In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen. Beloved brothers and sisters in Christ, can you possibly understand the overwhelming sense of joy that possesses my heart and soul at this moment? I have just completed a long, long journey. It has taken me 460 years to walk one block - from St. John’s to St. Ambrose - because this Year of Our Lord 1979 is the 460th Anniversary of the greatest revolution that have ever shaken this globe. This marks the beginning of that Reformation and that Counter-Reformation, and when I think of the hatreds, the turmoil, and the bloodshed that resulted as Christian turned upon Christian, to kill and to maim, I can only look upon this moment with holy and unrestrained rejoicing.

Little did I ever dream as I grew up as a Lutheran pastor’s son in the City of Chicago that some day I would stand in the pulpit of a cathedral of the Roman tradition. May I express my heartfelt gratitude to your beloved Bishop (Maurice Dingman), the pastors of this cathedral parish, and to all of you, my friends in Christ.

Some years ago, a New Yorker carried a typical cartoon in which it showed a middle-aged lady lying on the psychiatrist’s couch. There was a look of great agitation on her face. The doctor was saying to her: "Mrs. Murgetroyd, you just have to stop worrying about the changes that are going on in the church." Well, I hope that by this time, not only Mrs. Murgetroyd, but all of us, have stopped worrying about the changes, because we have come to realize that those changes have been instituted by Almighty God, through the power of his Holy Spirit. I also hope that we realize that the changes we have witnessed and that the changes that we will witness are evidence of the return of the church - the Church of Jesus Christ - to true catholicity.

If you should, perchance, think that I stand here as a representative of the Lutheran Church, then may I disabuse your minds by saying that there is no such thing. There is no Lutheran Church. As Martin Luther, a faithful priest of God, once said: "God forbid that any church should bear the name of such a worm as I." If I say without equivocation, not only is there no Lutheran Church, but we hold no doctrine because it is Lutheran, we celebrate no Sacrament because it is Lutheran, we participate in no liturgy because it is Lutheran, we follow no tradition because it is Lutheran. The Augsburg Confession, the first great doctrinal statement of our Lutheran tradition, addressed to the then Pontiff Leo, does not even contain the name "Luther" or the word "Lutheran." And we are not followers of Martin Luther, any more than you are followers of St. Peter or of His Holiness Pope Paul. We are disciples of Jesus Christ. We proclaim the gospel given to us through the Holy Spirit by Jesus Christ. We are part of the Church of Jesus Christ.

What tragic minunderstandings have come about through the ambiguity of our language. We talk about the churches of Christendom, when, in actuality, the word "church" should never, never be used in the plural. Certainly you realize that to speak of a group of Christians as both "Lutheran" and "catholic," or both "Roman" and "catholic" is a contradiction in terms. As St. Paul wrote to the people at Corinth: "Each one of you says, ‘I belong to Paul,’ or ‘I belong to Apollos,’ or ‘I belong to Peter,’ or ‘I belong to Christ.’ " What? Is Christ divided? Oh, yes, we can tear to shreds the visible institutional church by our prides, our sinfulness, or divisiveness and our human stupidity; but no man, nor any GROUP of men, can ever dismember the body of Christ!

Together we confess our faith by the use of the first credo of the church, written at the First Council of the Church in Nicea in the year 325. In that creed, we, in both of our traditions, state that we hold absolutely to the conviction that the church is ONE, HOLY, CATHOLIC AND APOSTOLIC. You know there is one verse in Chapter 4 of Ephesians that contains all four of those marks of The Church: "There is one body and one Spirit, just as you are called in one hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in you all."

The Oneness, for it is the same Holy Spirit of God that has called us into his Church, as our Lord said: "You have not chosen me. I have chosen you." The holiness of the church, through the redeeming, vicarious sacrifice of Jesus Christ our Lord, that makes us holy, even in the filth of our sinfulness. The catholicity - one God and Father of all, who is above all, through all, and in all, and the apostolicity in the fact that we hold the same hope of the gospel that the apostles held.

There is, however, one note of sadness in this celebration, for we have not officially joined together in communing with Christ through his Sacrament. It is the tragic irony of the history of the church that that Blessed Sacrament, with which we receive the sign and seal of our redemption, the gift that our Lord left for us to make us One Body, part of his Body, is the thing that has separated us. Traditionally, it has separated our tradition from your tradition, our tradition from the tradition of other Protestants.

In this regard, please forgive my personal impatience. I suspect that it is my background that has caused most of it. I was raised in an Irish Catholic neighborhood in the city of Chicago. One of my closest boyhood pals was one of those descendants of the Irishmen, and a faithful Roman Catholic. Despite the fact that he and I were singled out as the ringleaders in most of the juvenile delinquency that went on in that community, he was called into priesthood and I was called into the ministry.

I shall not forget the last time I saw him. It was sonic years ago, and it happened that we were both home during the Christmas holidays. I visited the old neighborhood, and I met him on the sidewalk. We embraced each other with laughter, glad to see each other again after all of those years. We talked about the joys of our boyhood together, and the joy that we now had, at that time, of serving the same Lord. And then, just about a year after that, I received the sad news that he had died of cancer. I was so happy that we had shared those moments together toward the end of his life here on earth.

I shall not forget the many summers I spent in the home of a devout Roman Catholic aunt, who would take me regularly to Mass and would also take me around to the various sacred shrines to which she would make a pilgrimage. People sometimes wondered why I could pray the Rosary just as easily as I could pray the "Our Father." Oh, I learned it very early in life.

And then it is the fact, also, that my daughter married a faithful Roman Catholic young man, who today is a devoted and effective Lutheran pastor in Albia, Iowa, not through my influence, not through my daughter’s. He is an effective pastor, because when he entered the seminary, and all through his training, he was far ahead of the rest of the class because of the fine, Christian training that he had received in Catholic and parochial schools throughout his high school days. He is now serving the Lord because he felt, after he was married, that he had been called into the ministry.

In June, I will go to Davenport there to assist a priest in marrying my son to a beautiful, devout, Roman Catholic girl, whom we have all learned to love. I don’t know where they will worship, I only know they will worship together.

But I suppose, most of all, I remember the nearly three years that I lived, worked, trained, and ministered with a Paulist missionary priest, a fellow chaplain in the Marine Corps. I remember the Sundays in our base camp overseas when he had two Masses and I had two Services, and despite the fact that there were many men that had to be on duty and couldn’t attend Services, we could have 2,000 of the 3,000 men in our regiment attending Services. We started out with a little reed organ, then with a brass quartette from our band, then with the entire regimental band.

I remember so vividly the day we landed on the black beaches of Iwo Jima, in the first hour of what was to prove to the the bloodiest battle in the history of modern warfare. I remember from the first hour to the last, some thirty days later, how we went about seeking to minister to our men, to assist with the wounded, to gather up and bury the dead. I remember how we used to crawl up through the artillery barrages, sniper fire, hails of mortar, to seek little groups of men along the line and give them Holy Communion. He heard the confessions of some of my men, and I heard the confessions of some of his, and we each bestowed the absolution of the gospel. He gave Communion to many of my men, and I gave Communion to many of his. When you are faced with matters of life and death the very next second, it does not matter who brings you Christ. It only matters that he is there, and that he’s with you.

I remember the day we stood together and were decorated for valor before the whole Division - not for our valor, but for the hundreds who died, so that miraculously, impossibly, he and I came through unscathed to carry on our ministry. So we wear our medals in their honor, not ours.

Oh, yes, our theologians, you see, had a joint commission studying the Eucharist, but we have to be very patient with them. You always have to be patient with theologians.

But you’ll understand why, when I went to a Catholic church in Rome, or Notre Dame in Paris, or a church in Spain, or a pretty parish church in Central America or Mexico, or the cathedral in Saigon in Vietnam, or Hong Kong, and felt no strangeness whatsoever in receiving the Sacrament with the rest of the congregation, because I know that they believe exactly what I do, that they are receiving under the rude sacrifice of Bread and Wine, the true Body and Blood of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. And this is what we, in our Lutheran tradition, have maintained unshakably through these four and a half centuries, that we believe even as you do that, as Paul said: "Though we are many members, yet we are One Body in Christ."

Yes, we’ll have to wait for the theologians, but you and I and your beloved Bishop, pastors, all know what Christ graciously gives us in the Sacrament. By giving us his Body, he makes us One Body, and being part of the same Body, how can we be separated? I don’t care how many thousands of words Martin Luther, or Melanchthon, or St. Thomas Aquinas, or Loyola wrote about how Christ accomplishes this, the wisdom of men is still foolishness with God. You and I know that here we face the mysterium tremendum, that great, tremendous, sacred mystery of the Real Presence of Christ.

Last summer, the President of our particular group of Lutherans took part in your Eucharistic Congress in Philadelphia. They decided among themselves that it was not yet time for altar fellowship, so, instead, they washed one another’s feet. That might be a good place to start, to wash each other’s feet in humility and penitence.

Three years ago, I sat in an audience with the Holy Father in Rome and received his blessing with the other thousands that were gathered there. I can’t help remembering the words with which he reopened the Vatican Council. He was speaking of the historic division of the Church, and he said: "If we are in any way to blame for that separation, we humbly beg God’s forgiveness, and we ask pardon, too, of our brethren who feel themselves to have been injured by us." I wonder if all Lutherans could be equally gracious.

But if all of us of our Lutheran tradition are of the same spirit, along with all of you of your tradition, the time is not far off when the true oneness and the true catholicity of Christ’s Church will be restored, and you and I can publicly and in good order receive his Body and Blood together. I pray earnestly for that day, and won’t you join me in your prayers, also, that that day may come that Christ’s prayer may be fulfilled, "That they may be one as we are one."

I greet each one of you with a holy kiss.

Now may the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the communion of the Holy Ghost be with us all. Amen.

(This sermon was preached at St. Ambrose Cathedral, Des Moines, Iowa, at three Masses in observance of the 1977 Week of Prayer for Christian Unity.)