All God’s church together

Wearing a suit and clerical collar, I was once on my way to an appointment at St Mary’s Cathedral in Sydney. My route took me through Hyde Park, where city workers and tourists ignored me. People sleeping rough on the park benches, however, looked up, since they received support from Christians at the cathedral and the nearby St James Anglican Church. Thinking I was a priest of one of those churches, a homeless man called out to me, ‘God bless you, Father’.

Around the same time, I hailed a cab from my office in the city. The driver asked me what I did and I told him I worked for the Christian churches. His immediate response was: ‘Those priests – how could they do that to those little children?’ Revelations of sexual abuse in church-based institutions had just hit the media.

Both experiences are reminders of the interconnectedness of all Christians. When one is praised, all are praised. When one sins, all are guilty. Society today does not distinguish between us as neatly as we do between ourselves. People aren’t interested in doctrinal divergence, ecclesiastical structures, 2000 years of church history, or the ways in which we self-define. They think and judge in the moment, and the only evidence they require is what they see and hear in the moment. To society, it’s all just ‘religion’ these days, and religion is a tarnished commodity.

The worst defence is when Christians use the argument, ‘We are not like those others’. Unfortunately, in the ways that count, we are (Matthew 18:9–14). If we show that we think we are somehow better, we bring the whole body of Christ into disrepute. People easily see it for the hypocrisy it is.

Christians belong to one another. Even more, we are to love one another, speak well of one another, and defend one another (see the explanation of the eighth commandment in Luther’s Small Catechism). We must learn to understand, therefore, that we belong to a body, a family, which God creates and calls into being. It is his church, not ours. And God invites into it everyone he loves (Matthew 22:9). So the church cannot be a limited, exclusive group. God doesn’t love just a select few, he loves the world (John 3:16). The Epistle to the Hebrews tells us that we are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses who draw us to Jesus, ‘the pioneer and perfecter of our faith’ (Hebrews 12:1). John’s Revelation speaks of the church which cannot be numbered (Revelation 7:9).

So while we often treat the ecumenical nature of the church as an optional extra, faith doesn’t know those limitations. Lutherans hold to Scripture and Confession, but that must not be seen as an act of separation or superiority. Confession means declaring the faith, and our formal Confessions begin with the three ancient ecumenical creeds. The Augsburg Confession of 1530 is a defence within the church and before the world of the true catholicity of the Lutheran faith. So our confessional beliefs are a loving conversation within the family, a conversation we must have for the good of the whole body.

It does no-one any good if we simply stand apart. For, like it or not, we are all part one of another. That’s how the world sees us and so does God.