John 17: 1–11
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May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable
in your sight, O Lord our strength and our redeemer. Ame
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Last winter, on paper, I began to plan a new sunny garden, full of
flowers. I started carefully, cautiously, spending a fair amount
of time poring over garden catalogues and ordering plants online. I
was trying to work out which flowers might look good together, all
blooming in harmonious colors at roughly the same time. But as
soon as I clicked onto one flowering plant site, six others took notice
and began to send me their online catalogues, their
urgent “don’t miss out” kinds of offers.
Before long, I’d thrown caution to the wind, and fallen for more of
their offers than my garden actually had room for. So, this winter I
wasn’t just tempted – I was totally enticed by all
those images of beautiful gardens in glorious bloom.
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Now, finally, many of the plants I ordered are flourishing
together out in that sunny bed. Each flower is beautiful in its
own way. But the total effect of all of them, blooming together,
is a little wilder than I had planned on. I thought I knew what
I wanted. But I ended up with much, much more. The red,
white and pink roses are blooming alongside yellow, orange and salmon
pink Asiatic lilies. The oakleaf hydrangeas are fighting for
room with the black and blue salvia. And it’s anybody’s
guess whether the blue and white plumbago will prevail over the masses
of lavender I planted earlier around the edges of the bed. Then,
of course, there are the plants that were already there – the
gardenias and the hydrangeas. So, it’s hardly the sedate
garden, the carefully planned cottage garden I thought I was
getting. But you know what? Even in its wild, unplanned
state, my garden this year is beautiful, and I’m celebrating the
diversity.
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I think of that garden today as I read Jesus’ prayer for the unity
of the Church. Just before his crucifixion, Jesus prays to the
Father that every member of his Body may be one with one another, just
as He and the Father are one. But over the centuries the unity he
prayed for has been elusive. Instead, there have been
disagreements, disharmonies, outright schisms in
the Body of Christ – hardly the Church Jesus’ prayer led us
to expect. Even so, our Lord has breathed his life into each and
every one of us and has never left our side. So, despite our
denominational differences of doctrine and creed, liturgy and
theology, by the grace of the Holy Spirit, we are one in our love for
Him. And somehow, that love unites us. Somehow, that love
for Him makes us resemble one another in more ways than we know.
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How so many different points of view, so many different styles of
worship can finally blend together into a single complementary whole,
a glorious Church without spot or wrinkle, is a paradox I won’t
even try to explain. Yet, time and again, in ways we can’t
explain, it happens. Maybe we can understand it better when we
think of harmonies in music. And this week I came across a
stunning example of musical harmony – this one, drawn from one
man’s experience in a boys’ choir, years ago. Today,
Paul Sullivan is a composer and concert pianist, but he remembers
vividly the experience that introduced him to the possibilities of
harmony that music can offer.
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“ On a September morning when I was nine years old,” he
writes, “I showed up for the first day of our choir school in
Boston. I was one of forty boys raging around the choir room,
whooping and babbling and trying to find our assigned seats, when
suddenly the choir master entered, and the room fell silent. He
smiled gently at us and told us to open our hymn books to a particular
page, where we found a Bach chorale. He played our starting notes
quietly on the piano, paused for a moment of silence and gave us a
downbeat. What happened next changed me forever.”
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“Timidly, I floated my little note out into the room, where it
merged and dissolved into a lustrous, shimmering world of sound. I
could still hear my note, but it had been transformed. It hung with
the thirty–nine others in a huge golden cloud of harmony. As
the measures rolled by, I had to hold on hard to my own notes and not
be seduced or distracted by the passing tensions and dissonances which
the other parts created. Yet at the same time I was almost
physically lifted off the floor by the beautiful river of music we were
creating together. In a breath–taking magic trick, all of
those shouting, fractious little boys, many of whom had never met, were
now intimately, completely connected, utterly unified until the final
note of the hymn.”
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“Although my instrument eventually changed from voice to piano,
that moment ignited something in me as a musician that stays with me
still. In the nearly forty years since then, I have performed in
venues humble and grand, and I am always struck by the power of music
to draw people together . . . [to]
connect us all with something larger than ourselves.”
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In that eloquent memory of a Bach chorale, performed by forty talented
boys willing to follow their conductor’s lead, Paul Sullivan shows
us how different voices can work together in harmony – no part
extraneous, no part unneeded or unattractive. Our differences, in
fact, can complement the whole — rather than disturb or distract
from it. And as Paul Sullivan notes, altogether those differences
somehow attract others to us rather than driving them away.
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As it is in music, so it is in flower gardens . .
. and so it was in the Christian Church, spreading
throughout the world during the first few centuries of the common
era. We conceive of unity and harmony one way. But God the
Holy Spirit is much more creative, much more inclusive, much more loving
than we can imagine. From the beginning, there was one Lord, one
faith and one baptism. But beyond that basic unity, no two
churches did things the same way. They had different liturgies,
different hymns, different customs — and certainly different
theologies – to explain it all. Yet, by the grace of the
Holy Spirit — the differences between them have finally enriched
the Church, rather than diminishing it. And we are still
discovering, still learning to appreciate that marvelous diversity.
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To God be the glory for the things he has done.
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Amen.
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