What price Unity?

Why does it seem to take terrible disasters to get us to be half decent to each other? Helplessly watching the images on TV a small amount of imagination enabled many people to feel that, after all, we really are one world. This awareness put side issues in the shade for most of us. Not everyone — an Australian preacher said God was punishing Muslims for being Muslims, and, just to show Christians don’t have a monopoly on craziness, an Imam explained on TV that his Mosque survived because God uses disasters to punish evil people, not his lot. Back on planet earth, however, most people were touched by fellow feeling, powerfully affirming that God has made of one blood all his children upon earth.

There’s been a remarkable release of positive energy all over the world since Boxing Day.

Encouragingly, the generosity of ordinary people has often led the way. This is only a beginning, of course. We mustn’t let generosity now create a self-satisfied feeling later in the year that we’ve done our bit. Other needs continue to press themselves upon the real world. Remember Africa.

We still need structural solutions to poverty, including debt repayment. Encour- agingly, there do seem to be people at the heart of our government who really understand this need, and want to use the UK’s position in Europe and the world this year to help make poverty history.

How do we sustain positive awareness of unity among Christians, even when there isn’t a disaster to catalyse it? Turning back to the 2005 In-tray, I found the Windsor Report. There are single issue fanatics who think it’s all about sex. In fact, it’s all about Unity. Scripture urges us to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the Bond of peace. So what bonds should peace have? Legal? Ceremonial? Emotional? Historical? Geographic? Anglicans use all these, in various permutations.

First and foremost, real unity comes from Christ. We can’t create it by trying to be nice to each other, whipping everybody into line, or papering over the cracks. God has already created Unity for us in Christ, as a free gift, through the pain of the cross. Sadly, we aren’t always ready to receive this Unity for what it is, in the spirit it is given. Rather than imposing anything on all the others, we need to find ways of receiving for ourselves the peace Christ made on the cross, so that it changes our own awareness and attitudes.
This Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, worshipping with Christians from all over Milton Keynes, we prayed these words. They are by Arthur Gray, and used by the Iona community:

O Christ, the Master Carpenter, who at the last, through wood and nails, purchased our whole salvation: wield well your tools in the workshop of your world, so that we who come rough-hewn to your bench may here be fashioned to a truer beauty of your hand.We ask it for your own name’s sake. Amen.

The Bishop of Buckingham