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Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father, from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
Brothers and sisters, looking at the Gospel reading today for the text, please be seated. Musicians are an interesting bunch. No, I’m not talking about our Minister of Music candidate in particular, so relax, Jonathan. I’m talking about musicians in general. They’re interesting. Certainly, musicians have some sort of talent, but oftentimes it’s the musician that appreciates their talent the most. That is to say, musicians have egos.
I once asked a music major at UT, “Do musicians have egos?” And they said, “Oh yes, just spend about five seconds at the UT School of Music and you’ll see that.” Musicians often think highly of themselves. They’re very self-conscious, they’re very self-interested, self-focused. They enjoy hearing themselves perform music; they have a concern for themselves and their talent. Musicians will even joke about this, and there are jokes like this: How does a lead singer change a lightbulb? Well, they just hold it in place and the world will revolve around them. Is a violin smaller than a viola? No, it’s not, it just looks that way because violin players’ heads are bigger. And how many trumpet players does it take to change a lightbulb? Well, just one, but there’ll be 15 other of them standing around saying how they would have done it better.
Musicians have egos. And I think one of the best places to see this on display is at a band or orchestra concert before the concert begins, okay? The audience is coming in and they’re sitting there, and the musicians kind of slowly trickle onto the stage. They usually don’t talk to anybody else; they just take their seat and sit there. They know people are watching them, so everything they do, they’re trying to look cool, okay? I know, because I’ve done this, all right? They sit there, check out their instrument, adjust their music on their stand, look around to check out who’s checking them out, and then they’ll start to warm up. But when they do, they only play music that they know really well, and they play it loud for others to hear. And if they make a mistake while they’re playing, they’ll look at their instrument and kind of make some adjustments like it was the instrument’s fault. You know, it’s pathetic. Soon the stage is full of musicians trying to be cool and look impressive—something like a collective group of egos. But then it happens.
The conductor comes out. The conductor walks onto the stage and gets on the podium, and it gets quiet. Everybody is focused on the conductor. The conductor then raises their arms and starts to lead the musicians in playing together. At that point, it’s no longer a collection of individual egos. They’re all together. They’re one, and they’re making beautiful harmonious music together. The conductor has stepped in, taken away the selfish oneness of the egos, and given them a new oneness of playing together.
In fact, the word symphony comes from a Greek word that means harmonious, or even more literally, to sound together. Behind the word is the meaning of agreeing, of agreeing with those that you’re with. And when musicians are led by the conductor, they agree to sound together. All concern for self disappears and they’re in harmony. In fact, this word for symphony is also the word that we get the word synod from. I’ll just let you deal with that one on your own. The synod doesn’t always agree with each other, does it?
Anyway, now there’s a lot of talk in the world sometimes among Christians that we need unity in Christianity. There are too many denominations, there’s too much disagreeing about practices and doctrines, and that we should all strive to be one. The verses that we just heard in the gospel reading today are often cited as those verses that say we’re supposed to be one. Jesus wants us to be one.
Now, John 17, the whole chapter, is a prayer. It’s called the high priestly prayer, where on the night of the Lord’s Supper, just after the Lord’s Supper with His disciples, Jesus then prays for them. He’s praying for them, but not just them. Maybe you caught that in the reading. Jesus prayed, “I’m praying also for those who will believe in me through their word,” through the teaching and message of the Apostles. Others were going to come to believe in Jesus, and He was praying for them. He’s talking about us, really, and others who would believe in Jesus through that same message.
So does Jesus mean that Christians should drop all of their differences and become completely one in all that they do? I don’t think so. But He’s praying about a oneness for His disciples that I think is a little bit bigger than that, actually.
First of all, Christians and all of humanity, we’re already one. We already have a oneness together, and Jesus is very concerned about that. To see this, we need to think back to the musicians, okay, that I was talking about. Because we’re all a lot like them. We, too, can think highly of ourselves and be self-conscious, self-promoting, self-interested. We like hearing ourselves. We have a concern and appreciation for our own talent. We, too, have egos. We like to admire ourselves. Basically, we’re all selfish. We all think that our way of changing light bulbs is the best.
More compactly, this is to say that we’re all sinful. We’re one in sin. We sound together in sin. Our whole world, all of us, it’s like a collective group of egos on a stage. But it happened.
The conductor came. The conductor walked onto the stage, and at a point in history, everybody was focused on Him when He got onto the podium of the cross and raised His arms and spread them out and was crucified on it and died there. Through this, the conductor leads His people and makes them one in the forgiveness of their sins. Of course, I’m talking about Jesus as our conductor. He leads us into that forgiveness of sins, taking the oneness of our sin that we all have together and giving us a oneness of salvation. We’re no longer a collective group of egos. We’re together and one in Christ. Sounding together, making harmonious music in His grace.
With Jesus as our conductor, He takes away the oneness of sin and gives us a oneness of forgiveness to those who believe in Him. In the prayer, Jesus talks about His oneness with the Father and that oneness being then with us. That close, that intimate, that fulfilling kind of oneness. That’s the oneness that Jesus wants for us, not just denominations dropping their names or dropping their doctrines or anything like that.
We’re always going to have some sort of differences in Christianity with different groups. This could be physically in locations or in cultures or any of those. We’re always going to have some sort of differences in that. But our oneness is always in Jesus. Ephesians chapter 4 says, “There’s one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of us all, but grace was given to each one of us according to the measure of Christ.”
That’s truly what makes us one. Not particularly some doctrines that we have, or some traditions that we have, or something about our culture that we have in Christianity, but the oneness of faith in Christ. We experience that oneness here at St. Paul every time we gather for worship. We experience it several times, actually, in worship.
Literally, we sound together several times in confession, we sound together the oneness of our sin, confessing that together and receiving the oneness of Christ’s forgiveness. Then we share that oneness. We move about shaking hands and sharing the peace of the Lord, that oneness that we share together, physically bringing it together in a handshake. We enjoy that oneness in the creeds when we confess them. We’re confessing the same message of Jesus that was confessed by the Apostles, that same message from 2,000 years ago. We still confess that today, that oneness together that we’re saying all together we believe in this, and we sound together in that confession.
This is what makes us one: that same message that Jesus passed to His Apostles and they’ve passed on to the entire world. We enjoy that oneness in Holy Communion. When we come together here to eat and drink, we sound together as we agree on what’s going on up here, but also in eating and drinking in the oneness of Christ’s forgiveness of our sins.
We have the privilege of passing on that oneness to others. I mean, why does Jesus want us to be one? He prays for us to be one for our benefit, yes, so that we can enjoy that oneness and sounding together and agreeing and making harmonious music in our Christian life together, but also for those who aren’t yet part of that oneness. Jesus wants us to be one for those who don’t yet believe in Him.
That’s very much what He said in the prayer. He prayed, “Father, may they also be in us so that the world may know that you sent me and love them.” Jesus wants us to be one so that the world will know about Him, so that we’re one in that same message that Jesus died and rose again for them.
We’re to be one for those that don’t yet believe in Jesus, who don’t know the Conductor, whose lives are maybe out of control and their egos have taken over and they’re only concerned about themselves and selfishness, and maybe they really want to change. They want something else; they’re looking for more in their life. And we have that for them. We can proclaim that oneness in Christ to forgive them and make them part of the oneness, too.
So Jesus, our conductor, if you will, He stands on the podium of the cross and brings us together in His death and resurrection. It’s not oneness that comes from our talent or our egos, but oneness in His salvation for us. May we always enjoy oneness under that same conductor. Amen.
And now may the peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus our Lord. Amen.
