I had been given an assignment to write on maintaining unity even in the midst of diversity. I wasn’t too excited because nothing came to mind.
The deadline passed a week before I joined in worship at Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in Miami, Fla. Yet those who gathered there, as well as you who gather in your own congregations each week, were baptized into one body. Differences are irrelevant in the face of that overwhelming reality: we were baptized into one body in Christ.
Our prayers that day asked that “our divisions may cease and that all may be one” (John 17:20). The benediction at Trinity that that God might be with us, with those we love, those we find difficult to love, and those who find it difficult to love us. May it be so.
From “United by Baptism” by Linda Post Bushkofsky, Gather magazine, September 2005. Today is the seventh Sunday of Easter. The readings are Acts 16:16-34; Psalm 97; Revelation 22:12-14, 16-17, 20-21; John 17:20-26. Today, Mother’s Day, we remember Julian of Norwich, renewer of the church, who died around 1416.