John 17:20-26
[Jesus prayed:] “I ask not only on behalf of these, but also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me. Father, I desire that those also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory, which you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world.
“Righteous Father, the world does not know you, but I know you; and these know that you have sent me. I made your name known to them, and I will make it known, so that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them.”
In the late 1880s a group of pioneering men set out from Minnesota and headed west. They made the arduous journey across the expanse of the American Great Plains, then across the great continental divide of the Rockies, and continued through the mountainous regions of the coastal ranges to Seattle.
There they secured the services of a boat to take them deep into Canadian waters, beyond the north end of Vancouver Island to Burke Channel. They landed at Bella Coola, trekked 20 kilometres inland, and there made camp. Although they were not the first people of European descent to visit that spot, they were the first to stay.
That year they worked hard to carve a settlement out of the dense cedar forest. Using only cross-cut saws, broad-axes, and other hand-tools, they felled trees, and bucked the logs into manageable lengths. These they split them into four-by-twelve timbers with which they built a refined style of log-house for each of the families represented.
For these men indeed had families waiting back in Minnesota – wives and children who would join them the following spring, once houses had been built and other rudiments of survival put into place. At first they called their settlement “Krisitiana,” which was the former name for Oslo, but later they switched to “Hagensborg.” Both names, of course, have a distinctly Norwegian ring. That’s because these people were Norwegians and Americans of Norwegian heritage.
The motivation to leave the American midwest and come to Canada were typical of that era: pretty well all the farmland in the Midwestern USA had become very expensive; many people had suffered the hardship of repeated crop failures; the Canadian government was offering land to pioneers practically free of charge; and, above all, the colonists believed that church and society were going to hell.
They wanted to create a society of people united in Godly vision and purpose. For theirs was not simply a colony of pioneering settlers; it was also self-consciously a homogeneous ethnic and religious community.
They were all pietistic Lutherans, led by Pastor Christian Saugstad, who had heard of the Bella Coola valley from an anthropologist who had studied the valley’s unique petroglyphs and had gone on a lecture tour that took him to the American Midwest. Saugstad had organized this colony – people who, like himself, wanted a new life united by a singleness of purpose: to create a society of Christian faith, separate from the rest of society and set apart for a holy life.
The religious and moral code of the community was very strict. And so, when the group of men who preceded their families had landed at Vancouver on their way up the coast, and one man went to a pub for a drink, upon hearing of it Pastor Saugstad immediately expelled the man from the colony. Everyone had to toe the same moral line.
As soon as they were able, these colonists erected a church building, naming it the Augsburg Church – a typical name for Norwegians of the Lutheran Free Church. (That church building still stands today and still bears that name, even though the responsibilities for ministry were handed over to the United Church of Canada in the mid-20th century. It’s now a museum.)
Worship services were conducted every Sunday, and religious instruction was provided every day … and not just for the children. Everyone had to memorize extensive portions of Holy Scripture and Luther’s Small Catechism. Under the leadership of its Pastor, every member was instructed according to the same faith, the same vision, the same purpose.
And everyone spoke Norwegian.
I know about all this because I have met a number of people who were born in Hagensborg. Two of the congregations that I have served in Metro Vancouver each had a descendant of the colony. And one of Lorraine’s pastors when she was growing up (and a dear friend of Lorraine’s family), the late Rev. John Lokken, was a product of that unified society.
And it was indeed unified. You couldn’t have asked for more unity than what you got at Hagensborg.
But it was a unity achieved by sameness: same land, same vocation, same houses, same rather desperate household economics, same language, same books, same pastor. It was unity through sameness.
Here’s what I want to know: Is unity possible through difference?
When Jesus anticipates his departure from his disciples and his return to his Heavenly Father, he prays a long prayer to his heavenly Father in which one of the most important themes is unity. Jesus wants his people to be unified in faith and purpose. In fact, Jesus says that the credibility of our witness to him depends upon our unity. If we are not unified then people will not believe that the Heavenly Father has sent the Son to save the world from sin and its effects. In fact, Jesus implies, our lack of unity is itself a sign of our sin.
Jesus’ prayer is a very tender prayer, but what he prays for turns out to be very tough. For if there is one thing that characterizes the church, it’s the lack of unity. In North American Lutheranism alone, about 100 years ago there were over 65 different autonomous Lutheran groups. Now we’re down to about a dozen distinct Lutheran Church bodies in North America, some of which are very small and ethnic in origin, while others are quite large (although all are now shrinking).
Why so many different autonomous church bodies? For those that have been founded here on the North American continent, no longer is it because of ethnicity or geography or anything like that, but because of differences of opinion, differences of belief, differences of teaching and doctrine. And beyond Lutheranism, of course, there’s a wide variety of denominations, some of which seem to exist for the sole purpose of calling the others heretics.
And that’s just in the western world. There is a bigger, more fundamental rift in the Christian church that came into being over one millennium ago, in the year 1054, when the Roman church and the Eastern Orthodox church went their separate ways. There were various factors that led to that split, including geography, politics, and power. It wasn’t just a matter of doctrine, although that was an important issue, too.
But that’s nothing new. That’s how it has been down through the ages for Christians in every time and every place.
I feel all this keenly, because I want the whole world to know that God-the-Father has sent God-the-Son into the world for the sake of new life and salvation for all people. Moreover, Jesus says that our witness is compromised by our lack of unity. If unity is an ideal that Jesus holds up for us, then it seems that it’s always beyond our reach. And it sometimes makes me wonder about the credibility of our mission in Christ.
The world has noticed this, too. People have seen the internal rifts in the Christian church and have become weary and wary. Some people have said as much to me. They wonder how we can be Christians and still suffer such powerful and often acrimonious internal differences.
Some churches have responded by dropping their denominational names from their titles. So now it’s no longer “Willingdon Mennonite Church” in Burnaby, but simply “Willingdon Church.” Now it’s not “Broadway Pentecostal Tabernacle” in Vancouver but simply “Broadway Church.” Or they may replace their denominational name with the word, “community.” So in Glendale, Arizona, the “Lutheran Church of Joy” changed its name to “Community Church of Joy.”
That’s what people want to hear. People want comm-unity. They want to satisfy their feelings for togetherness and oneness. Whatever else they may want from religion, it seems that people want these two things: feelings of togetherness and feelings of oneness.
Do you know what I want? I want a unity that is not created by human hands. I am suspicious of a unity that glosses over differences. I am convinced that any unity which seeks sameness is not only bound to fail but will produce even more human misery than that which it seeks to overcome.
The religious colony of Hagensborg BC is gone. It began to disintegrate in the 1950s when the road that eventually became Highway 20 was finally punched through the coastal mountains, winding its up onto the Chilcotin Plateau, and connecting Hagensborg (and Bella Coola) with Williams Lake. But long before that, the colony sagged under its own weight. It collapsed internally because it was built largely upon a human drive for sameness.
And that drive for human sameness will not carry the day.
We need to be realistic about our profound differences as human beings. Let’s not pretend. Let’s not delude ourselves into dreaming that we can ignore those differences. Let us not be afraid to be distinctive.
I am a Lutheran Christian. That is a unique and distinctive voice in the panoply of the Christian faith. I don’t apologize for that, even though I know that when I express as clearly as I can the radical nature of grace in God’s redemption in this distinctly Lutheran way, other Christians may become unsettled and turn away to seek something more comfortable.
But I am not going to quit proclaiming the Good News of God in Jesus Christ according to the faithful tradition in which I was raised and trained.
At the same time I pray and yearn for the unity of the church of Jesus Christ. It’s a unity that derives from the internal unity of God. For Jesus prays to his Heavenly Father: “The glory that you have given me, I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, so that they may be completely one.”
What that requires of me, I believe, is a fervent quest for the truth of God, coupled with the resolve to proclaim it faithfully, for the sake of the new life of faith; while at the same time recognizing that other people of God are doing the same, as different as we may be.
What I’m talking about is respect – respect, patience, and a willingness to listen together with the compulsion to speak. What I’m talking about is love – the love that begins with God and finds its expression in our convictions that God has made each of us unique, even as God calls us together into one people.
This is unity with a difference. This is unity created and sustained by the Holy Spirit. Apart from the Spirit, we are incapable of unity. But because of Jesus Christ, God lavishes the gifts of the Spirit upon us – first and foremost the gift of faith itself. And together with that faith will surely come a desire for unity and the thirst for the well-being of all God’s people.
Dear friends in Christ: let us take up life together in this faith. Let us express our unity in the love that begins with the Holy Trinity: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.
Peace be with you all.