There’s a church in the town of Madison, Wisconsin where new members are welcomed by the singing of a somewhat modified version of a song from Lionel Bart’s musical Oliver! It starts “Consider yourself confirmed…”

This seems, on the face of it, an odd choice, since, as those of you who have seen the show or the film will know, the song is sung by the Artful Dodger and his gang to welcome Oliver into the criminal fraternity run by Fagin. The original version starts like this:

“Consider yourself at home
Consider yourself one of the family
We've taken to you so strong
It's clear we're going to get along.”

“Consider yourself one of the family…”

As Dean explained to us last Sunday, if the head of a household was baptised into the Christian faith, sometimes the whole household, including family members and slaves was also baptised. Last week it was Lydia, the dealer in luxury purple cloth. This week it’s the jailer who was responsible for Paul and Silas, and who was terrified when he thought that they had escaped.

Some people find the idea of collective conversion difficult. We live in a very individualistic culture, a culture which prizes personal choice and the thought that servants and slaves may have been unduly influenced or even coerced into changing their beliefs is troubling. However, we read that Paul and Silas

…spoke the word of the Lord to him and to all who were in his house.

The whole household heard the good news were united in their response to it. That doesn’t sound like an imposed uniformity of belief but individual members of a household responding positively to what they had heard. Their responses would, of have been personal, rooted in very different life experiences. They came together from different directions to form a household of faith. Just like us.

Unity is, of course the theme of today’s Gospel and when Jesus speaks of unity, I don’t believe that he is speaking about uniformity, though a literal reading of the Gospel might suggest that, especially when you read those words in verse 23 when Jesus prays that his disciples

“…may become completely one.”?

It’s always important to place particular sayings of Jesus in the context of all of his teaching. He spoke of the God who numbers the very hairs of our heads, the God who marks the fall of a sparrow, the God whose house contains many mansions, who knows and loves our individuality and prepares to welcome us individually when our earthly life is over, and welcome us into the closest relationship possible.

So for what was Jesus praying when he asked that his followers

“…may become completely one.”?

As is sometimes the case, English translations of the original Greek don’t serve us as well as they might. A literal translation would be:

“…so that they might have been made complete as one.”

The verb that is used for “to make complete” is only used in four other places in St. John’s Gospel. The other four uses of it refer to Jesus completing or finishing the work that God has given him, and the best known of the four is the sentence “It is finished” – the last words spoken by Jesus before his death on the Cross. Again, the translation is misleading for the Greek verb doesn’t mean finished in the sense of “it’s all over”. A free but faithful translation would be “Mission accomplished”.

Our unity, today’s Gospel teaches, isn’t about everybody worshipping God in exactly the same way or having the same church rules and structures. It’s about something much more profound. The unity which Jesus prays that we may have is the same unity that he has with God the Father:

“As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us.”

It is a unity that will only be fully accomplished when we find ourselves in the closest presence of the God who loves us, but it is also a unity which we can and do begin to experience in our earthly lives. We experience it in our families, in times of joy and of sorrow, and the pandemic, when the full and proper sharing of those times was not possible, was a profound reminder of the value of that. We experience it in our church families, just as the first Christians did. We read in the second chapter of Acts that

“All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need.”

Or, as Lionel Bart put it in the next verse of the song which I quoted at the beginning of this sermon:

“Consider yourself well in
Consider yourself part of the furniture
There isn't a lot to spare
Who cares, whatever we've got we share.”

Jesus’ prayer for unity was richly answered in the early church. That prayer was also prayed for us, for

“…those who will believe in me”

in the future.

We are the community for whom Jesus prays, and his prayer for us is that we may all be one, not uniform but united in love and action and showing a divided and suffering world the way of unity and love. We are the community for whom Jesus prays, and that is something to think about as we prepare to celebrate Pentecost and the power of the Holy Spirit to draw people into loving community one with another.