Easter 7A Evensong: The Conversation Christ Began

Since the beginning of the US president’s second term, a stormy public debate has been unfolding. It began when Episcopal Bishop Mariann Budde urged the president to “have mercy” on frightened immigrant and LGBTQ communities - only to have her compassion dismissed by its audience as weakness.

As immigration crackdowns intensified, bishops and clergy across denominations have continued speaking about mercy, dignity, and the protection of the vulnerable - only to be labelled naive, partisan, or out of their lane. With the outbreak of further war in the Middle East, Pope Leo has also entered the conversation, challenging attempts to wrap nationalism and violence in divine endorsement - attracting rebuke from some for his theological confidence.

From this struggle of voices, has emerged the question:
Who gets to define our Christianity? And how does that shape our life together?

Today we begin the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity — a week grounded not in institutional glory, but in Jesus’ own prayer “that they may all be one.” One in a shared life born from baptism - one common calling to participate in the life and mission of Christ for the sake of the world.

Missional theologian Lesslie Newbigin once suggested that the Church itself the hermeneutic of the gospel. In other words, the world learns how to interpret the gospel by watching the way Christians live together. 

For better or worse, we become part of the message we proclaim. And our reading from Acts is honest about how partial and human that process can be.

The Ascension has just occurred. Jesus is no longer physically present, and the Church must now learn how to continue the conversation and life the Christ began. So the eleven gather. They pray. They draw on scripture. They discern. Peter proposes that another take Judas’ place. Criteria are established. Matthias is chosen.

This process matters as much as the outcome. The first act of the post-Ascension Jesus followers is not assertion, but discernment  — listening together for what faithfulness requires of their changed context. But in the outcome there is also evidence of how unfinished this early Church still is.

Although the gospels describe women who meet Peter’s criteria — women who travelled with Jesus from Galilee and stood among the first witnesses to the resurrection — the discernment process does not even imagine them as possible successors among the twelve. And the narrowing of that horizon would go on to shape centuries of Christian history and women’s vocations within it.

Yet the formation of the Church does not stop in that upper room. From this beginning, the church has been continually shaped by the courage, wisdom, and long persistence of far more people than the apostles could possibly recognise. Women, migrants, the poor, new converts, reformers, contemplatives, and ordinary faithful people continued to preach, teach, pray, lead communities, sustain ministries and nurture faith - pressing the Church toward a deeper theology and fuller humanity.

Christianity is, in part, a faith made wiser through participation.

It is one of the quiet miracles of this ever-becoming Church: the Spirit often speaks not through the loudest voices or the quickest solutions, but through the faithfulness of people willing to show up and persist in the conversation. 

I think that is something of increasing importance to us, because the questions before us are not temporary questions. War, nationalism, migration, climate crisis, poverty, exclusion, human dignity — these are not problems solved within an election cycle, a news cycle, or a funding model. They require communities capable of memory, patience, repentance, life-giving sacrifice, and a hope. They require the response of people willing to take the long view and remain answerable not only to the urgency of the day, but to the Kingdom of God and to its Rule of Love unfolding among us.

Which is why the shared witness of Bishop Budde, Pope Leo, and church leaders across traditions is, for me, a sign of hope. 

They are not identical in theology or practice, but they are committed to that long conversation the Christ began with us — a conversation about the embodiment of mercy, justice, truth and what it means to be truly united in our common vows to be for God, for each other, and for this world.

As we begin this week of prayer for Christian Unity may it be so for us also.
For the sake of this world God loves.