Courtney McGrailCelebrating Week of Prayer for Christian Unity
Archbishop Michael Jackson
St Paul is among the most volcanic characters in the New Testament, yet the feast of his conversion every year draws us into the celebration and expectation of Christian unity. And Christian unity is unity with Christ and unity in Christ for all of us, as children of God and as people who journey in faith, hope and love.
However confused our own pathway in the journey of faith, however combative our relationship with our own church, indeed with any church, St Paul is here every year to smile encouragingly on us and on our endeavours. He reminds us of one thing particularly: it is not really ever all about us and our capacities and inadequacies. It is really about God.
God calls us into unity in God’s own time and in God’s own way. It is not the pride of man or earthly glory, as the hymn-writer expresses it, which gives glory back to the God of grace and the Lord of life.
It is God’s implanting of God in us through baptism that works this work and energises this energy for reconciliation of relationships and for fullness of life.
I say this not to diminish the contribution of any one individual to the disclosure of God’s kingdom into this world. All that watchful prayerfulness of Advent bears abundant fruit in the light of Epiphany and in the gift of salvation. I say it, rather, to affirm the channel of faith, hope and love that connects us, as dynamic members of the creation, to the dynamic Creator who is Lord of life.
Pathways of faith
Worship and blessing; glory and belonging; delight and adventure: these are pathways of faith, avenues of hope, highways of love into which God calls us as God’s children – born of God, not of the flesh, not of the will of man, but of God, as the Christmas Gospel tells it.
The great thing about St Paul is that he helps us to travel on when we feel we can’t. For St Paul, what gets him going and what keeps him going is resurrection. The pivot on which his door swings is the resurrection of Jesus Christ. This is what makes him so important for us, so radical and so difficult. This resurrection-life is what makes his conversion so interesting.
In Acts, we are told that, after his lightning vision, Paul was without sight for three days and neither ate nor drank. In other words, his own personal spiritual experience overlapped with the death and resurrection of Jesus. Once he came out of this, there was no holding Paul back. And that is why we need him in the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity.
Enterprise, mission, community, pastoral response, self-reliance, leadership and service – all of these things in the life of the Church we owe to St Paul.
One of the first things to fade and falter is hope. Like all of you, I see it in every generation. It is entirely human to need encouragement; and when we get it, we tend to thrive. All of us can feed our sorrows. We need even more to share our blessings. 2015 calls for a renewed sense of community in as uncomplicated a way as possible.
It is local, national and international. However hard it is for us to accept or understand it, the image of God is in the face of our neighbour and in our own face. And this is why we need to grapple with words like conversion.
Neighbours
Conversion also requires turning towards and turning with our neighbours if we are to hold the rhythm of life and the rhythm of hope in the harmony of God.
2015 comes on the back of a year of unimaginable international brutality and human sadness. It is already showing us evidence of more of the same. The suffering of people who witness and the witness of people who suffer, have come together in our time. We see it right across the world, whether we live in the Northern or the Southern hemisphere.
In this Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, the call of God to Christian people is for presence and engagement: being there and being involved. One of the most encouraging things St Paul says is in chapter 8 of the Letter to the Romans: hope is in the things not seen. Let us imagine that hope today. Let us act on it and let us live by it.
Archbishop Michael Jackson is the Church of Ireland Archbishop of Dublin.