Who are we? We are you? This simple question, familiar to fans of the pop group ‘The Who’ from the 1970s, with their song ‘Who are you', and those of us over a certain age, begs another fundamental question. Is it ‘who am I’ or ‘who are we’? We are persons in community and so there is no ‘I’ without ‘we’. That has its foundation in God, in how we understand God as Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and the Trinity, our doctrine of God, is foundational for any understanding of who we are, of who I am.
This question about who we are has been raised in the last
few weeks rather dramatically and tragically.
And the week of prayer for Christian Unity asks it too. Answers have abounded. We have seen placards bearing the statement
‘Je suis Charlie’, ‘I am Charlie’. It is
an expression of solidarity with the murdered cartoonists in Paris. It has echoes of John Donne’s famous poem,
“No man is an island entire of itself…
Any man’s death diminishes me,
because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know
for whom the bell tolls;
it tolls for thee.”
We are united at a basic level of humanity and ‘I’, ‘me’,
only exists because there is ‘we’, humanity.
We are brothers and sisters.
Outside St John’s Church in Cathedral Square we have a
poster which proclaims that “we are ‘N’”.
Underneath this is the Arabic letter ‘N’ and it stands for ‘Jesus, the
Nazarene’. This is a symbol that has
been daubed on the doors and houses and churches of Christians in Syria and
other places marking them out, identifying them for persecution by extremist
groups. There was encouragement over the
summer and autumn to stand alongside our persecuted brothers and sisters by
displaying this poster and it’s statement ‘we are N’. The Archbishop of Canterbury has this as his
profile picture on Facebook and Twitter.
I have it added to mine as a badge.
We are ‘N’ because we share the name of Jesus, and it is to him that our
primary allegiance is due, above all others.
Christian Unity week reminds us that this is what unites us. We share the name of Jesus, we share
allegiance to him above all others, and it is a week to remember our unity in
Christ, in Jesus the Nazarene, the name above all other names, at whose mention
every knee is to bow in adoration, rather than to focus on our differences.
The Jesus we are identifying with is our crucified Lord and on
the cross he shares our fallen humanity and shares in our suffering. He takes it into himself. So when people are persecuted, as in France,
but more numerously in Nigeria under Boko Haram, in Syria and in so many other places
which have not been given any where near the same publicity as the European
atrocities, when these terrible things take place, Christ suffers too because
we see him in the faces of those who suffer.
Whatever we do to the least of our brothers and sisters, we do to him;
whatever is done to the least of these, is done to him. We are ‘N’ reminds us that Christ suffered,
suffers with us and with the persecuted.
They share in his sufferings and are blessed by this. The blessing comes because God doesn’t abandon
them but identifies with them, holds them, redeems them.
Our readings this morning talked about God calling us to
follow him. Samuel heard the call as a
young boy in the Temple (1 Samuel 3:3-19). The story gives us Samuel hearing God in the
night and not understanding what was going on.
Just before where we picked it up, the Old Testament writer tells us
that the word of the Lord was rare and visions were not widespread. The old priest guardian, Eli, to whom Samuel
goes, eventually catches on and realizes that God is speaking to the boy. The message is not pleasant for Eli. His sons don’t do what they should do and Eli
is blamed for not guiding them. The
consequences will be terrible. And here
we are taken back to the ‘I’ and ‘we’ discussion with which I began. Samuel does not receive a private message but
one for the community, for Eli and his sons.
This message was not pleasant and could be taken as being offensive. It would have been easy for Samuel to avoid
saying the hard things that Eli needed to hear.
But Eli realizes that Samuel must speak and he must hear.
When we speak, when speech is freely allowed, as it should
be, there is also a responsibility to be aware of the consequences of what we
say. Free speech exists in the context
of the ‘I’ and the ‘we’. No one exists as
an island, but we belong together so whatever we say is for a common
purpose. It is communication after all,
so there is a message to be heard, even if it is muddled and mixed up – the
muddle is part of the message, and speaker and hearer need to realize that they
share this connection in the exchange.
When the ‘I’ tries to exist and express in a vacuum, things become
distorted and disconnected. That
disconnect leads to tension and conflict, which has at its root a lack of
humility and grace to be shaped as disciples of a higher purpose. At least Eli recognized this. This was colourfully expressed by PopeFrancis this week when he said that if you say a curse word against his mother
you can expect a punch. There are
consequences, there will be a reaction, our free speech is in a context and it
should be used for a purpose that is wholesome and uplifting, not destructive,
though of course challenge is acceptable, is to be expected, just as Samuel
challenged Eli.
This is taken on by St Paul in the Epistle reading (1Corinthians 6:13-20), where he reminds us that what we do is for a moral
purpose. Again the passage begins just
before where we began to read. All
things may be lawful but not all things are beneficial. Our bodies are to glorify God; the freedom
that we have is for the purposes of God.
There are consequences and therefore there are boundaries because we
want what we do to be blessing, to be wholesome and to build us as children of
God.
The Gospel reading gave us the call of Jesus’ followers (John1:35-42). Andrew finds his
brother Simon Peter and tells him about Jesus.
That call comes to all of us to follow Jesus. All of us are ‘N’, named after the Nazarene
and therefore all of us have to ask what following him means. For the Gospel
writer it means finding others and encouraging them to follow too.
So this past week has asked us who we are, who you are. The question was posed by crowds identifying
with those who were murdered and affirming the importance of free speech. Freedom is set in a context, not a vacuum,
and that context is our common humanity, derived from God. We are persons in community, as God is three
persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
Our primary allegiance is to Jesus the Nazarene and the call to follow
him. ‘Je suis Jesu’; ‘We are N’. That is the source of our unity for this week
of prayer. After all it comes from his
prayer on the night before he died that we would all be one as he and the
Father are one.
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