And if a house is divided against itself, that house will not be able to stand (Mark 3:25)

There is said to be a street in he United States where, as you drive along it, you pass the Presbyterian Church of…wherever”. Then the “True Presbyterian Church of…the same town” and then, the “One True Presbyterian Church of… wherever.” I’ve been meaning to find out whether this is true. Still, it says something abut the Presbyterians in that place. They had fallen out - probably over abstruse matters of doctrine - and split over and over and over again, each group claiming to have The Truth. Capital T’s.

We can see this in our own towns and villages in Scotland. Go to Lockerbie and you’ll see three large church buildings - one was the Auld Kirk of Scotland, another was the Free Church of Scotland, the third - now the Catholic church - was the United Presbyterian church. In Inverness, famously, there is a crossroads with a church on each corner.

“If a house is divided against itself,” Jesus says, “that house will not be able to stand”. If that house is the Christian church, I’m not sure we can claim to have not been divided against ourselves. If all that sounds like ancient history, it’s worth noting that the Presbyterian Church of Ireland last week decided to sever its links with the Church of Scotland over our changing attitudes to same-sex relationships.

“If a house is divided against itself that house will not be able to stand.” It almost seems as if Jesus is speaking about divisions in the Church. And to be sure, those divisions can make it very hard for the Church. It can make it very difficult for us to do the task that Christ sent us to do - to make believers in all the world. When I was growing up in the 1970s it seemed to me that one of the craziest things about religion was that, on the one side, Christians claimed to follow a teacher who taught his followers to love one another - a teacher they called ‘Prince of Peace’, while over the Irish Sea, in Liverpool and in Glasgow, there were tribes who called themselves ‘Protestants’ and ‘Catholics’ who were knocking seven bells out of each other.

I use the word “tribes” deliberately and I’ll come back to it. For the moment let’s remember that Mark is reporting the words of Jesus who was saying them long before there was any institution that could call itself “The Church”. But Mark is writing them at a time when there were already divisions between Christians. There were differences of opinion over who Jesus actually was, what his relationship with God is and how Christians should make sense of the Old Testament. This shows up a lot in Paul’s letters. In the writings of John in the New Testament Jesus is presented in a subtly different way to the way we encounter him in Matthew, Mark and Luke.

There have always been divisions - or at least, disagreements - in the Church. And there are bound to be. We are dealing with big ideas that transcend our experience. We’re dealing with an eternal being in God for whom all of time is laid out to his gaze, while I have trouble enough remembering my wedding anniversary. We’re talking about that eternal God coming into the world in the life of a human being. The rest of us are just human - we have no experience that can equip us fully to understand what we call - because having big words gives us the idea that we can understand stuff - “the incarnation”. Then we’ve got the Holy Spirit to deal with. Does the Spirit come from God? Or from Jesus? Or both? Beats me.

Yet there, in that last question, you’ve got the issue which, nominally at least, split the Church down the middle in the 11th Century between the Catholic church and the Orthodox church. All over one word - filioque - inserted into the Nicene Creed - a creed written to decide which strains of Christian thought were “true” and which were heretical. It was inserted to counter a bunch of “heretics” in the West but bolstered the position of another bunch of “heretics” in the East and, by “heretics” I mean people like us - Presbyterians - who split from the Catholic Church over other disagreements.

“If a house is divided against itself,” says Jesus, “that house shall not stand.” Seems like bad news for the Church. But things aren’t that simple. One of Mark’s literary tricks is to insert one story inside another. The passage about the Satan being divided against Satan and so forth is in the middle of a bit about Jesus’s family thinking he’s nuts and coming to find him. In a sense, here, his family represent wider humanity: they represent his human heritage and, by extension, our human heritage.

Because this kind of division is hardly restricted to Christianity, is it? Earlier I called the violence between Protestants and Catholics in certain places as “tribal”. That’s what we do, as human beings. We divide ourselves into groups that share beliefs and values and we contrast ourselves with that lot over there who think differently, act differently, speak differently and who don’t seem to understand - perversely of course - The Truth that we have. 

What if “The Truth” isn’t what’s important? At least, not in the sense of a defined creed. When Jesus is told his family are outside he turns to those sitting around him and says, “these are my family” and “whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister.” And what is “the will of God”? It’s in John’s Gospel and it’s simple: “Love one another.” Not “agree on a whole pile of theological musings”. Not “believe an agreed set of doctrines.”  Not “understand the ways of God with a certainty no human being can genuinely have in the face of the Eternal and the infinite”. Just recognise that we are brothers and sisters in the love of God.

And in families, among brothers and sisters, you don’t always agree. My brother and I, for example, have markedly different views on Brexit. But I love him - he’s my brother. My sister doesn’t like the music I like. But I love her - she’s my sister. It really is that simple.

As Christians we have a super power. The world sees us as fractured and divided - yes we are; but we need not be divided against ourselves. While the Presbyterian churches were divided in the way I talked about earlier, Ministers still exchanged pulpits. Churches still worked together to supply food to the poor and to preach the Gospel in their communities. They still recognised a family relationship between them. They still embraced each other, not despite their disagreements, but in them.

And that is the Church’s super power. Divided we may be, but we can love each other in those divisions.  Fractured we may be, but those fractures can be healed by acceptance and respect and humility - a humility that recognises that, however certain we may that we are right, we are fallible. If we can see that, beyond the shades of denomination and doctrine that divide us, there is a unity in which we are bound by the love of God, then we are not divided against ourselves and the house stands.

And more. We are witness to a world divided by race and politics and beliefs. If we can love one another in our beliefs then we are witnesses to the world of the power of love. If we can love another in our different ways of running church then we are witnesses to the world to the power of love. If we can set aside the differences that divide us into tribes and embrace one another in the love of God, then we are witnesses to the power of love. 

Lord, we can’t fully understand you. Grant us humility to accept that. Grant us faith to find you in your Son, Jesus. Grant us love to reach beyond our differences and embrace each other as your children

Preached at Kirkpatrick-Fleming parish church