A commitment to healing, unity

Contemporary preachers have not always served us well, acting more like shock jocks and provocateurs, eager to stir rivalry to improve ratings rather than as servants of gospel unity. St. Paul, who was first and foremost a preacher, provides a model in need of restoration. Preaching is a labor of love at the service of a demanding agenda for justice, peace and reconciliation.

Dominican Father Timothy Radcliffe, a global voice for reconciliation in the church, put the challenge succinctly: "Ultimately the church will only be a credible witness to peace in the world if we learn how to be at peace with each other, and with ourselves."

The struggle of the church Paul knew in his time bears some resemblance to our own current struggles over unity. The difference is we have had 2,000 years to read the paschal pattern of death and rebirth that has always been the secret of the church's astonishing capacity to recast her mission and adapt her structures to an ever-changing world.

Paul's preaching helped spur and shape the outward expansion of the Jesus movement, first into the Jewish diaspora and then into the vast, rich religious cultures of the pagan world. It is hard for us to imagine Paul's mission to establish Christian communities across Asia Minor and beyond.

There was no creed, no developed theology, no structure, no pope, no liturgical norms - only the preaching, fueled by Paul's passionate belief that God had spoken decisively in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, revealed as the source of divine life for all who hear his gospel of forgiveness and regeneration.

Paul's dramatic conversion from persecutor to tireless broker of the Jesus movement became the road map for the tumultuous history of the early church. Without Paul (or another genius like him), the story of Jesus of Nazareth, the crucified and risen Christ, might have remained a small heresy within Judaism, swept away like so many other subsets when Jerusalem was destroyed in 70 A.D.

The birth of the new church was difficult in all respects. In his own poignant recounting of the trials that accompanied his preaching, Paul put beatings, imprisonment, shipwreck and the constant risks of the road well behind his greatest suffering, which he called "my anxiety over the churches." What were these? Chief among them were dissension and rivalry within the church itself. Spies from the "mother" church of James in Jerusalem dogged Paul's missionary journeys, insisting that circumcision and full observance of the Mosaic Law were required of all converts, undermining Paul's insistence that grace in Christ alone was what saved.

In her book, Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith, author Anne Lamott tells of a man who worked with the Dalai Lama. "And he said ... they believe when a lot of things start going wrong, it is to protect something big and lovely that is trying to get itself born - and that this something needs for you to be distracted so that it can be born as perfectly as possible."

Paul the preacher would understand the image. Something big and lovely is at stake in our church today. How can we protect and nurture what God is doing for us and for our troubled, divided world? The death to self and ego required for ordinary conversation with those with whom we disagree seems a small sacrifice for church unity.

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