One

Acts 16:16-34; Revelation 22:12-14, 16-17, 20; John 17:20-26

"If the earth were only a few meet in diameter, floating a few feet above a field somewhere, people would come from everywhere to marvel at it. People would walk around it, marveling at its big pools of water, its little pools and the water flowing between the pools. People would marvel at the bumps on it, and the holes in it, and they would marvel at the very thin layer of gas surrounding it and the water suspended in the gas. The people would marvel at all the creatures walking around the surface of the ball and at the creatures flying in the gas and swimming in the water. The people would declare it as sacred because it was the only one, and they would protect it so that it would not be hurt. The ball would be the greatest wonder known, and the people would come to pray to it, to be healed, to gain knowledge, to know beauty and to wonder how it could be. People would love it, and defend it with their lives because they would somehow know that their lives, their own roundness, could be nothing without it. If the earth were only a few feet in diameter."

In the last few years, through the technology of direct satellite communications, television has brought some of the most amazing scenes from around the world directly into our own living rooms. Within the last two years we have been frustrated and saddened over the massacre at Tiananmen Square in Beijing. We have bitten our fingernails and prayed during the unfolding of the Gulf War. And we have sat open-mouthed and amazed at the systematic dismemberment of the Soviet Union. As a world we have participated in these events together. Our national identities have been submerged in the unifying excitement of seeing it all unfold before our very eyes.

Because of television, because of rapid mass communications, something beyond nationalism is slowly beginning to taking root in the world. Slowly, ever so gradually, people around the world are developing a real sense of common destiny. The newspapers, television, magazines, and radio, which allows us to all have the same experience at the same time, covers world affairs under the assumption that we are all connected to each other. Or, if you would like a slogan that expresses it, we are beginning to see that we must "think globally and act locally."

In our gospel lesson for today, Jesus says words that are very powerful and full of comfort. He prays to God asking that those who follow him, that those who will build his church, may have the blessing of "I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one."

But oneness has never really been an overwhelming quality of the church. With all the different denominations, with at least 80 different churches within this area, alone, we as the church have not had much of an opportunity to celebrate this thing we call "oneness." In the church's first few centuries it was so concerned about establishing a creed of theological orthodoxy that it saw heresy and treachery everywhere. And, since the time of the Reformation, the church has become many different churches, defined by denominations obsessed with establishing their differences rather than their similarities.

It could be that one of our biggest problems has been being able to distinguish between Jesus' promise of oneness from our own concepts of domination and hegémony. In the past, when we have thought of unity, we have thought that it was where everyone believed one way, and saw things in one way. Historians have finally noticed in the last few decades that the writing of history books has been done from the exclusive viewpoints and experiences of Western white males. Breaking that hegémony has led to the rediscovery of Afro-American history, women's history, Eastern civilizations history, Native-American history, Latino-American history -- all experiences which had been deemed without much worth by the dominant power structure of our society.

But, Jesus didn't come to establish the hegemony of the church. He didn't come to make everyone think, or believe, or act in exactly the same way. He didn't come to create a church wherein all the men would wear suits and ties and all the women would wear dresses. Rather, he came to enable us to become a community united by love. In our contemporary culture the Self is still, as the Spanish say, "Numero Uno." But our role as the church is to recognize that our purpose on earth is to promote a very different Latin phrase -- the unum humanum -- one humanity. Even the secular world is beginning to understand this, as CNN and other news broadcasting networks show us the interconnectedness and interdependence of people and planet.

There is a joke about an old hermit who had been living back up in the hills for many years. One day he got a wonderful idea. He figured out a way to send moving pictures with sound through the air, from one place to another place. He called his resulting invention a television set! The problem is that it was 1985 and the television set had already been invented forty years earlier. Likewise, the church is quickly approaching the time when its original discovery -- the oneness of the heart of humanity -- has been forgotten and waylaid so long that when it finally does begin proclaiming this concept the world will yawn with boredom. The concept will not seem original, at all.

But, nevertheless, if the world is ever going to really achieve political, economic, even environmental oneness, a significant number of folks will have to recognize and accept the spiritual oneness shared by all humanity. Arab and Jew, Serb and Croat, black and white, will continue to resist the call to global kinship until they experience the breakdown of borders and bigotry and boundaries within their own souls, until they recognize the divine spark that flickers in every heart.

Not surprisingly, even as national borders become less meaningful and less useful, they are yet greatly desired. As the Cold War has thawed out, the Communist Bloc, or what is left of it has become a messy quagmire. Out of tradition and out of fear, some of these countries are making a last ditch attempt at nationalism. As we can see in what used to be Yugoslavia, it is a stand that has already cost many lives and which threatens to take many more.

Human beings have always had difficulty balancing the concepts of individuality, one the one hand, and community, on the other. But, the secret to solving the riddle of the relationship between the personal and the communal, the particular and the universal, is as close as your hand: Each of us has fingers. Some of us have big fingers, some little. But even among those of us who have fingers that look exactly alike, we have unique fingerprints. No two fingerprints are alike.

Speaking about strategies for living in the 21st century, one writer says, "A part cannot remain healthy in a system which is sick and the whole cannot thrive when its parts are suffering."

Or as one astronaut said as he went into space with persons from other countries: "The first day or so we all pointed to our countries. The third or fourth day we were pointing to our continents. By the fifth day we were aware of only one Earth."

Christ's gift was unification, not homogenization. Homogenized faith was what the slave girl's spirit was proclaiming as it followed Paul and Silas around Philippi, proclaiming to everyone that they were slaves of the Most High God. A homogenized faith is faith in everything, and therefore, faith in nothing. One of the most powerful images that comes from Karl Jung is that of the one family tree where we all finally unite. But the one tree without the many dissimilar branches is only a stump. It is time we stopped trying to make people just like we are and started encouraging them to be just like God made them. We must celebrate differences, not just sameness.

When the jailor from our story in Acts 16 responded to the witness of oneness so powerfully performed by Paul and Silas, he and his family were immediately baptized into the family of faith. What could Paul and Silas possibly have in common with a Gentile who earned his living locking up and abusing prisoners? The answer, of course, is "nothing" -- nothing except complete faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, which is everything. With that faith Paul, Silas and their former jailor become one humanity.

As the world continues to shrink we find our own welfare increasingly caught up in the wellbeing of our global neighbors. Ephesians 2:19-20 gives us an image of what might be if the church can witness through its own oneness to the rest of the world:

"So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone."

A writer once described an experience of returning to his native country of Crete. As he walked along, an old woman passed him, carrying a basket of figs. She stopped and lifted two or three fig leaves which covered the basket, picked out two figs and presented them to him. "Do you know me, old lady?" the man asked. She glanced at the man in amazement. "No, my boy. Do I have to know you to give you something? You are a human being, aren't you? So am I. Isn't that enough?"

Or, as another writer says, "You are a child, I am a mother. That's enough. You are a son, I am a father. That's enough. We are brothers and sisters. That's enough. I am your God, you are my people. That's enough." Amen.