Reflection for North Balwyn Uniting Church
Anniversary of Church Union, 22^nd of June 2025

Ephesians 2:19-22
John 17:1-11

Today is the 48^th anniversary of Union, the day when, after seventy-five years of faithful work, the Congregational Union of Australia, the Methodist Church of Australasia, and the Presbyterian Church of Australia became the Uniting Church in Australia. Today’s suggested Scripture readings are both frequently used to encourage ecumenism, Christian unity; as I have mentioned before Rowan Williams, theologian and former Archbishop of Canterbury, has said of today’s reading from the Letter to the Ephesians that it is ‘used rather too frequently in the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity and on other occasions when we are being urged to be conciliatory to each other’.[1] But as I write this Reflection, Israel and Iran are dropping bombs on each other, and there seems every likelihood that President Trump wants the USA to be involved. So today these readings seem to me to speak less about the need for unity among Christians, and more about the need for unity among human beings.

I have preached before about the incredible prayer we overhear in today’s reading from the Gospel according to John. On the last night of his life, before going to a humiliating and painful death, in the hearing of his disciples, Jesus reaches out to his Father in words of intimate communion. It is absolutely astounding that we have access to this prayer. We know that Jesus prayed often, but we also know that to do so, he usually withdrew from his disciples. (Luke 5:16) Here, we are given access to the content of one of his prayers and, as we join Jesus’ first disciples in an act of involuntary eavesdropping, we find that Jesus is praying for us, for his disciples and for all those who will come to believe through them. (John 17:20)

How do you feel when you know someone is praying for you? One of the things that happens to me when The Evil Depression gets bad is that I lose the ability to pray. Depression cuts me off both from other human beings and from God. In those times I am profoundly grateful to know that other people are praying for me. I know that I am being held up by the prayers of those who care about me. In today’s reading, we see and hear Jesus praying for us; we have the reassurance that even if no one else were to pray for us, we are still being held in the love and the prayers of the Son.

Jesus’ prayer is a prayer of unity: between the Father and the Son, who are one; between the Father and the disciples: ‘They were yours’; between the Son and the disciples, ‘you gave them to me’; between the disciples, ‘that they may be one’; and between Gpd and all people, because the Father has given authority over all people to the Son. There is so much unity in this prayer. We see the core of that strange Christian concept, the Trinity, in the oneness of the Father and Son. We see the unity between God and the disciples to whom Jesus has revealed the Father so intimately that they now know God by name. You may be tired of me saying this, but I will say it again: the name of the God Jesus has revealed is Love. In this Farewell Discourse, Jesus has already told his disciples that love is the new commandment, that they are to love one another as he loves them. In the crucifixion that will take place the next day, Jesus will make that love, God’s love, manifest by laying down his life. Jesus has made God known by name, and that name is Love.

Because we are being drawn into the community of love that is the Trinity, we too are called to love one another and to be one, as the Father and Son are one. We listen to this prayer on the anniversary of the Uniting Church because one of the ways in which Christians have shown love and unity has been through the union of churches that were previously divided.

Christians have at times been so divided that wars have been fought and Christians have killed one another because they worshipped the same God in different ways. It is reported that during the thirteenth-century Albigensian Crusade, a Cistercian Abbot said of a French town in which heretics lived side by side with good Catholics, ‘Kill them all, for the Lord knows those that are His’. Australia has never known that sort of division, although there have been fears that it might be imported from Europe. (A side note: this is why there is a clause in the legislation that set up the University of Melbourne that says that the University’s ‘Council has power, and is deemed always to have had power, to confer any degree or grant any other award in any discipline, except divinity’.[2]) But while Christians have never killed one another in Australia, you may remember times when Christians were unable to enter the churches of other denominations for weddings or funerals, and mixed marriages were frowned upon. We celebrate Union each year not primarily because we think the Uniting Church in Australia is wonderful, although I certainly feel that we are the coolest of denominations, but to remind us that theological divisions can be overcome.

Today’s reading from the Letter to the Ephesians talks about a theological division much deeper than that between Congregationalists, Methodists, and Presbyterians – the division between Jews and Gentiles. The author of this letter believes that through Christ peace has been created between the two groups most profoundly separated in the Roman Empire. When the author of the Letter talks about Christ breaking down the dividing wall between the two, they are referring to a literal wall in the Temple in Jerusalem that separated the outermost Court of the Gentiles from the rest of the building. On the wall were notices, in both Greek and Latin, warning foreigners and uncircumcised men that crossing into one of the other courtyards was punishable by death. We take it for granted that Gentiles have been welcomed into the people of God, but it was an act as radical then as it would be for Jewish Israelis and Palestinian Christians and Iranian Muslims to worship together today. And yet it happened. Through Christ, the author of the Letter to the Ephesians writes, Gentiles are no longer strangers and aliens, but fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets. This is simply astonishing.

Because we are heirs of such an astounding act of unity, because we celebrate the overcoming of the deepest of divisions, we know that we have been called to demonstrate through our lives the unity that God intends for all creation. We have an awesome responsibility, to model God’s intentions for the whole cosmos. Luckily for us, this responsibility is also a gift. The unity we are called to demonstrate is the unity we have already received. As the Son says to the Father, ‘All mine are yours, and yours are mine.’ Through Jesus we have been drawn into the life of the Trinity. Through Jesus each of us has become a stone in the building that is a dwelling place for God. When we honestly seek to live out God’s unity, we can be certain that God will give us the gifts and skills we need.

When preparing Reflections I frequently read commentaries that are decades old. This week, there were two reflections on the Ephesians passage whose historic context struck me. The first was written in 2005, and although, like me, you might think that 2005 was yesterday, it is unbelievably twenty years ago. In it, the author refers to a ‘painful current example’ of the construction of new dividing walls: ‘the security wall Israelis are building between themselves and their Palestinian neighbours.’[3] I’ve seen that ‘security’ wall, which the International Court of Justice had already said in 2004 was contrary to international law. It is the perfect example that strong fences do not make good neighbours, and it is deeply painful that it still exists twenty years later. Can anything bring a wall like that down? Then I read a sermon from 1967 in which the preacher talked about the divisions of the world of the nineteen sixties being symbolised by ‘the substantial Berlin Wall and by the metaphorical Iron and Bamboo Curtains.’[4] We can always have hope. Sometimes the dividing walls do come down.

In the chapel at the World Council of Churches headquarters in Geneva, there is a cross called the Cross of Reconciliation. It is made from fragments of bombs that fell on Dresden in Germany and Coventry in England during the Second World War. After the war, Dresden and Coventry became twin cities, and pieces from the bombs were collected and put together in the form of a cross to serve as a symbol of reconciliation and renewal. We must never believe that war is inevitable and reconciliation impossible.

I’d like to end with a prayer from the Lutheran World Federation:

God most mighty, God most merciful,
our stories tell us that you help and save your people.
You are the fortress: may there be no more war.
You are the harvest: may there be no more hunger.
You are the light: may no one die alone or in despair.
God most majestic, God most motherly,
grant us your life, the life that flows from your Son and the Spirit,
one God, now and forever. Amen.

[1] Rowan Williams, ‘Resurrection and Peace: More on New Testament Ethics’ in On Christian Theology (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2000) pp. 265.

[2] University of Melbourne Act 2009 (Vic) s. 10 (1).

[3] Amy Plantinga Paul, ‘Theological Meditations on Ephesians 2:11-22,’ Theology Today 62 (2005), p. 83.

[4] James T. Cleland, ‘Someone There Is Who Doesn’t Love a Wall,’ Interpretation, 1967, pp. 152-3.