‘That they all may be one’: Service of Prayer for Christian Unity
This homily, preached by Fr. David Curry at an ecumenical service in 1999, offers an extended and charitable view about the common mind of the Church in and through the churches. He recently sent this out to the discussion group about the concept of the consensus fidelium, and now we post it here.
“That they all may be one” (John 17.21)
“That they all may be one” is the prayer of the Son to the Father. The force of that prayer derives entirely from his being with us in the substance of our humanity. He is “the Word made flesh who dwelt among us”. His prayer expresses something of the purpose of his being with us. He seeks our “atonement”, our ‘at-one-ment’, that is to say, our being at one through our being with him in his being with the Father.
It was the poet and preacher John Donne who observed, in his magisterial Christmas sermon at the beginning of his ministry at St. Paul’s, London in 1621, that the “wholle Gospell [of John] is comprehended in the beginning thereof” and that “in this first chapter is contracted all that which is extensively spread…through the whole Booke. For here is … the Foundation of all, the Divinitie of Christ”. It was the burden of his sermon to show that Word, Son, and Light were more than mere metaphors; they belong “essentially and personally”, “truly and properly” to his divine identity, to his being one with the Father in the bond of the Holy Spirit. His being with us is the condition of our being one. We can only be one through him, through his being with us in his essential identity as the Word and Son of the Father.
This is the burden of the Church’s proclamation. What is proclaimed to the whole world is received for the whole world; and it creates a new world, as it were. That new world is the Church Oecumenical, the Church Universal (οικυηεναι), which is shaped fundamentally and essentially by what has been given to be proclaimed.
The Church, in some sense, is that whole new world, not the global village of cosmic orphans, mind you, but the whole world as the household of faith, defined by what has been received and by what is given to be proclaimed. The Church is not and cannot be a closed door society. The Church is open to the world, not to be overrun by its follies and concerns, noble or otherwise, to be sure, but to proclaim the world’s redemption in Christ, to set love in order and to be the place where the world is at peace with God in his reconciling love for the world. The Church is not a closed door society because, first and foremost, the Church exists to be open to God in the truth of his revelation, to be the place where God dwells with us, where his Word is preached and his Sacraments are celebrated, where his Praises are sung, where Prayers are offered in his Name; the place where our prayers find their place in his prayer.