There’s something about coming together that makes us stronger than when we are on our own. As you may know if you follow me on Twitter, I’m a massive fan of the Marvel Universe, particularly the Avengers franchise. What I love about the Avengers films, apart from the insane action sequences and Scarlett Johansson, is that they focus on the importance of trust and working together. For those who don’t know the films, the Avengers are a team of superheroes who are brought together to save the world from big threats like alien invasions or killer robots. When they first come together, although they are working together, they’re focussing on themselves, they try to one up each other, they don’t trust each other and they don’t work as a team and as a result they usually crash and burn. Then something happens that causes them to see the bigger picture, they realise they have to trust each other and work together, and they KICK ASS. They realise that when they try to come together without trusting each other and working as a team, their weaknesses and pride cause them to fail; but when they work together as a team and trust one another, suddenly what were their weaknesses become strengths and they realise, to quote Aristotle, “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” Unity is important for the Avengers, but it is infinitely more important for the Church. The Church has grown a lot since it began, from a handful of people in a prayer room in Jerusalem, there are now over 2 billion people in the world who identify as part of the Church. 2 billion people who believe in Jesus, who love him and try to live differently because of what he did 2000 years ago. Unfortunately, the Church is not united. We are so good at disagreeing and dividing that there are now over 41,000 denominations worldwide. The Church is splintered over almost every issue, from doctrine to music style, from ethics to the colour of the carpet, when we disagree we divide.
With such division, such disunity, it’s a surprise that we’ve lasted this long. You only need to turn on the news to see that disunity is giving the Church a lot of bad press. We are known disagreeing about almost everything, for refusing to bake cakes or cancelling our sponsorship of children in the third world. We are known for what we are against, and lets face it, that seems to be a lot.
But there is another way.
All over the world there are people recognising, as the Avengers did in 2012, that unity is better than division. People are realising that Jesus’ message of unrelenting love is bigger than any issue, stronger than any division and that maybe we should be focussing on that rather than our disagreements.
The core message of Jesus never changes. The message of the hope, love and grace that God has for us is far stronger than the issues we divide over. In her book Searching for Sunday Rachel Held Evans put Jesus’ message like this:
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“We could not become like God, so God became like us. God showed us how to heal instead of kill, how to mend instead of destroy, how to love instead of hate, how to live instead of long for more. When we nailed God to a tree, God forgave. And when we buried God in the ground, God got up.”
All over the world people are getting this message, Christians are showing the love of God through food banks, debt relief, homeless shelters, work in prisons, with the elderly, caring for the sick, schools, hospices, saving people from slavery, fighting poverty, serving the last the least and the lost and sharing God’s love with the world. As Christians we have a powerful message and commission to live and love the way Jesus did, and that could change the world. But if we continue to focus on that which divides us, the message gets lost.
In the book of Revelation, a pastor called John had a vision from God. Out of this came a glimpse into heaven, a bunch of really scary apocalyptic stuff that I’m not qualified to talk about and 7 letters from Jesus to 7 churches of that day. Like every letter in the New Testament, while they were written into specific situations and to specific churches, they somehow still speak to us. The first of the letters in Revelation is to the Church of Ephesus and starts like this:
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““I see what you’ve done, your hard, hard work, your refusal to quit. I know you can’t stomach evil, that you weed out apostolic pretenders. I know your persistence, your courage in my cause, that you never wear out.“But you walked away from your first love—why? What’s going on with you, anyway? Do you have any idea how far you’ve fallen? A Lucifer fall!
“Turn back! Recover your dear early love. No time to waste, for I’m well on my way to removing your light from the golden circle…” ”
“You walked away from your first love…”
Nicky Gumbel summed the message of this letter up like this:
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“The church should be famous for its love. Unconditional love breaks down barriers, puts people back on their feet, restores and heals.”
We need to be famous for love. The whole message of Jesus was from a place of unconditional, unrelenting and unending love. When we miss this, as happened with the church of Ephesus, we risk God removing our light from the world. We lose our effectiveness as people of God when we focus more on issues or disagreements than love. We just become, as Paul said in 1 Corinthians 13, “a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal”. Love speaks through our differences, through our disagreements and through our dysfunction.
Love brings unity.
What if the Church, the people of God, rather than disagreeing, debating, and arguing with each other and the world, chose to love? What if instead of trying to correct the world’s moral failings, we chose to love? What if we known not for what we are against, but what we are for? Known for loving at all costs, even if we don’t win the argument, even if people tell us it’s not deserved, even if it kills us.
Because love conquers all.
