“A Shared Treasure in Earthen
Vessels”
by Bruce
J. Johnson
We live and love, we work
and worship in a time of disillusioning scandals, when no institution is exempt
and no individual, or so it seems, is untouched. This may be, perhaps, a
sweeping generalization but none the less, I think that it is true.
Indeed, this coming week,
more than 2100 people--- business executives, government officials, social
activists, academics, religious leaders and others will be gathering in
‘the decline of trust’ in just about every aspect of our lives. The agenda
even includes a specific panel discussion on
“restoring trust in
religion.”
(Peter Steinfels, NYTimes,
Not long ago, Father Bernard
Bonnot, Vice president of religious programming for the cable network, Hallmark
Channel, (channel 70, one of my favorites), suggested that as it relates to
Christianity:
“Christian
disunity is a scandal.”
(
And,
indeed, it is!
This morning begins the
international Week of Prayer Christian Unity and we are being challenged to
confront all that might separate us and to affirm all that is meant to bring us
together as one in Christ. The actual theme for the week is taken from Paul’s
second letter to the Corinthians, chapter 4 where he
talks about having the treasure of God’s transforming power, His redeeming and
unifying love, in earthen vessels, namely, in us, human beings who are flawed
but useful, breakable but still durable. To my mind there are two fundamental
truths that were always meant to bind us together in Christian Unity--- our
shared faith in the same Jesus as Lord and Savior and of course, our common
humanity. How’s that? The shared treasure of the same Lord
and the gift of a common humanity, i.e.—the fact that we are all earthen
vessels?
First the treasure!
The apostle Paul says it
best in his letter to the Galatians:
“Far
as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is
neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor
free, there is neither male nor female, for all are one in Christ Jesus.”
(Galatians 3:
27-28)
We are all brothers and
sisters in Christ—Catholic and Protestant, black, white, red and yellow, rich
and poor, heterosexual- homosexual, Democrat, Republican, Green Party,
Independent, left and right, tall or short, narrow or wide! We are all brothers
and sisters in Christ by virtue of our one baptism, one Spirit and our belief
in and holding dear the same Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.
In his book, Handyman of
the Lord, William Borders tells the story of a black man whose poverty had
left him begging for food. Ringing the front doorbell at a Southern mansion,
the man was told to go around to the back, where he would get something to eat.
The owner of the mansion met him on the back porch and said, “First, we will
pray together. Repeat after me, ‘Our Father, who art in heaven…”
The hungry man replied, ‘Your
Father who art in heaven…”
“No,” the owner of the
house corrected, “Our Father who art in heaven…”
Still
the beggar said, “Your Father who art in heaven…”
Frustrated, the giver of
the food asked, ‘Why do you insist on saying ‘your Father’ when I keep telling
you to say ‘our Father’?”
The man answered, “If I
say, our Father,’ that would make you and me brothers, and I’m afraid the Lord
wouldn’t like it, you askin’ your brother to come to the back porch to get a
piece of bread.”
This morning, when we pray
our Lord’s prayer or the ‘Our Father’ we’ll all be
saying “Our Father” and that makes us brothers and sisters in Christ!
So why this
disunity when we are all brothers and sisters?
Second, we are all earthen
vessels; we hold this too in common!
A couple of weeks ago, the
lectionary reading we shared had the story of Simeon and Anna in the temple
when they held the baby Jesus and told Mary and Joseph that their son was “set
for the fall and rising of many in Israel” and “for a sign that is spoken
against.” His birth has never been just about Him but more importantly, about
us. What that tiny baby in the arms of Simeon and Anna would do for the world
would be to show us that we are all bound into one bundle of life and that what
hurts any one of us hurts us all. You can look at that
I’m reminded the wonderful
story told by the late Peter Arnett, the CNN television commentator and
reporter.
“I
was in
So,
he put them in his car, got thought he sealed off area and sped thought the
streets of Jerusalem toward the hospital--- all this to the pleading the man in
the back seat that he go faster and the confession that he thought that they
were losing her.
When
they finally got to the hospital, the girl was rushed into the operating room.
Peter Arnett and this man retreated to the waiting room and sat on a bench
together. They sat there in silence, too exhausted to speak.
After
a little while, the doctor came out and told them that the little girl had
died.
The
man collapsed in tears and as Peter put his arms around the man to comfort him,
he said, “I don’t know what to say. I can’t imagine what you must be going
through. I’ve never lost a child.”
The
man looked back at Peter in a startled manner and said, “Oh, mister! That
Palestinian was not my daughter. I’m an Israeli settler. She’s not my child but
there comes a time when we must realize that every child, regardless of that
child’s background, is a son or a daughter and they are all our children.”
(Campolo, Let Me Tell You a Story, p. 120)
Last Saturday, there was an
article in the Hartford Courant about the Rev. Bob Evans and his organization
called Plowshares, Inc. which organized a recent trip to Iraq—visiting the
schools, churches and other organizations, for the World Council of Churches---
what they wanted to see and share were the faces and their everyday lives---
not much different from ours, especially as it relates to the children.
I’ve heard it said
That we can “look at a window and see a window
or we can look through a window and see the stars.”
We can look at a baby
cradled in a manger or in his mother’s arms and see just that baby or we can
see all children. We can look at a man from Nazareth and see just that man or
we can see all people, even you and me and what he wants our relationship to
be--- that we love one another, even as he loves us.
I like reading reviews of
movies in anticipation of maybe seeing them. I have been intrigued by Roman Polanski’s “The
Pianist,” nominated as this year’s best drama by Golden Globe. It is the story
about how this musician survived the Holocaust. In all the advertisements you read
“The Pianist: Music was his passion---Survival was his masterpiece.” His will
to live, to survive— was not for family and friends, not for love even but
simply so that he could play his music
This reminded me of the
autobiographical story told by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross about her
meeting a German born and raised Jewish woman named Golda at the Maidanek death
camp in
This is how Kubler-Ross
tells Golda’s story and its effect on her:
“She
had little time to grieve. Most of her
energy was consumed by the basic task of staying alive. She scrambled to survive the Polish winter,
find enough food and avoid diseases like typhoid or even a simple cold, which
would prevent her from digging ditches or shoveling snow and would send her
back to the gas chambers. To keep her
spirits up, she imagined the camp being liberated. God had chosen her, she reasoned, to survive
and tell future generations about the barbarity she had witnessed.
This was enough, she said, to keep
her going through the harshest cold of winter.
If she felt her energy fail, Golda closed her eyes and imagined the
screams of her girlfriends who had been used as guinea pigs in experiments
conducted by camp doctors, abused by camp guards or often both, and then she
told herself, “I must live to tell the world.
I must live to tell them the horrors these people committed.” And Golda nourished this hate and
determination to stay alive until the Allied forces arrived.
Then, when the camp was liberated
and the gates opened, Golda was paralyzed by the rage and bitterness that
gripped her. She did not see herself
spending the rest of her valuable life spewing hatred. “Like Hitler,” she said. “If I used my life, which was spared, to sow
the seeds of hatred, I would not be any different than him. I would just be another victim trying to
spread more and more hate. The only way
we can find peace is to let the past be the past,” she said. So she chose to
forgive and to love.
She explained herself by saying, “If I can change one person’s life from
hatred and revenge to love and compassion, then I deserved to survive.”
(Kubler-Ross,
The Wheel of Life, p.77.)
Indeed, that’s why we all
survive and live--- that in the sharing of our common humanity—our earthen
vessel-ness, if you will---- we can become more loving, and more compassionate,
and more understanding and accepting and forgiving toward one another.
So, let us rejoice in this
Week of Prayer for Christian Unity for we share this treasure --- our Lord
Jesus Christ --- in the earthen vessels of our common humanity. Both are meant
to make us one!