“The Gospel of Oneness”
May 18, 2014
4th Sunday
of the Great Christian Passover
Acts 17: 1 – 15/Psalm 66: 1 – 9/1 Peter 2: 1 –
10/John 14: 1 – 14
His Excellency
The Most Reverend Ariel Cornelio P.
Santos D.D.
of the
Archdiocese of Manila
the
National Church in the Philippines
and the
Territorial Church of Asia
International Communion of the
Charismatic Episcopal Church
We are thankful that God
continues to be with us, patiently leading us, molding us, training us and not
forsaking us. This is our God who never leaves us and forsakes us and turns
away from us. What God started, He will be faithful to complete.
Repeating
what Jesus said in John 14, "Do not be troubled; do not be afraid; do not
fear; do not be anxious; do not be in doubt; instead believe!” Do not
fear, only believe. These are not my words, but Jesus’ words. As
Christians, we are called believers not unbelievers, not doubters, and we
believe in God. If you believe, then, you will see the glory and the
salvation of God. Believe in what? Among other things, Jesus says, “I am going
to prepare a place for you. I am not leaving you for I am Omnipresent. I
am not going away. I will prepare a place for you and then, I am going to come
back so that I can receive you to Myself that where I am there you may be
also.”
Thomas,
one of the apostles, didn't quite understand what Jesus was saying. He
asked, “Lord, we do not know where You are going. How do we know the way?
Show us the way.” Jesus answered, “I am the Way; I am the Truth; and I am
the Life.” No one comes to the
Father but through
Me.” Obviously, Jesus was going to the Father and He wants us to be
with Him and with the Father. Jesus said, “The Father and I will
make an abode in you so that you can be one with Us as We are one.” This
place is where the Father is.
I
am not here to talk geographically where heaven is because our Father is in
heaven as the prayer says; but the Father is bigger than heaven and earth and
He made heaven and He made earth. What was it before that was there
before heaven and earth were made? It is the kingdom of God. What is it
now that there is heaven and earth? It is still the kingdom of God.
It really doesn’t matter but what matters is that Jesus prepares a place for us
where the Father is. This place being prepared for us is called being one
with the Father and Jesus is the Way.
When
the first Adam was created, he was put in the Garden which was on earth.
Earth was made by God. It was not separate from heaven.
It was part of the kingdom of God. Everything is part of the kingdom of God and
everything is smaller than God. He is eternally huge and unfathomable.
The first Adam was in heaven, in that, he was in the kingdom of God walking in
its principles and more importantly, he was one with God. The
Father was in him and he was in the Father. He spoke to Him face to face,
walked with Him in the cool of the day and the night and communed with
Him. Earth and heaven was one kingdom – no division; seamless; not
even an extension.
It
is like Luzon is as much part of the Philippines as Visayas and Mindanao.
A better comparison is Hawaii is as much as State as California is even if it
is not in the U.S. Mainland. The same federal laws are in place and at
work in Hawaii. It is a full status State even if it is not in the
Mainland. The people that are there are called the citizen of the United
States of America and their laws are the same federally.
There
was no division, no heaven and earth, but only the kingdom of God. It
wasn’t necessarily to pray, “Thy kingdom come on earth; Thy will be done on
earth as it is in heaven,” because it was being done. There was harmony,
unity, and what was on earth in the Garden was the same that took place in
heaven. There was life; there was no death. This was heaven but
Adam fell and sin entered into the world, a part of the kingdom of God; and
then, death came.
Jesus
had to come. A second Adam had to come so that He could restore this part
of the kingdom of God that fell back and fell short of what the kingdom of God
was supposed to be. Christ is now the new and living Way back to the
Father, back to His kingdom, back to communion with Him, and back to fellowship
with Him. We always say this, “God, in Christ Jesus, reconciling the
world to Himself.” The world is part of His kingdom. It has to come
back to Him because He created both the heaven and the earth. It is all
His kingdom.
Philip
says to Jesus, “If the plan is for us to go back to the Father, then, simply
show us the Father and it is enough for us.” Jesus says to him, “Have I
been so long with you, and yet, you have not come to know Me, Philip? He
who has seen Me has seen the Father. How do you say, ‘Show us the
Father?’ Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in
Me? The words that I say to you, I do not speak on My own initiative but
the Father abiding in Me does His works. Believe Me that I am in the
Father and the Father in Me, otherwise, believe on the account of the works
themselves.” Jesus is the Way and He is one with the Father so that
whosoever has seen Him has already seen the Father. Really, that is
enough because the Father is invisible; He is spirit. Jesus has flesh and
He is the embodiment, the fullness of the Godhead in bodily form so that the Godhead
can be seen and be manifested. This is why He became incarnate so that
God can be seen and heard and tasted and felt in a more clear way.
Jesus
says, “The works that I do proved that I am in the Father and the Father in Me
because He does His works through Me. Because I am First-born of many
brethren, He who believes in Me, who lives out My principles and applies My
words, the works that I do shall he do also and greater works than this shall
he do because I go to the Father.” Like what Peter said to the lame
man, the Church, you and I, should be able to say, “Look at us!” When you
make your witness in your workplace, in your neighborhood, in your school, you
don’t say, “Look at my Church leader because he is a good preacher.” “Look at
my sister in this Church because she is a good minister.”
We
say, “Look at us! All of us are the Church!” “Look at us! He who
has seen us has seen the Father and has seen Jesus.” We should be able to
say this because we are His hands; we are His feet; and we are supposed to be
Jesus with skin on. He is sitting at the right hand of God waiting for us
to be able to say that with fullness and genuineness and authenticity. He
who has seen the Church! We are supposed to be one with Christ. We are
one Body who has also seen Christ, and he who has seen Christ has seen the
Father.
We
must be able to show our oneness with God and our oneness with each other to the
world. We are supposed to be able to show them that we are of one
mind, one soul, and we have singleness of heart. As the kingdom of
God, as the church of God, we cannot, borrowing the words of Elijah, falter
between two opinions. We cannot serve God and the world at the same
time. We cannot walk in the principles of the kingdom of God and at the
same time walk in the principles of the world. One cannot have fellowship
with God and with belial or an idol. In Tagalog, “Huwag mamangka sa dalawang ilog.” We cannot do this. We are
citizens of the Kingdom; we are citizens of heaven. There is only
one way and our goal is to go back where the Father is. The Father is
where there is life, light, righteousness, joy, peace, salvation and all the
things of the kingdom of God. This is where the Father is and this is
where we are going. Jesus says, “Where I am, there you may be also so
that We can make our abode in you.”
I
was asked one time by a friend, a bishop, who is in the United States.
They watched the video of the sermon on the website and they have heard that we
have left Sheridan. They were asking how we were doing and one of their
questions was, “How many followed from Sheridan?” I said confidently or
maybe naively or ignorantly or with hyper-faith, “Everybody!" Why
would somebody not follow? In my mind and in my heart and I am convinced
of this: we are not the Cathedral of Sheridan. We are the Cathedral of the
King. Where He is, there we are. When we occupy a building, we give
life to the building and the building finds its identity in us. The
Cathedral; the church of God; the kingdom of God; the citizens of heaven.
Why
would somebody not follow? Is he worshipping the building or is he
worshipping God with the people of God? All follow! I did not even think
that some would not be where the Church is. The Church is not the
building; the Church is the people of God. Where we are, that is the
Church.
If
you are one with someone, it is through thick and thin. Sixteen years
ago, my family moved out Merville and to Sucat which is also in
Paranaque. Then, all my family members moved with me – all of them
followed. They had to adjust; my wife had to adjust because she really
struggled because I took her away from her Dental Clinic which was five minutes
away from the house we lived in before. If you are one, you stick
together! This is how we show our oneness. The inconveniences don't matter. We
have to build relationships; we are to show the authenticity, the genuineness
of our being one. This is the goal.
Jesus
and the Father are one. His prayer is that we be one with each other and with
Him, “Make us one with Thee and with each other.” Sometimes, we have to
adjust, but we are bigger than that. Our love for each other must be
bigger than anything, not that God’s purpose is to inconvenience us. God
is not an old man sitting on a big throne where every day, He is thinking how
He will make life miserable for us. God is not like this; He wants the
best for us. Sometimes, to get to the best, we need to be
inconvenienced. We need to learn certain things. I am here to tell you,
borrowing God’s promise, I promise you that the best is yet to come because He
wants the best for us. Nobody else can give us anything better.
Many
times, the problem with us is that we redefine words and understanding of
certain things changed. One word is swerve. My understanding of that, prior
to an encounter with a traffic enforcer, is to change lanes or direction
abruptly or suddenly. To some traffic enforcers, it simply means you change
lanes. Another word is friend. How many friends do you
have? I have at least four hundred whom half I don’t even know. For
a friend, we sit at one table, face to face, and we spend two hours together
having a meal and we only fellowship for one minute. This is between
looking down on our gadgets and posting our picture together. They spend
quality time together being on Facebook while having a meal.
We
have redefined time. Two o’clock in
the afternoon is not really two o’clock in the afternoon. It is
usually after thirty minutes or an hour later. We have redefined love. A young man would say to his
girlfriend, “If you love me, you will do this for me.” We have redefined marriage. We have to be vigilant on this
in this nation. Marriage is between a man and a woman.
I
come to a word that I really wouldn’t want to be redefined and I want to be
preserved: know. Know or
knowledge means more than just intellectual recognition of something. It
is relational and experiential. It involves intimate communion and
fellowship. Know means to be one with. In the Bible, it also means
to be one flesh with. In the German understanding, know doesn’t mean, “I
know President Noynoy.” You don’t know him because you don’t have a
relationship with him. A mother knows her son. She raised him; she
cleaned up his mess; and she fed him. She knows him because she has a
relationship with him. A husband knows his wife because they have gone
through crisis and problems and they worked them out together. They fought
against each other; they kissed and made up. This is knowledge; this is
knowing somebody. You don’t know your neighbor. You may know their name,
certain traits of theirs, but you don’t know them because it is not in the
Biblical sense of the word.
Know
is what John said in his Epistle, “What we have heard, seen, smelled, touched,
tasted – if I may add – whom we ministered with, whom we had been persecuted
with, whom we almost sank in the boat with, whom we went on missions with and
sent by, who trained us, who disciplined us, who rebuked us and corrected us,
whose breast I rested my head on, this is who we proclaim to you.”
It is not somebody we googled, not somebody we studied in a theological school
or not somebody we read about in the Internet. You just do not hear about him,
but you have a relationship with him. You know him. This is a
prerequisite to proclaiming God. This is knowledge.
The
Gospel was not proclaimed by word only but by spirit and power. Spirit
and power come from good witness of relationship and knowledge. Remember
that the purpose of Jesus going to the Father is to prepare a place for us so
that we can be with Him and be one with Him. John said his purpose was so
that, “You may have fellowship with us or be one with us or know us and have
communion with us because indeed, truly, genuinely, authentically, our
fellowship, our oneness, our communion, our knowledge is with the Father and
His Son.
Meditate
on this: as Christians, the power of our testimony or our witness is
proportionate, commensurate to our knowledge of Who we proclaim. The
early Church turned the world upside down in their generation because they were
one with each other and they were one with God. John says, “These things
we proclaim so that our joy maybe made complete.” If we are one with God
and we are one with each other, we will find our joy in the fruit of our
proclamation of the Gospel.
Jesus’
own words, “Love one another. Bring good news to one another. Stimulate
each other to good deeds and obedience so that your joy may be full.” St. Paul
said to his letter to the Thessalonians, “Now, we really live. Now, we
find full meaning in our lives because we know that you, the fruit of our
labor, are standing firm in the faith. Our joy is made full when we edify
others and we bring them to the knowledge of God. We are to bring
good news so that our joy be made full. Do not give bad reports. In
Tagalog, “Huwag magtsismis.”
Bring good news. Bad reports, tsismis, are usually
exaggerated and based on fear and ignorance of the truth of God’s promise.
Sometimes, it is based on jealousy and other unfounded reasons. Good
news, good reports is what should come out of our mouths because we are the
people of God. We are to lift up, not tear down. We are to build
up, not to destroy. You will not find joy in destroying others.
Never! You will find fulfillment in edifying others.
Jesus
says, “Love one another. Be one with each other and with God that your joy be
made full.” We are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy
nation, and God’s people. We are to act on our prayer for His kingdom to
come and His will to be done on earth as it is in heaven. Why are we the
people of God? This is so that we can proclaim His praises by our oneness
and by our love for Him and for each other.
This
is the way it is in the kingdom of our God!
LET US CONTINUE OUR REFLECTION
WITH
CARDINAL OF HOLY MOTHER CHURCH
AND
VENERABLE PRIMATE
OF THE PHILIPPINES
THROUGH
THE WORD EXPOSED
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