The apostle Paul in his first letter to the Corinthians is appalled at the divisions found there, apparently their quibbling over whose baptism was the best. That might seem inconsequential to us, but the Church has been divided over first one thing and then another as long as it has existed. There was the Great Schism between the Eastern and Western Churches at the end of the first millennium, which has yet to be healed. There was the Reformation in the 16th century when the first Protestants separated from the Roman Catholic Church and, as we know, have been separating ever since. For example, I grew up in the Cumberland Presbyterian Church which left Calvin’s Presbyterians 200 years ago over the issues of predestination and the need for seminary-trained ministers in the wilderness settlements of the west. The Episcopal Church is no stranger to divisions in our time. In just the fifty-plus years I have been an Episcopalian, there have been major divisions where people have left the church over the revision of the Book of Common Prayer, women’s ordination, and more recently the ordination of an openly gay bishop. Local churches of all persuasions have their own divisions over issues major and minor. Emotions can run high as applecarts are upset. People, for some reason, see separation as the only solution. That is just what Paul hoped to forestall.

Separation is not God’s way. Love is! Elsewhere in his epistle, Paul tells us what love is: “Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrong doing; but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things; hopes all things; endures all things.” (I Cor.13:4-7) If we, each and all, would incarnate God’s love in our lives day by day, divisions of all kinds would cease. The Kingdom of God would be manifest here and now.