Thanks, Tom. Hello, everyone. As Tom said, my name is Nathan Barzey. It's a delight to be with you again. I am a pastor at Christ the King Church in Newton. In Newton, we have been preaching our way through the Gospel of John. And we have made it as far as, we're actually a little bit into chapter 18 now, so I'm backing up a few weeks. and preaching a sermon that I preached there a few weeks ago in the Gospel of John chapter 17 verses 20 to 26, if you want to turn there now. Just to give you a little bit of background, if you're not familiar with this text, This is a little bit unfair. I am parachuting into the middle of one of the most significant texts in the entire Bible. This is on the tail end of the conversation that Jesus has with his disciples on the night that he's betrayed. In John's gospel, that goes from chapter 13 through 17. So this comes at the end of that. And I'll make reference to a few things that he says there because he very much builds on what he's been saying in this last chapter. But I'm also dropping you into the middle of John 17, this chapter, which is sometimes referred to as Jesus's high priestly prayer, where having spoken to his disciples on the night that he's betrayed, he now turns and speaks to his father. And you gotta stop and just ponder the mystery of what this is and and just wonder at the fact that we Get to read it that we get to hear it. This is a conversation Between two persons of the Trinity, right? This is this is the eternal Son of God Who has been made flesh and dwelt among us speaking to his father and that is an amazing thing that we get to read this and and maybe more amazing than that is is the fact that as we get to hear what he says, what he says is a prayer for the church. In the first 19 verses that we're not going to look at, he prays for his disciples. And then when he gets to verse 20, he turns a corner and he prays for us. And us, I mean us in this room, right? He says, he says right at the outset, I do not pray for these, the disciples alone, but also for those who will believe in me through their word. And if Paul's right that faith comes by hearing and hearing through the word of Christ, that means that every one of us that's here that would call ourselves a Christian that has faith in Christ, hearing the words of Jesus' disciples, the apostles and the others that were inspired to write holy scripture, that's a big reason that we have faith at all. And so I just wanted to set the scene and just realize what we're reading here. This is a prayer for us personally in this room. So let me read this. This is John chapter 17, verses 20 to 26. Jesus is speaking. I do not pray for these alone, but also for those who will believe in me through their words. that they all may be one, as you, Father, are in me and I in you, that they also may be one in us, that the world may believe that you sent them, and the glory which you gave me I have given them, that they may be one just as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may be perfect, that they may, excuse me, that they may be made perfect in one, and that the world may know that you have sent me, and have loved them as you have loved me. Father, I desire that they also, whom you gave me, may be with me where I am, that they may behold my glory, which you have given me, for you loved me before the foundation of the world. O righteous Father, the world has not known you, but I have known you, and these have known that you sent me. And I have declared to them your name, and will declare it, that the love with which you loved me may be in them and I in them. This is the word of the Lord. Would you bow your heads and hearts and pray with me before we come to this passage. Father in heaven, this truly is an amazing text. It's a text that on the one hand makes us all feel that we're not worthy to hear it. And I certainly feel the weight, the awesome and solemn weight of preaching it. And at the same time, our hearts just overflow with gratitude that we get to read these words, that we get to see how Jesus has spoken to his people. Father, I pray as we look at this passage, that the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts may be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our rock and our redeemer. Amen. So as I said, we get here to read a prayer that Jesus offers for us. And what does he pray for? What he prays for is unity. He prays for the unity of the church. He prays that they may be one. He even prays in superlative terms that they may be one as he and his father are one. So what I want to look at as we look at this passage is three things. First of all, I just want to sketch. just briefly sketch out what unity is, the way that Jesus is talking about it. I'm just gonna sketch this just to get a definition out there. You'll see, even in getting just a brief definition out there, we get into some pretty deep theological waters right away. This is a deep and profound mystery that Jesus is talking about when he prays for the unity of the church. The second thing, though, having just put that brief definition out there, is that I think it'll be helpful if we take a look at what unity is not. In other words, if we take a look at other concepts of unity, things that we would normally hear about in the world that we live in, and see that this is really not what Jesus is talking about. I think that'll be clarifying for us in understanding what it is that he's talking about. And then, having said what unity is and what it's not, then I wanna come back and talk practically. What does unity do? What does it mean? What's the impact that it has? So, what unity is, what it's not, and then what it does. So, first of all, the way that Jesus talks about unity, he talks about it in two ways in this passage. On the one hand, you can think of it as an organic union with Christ, that we are united to him. We are made one with Christ. And in being made one with Christ, we're united to the life of the Trinity. Like I said, we're gonna get deep fast here. And in that life of the Trinity is this mutual constant circle of glorification and honor Jesus has been saying a lot throughout all of John's gospel, but especially in these last several chapters He's been talking about how his mission more than anything else is to glorify the father when he talks about setting the spirit He says what the spirit is gonna do is glorify me that I might glorify the father the spirit will point you to me glorifying the father so there's always this circle and In being united to Christ, we're taken right up into that. Augustine talked about unity in exactly this way, as being a union of love, a union of what it is that we love most of all. Here's what Augustine said in The City of God. He said, a people, we may say, is a gathered multitude of rational beings united by agreeing to share the things they love. Okay, so for Augustine, what made a people a people, what united them together was the fact that they all agreed about what was most worth loving, what was most valuable, what to put at the center of their lives, right? And so earlier in the city of God, this is how he defines the city of God over against the city of man, right? He says, there's two cities. created by two kinds of love, the earthly city created by self-love and the heavenly city by the love of God. Right, so for Augustine, what makes a people a people, what makes them one, what unites them, is that they all agree about what's most worth loving. Look at how Jesus talks in this passage about the love of Father, Son, and Spirit. that grounds the unity that he's praying for. He says it three different times, and conveniently, it's in the even-numbered verses, okay, 22, 24, 26. In 22, he talks about the glory that you have given to me, I've given to them. In 24, he says, I desire that they also, whom you've given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory. that you have given me because you loved me. And then in 26, he prays that the love with which you have loved me may be in them. Right, so three different times, as he's praying for unity, he says that what's gonna ground their unity is that they are going to love God, that we are going to love God, that we are going to love Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Just the way he, throughout his life, has loved his father. And the father has loved him. And again, when he talks about setting the spirit, that's what the spirit is going to do as well. So on the one hand, unity is defined by this relationship of love that we're taken up into. At the same time, it is an organic unity to Christ in particular. So we talk about being united to Jesus in particular, because he's the one that took on our nature. He's the one who's the Word made flesh. He took on our nature in order to stand in our place, to die the death that we were meant to die, and then to be raised to new life, which if we put our faith in him, then just as we're united with him in death, Paul says we're also united with him in that life. In the same verses I just read, Jesus also talks about unity as being an organic unity with him. In 24, again, he prays that they may be with me where I am. And then even more explicitly, the end of verse 26, that the love with which you have loved me may be in them and I in them. So very, very explicit there. One of the commentators that I read summed it up in this way. He said, the unity that Jesus is talking about is such that we are taken up into that mutual honoring, which is a participation in the being of God. That's what Jesus is praying over here. So as I said, we've gotten very deep very quickly. And I just wanted to get that definition out there. It's an organic unity with Christ, and it's a unity of love. It's a unity in which we are united by holding God, Father, Son, and Spirit as being most worthy of worship, most worthy of love. That's the kind of unity that Jesus is talking about. I'm gonna put a pin in that, because now, I want to turn a corner and talk about what unity is not. If that's the kind of unity that Jesus is talking about, I want to talk about three forms of unity that we're used to talking about in the world that isn't what Jesus has in mind, and which I'll argue isn't as robust, isn't as strong, can't be an eternal ground of unity for us. I want to talk about three different kinds of unity On the one hand, you might call these democratic unity, secondly, imperial unity, and lastly, religious unity. Okay, so democratic, imperial, and religious. Democratic unity, this is the one that we're the most familiar with. Okay, this is the one that we hear about all the time. This is the idea that in a pluralistic society, in a democracy, we can have unity because we all hold to some kind of common vision. that we collaborate together on, right? When I quoted Augustine a few minutes ago, talking about common objects of love, some of you might have said, wait, I've heard that before. I've heard that quote. It came up in President Biden's inaugural address. Okay, when he was inaugurated, here's what he said. So this is January 20th, 2021. He said, many centuries ago, St. Augustine wrote that a people was a multitude defined by the common objects of their love. There's the quote. Then he went on, here's what Biden said. President Biden said, what are the common objects we love that define us as Americans? I think I know. Opportunity, security, liberty, dignity, respect, honor, the truth. Those are all good things. I'm not saying those are bad things. And I'm not saying that it's a bad thing for people to be united in pursuit of things like that or to have a common vision that they're working towards. The problem is that kind of unity is fragile. It's not robust enough. I probably don't have to convince you of this. All we have to do is look around. How united are we as a people? Are we united by a common vision? Are we united in something that we can collaborate together with? Or more often is it the case that we look across the aisle and we say, wait, you believe what? Your vision of the future is what now? We're more divided than we've ever been before. This is relevant to the church too. right, because in the church, although on the one hand we have a common faith, that's important, we have a common faith, but beyond that common faith there are as many different ideas of what the church should be and should do as there are people in this room, or in any room containing Christians, right? And it's really important for us to know that our unity as a church does not depend on us having a single common vision. of what the church should do or what it should be about. And to prove this, all you have to do is look at the people that Jesus called to be his disciples. You know that among them was, on the one hand, a zealot, which is to say someone, a devout Jew who is willing to use violence to overthrow the Roman Empire. And then on the other hand, a tax collector who's working for the Roman Empire. And he got these guys together for three years. They didn't kill each other. Their unity could not have been grounded on a common political vision. That's not the basis of our unity in the church. So democratic unity is not the kind of thing that Jesus is talking about here. Secondly, there's imperial unity. If the logic of democratic unity is common vision that we work towards together, the logic of imperial unity is assimilation. The way empire works is the empire says, we are powerful enough to provide you with peace, with stability, right? Pax Romana, right? But there's a cost, which is that you do things our way. You adopt our customs, you worship our gods, and then everything will be cool. If you look at the first chapter of the book of Daniel, the book of Daniel, the Babylonian Empire has taken the Jews into exile, they've brought them to Babylon, and in Daniel 1, we meet Daniel and his three friends, and the reason that we meet them is because Babylon has said, go and get all the people of noble birth, high education, Right? And bring them in and train them in our ways. In other words, go get the elites. Go get the people that could possibly cause us trouble later. And turn them into Babylonians. Right? Assimilate them. Daniel's a great example. The book of Daniel's a great example of how the church is simultaneously the most dangerous, the most hated, but can also be the greatest blessing when it refuses to assimilate. But I also want us to think a little bit about how the logic of assimilation works its way into the church. And this one is subtle. And I'll say right now, this is the pokiest thing that I'm going to say this morning, this bit here. And I know I'm a visiting preacher, so you can take this with a grain of salt, ignore it. But I think this is worth thinking about. I think this is important for us. The way that the logic of assimilation works inside the church, let me tell you a story. So at the beginning of Tim Keller's book, Generous Justice, as a PCA pastor, I am contractually obligated to quote Tim Keller at least once. in every sermon. At the beginning of his book, he tells a story about one of his classmates back in seminary, a young black man with whom he has maintained a friendship and ministry partnership throughout his entire life. In fact, this guy has been tremendously important for efforts towards racial reconciliation, justice, truth-telling in my denomination. But the story from his seminary days He says, you know, one day I made this offhand comment about how much I appreciate the African-American tradition of preaching. And his friend said, Tim, I appreciate that. But sometimes you talk as though you don't seem to understand that you, in the churches you've grown up in, predominantly white evangelical churches, you've got a tradition. You've got a way of doing it. You talk about appreciating African-American preaching. or African American worship, right? Or Korean worship, or Brazilian worship, right? As though you say, these are all these beautiful, wonderful ways of worshiping God, but you talk about your way as though it's just worship. Like your way is just normal. I think this is really, really common. I think this is tremendously difficult to see. especially when you're the member of the dominant majority culture, which is what I've done most of my life in churches that I've been. So I can say from experience, it's really hard to see this. And the problem is that when there's an implicit assumption that your way of doing church is just sort of the way, the normal way, And it's always implicit. It never gets said out loud. But when that's the implicit assumption, you end up with this dynamic that says, anyone is welcome to come into this church. Anyone's welcome here, as long as you'll do it our way. As long as you will adopt our habits and our practices and our customs. Now, I could say a lot more about that. I could get pokier. But all I want to do I'll stop there and just say, does that sound like the vision of the church that we see in the New Testament? We look at Revelation 7, and we see this multitude, every tongue, tribe, and nation praising God. And it's pretty clear, all of those tongues, tribes, nations, and presumably cultures, and worship styles, and all of it, those haven't been eradicated and all turned into one uniform thing. They're all still there. They're all still different. We read Romans 12 this morning. That's one of three places where Paul talks about the image of the body. Romans 12, 1st Corinthians 12, Ephesians 4. Peter talks about it in 1st Peter 4. A body which is one, but which has many different parts. And they need to be different. Ed Clowney, in his book, The Church, says this about that image. He says, Paul's image of the body of Christ offers profound insights for nurture. All the members are needed, gifts are for the body as a whole, isolation is tragic, and diversity of function produces not division, but unity. The logic of assimilation is not the ground for the unity that Jesus is praying for here. That's not what unity in the church looks like. So you've got democratic unity and imperial unity. The last one, religious unity. This is unity if the logic of democratic unity is common vision, the logic of imperial unity is assimilation, the logic of religious unity is purity. This is what the Pharisees were really good at. They came up to Jesus and his disciples and said, why aren't you washing your hands? Why are you breaking the Sabbath? Unclean, unclean. It's a way of getting people on the outside. But of course, there are secular forms of this also. There are secular forms of these purity tests. I remember 25 years ago when I was heading off to college, the big concern among Christians was moral relativism. The big worry was everybody's just going to believe, you know, there's no truth out there, so I believe what I believe, and you believe what you believe, and we live and let live, right? And I don't know if you have noticed, but that has not turned out to have happened. If you have spent any time on Twitter, just go on Twitter and just say something you believe, right? And you will discover that there's a lot of people out there who care very, very much about what you believe. It is not a live and let live world that we live in. It is one of the things that is dividing us most sharply. I mean, there are polls out now that say that Republicans cannot imagine marrying a Democrat, right? And Democrats can't imagine allowing their children to marry a Republican. That's not language that you use for people that you just kind of disagree with. That's purity language. And it is ugly. And it is powerful. C.S. Lewis has this great essay that I recommend you go look up. I think it's called The Inner Ring. Yeah, it's called The Inner Ring. As to why this is so powerful, and I won't quote it here just for the sake of time, but it's just a very powerful exposition of how alluring and attractive and hard to resist it is to be on the inside, to be the one who's considered clean and pure and to pass the purity test. But this clearly is not what Jesus is after either. Jesus spent his entire life deliberately going after the people that were considered unclean in his society and bringing them in. So these are these three kinds of unity that we're familiar with, but are not what Jesus is talking about, democratic unity, imperial unity, and religious unity. I would even go as far as to say that not only are these three not what Jesus is talking about, but in some sense, they're even opposed to him. And why do I say that? If you think about the night when he was betrayed, the democratic mob and the imperial power and the religious tribe, they were all present and accounted for. And for one brief moment, they all found unity as they cried out with one voice, crucify. These three forms of unity are actually opposed to what Jesus is praying for. True unity, what Jesus is talking about, is only found in this organic unity to him, union with him. A union that takes us up into the love of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. A love which is sufficiently powerful that we see exemplified when Jesus on the cross is forgiving those who are killing him while they're doing it. That's the power of that love. Now lastly, I just wanna talk about what is it that unity does? Okay, so practically speaking, what does this look like? How does it play out? What does it do? Simply put, the kind of unity that Jesus is talking about, if it's put on display in the church, it makes the father known. It bears witness to who he is. And again, this is the thing that Jesus wants more than anything else, is for the father to be known, for the father to be glorified. Jesus said back in chapter 15, so he pulls these things together. In chapter 15, he uses the image of the vine and the branches, right? So there's this picture of organic unity, right? I am the vine, you are the branches. He says, abide in me, draw your life from me. And in 15 verse eight, he says, by this my father is glorified, that you bear much fruit. and so prove to be my disciples." This kind of unity bears witness externally. This is something that makes the Father known to a watching world. It also bears witness internally. It bears witness to us, also, as we see a unity that goes beyond the bounds of what we expect and what we're used to. Here in John 17, 25, as Jesus is praying, he says, O righteous Father, even though the world does not know you, I know you, and these know that you have sent me. So it's an internal witness, as well as an external witness. Why is that? I think it's because all these other forms of unity that I talked about, they're not what Jesus is talking about, but they all make sense on some level. They're all things that the world can see and say, yeah, I get it, I understand how that works. If you think about imperial unity, imagine some tyrant who achieves unity by taking everybody who disagrees with him and putting them in prison, or deporting them, or executing them, right? We would not agree with this. We wouldn't think that's a good thing. But we would say, OK, I get it. I get how this little tiny homogenous group that you're left with is united. That makes sense. The kind of unity that Jesus is talking about, if it's a unity that doesn't depend on having a common vision, if it doesn't depend on assimilation, if it doesn't depend on purity, if, in fact, it's strong and it's robust even though none of those things are present, That is not gonna make sense. That's gonna be weird. It's gonna be weird to us and it's gonna be weird to the world. And we're gonna say, what is going on here? Who is at work? Who is doing this? This is how this makes the Father known. The last thing I'll say as an encouragement to us for prayer, this whole thing If unity makes the father known, that presupposes that it is a visible unity, right? It is on display. It's not just something hypothetical, right? It's not just the comforting, you know, sometimes we look at like the thousands of different Protestant denominations, right? And we say, oh, but we all know that there's only one church. And this is true. This is true. But this goes beyond just, knowing that something is true even though it can't be seen. This presupposes that there is a visibility to this unity, that people are coming together, loving one another. In John 16, Jesus has gone as far as to say, if you really love me and love one another, you're going to lay down your lives for one another. It's that kind of unity. It's costly. It's sacrificial. And so the question for us, the encouragement or the challenge for us is simply to say, are we praying for that? Are we praying for the unity of the church? Are you praying for the unity of First Reformed right here, like this church or of your denomination or across different denominations? Is that something that we pray for and we hope for? It is something that Jesus prayed for and that should give us a lot of hope and a lot of encouragement. At the end of the day, Jesus gets what Jesus wants. And so if we enter into this prayer, we're doing it with him. We are not alone. Why don't we close by praying for this just for a few minutes right now. Father in heaven, it is so much easier to think of division in the church than unity. It is easier to think of divisions that separate East from West, and Catholic from Protestants, and then scads of different divisions and schisms within the Protestant church, even until we whittle down to our own reformed and Presbyterian tradition, and just see the history of division. Lord, we know that these divisions are often over important things. We're not asking that you would sweep them under the rug. We're not asking you to help us pretend that they don't matter. Father, what we're asking for is that we would have a unity which is stronger than those divisions, a unity within which we could say, we disagree about things, and they do matter, and we need to talk about them, but at the end of the day, we are brothers and sisters. and we are members of one body, not because we chose to be, but because you chose us, because you died for us, because you prayed for us. Jesus, I thank you that you are the head of the church and there is no other. May we all abide in you and find our life in you and in so doing realize that we have been united to one another in a body which is stronger than any of those things that we usually look for unity in. Father, we thank you for giving your son. We pray all this in his name. Amen.