial the phone number on this piece of paper - it will help you if you need help. If not, it will do you a lot of good to listen." I was about to refuse because I was afraid that the young man was not well when I noticed the tears in his eyes and the sincere tone of his voice. So I took the money and told him I would make the call. He said to me, "Thank you, Lady. I was about to do something foolish with my life but that number really saved me." With that, the young man walked away.
My curiosity got the better of me, so I approached the phone, put in the money and dialed the number. I was just about to say,"Hello," when a voice answered and said, "This is one of the ministers from Westminster Church responding to your Dial--A--Prayer request. Let us pray ..." The tape recording of the minister's prayer was filled with comfort and assurance and I can see why it brought such peace of mind to that troubled young man.
Many of us have experienced something like that - the feeling that comes over us when we know that somebody has been praying for us. Those facing surgery enter the operating room with greater confidence knowing that friends and family are praying for them. Those who survive cancer or some horrendous accident will often say, "I believe that all of those prayers said for me made a huge difference." Those who experience some dark night of the soul or walk through the valley of the shadow of death find great comfort when someone says, "I'll be praying for you." Even ministers - or perhaps we should say especially ministers - draw strength from the prayers of others. "Tell me what day you write your sermons," she said, "and I'll be sure to pray for you then." Is anything more wonderful than knowing that somebody is praying for you?
Maybe there is. What may be even more wonderful is when the One praying for you is none other than Jesus himself. The disciples experienced his prayers firsthand. He had gathered them in the Upper Room, you recall, where he began to prepare them for his departure. He picked up a towel and a basin of water and washed their feet. "I have set you an example," he said to them, "that you also should do as I have done to you" (John 13:15). He gave them a new commandment: "... love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another" (John 13:34). He told them about the many dwelling places in the Father's house and how he was going to prepare a place for them. He warned them to be wary of the world and its corrupting influences, and he challenged them to define themselves, not according to the standards of the world but according to the standards of the gospel. "If you love me," he said to them, "you will keep my commandments" (John 14:15). He gave them the promise of his presence, the presence of the Advocate - the Holy Spirit - to be with them forever. He warned them about the persecution they would face (John 16:2). And then he prayed for them.
The seventeenth chapter of the Gospel of John records that prayer, in which Jesus prays first for himself and his own impending "glorification" on the cross. Then he prays for his disciples. Finally, he prays for all of the future faithful - people like us, in fact - who one day would receive the gospel message like a fine family heirloom which has been passed on lovingly from one generation to the next. It is a wonderful prayer, but even more wonderful is the knowledge that he prayed it for his disciples and for us and, therefore, for the church. There is nothing more wonderful than knowing that somebody is praying for you, especially when that somebody is Jesus.
According to the seventeenth chapter of John, Jesus prays for a number of specific things: for safety and protection, for the joy of faith, for victory over the powers of darkness. But the one thing he prays for twice is for unity, for oneness. For the disciples he prays, "Protect them, so that they may be one, as we are one" (John 17:11). Later, when praying for the future faithful, he asks, "... that they may all be one" (John 17:21).
If there is one prayer which we Christians have always needed it is the prayer for unity. Clearly, the disciples needed a prayer for unity. Sometimes we think that the disciples were one big happy family, but such an assumption is far from the truth. Just remember whom Jesus invited to be his closest friends and followers. For example, one of them was Levi who is sometimes called Matthew the tax collector. No one was more hated in Jesus' day than a Jew who had gone to work for the Romans, collecting taxes from his own people to turn over to Caesar. Can you picture Matthew walking to work in the morning, the neighbors looking the other way as he passes by, the children spitting in his path or throwing stones at him, the neighborhood dogs growling at him in anger - even their dog food is taxed! There was no one in Jewish society more despised than a Jew who had sold out to collect taxes for the Romans, and Matthew was one of them.
Sitting there in that Upper Room was another of Jesus' disciples, Simon the Zealot. We don't know much about Simon; the New Testament just doesn't say. But we do know something about the Zealots. The Zealots were intensely committed religious nationalists, a kind of John Birch Society of the ancient world. Completely dedicated to Jewish law and custom, they hated foreigners, especially the Romans who were taxing the lifeblood out of the Jews the way the British taxed the colonists before the Boston Tea Party. Undoubtedly, Simon hated tax collectors like Matthew nearly as much as he hated Romans.
Yet here they are in the Upper Room, Matthew the tax collector with his briefcase stuffed with 1040 forms and Schedule Cs, and Simon the Zealot with his lapel button which says, "Palestine - Love It or Leave It"! Can there be any doubt why Jesus felt the need to pray for the unity of the disciples? Unity would be a struggle, even among his closest followers.
Some 2,000 years have come and gone and we modern--day disciples of Jesus are still struggling for unity. We continue to fall short of the high hope of our Lord's Upper Room prayer for oneness. Not long ago a minister described his recent trip to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, which was built on the very place where tradition says Jesus was crucified and then raised from the dead. That church should be a place of intense spiritual vitality and power and for many people it is. But what other people experience there is not the power of the gospel which overcame the grave but contentious clusters of Christians each claiming this sacred site as their own. It is like a war--zone "where this group claims this part of the church and that group claims that part." Said the minister:
The church is such a battleground that for the last hundred years or so, they haven't even let Christians have keys to the place. Instead, a certain Muslim family has been charged with keeping the keys, and when things get really bad, they just lock it up!1
And what can we say about the Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland who are forever fighting with each other? What can we say about the history of Protestantism with its constant quarreling between denominations and even within denominations with one church breaking away from others, sometimes over large issues and sometimes over small issues? What do all of these denomination disputes say about the unity of the Church other than that somehow we have fallen short of the unity for which Christ prayed in the Upper Room? Will we ever resolve our deep divisions over issues like abortion and homosexuality and the methods we use to interpret the Bible?
"The glory that you have given me," Jesus prayed to God, "I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one ... so that the world may know that you have sent me" (John 17:22--23). This is why Jesus prayed for unity - not so that diverse Christians can sip coffee out of paper cups at the fellowship hour after church, nor so that we might all be the same - unity does not mean uniformity. Rather, Christ prayed for Christian unity so that the world might know that God sent Christ. Our Christian unity is supposed to say something to the world about our evangelical witness to the uniqueness of Jesus Christ.
The Good News which John spells out in the seventeenth chapter of his Gospel is that the Risen Christ continues to pray for us, continues to foresee our unity when all we can see is division and dispute. In this regard, he reminds me of a certain minister whose custom it was to visit all the patients in the local nursing home whether they were members of his congregation or not. One of those patients was a young man in his thirties who was confined to the nursing home because of an injury to his brain. He lived his life in a coma--like state, unable to respond to anybody or anything. One day the parents of the young man came to visit and found this minister - this stranger - sitting in a chair by their son's bed. The minister was talking to their son - as if the son could understand. Then he read scripture to the son - as if the son could hear it. Then he prayed for the son - as if the son could know that he was praying. The father wanted to say to the minister, "You fool, don't you know about our son?" But then it dawned on him that the minister did know. He knew all along. He cared for their son as if the son were whole, because he saw him through the eyes of faith and, therefore, saw him as already healed.2
Christ sees the church the way that minister saw the young man, not as the fractured and fragmented fellowship that we so often are, but as the unified body of believers that we by God's grace are yet to become. And so he continues to pray for us, that some day we will all be one, and not so much one in doctrine, but one in Spirit, one in respect for one another, one in love for one another and for the world. As the old spiritual puts it, "They'll know we are Christians" - not by our uniformity of doctrine. Rather, "They'll know we are Christians by our love, by our love. Yes, they'll know we are Christian by our love." And miracle of miracles, Christ's prayers for our unity are making a profound difference.
On World Communion Sunday in 1998, 2,000 people jammed into Rockefeller Chapel at the University of Chicago as leaders from four major Protestant denominations gathered to celebrate what they hold in common. On that historic occasion the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), the Reformed Church in America, and the United Church of Christ took one step closer together in the long quest for Christian unity. One of the leaders confessed:
Part of the meaning of this day has to do with the historic blindness of our traditions to one another ... God opened [our] eyes to see that the disagreements that divided were in fact differences that need not divide.3
The following year, on Reformation Sunday 1999, the anniversary of the day when Martin Luther nailed his Ninety--five Theses to the church door in Wittenberg, Germany, effectively launching what came to be known as the Protestant Reformation, Lutherans and Roman Catholics signed an historic agreement. The agreement attempts to reconcile differences of belief concerning "justification by grace through faith," a doctrine which has been one of the major points of contention between Catholics and Protestants for the last 482 years. A professor of theology from Catholic University in Washington, D.C., observed:
This document appears to be saying that the doctrine that Luther thought was central to the Reformation, and which led him to undertake it, is not one on which there are serious enough differences between Catholics and Lutherans to justify the division of the church.4
The risen Christ continues to pray for the unity of Christians, and little by little those prayers are bearing fruit. There is nothing more wonderful than knowing that someone is praying for you, unless that Someone is none other than Christ himself!
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1. Theodore J. Wardlaw of Central Presbyterian Church, Atlanta, offered this description in a sermon he preached at the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), June 25, 1999.
2. This story in told by Thomas G. Long in Preaching Biblically, Don M. Wardlaw, ed. (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1983), p. 99.
3. Quoted in The Christian Century, October 21, 1998, p. 959.
4. See Charles Trueheart, "Faiths Heal Ancient Rift Over Faith" in The Washington Post, November 1, 1999, p. A1.
