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God’s will and Christ’s prayer

Extract from a homily given by the Rev John Miller, Moderator of the Presbytery of Glasgow, at Glasgow Churches Together's Unity Week service in January 2005. You can download the whole talk as a pdf (56kb).

A couple of years ago I was looking at the way Christianity is evaporating from our culture, and the young generations turning their back on the Church.

One evening I was particularly down-hearted about it and I felt that the Church simply wasn’t anxious enough about the situation. So I went out to gather evidence ...

... I had gone out into the street expecting to find people thinking the Church had nothing of value to say to them.

But in the event, they were affirming that the gospel already spoke to them.

They could tell the difference between the un-failing God and God's all-too-fallible servants, between Jesus and his far-from-perfect followers.

Even our divisions, all too prominent in people’s lives as the man said to me, even our divisions have not obscured the face of Christ. But Christ prays for us to have unity.

And where is our unity to be found?

Not in our history for it is history of division. Not in our common humanity, for though we are moved to compassion in the face of suffering we have often inflicted suffering on one another in the name of the Lord.

No, our unity comes only from our common dependence on Christ. In our service today we have this image before us of Christ the one true foundation on whom we build.

The world needs us to find the way for Christianity to relate well to Islam. We can do this only if we relate well to one another. But again, we seek unity not because the world needs it of us, but because it is God’s will and Christ’s prayer.