It was during a reception at a rather sad occasion that a young couple came up and spoke to me. It was the first time that they had been in a church, certainly the first time as a married couple and, for one of them, probably ever. They were amazed and astonished at this place – at the building, at the scenery of the windows. They were in awe. But they were also perplexed and they thought it would be a wonderful opportunity to ask me a challenging question. They just asked the obvious. It went like this: “Why do people come into this church and worship regularly?”
It is one of those questions that as a pastor you are unprepared for because you are just used to doing it. It is part of life. It is part of ministry and church. But to actually be asked straight out “Why?” was enormously challenging. I sort of fumbled through the index of my pat phrases and couldn’t find one that was suitable. So, I blurted out, “Well, it is the same reason that people go to Union Station” and then, I had to think why I said that! They stared at me with a blank gaze – and I had a blank gaze right back at them. I thought “Why, Stirling, is it like Union Station?” And then it dawned on me.
It is like Union Station because Union Station is a gathering place. It is a place where not only you meet, but a place from which you go. It is a point of contact between different lines and different trains and different people and different places. The church is sort of like Union Station. The more I thought about it, the more it became clear to me as I talked to them that we are a Union Station between God and us. We gather and we worship, because we seek God and we want to meet God, but more than that, we meet each other.
It is a place where those who are seeking God come together and join with one another and communicate with one another. Even more than that, it is the place from where having been gathered, we engage the world. We both invite people in and we ourselves go out. So, I said to them, “Welcome to Union Station!” And you know they got it! They said, “We’ve never thought about it in those terms, but actually the simplicity of that says so much.”
This is in keeping with what I just read a few moments ago from the Book of Acts. From the very beginning, from the foundation of the Church, it was the Union Station, it was the gathering place. In that particular time, they had come to Jerusalem. The people had come for the great celebration, and at that very moment, at Pentecost, they had come and they gathered as people of faith from Pamphilia to Cyprus, from Rome to Jerusalem itself.
When they gathered in this place, and when they had come together in Jerusalem, it was then and it was there that the power of the Holy Spirit was unleashed onto the people, released amongst the people, so much so that they were astonished at what their meeting with God and God’s meeting with them was doing. It was there that the Church was born. It was there that the Spirit moved. They were in one place; they were of one accord; and God moved amongst them.
Now, there are many reasons why some of you might be here today. Over the course of a church year, there will be a plethora of reasons why people gather at this particular part of Union Station. There are some that will come because they are dealing with a profound sorrow or struggling with a particular illness or a fear. There are some who come because there is this great sense of joy as when we heard the music of Rutter this morning, or we gather and we celebrate the joys of one another. Some of us come because we just want to praise, we just want to say “Thank you” to the Lord our God and our Maker.
Some of us are here because of a constant intellectual curiosity. We want to know more about the Christian faith and what it means and what the church should be. Some gather here simply out of tradition, because it is Sunday and on Sunday you go to church. Some gather out of guilt: something has gone wrong in their lives and they feel that the Prayers of Confession and the Assurance of Pardon will help them. Some will come because they want their children to grow up in a faith that will help form and shape their lives. Some of them come for no apparent reason at all, except they just think they should worship. Over the centuries, people have come to church with all these different motivations – from joy to sorrow, from extreme religiosity to no religion at all.
We come and we gather and we praise and we seek, and the thing that we have in common is our God. We come because of the call of that God, of the invitation of that God, and the invitation comes in the form of his Son. When Jesus gathered his disciples together in today’s from John 17, before his death, before his crucifixion, before his resurrection, before any of that, Jesus prays for his disciples. He prays that they may become a Union Station, that they might be one, and that through their ministry and through their convictions and through their love for him, the rest of the world might know him, and might know the love that he has for them.
As we unpack this passage and we look at John 17, very clearly there are four dependent clauses here. Each of these four dependent clauses tells us how important the Church of Jesus Christ is and why being here this morning is so vitally important. Even if you are listening on the radio this morning or you are accessing us through the Internet, you can still be in a bond of fellowship with us through these four dependent clauses.
The first of these is one that rings so loud and so true. Jesus’ prayer for his disciples is this: that they all may be one. Now, if you look carefully at this, the “oneness” that Jesus is talking about is not some sort of “Well, let’s make sure that we all agree and get along.” The oneness that he is talking about is the oneness between those who have brought the faith and those who are new to it who are now going to live it. If you look carefully at the passage, it is about those who have had the faith and those that in the future or in the present are grasped by the faith may live by it.
Jesus prays that all of these may be one and that they may have a unity of purpose, a unity of calling, a unity of the Word. The unity that he prays for is the unity of the times. Last week, I was talking about the fact that the faith is transmitted, that it is passed along. Jesus wants the unity between those who know him and love him and follow him, the disciples in other words, and those who are going to follow. Their oneness is going to continue the mission and the purpose of Jesus as he brought it to those original disciples.
When you really think about this, Pentecost is the time to celebrate not only our present and to look to our future, but to celebrate our past. It is to recognize that we are one with those have gone before us. Just recently I was reading a fascinating article on a person who made a profound contribution to the Christian Church in the seventeen hundreds. It is someone who our own Reverend David McMaster would know a lot about, because he actually went to a seminary in his name, and the man’s name is Francis Asbury. Victor Shepherd has a tremendous essay on this inspiring man.
Francis Asbury was a Methodist. He was chosen by John Wesley himself to go to the United States in the late seventeen hundreds to grow Methodism and the ministry of the Gospel in the United States. Asbury’s travels are legendary. It is estimated that more than sixty times he crossed the Allegheny Mountains. He would go out in storms and rain and snow, so much so that he developed such bad rheumatism that he couldn’t walk at times and people had to carry him into the pulpit and place him there in order that he could preach.
He went from everything – from mills to street corners to small churches. Wherever he could find an opportunity to proclaim the Gospel, Asbury took it. Methodism grew from some 8,000 members when he arrived to 250,000 by the time he died. He had this great passion, you see. He had a great passion for the Gospel, and he wanted the Church to be united around that Gospel: to know it and to love it and to celebrate it.
He spent time developing young ministers. He wanted them to grow in the faith and even though he was physically ill with his rheumatism, and later his pleurisy, he stuttered, he had problems with his speech, he had physical illnesses, he struggled with everything in his fibre, but he still wanted young ministers to know the Gospel. He also knew, and this is significant, that the first Methodist ministers in the time of Asbury, (and there were 741 new ministers that came about because of Asbury), that only half of them would survive until the age of thirty, such were the conditions that they ministered in. He felt at times when he called them to serve Christ in terrible conditions; he was almost inviting them to die. But he kept going and he kept preaching. And, even when he was so ill and so weak that he couldn’t stand, he said, and these were his words: “This is not about me; this is always about Jesus Christ, our Lord.”
This great uniting force, this great preacher to his very last days wanted people to know Christ did what he did for future generations. I think Jesus, when he gathers and has this prayer with these disciples seventeen or eighteen hundred years before, was praying for exactly that same thing: that each successive generation would be one, and that they would be one through the power of the Gospel, and that they would be joined by a common confession and fellowship.
Jesus goes on. He says, “I pray that they may be one” but the second clause is “just as you and I are one (He is talking to his Father) and I am one with you.” There is no question that for Jesus it is the bond that he has with his father that becomes the bond for the Church. There is no other bond. There is no other source of unity. There is no other thing that brings us together and unites us. I love something that the great writer E. Stanley Jones once said: “Talk about what you believe and you have disunity; talk about who you believe in and you have unity.”
And, isn’t he right? Isn’t so much of the disunity the wrong timing of the arrivals at Union Station due to the fact that people get hung up on what they happen to believe at any given moment. And, if it is different from what you happen to believe in any given moment then this becomes a source of disunity. This is what fractures the Church of Jesus Christ: we have disunity when we are preoccupied, as he says, with what we believe rather than who we believe in. It takes humility to say that.
In a highly individualistic society like ours, which puts a premium on people going around saying, “This is what I believe” whether it has anything that can substantiate it, whether it builds any bridges or creates any unity, just simply this desire to be heard and for your own beliefs to be extolled, in that world we create the fragmentation of disunity. That is what I noticed in talking to this young couple at the reception. I think what astonished them was that I actually believed that coming together is necessary.
It is necessary to extol and lift up the one in whom we believe rather than just sort of a collective of ideas that everyone might have. It is when you look at worship as the coming together in worship of the One that we believe in that we find our great strength. Jesus knew that. He knew that for his disciples, if they got caught up simply in what they believed rather than in the relationship that he had with the Father and the Father had with him, if that wasn’t central, then the unity he prayed for would not be achieved.
He goes on, and the third dependent clause is: “That they may be in us.” Jesus has a vision and it is that his believers were drawn into the presence of the Father and the Son and the Spirit, that we are led into the presence of God and as we are led into the presence of God to worship, and we are led into the presence of God through the power of the Spirit, and we join in the company of God the Father and God the Son and God the Spirit, then something powerful happens.
A few years ago if you recall, in the 90s, there was a great concert by the three great tenors: Domingo, Pavarotti and Carreras – do you remember that? There was a big to-do about these tenors singing together, and Domingo was asked: “How do you, with your three great egos manage to sing so well?”
Domingo said, “Only when you get caught up in the music do you forget yourself. The music becomes the important thing, not the voice. That is why, when we love the music, the voices blend and the music is made.”
Is that not the case with the Church? It is not when the voices that are heard are the most powerful; it is when the music is focussed and the sound of it is great. It is when we are drawn into the presence of God that its music is beautiful, that its unity is found.
It is interesting this week watching the Toronto Maple Leafs suffer. I take no joy in this. But I watched them suffer – and they suffered, man. Everybody suffered. For a moment in their suffering they were one with all those in Maple Leaf Square and I have never seen such unity of misery in my whole life! It was quite moving actually. I thought for a moment that at times when you have that commonalty of experience, it draws you together in a bond and a resolution. Did you notice one thing that I really liked? They didn’t turn on each other. Oh, they might have in the clubhouse but they certainly didn’t publicly.
There was this sense that we all went down together in this one and they were in shock that it happened, but there was a commonalty of purpose and humility about it, actually. It was really quite winsome. I think the Church of Jesus Christ needs to think more like that rather than like a group of individuals who just happen to have a few ideas of their own. The Church of Jesus Christ finds its strength and its purpose and its power when it does as Jesus wanted. That we become one with him and in seeking to become one with him, we find our song, we find our unity, and we find our joy.
There is one last clause: “That others may believe, that the cosmos might believe.” Jesus prayed for his disciples because he wanted them more than anything else to bear witness to the world. The Church is the only body and I have said this before that actively proclaims Christ to the world. We do many other things, but they pale compared with what we offer to the world, which is the Gospel: The Good News. We exist because of the world; we exist for the world. We are a body and a Union Station that says to the world, “Come to us and we, from this place, will come to you.”
I really noticed the power of that this last Monday night. I was privileged to attend the Convocation at Wycliffe College. I went to see and to witness the Honorary Degree recipients. There was one that kind of stood out from the masses, because he is none other than R. A. Dickey, the great Toronto Blue Jays pitcher. He got up to receive his Honorary Degree and the reason he received this degree was because R. A. Dickey is a Christian author. You don’t have to be in his presence for more than ten seconds and you just know that he is a Christian.
He has written about it; he has spoken about it; he is not ashamed of it. He is an extremely humble and kind man. He actually got up there and said, “You know, Toronto Blue Jays are having a pretty wretched season. It is nice to be in an audience that has at its core grace and forgiveness.” Then, he went on to talk to the young ordinands. In his speech he said a few things that I thought were absolutely fantastic! He says the following:
I think one of the things that we share in common, whether we are Canadian or whether we are American or whether we are African it does not matter, we are all at times bound by adversity and tribulation to some degree – maybe the loss of a loved one, maybe a broken relationship, maybe something deeper – but we are all in that together, and I have realized that at many points in my life. I hope that we might go out then into this world to have an impact on the lives of other people.
I have started to develop disciplines and mechanisms and prayers to deal with the broken world. But I also realize how beautiful this world is, and how I go about being able to hold both the tragedy of this earth and the joy of this earth is one of the great challenges in my life. As I continue in my life, whether it is at the Roger’s Centre or here with you, God has given me a responsibility to invest every moment, every conversation, every relationship with whoever and devote it to the Lord Jesus Christ.
In Mark in particular Jesus said, ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all soul and with all your mind and with all your strength’. And, the second commandment is ‘to love your neighbour as yourself’. Even Victor Hugo, in one of the lines of Les Mis says, ‘I think it is to love another person is to see the face of God.’
So, I stand before you as a Christian and I encourage you to follow the importance of community, to reach out into the world and to go out into the world and to present Christ and his loving relationship with God to the world. So I go back to Opening Day, and I didn’t know what to say when I was introduced and they said, ‘Here is R. A. Dickey, winner of such-and-such award’, but what I wanted the PA announcer to say is this: ‘R. A. Dickey, starting pitcher of the Toronto Blue Jays, and the child of the living God.’
He encouraged all those new ministers, just as Asbury had done 200 years before, to go out into the world in Christ’s name, and draw them in, and bring the world closer to God. The Church is always Union Station, the place where God and we meet. Amen.