Oned in Christ is the work of the Spirit in this wonder-ful time and this one-derful world.

In the last few years, through the technology of instantaneous satellite transfer, television has brought some of the most remarkable images from around the world directly into our living rooms. We have wept over Tiananmen Square, rejoiced over the dismantled Berlin Wall, bitten our fingernails and prayed during the unfolding of the Gulf War and sat open-mouthed at the systematic dismemberment of the Soviet Union. As a world we have participated in these events together, our national identities submerged in the unifying excitement of seeing it all unfold before our eyes.

It seems that something beyond nationalism is slowly taking root in the world. Ever so gradually we are developing a sense of common destiny. The media, which allows us to all have the same experience at the same time, covers world affairs with the assumption that we are all connected. In the language of bumper-sticker philosophy, we are beginning to see that we must "think globally and act locally."

This week's Gospel text presents Jesus' words of power and comfort, "I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one" (John 17:23). But oneness has never been a quality the church has had much of an opportunity to celebrate. In the church's first few centuries it was so concerned about establishing a creed of theological orthodoxy that it saw heresy and treachery everywhere. Conversely, since the time of the Reformation, the church has become churches, defined by denominations obsessed with establishing their differences rather than their similarities.

Perhaps our greatest problem has been distinguishing Jesus' promise of oneness from our own concept of "hegemony." Hegemony refers to the situation where only one way of thinking, one way of seeing, is allowed and accepted. Historians have finally noticed in the last few decades that a hegemonious skewering of history has led to textbooks filled with the exclusive viewpoints and experiences of Western white males. Breaking that hegemony has led to the rediscovery of Afro-American history, women's history, Eastern civilizations history, Native-American history, Latino-American history - experiences which had been deemed without worth by the hegemonious power structure.

Jesus did not come to establish the hegemony of the church. He came to enable us to become a community united by love. In our post-modern culture the Self is still Numero Uno. The church needs to recognize that its purpose on earth is to incarnate a very different Latin phrase - the unum humanum - one humanity. But as recent history has shown us, the secular world is also finally moving towards recognizing the interconnectedness and interdependence of people and planet.

There is an old joke about the man who invented television - in 1975. It worked, but it wasn't sufficiently original. The church is fast approaching the time when its original discovery - the oneness at the heart of humanity - has been forgotten and waylaid so long that when it finally does begin proclaiming the unum humanum the world will yawn with boredom. The concept will not be sufficiently original.

But achieving political, economic, even environmental oneness will ultimately depend on recognizing the spiritual oneness shared by all humanity. Arab and Jew, Serb and Croat, black and white, will continue to resist the call to global kinship until they experience the breakdown of borders and bigotry and boundaries within their own souls, until they recognize the divine spark flickering in every heart.

Not surprisingly, even as national borders become less meaningful and less useful, they are yet greatly desired. As the Cold War has thawed out the Communist Bloc, it has left the components of the Soviet Union in a messy quagmire. Out of tradition and out of fear, these countries are making a last ditch attempt at nationalism. It is a stand that has already cost many lives and which threatens to take many more.

Human beings have always had difficulty balancing the concepts of individuality and community. The secret to solving the riddle of the relationship between the personal and the communal, the particular and the universal, is as close as your hand. Each one of us has fingers. Some of us have big fingers, some little. But even among those of us who have fingers that look exactly alike, we have unique fingerprints. No two fingerprints are alike.

Christ's gift was unification, not homogenization. Homogenized faith was what the slave girl's spirit was proclaiming as it followed Paul and Silas about Philippi. A homogenized faith is faith in everything, and therefore, faith in nothing. One of the most powerful Jungian images is of the one family tree where we all finally unite. But the one tree without the many dissimilar branches is but a stump. It is time we stopped trying to make people just like we are and started encouraging them to be just like God made them. We must celebrate differences, not just sameness.

When the jailor from our story in Acts 16 responded to the witness of oneness so powerfully performed by Paul and Silas, he and his family were immediately baptized into the family of faith. What could Paul and Silas possibly have in common with a Gentile who earned his living locking up and abusing prisoners? The answer of course is nothing - nothing except complete faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, which is everything. With that faith Paul, Silas and their former jailor became unum humanum.

As the world continues to shrink we find our own welfare increasingly caught up in the well-being of our global neighbors. Ephesians 2:19-20 gives us an image of what might be if the church can witness through its own oneness to the rest of the world:

So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone.