Steve Blow published some of Grover Gillett’s jokes the other day in the paper. Like this one I like: A family- style restaurant is one where there is an argument at every table. Cute.  Sadly, some could just as easily say that about the church that gathers round the Table of the Lord and calls it Communion. A church is where there is an argument at every Lord’s Table. [The Dallas Morning News (3 Oct. 2003): 1B.]

Wouldn’t it be great if that weren’t true?  What if the church were the one place you could go to find what family is all about? Family of spirit teaching family of blood how to live.   Family that comes together by choice out of a love that has so taken us that it is no choice at all. Wouldn’t that be communion?

One reason we don’t know church like that is that we mistake communion for union. Most divisions in churches across time have been over forced oneness — compelled agreement in doctrine or ritual or class or race or whatever. We want everyone to be alike, to think alike, to look alike, to act alike. Stepford churches rather than Spirit churches.

I was in a car recently in East Texas with Jon Whitten and Greg White.  We were passing church after church.  There are a lot of them in East Texas, don’t you know?! Anyway, I told them that one of my hobbies is to guess what denomination a church is by the architecture of the building. I think I could make the honor roll if you graded me on only that. But even if you blindfolded me and dropped me into a gathering of church people, I think I could tell you before long what denomination they are. Some of that is harmless; we all know that spouses start to favor each other over time, and even the dog takes on the look.

More serious is when the unique personalities of people are absorbed by the conformist spirit of the church; when the diverse ways God has made us are swallowed up in a homogenizing process that is good for milk but not for church; when the Spirit of God cannot bubble up from within the congregation because there is a man or a group of men in charge that keep bursting the bubble with their controlling rule; when self-appointed infallible interpreters decide what the truth is for everyone else and say that anyone that doesn’t see it that way is arguing with God not with them; when attempts to purify the church end up wringing all the joy out of it, and the hilarity of grace is muted by moral correctness:  when these things take the place of genuine communion at the Lord’s Table, we have left the definition of Jesus as to what makes us one, what puts us at peace, and we have substituted stifling uniformity for serendipitous unity.

We’ve been looking for the past five weeks at the peace that passes understanding. God is peace. Our peace with God comes through Jesus Christ. Our experience of that peace depends in part on our making peace with our betrayers and our enemies both. We complete the series today by looking at how the peace of God is revealed to the world by the peace of the church and by the church’s peacemaking with other religions of the world. Peace within the faith, in other words, and peace among the faiths.

But if it is a peace that passes understanding, then this peace is a great mystery, a gift that invites our embrace but eludes all of our attempts to manufacture it ourselves. Jesus prays that his disciples — and that would be us as much as them — would share his peace. He wants us to be one with one another as he is one with God. But it is more than an analogy of oneness — be one as we are one. Jesus invites us to participate mystically in God’s own oneness.

God’s unity is not uniformity. The Father is not the Son, nor is the Son the Father. And the Holy Spirit, too, is a unique personality in God. The divine life is a triune community of love. The Father gives himself to the Son and the Son receives his life from the Father. The Son wants nothing but to give himself back to the Father in love. And the process with the Spirit works the same. Generosity and hospitality, giving and receiving, leading and following, loving and being loved: these are uninterrupted movements in the dynamic life of God. So much so that it has been called the dance of the Trinity.

Well, what’s your point, George? Real Christians dance! Even Baptists can learn how to dance like God. We are invited onto the divine dance floor; the music is playing. We are not allowed to be like a bunch of junior high boys too cool or too shy to get out there. Grab a partner and learn the steps. [Grab partner from the chancel and dance while speaking.] The peace of the church is a relational peace. We live and move and have our being in God and with each other. Sometimes we will step on each other’s toes, but grace demands that we not dishonor our partners when that happens by pointing out HER faults in public. If we share in the divine life, we will celebrate the wonder of each unique person in our midst and learn to move in beautiful rhythm together.

Wilshire, we do this better than most churches I have known. We allow for differences, and on our best days celebrate them without feeling that the unity and identity of our life together are threatened. But we must always be on guard about this, because unity and mission go hand in hand. When we draw in the tent, when we stop making room for new ideas and new people and keep everything safe and neat and tidy and just so according the taste and preferences of the pastor or a few people, we endanger our mission by closing off our open unity.

Jesus said that it was his oneness with the Father that caused the world to believe he was sent from God. It is our oneness with one another that will prove to the world we have been sent by Christ, who is sent by God. In other words, our witness to the world is at stake in our unity with one another. We need to be sanctified in the truth of this, so that we will be effective in what God wants us to do in the world.

Jesus prays that God will sanctify us in the truth just as he himself is sanctified. Now, to be sanctified is to be made holy or pure. We usually think that means to be morally perfect or hold perfectly to the absolute truths of the Bible. But to be sanctified or made pure or holy is really nothing more or less than to be fit for a task. When a soldier goes into battle, he needs to be sanctified; that is, fully prepared to offer himself to the task and not fail because of fear or lack of training. In the same way, we offer ourselves to God and to one another as partners, not just for the sake of being together but for peacemaking in the world. We hold nothing back, leave no one behind; we are brothers in arms, so to speak, laying down our lives if necessary.

Sundown tonight begins the Jewish High Holy Day, Yom Kippur, or Day of Atonement, which concludes the Days of Awe that began on the New Year, Rosh Hashanah. A traditional Jewish prayer for the New Year goes this way: Purify our hearts to serve you in truth. You, O God, are truth, and your word is truth and stands forever. [Cf. Raymond Brown, The Gospel According to John, Anchor Bible Commentary (Doubleday, 1966), p.765.] To purify ourselves in truth is to be united with God in love, so that we will live out of God and for God in all things. And that means, also, that we will live for everyone God wishes to make peace with, including those of other religions that do not acknowledge Jesus as Savior of the world. If we consecrate ourselves as Christ did, we will love that world as he did, and we will not use power to claim privilege over others as a means to show them we are right and they are wrong. We will love them and engage them and befriend them and give ourselves in love to them the way Christ did for us.

In a little more than a week, Baylor University Medical Center will fulfill a founding pledge in a new and stunning way. The hospital will dedicate the Bradley Wayne Interfaith Garden of Prayer. It all started when a Jewish doctor, Bob Fine, found Muslim hospital employees praying in a stairwell because they had no place to practice their faith equally and openly. A hundred years ago, Dr. George W. Truett, a champion of religious liberty, pastor of First Baptist Church of Dallas, and founder of the sanitarium that predated the hospital, said: Is it not now time to build a great humanitarian hospital, one to which men of all creeds and those of none may come with equal confidence? At last Baptists will rise to that challenge in a generous and symbolic way. The garden will include a labyrinth that will serve as a prayer path for those who seek spiritual comfort in times of distress.  You will also find there a bench with a plaque on it with a verse from the Psalms that reads: Be still and know that I am God. It was given by Wilshire Baptist Church; I am proud and disappointed both that we are the only church to have contributed to the effort. Too many are afraid an interfaith garden will bless other religions in ways that undermine the truth of Jesus Christ.

But look at how the writer to the Hebrews used the non-Israelite figure of the priest Melchizedek as a figure of Christ himself. Abraham paid tithes to this mysterious king of Salem, which means “king of peace,” who knew nothing of the true God but was honored for what he did with what he knew. Christians must remember that Jesus Christ is risen from the dead and is drawing all people to himself. He is not only at work within the church; he is present everywhere in the world. And if that is so, he is not missing in action in any honest worship of people of other faiths. It is our duty as Christians to catch up to Jesus and bear witness to saving faith in him by our Christ-like relations with people of other faiths. We cannot erect walls that keep us safe within our faith, when the One who is the way, the truth, and the life, the One who was crucified outside the walls, is already outside the walls seeking all who would be saved.

In a moment we will go to the Lord’s Table, and we will do well to remember that it is the Lord’s Table, not ours. On this World Communion Sunday, we join Christians everywhere on the globe at the Table, celebrating our unity with Christ and each other. But it should lead us to everyday peacemaking beyond the Table, too.

The Masai tribe in Africa has a curious cultural rite that was baptized into a Christian practice after Catholic missionaries led them to faith in Christ. The passing of a tuft of grass is a gesture of peace among the Masai. If an argument becomes heated, they reach down and pass grass to each other as a sign that they will not allow the dispute to destroy their communion in Christ. It is also a promise that no violence will erupt because of the argument. When the time comes for the people to gather for Mass at the Table of the Lord, the elders of the community judge whether the grass has been honored or violated in any way that would bring sacrilege upon Christ in the Eucharist.  They will not share Communion if the peace of Christ does not rule among them. [Cited by Stanley Hauweras, The Peaceable Kingdom (Notre Dame Press, 1983),  pp. 110-11.]

My friends, let us be the kind of people who honor the peace of Christ by being at peace with one another within the faith and with those of other faiths. Then the world will know we truly belong to the God of peace.