17 Jun 08 - Some Thoughts on Unity

Unity is one of those “touchy” subjects. You hear it all the time in civic and church discussions. There seems to be a deeply ingrained longing for unity and an equally nagging fear of disunity. You can hear many examples of this longing for unity in Scripture, especially in the New Testament. Consider what Paul asks of his Philippian congregation, “Beloved, I urge Euodia and Syntyche to think alike in the Savior.” (Philippians 4:2) Here Paul is asking the congregation as a whole to help these two power women work for the same purpose. And Luke paints us a portrait of unity in the early church when he wrote, “Now the multitude of those believers were united as one heart and soul.” (Luke 4:32) And in a more chilling call for unity, the High Priest of those days said in so many words, “It is better for one to be eliminated so that the precious unity of our faith can be maintained.” (Paraphrase of John 18:14) We hear this cry today from many leaders when they tell us to hide part of who we are or stop doing something we love for what they consider to be for the better of the whole.

But God has something to say about this unity. God warns us that too much of a good thing can be bad. In the story of Babel in Genesis 11, Humanity was all united and was seeking to build a temple which would reach as high as the Heavens above. God “came down,” realized this was not a good thing, and intentionally disunited our ancestors by giving them the gift of different languages and cultures. No longer able to coordinate their massive building project, it fell into ruins as everyone went in search of a home they could call their own. By this confusion that God created, God was able to retain control — and that means that ultimately it is God’s Responsibility to unify us across all of our differences, because God was the One who created those differences. To go one more step, that means that Unity is in the Godhead and is something we can participate in but never fully achieve until we enter Paradise.

Historically we have paid a terrible price in war and other forms of strife because of disunity. We have also not been able to develop cures for diseases, nor have we been able to feed all the world’s hungry because of economic disunity. But look at what we have gained from intentional human acts of disunity: our Protestant faith was born out of our split with Catholicism, as indeed our Christian faith was from Judaism. Our country was born by disuniting from the United Kingdom, and how impoverished would be the whole world without the example of our Constitution — born to unite colonies which had won their freedom by disunion. And where would we be as various ethnic, racial, and sexual communities if we had not broken away from the mainstream to consolidate and live into our identities even as we maintain faith with a larger civic and faithful whole? In other words, it is not as simple as unity is good and disunity is bad.

Jesus sought to bring us to a workable state of unity when he asked us to love our neighbors as ourselves (Mark 12:31). But Jesus never told us to be our neighbor, or even to be just like our neighbor. No, there is only so much unity that Jesus wanted for us — Jesus well knows that too much unity like too much power can corrupt Humanity. Unity can help foster peace and efficiency, but too much unity can trivialize and diminish people’s lives.

So we have Humanity’s longing for unity and God/Jesus’ Cautions about having too much unity. We must seek a middle way between these two poles: a place in the sun that allows us to be who we are while helping others to be who they are.