nakedpastor

Today we are helping our son Jesse move to Fredericton to begin his B.A. studies. So I won’t be with a computer today. But I just want to share with you a story I told my community on Sunday:

I have a brother two years younger than I who has lived out west for decades. He left home when he was 16 for reasons I don’t need to get into. I’ve seen him only a matter of days these past 30 years. We hardly ever talk on the phone. But when we do talk, there’s a connection there, excuse the pun. I can’t explain it. We don’t see eye to eye on hardly anything. We aren’t on the same page in hardly any sphere. But when we talk we can talk for an hour. We can feel the love. The foundation of that love is not intellectual agreement, spiritual affinity, religious resemblance, personality compatibility, political likeness or anything else. Our union is that we have the same mother and father, period.

It’s the same with unity in the Spirit. The basis for our unity is not theology, denomination, belief, worship music style, liturgy, personal compatibility or anything like that. It is something that has happened that is beyond my control. Just like my birth parents form the foundation of my relationship and unity with my brother, so what God has done through Jesus, continuously applied by the Spirit, is the foundation of the unity with all people, regardless of religion, race, sexuality, culture or whatever. All efforts at visible unity are based on an invisible unity already secured and already real.