3rd Sunday of Ordinary Time (1 Corinthians 1:10ff)

                When we drove to church today, how many places of worship did you pass by to arrive at Sacred Heart? A lot.  Most of those places were Christian in nature.  We may ask: "If they were all Christian, then why couldn’t we have stopped at the first religious site we came to, to offer our prayers?"  In a way, it is a scandal that the Christian religion is so divided.   Obviously, this isn’t what Jesus intended.  Most Christian Church’s would agree. For that reason, each year we have a week in January when many Christian denominations pray for Christian Unity. We end the celebration of the Octave of Christian unity this Sunday.

                From the earliest times there has been a struggle for concord in the church.  Perhaps this has to do with the human temptation to want to feel superior in religious knowledge.  The struggle is reflected in the First Letter to the Corinthians which we read from today.  The Corinthian church was always an unruly church.  Somehow the Christians in Corinth were always disagreeing about something, whether it was where people should sit at worship or who should be served communion first.

                Paul writes from Ephesus to the Corinthians.  The Corinthian Christians had divided themselves into factions.  The disagreement concerned which leader had the most authoritative teaching. The church had several charismatic preachers.  One leader was compared to another.  Some people claimed that they were Christian because of the ministry of St. Paul.  Paul’s adherents were probably gentile Christians.  Apollos was from Alexandria in Egypt which was an intellectual center in the ancient world. His disciples thought they were the most intellectual disciples, a cut above. Cephas was a surname for Peter. His disciples felt like they were superior because they were born Jewish.  And finally, we have those Corinthian Christians who thought they had a better knowledge of Christ than their peers.  None of the leaders seemed to be arguing with each other, but nonetheless, the church members were choosing sides.  Paul compares the Corithian church to a torn piece of cloth. 

                The Christian church has been divided into factions far too many times. We remember the great schism between Orthodox Christians and Latin rite Christians that occurred after the first millennium of the church’s history.  We could also point to the time of the Reformation as a time when the fabric of the church frayed.

                Have there been attempts to stitch the torn fabric of the church back together?  Yes, 60 years ago during the Second Vatican Council, the bishops had great debates over how the Catholic Church should relate to other churches.  Since the 16th Century, the stance of the Catholic Church had been that the Catholic church was right and everyone who wasn’t Roman Catholic was lost. 

                The bishops gathered at the Council had many arguments.  A small but vocal minority didn’t want to acknowledge that other religions had any redeeming features. Finally, in the last session of the council, two documents were ratified.  One was Dignitatis Humanae which said that freedom of religious practice was a basic human right. The other document was Nostra Aetate which espoused respect for the Jewish faith.  We take these ideas for granted today, but it wasn’t an easy task for the institutional church to realize that unity only comes about by seeking to understand and respect other faith traditions.

                No one would have thought in the early 20th century that they would ever see a Pope or bishop entering a Jewish synagogue or a mosque. No one would have thought the King of England, who is the leader of the Anglican faith, would come and pray with Pope Leo at the Vatican in 2025, yet we have seen these things happen in our time. Perhaps it is a sign of hope for our fractured world, where we are increasingly divided, that there can be peace and unity.  Maybe religious faith will be the force that can save humanity from self-destruction. If we share our beliefs about God, can we give charity toward each other? Our prayer might be the prayer that closed Dignitatis Humanae,

“May God the Father of all, grant that the human family, by carefully observing the principle of religious liberty in society, may be brought by the grace of Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit, to that 'glorious freedom of the children of God which is sublime and everlasting.'”