Easter VII, Year C

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

+ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

I've generally assumed that there's no excuse for boredom, but I've been to a couple of commencements recently. One of them was a crushing bore. It was a typical university ceremony. The musical pomp as the graduates and faculty marched in produced a spark of excitement, and then it was sharply downhill: seemingly endless, rote recognitions and some civic pieties and platitudes about the meaning of success. Commencement exercises are important. We need to mark and to celebrate graduations and accomplishments and to remind ourselves of the purpose and value of education. But most I've attended are dull.

On Ascension Day, I went to commencement at Virginia Theological Seminary to be there as John Earls, our one-time seminarian, received a Master of Divinity degree. Commencement there was in the context of morning prayer. It made all the difference: rousing, inspiring hymns; scriptural readings pointing us to our purpose; prayers giving thanks for the many blessings of life and asking for guidance and courage in the future; an address - a sermon, really - encouraging us in ministry for God and to one another. The event oriented us to the bigger questions and purposes of our existence. It recognized that God was the center and meaning of life. It made me proud to be part of the Church.

In some brief remarks, Dean Horne spoke about significant events experienced by the Master of Divinity Class of 2004. They moved into the seminary and started classes just before 9/11; the following autumn the snipers terrorized the suburbs; our nation began a major war; and, the controversial acts of General Convention rocked the Episcopal Church. I'd not heard the war and General Convention in the same list. It got me wondering that maybe if the Church, and especially General Convention, had its own set of Geneva Conventions we might not be in such a mess.

The Geneva Conventions, more or less, have their origins in the same movement that created the Red Cross in the 1860s. ⁽¹⁾ The great powers of Europe ratified the first Geneva Convention in the mid 1860s, thereby establishing some humanitarian ground rules for war as pertains to treatment of the wounded. In 1863 President Lincoln's Administration had also set up guidelines for war. Today there are four Geneva Conventions, ratified by over 200 countries and designed to institute for times of war basic standards of treatment for civilians, wounded combatants, and prisoners of war. Perhaps, it's ironic that we try to regulate and control one of the most brutal things that human beings do to each other. In a sense, we're establishing rules for slaughtering one another. It reminds me of a scene in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid where Paul Newman is challenged to a knife fight: he reluctantly accepted the challenged, but insisted that they needed to have rules for the knife fight.

My understanding is that discipline and self-control are such priorities and virtues in the military precisely because discipline and self-control are essential qualities to deal responsibly with violence, to deal responsibly with incredible forces of destruction. My understanding is that a good military man must be able to control violence and to apply it specifically. The Geneva Conventions are one set of many possible guidelines for applying violence. Our country has generally championed the Geneva Conventions for two reasons: they are ethical, and they are practical. Civilized, gentlemanly, honorable military people want to defeat the enemy with as much dignity and humanity as possible. It's also in our interest to have rules of warfare. We want our civilians and our soldiers, if wounded or taken prisoner, to be well-treated. The Geneva Conventions are both ethical and practical.

When we read today's gospel, and reflect upon it and the other gospel passages we've heard during Easter, we realize that the Church does have its own set of Geneva Conventions, which have both ethical and practical implications. In essence, the Church's Geneva Conventions are the summary of the law: love God and love one another as God loves you. It's ethical because love is the heart and the goal of ethics. It's practical because loving one another is in our best interest if we're trying to become more godly.

In chapters 13-17 of John's gospel, Jesus is pleading for unity among his believers, and he summarizes his argument in chapter 17. Just as the Father is in Jesus and Jesus is in the Father, so the disciples should be in one another through God. What is this unity, this mutual indwelling? It's love. The type of unity that Jesus most wants from his Church is a unity which does not come from institutions and hierarchy, not from bishops and priests. It does not come from scripture and a common interpretation of scripture and a shared set of beliefs. It does not come from common experiences and practices and worship. These are important things, but today's gospel says that Christian unity comes primarily from loving one another. Just two weeks ago, we heard Jesus say to his disciples: "Your love for one another shows that you are my disciples." (Jn 13:35) That should be the primary mark of a Christian. That should be more important than anything else.

When I speak to couples before marriage, I am reassured when they tell me that they fight, that they have disagreements. Disagreements are impossible to avoid if two people are communicating, if two people spend much time together, and from what I can tell a lot of making a successful marriage is learning how to communicate, to spend time together, and to deal honestly and charitably with disagreements. My way or the highway is no way to live, no way to develop any attractive character, no way to become more Christ-like. Resolving disagreements is much easier when both parties are trying to love the other.

Obviously, the Church is an even more complex organism than a marriage. The Church wants to be the union of all humanity. That's our mission. Fierce disagreements are her continual condition. We'd be crazy to expect anything else. But fierce disagreements don't negate love. When we are at our best, we know that disagreements do not mean we don't love or respect or admire or emulate those with whom we disagree. It's not love when we demonize those with whom we disagree, when we don't give them the time of day, when we don't listen to their point of view or take it seriously. In these cases, there's not even a possibility for reconciliation. That's sad. When members of the Church behave that way, they are not obeying Jesus.

Disciples are called to be holy, to love one another. When we focus on our individual holiness, we sanctify the world. When our own holiness, our capacity to love, is our priority, our efforts at evangelizing the world are more effective. How can we not have sympathy with a non-Christian who looks at many Christians, many of us, who hold ourselves as superior not only to non-Christians, but also as superior to other Christians? Christian one-upmanship degrades us. We can't truly proclaim the gospel, witness to Christ, if we are not united to one another. If we live together in harmony, disagree in charity, then the Church has credibility and integrity. The world will be more open to the gospel. Our mission as Christians is not to keep the gospel to ourselves, but to share it with the world. Our worship is not to satisfy ourselves, not to serve ourselves, not to please ourselves, but to glorify God, to bring people to him, to beautify and to sanctify the world.

We are practicing Christians, and we come to the altar, because Jesus has changed our lives, and we want that change to deepen. If we want a grateful heart, pray and ask: how has Jesus changed my life? If we want a healthy spiritual life, a life of some contentment and purpose, pray and ask: how has Jesus changed my life? What would my life look like without him being part of it? We should be grateful that Jesus is part of our lives, and we should express that gratitude in our lives.

In today's lesson from Acts, S. Paul reached out and saved the life of his jailer, perhaps even the very man who had tortured him by putting him into the stocks. For the gospel's sake, not for the sake of justice, but for the sake of spreading the good news, Paul bore no grudges. His integrity, his faithfulness was a powerful witness to the jailer, and it led the jailer to get baptised. Once he opened up to Christ, the jailer immediately showed kindness. He attended to the wounds of his prisoners and gave them food and shelter in his home. Our faith must inform how we behave. If our Christianity has not made us more charitable, more merciful, more humble, how real is it? Like Christ, like Paul, we love one another, and our love for one another proclaims the gospel and reaches out to all people.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

1. Information about the Geneva Conventions and the distinction of 'soft' (ethical) and 'hard' (practical) reasons for observing the Geneva Conventions are from Hendrik Hertzberg, 'The Talk of the Town: Unconventional War,' The New Yorker, 24 May 2004.