Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of big shoulders.

That is how Carl Sandburg once described an earlier Chicago. Some people will undoubtedly point out that we continue to live up to this reputation earned in the past. Nonetheless, the challenge that we face today has less to do with our "big shoulders" than with the length of our arms, the extent of our reach. Can our embrace be wide enough to gather all our residents into one harmonious community? This challenge faces communities throughout this great nation.

I am grateful for this opportunity to join you once again for prayer and reflection. I hope that you will receive me into your homes this evening as a brother in the Lord, as one who respects and cares for each of you. I want to talk to you about our community in light of the teaching and example of Jesus.

One of my favorite Biblical texts is Jesus’ deeply moving prayer for unity in the 17th chapter of St. John’s Gospel: "...that they all may be one." This prayer is on his lips the night before he gives up his life for us that we might be saved, healed, reconciled.

Jesus’ prayer for unity has taken on new urgency and significance in the ecumenical efforts of the last twenty or thirty years. Nonetheless, its meaning extends well beyond our efforts toward Christian unity. According to the scriptures, God’s design for humankind is that we recognize that all of us on this planet are, indeed, the children of God and brothers and sisters of one another. This implies that we must live in accordance with this divinely inspired insight—that we live in peace, harmony, and unity.

We need only look around us to realize that we have a long way to go to cooperate with God’s plan. This prompts us to ask ourselves: What will it take for Jesus’ prayer for unity to be fully realized? What will bring about greater harmony and peace among nations and within our families? How can we better use God’s gifts to us and build up his kingdom of peace and justice?

First, we must pray for peace. We must acknowledge that true peace is ultimately God’s promise, his gift to us. Without his help, we can do nothing to solve the diverse and enormously complex problems which confront us. Without his guidance and enabling power we remain helpless to overcome our divisions.

Nonetheless, if prayer were all we needed to achieve unity and harmony, we surely would have realized our dream and goal by now. Obviously, more than prayer is needed. We must also do something. That is why I have chosen this evening’s scripture reading from the 13th chapter of St. John’s Gospel, the narrative which opens the last discourse of Jesus and provides a broader context for his prayer for unity.

Jesus’ actions are sometimes disturbing to us, but always revealing. At times, he jars us away from familiar concepts or attitudes and shows us a new, creative way of living in God’s presence and in human community. He touches contagious lepers, but also embraces small children. He seems to enjoy table fellowship more with public sinners and tax collectors than with scribes and pharisees, but he also dines with his disciples and friends.

He feeds vast multitudes without benefit of a computerized catering service, and, in the midst of a turbulent storm, he calms the wind and water. But he also retires to a quiet place from time to time, away from the crowds. Some of his actions are extraordinary, while others are quite simple.

Because I frequently experience distractions during prayer, I have often looked to Jesus’ example for a remedy. I have been struck with how busy Jesus always seems to be in the Gospel narratives. For example, as he walks on his determined way towards Jerusalem and Calvary, people with various illnesses and diverse questions constantly approach him and ask for a favor. They may need to be healed, have a question answered, or a dispute settled.

As he encounters these potential distractions, he is not deterred from carrying out his basic mission nor does he lose his way or sense of purpose. This often puzzled me until I realized one day that, when Jesus stops to embrace a child and when he stretches out his arms on the cross to embrace the whole world, there is a single theme, a common focus, in his life and ministry: Jesus has come to bring the Father’s healing and saving love to each of us.

In that sense, he does not do many things, but only one—he shows his tremendous love for us, and he does so in a great variety of ways—some quite simple and some extraordinary.

Close association with Jesus would naturally lead to an expectation of constant surprises. Peter and the others spent considerable time with Jesus, but Peter is quite taken aback when Jesus begins the unusual activity of washing his disciples’ feet. Perhaps you and I have less difficulty identifying with Peter’s reaction than we do with Jesus’ action.

But what a lesson there is for us here—the Lord Jesus becomes a servant. (He performs a menial task to show his love for his friends.) He had told them earlier: "The Son of Man has come to serve, not to be served." This statement is forthright and clear, but we do not begin to understand the depth of its meaning or the extent of its power until we sit among the disciples and await our turn for Jesus to wash our feet.

In other words, Jesus does more than pray for unity—he shows his disciples how to care for one another. He shows us how to achieve the unity for which we pray. We are to serve one another, to love one another as brothers and sisters in the Lord—indeed, to wash one another’s feet.

This mandate of Jesus is so simple and, yet, so difficult to fulfill. It is difficult because it runs counter to some of the values of our culture, which puts a premium on competition, consumerism, and individualism. It is difficult for those of us who are immersed in this culture to understand a mandate to serve others.

It must seem like an enormous anomaly to those who are told that they "can have it all now!" Jesus ‘ mandate may sound unrealistic, unfashionable, too idealistic or utopian.

But there is illuminating truth, saving wisdom, and great power in his example and command. We are not individual islands, you and I. We can no longer pretend to be "Lone Rangers" in a world becoming increasingly interdependent. We cannot go it alone when all of us are faced with enormous social, economic, and political problems.

As Christians, we are called to become—to be— the one Body of Christ, each member in close association and collaboration with the others. As citizens of the world, we share a common stewardship of the earth’s resources, and a joint responsibility for solving our common problems.

It is one thing to carry out Jesus’ mandate within our family or close circle of acquaintances and another to implement it within a local church or community. It is an even greater challenge to accept it as a blueprint for relationships among nations—or to realize that its embrace includes all our brothers and sisters, regardless of their religious affiliation or social condition. But we will not imitate the Master until our embrace is like his—wide enough to include the whole world in our love.

Let me make this more concrete by applying it to the Chicago metropolitan area. What I say about Chicago may well apply to other communities in our viewing area. I’ll leave that for you to decide.

We have reason to be proud of the broad range of ethnic and racial backgrounds within this community. Each wave of immigrants has enriched our life and broadened our experience of the wider world. Newly arrived immigrants—today more frequently from Latin America and Asia than from Europe—struggle to make their new home in our midst. They seek to preserve their particular heritage, their ethnic pride, and, above all, their dignity as they adapt to a new culture. In Chicago—and throughout the United States—we have a marvelous opportunity to demonstrate to the world that people of diverse backgrounds can live together in harmony and peace!

But our social diversity can also lead to conflict. This has been our sad experience, and it continues to this day, further complicating the other problems we face.

Apart from our ethnic or racial diversity, economic change is seriously affecting the quality of life in this community. We face critical issues which affect the health and well-being of all our people—our families, our youth, our elderly. Unemployment, underemployment, crime, poor and inadequate health services, deterioration of family life, decreasing social service problems, violence in our streets and on our playgrounds—all these problems demand our common concern and our collaboration.

In my three and a half years here I have visited various neighborhoods of Chicago and the suburbs. I have come to realize that Chicago is not one city, but two: the prosperous city, full of hope and potential, which we see reflected in the impressive skyscrapers downtown, along the magnificent lake shore, and in the beautiful residential areas of the outer city and suburbs.

And the other city of bone-crushing poverty and spirit-eroding unemployment, of decaying housing and fleeing business and industry, the city of fear and near despair which lies between the two sections of the prosperous city, the city where children frequently go to bed hungry.

Last summer a local newspaper carried a report about an eight-year-old Chicago boy named Terrance who was fretting because his mother couldn’t pay the family’s bills. He explained: "I ran away from home once so my mommy would have one less (child) to worry about." He sounded like a sensitive, courageous youngster—but hungry, nonetheless. His family’s plight, as we know, is shared by many others at many locations throughout this prosperous land.

What can we do to improve the quality of Terrance’s life and that of people like him? We simply must come together—with our big shoulders and our wide embrace! We must work together courageously and creatively to solve our common problems! But, to unite this community in the face of serious social, economic and political problems means that we must take down the racial and ethnic fences which separate people from one another.

In response to a neighbor who annually repeated the axiom "Good fences make good neighbors," the poet Robert Frost retorted:

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.
Before I built a wall, I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall
That wants it down.

Today it is not a question of loving or not loving a wall. Today we simply have no choice—if we want to survive as a human community—but to tear down the walls which divide us. If ever they made for good neighbors, that time is past! The high fences around our individual communities have only increased our suspicion, the fear, the distrust which threaten to isolate us from one another, thereby destroying the harmony of our community.

These fences have become obsolete and destructive because they make it impossible for us to be brothers and sisters toward one another. They make it impossible for us to confront our common problems. Facing these problems alone has proved inadequate, but we need not stand alone or walk single file into the next millennium. Indeed, we must not!

What shall we do? How shall we tear down the fences and walls? How can we build a united community? There is no one correct or effective way. I invite each of you to tap your creativity and generosity to develop new approaches to achieve this dream because we may need to try many approaches.

Our ecumenical and interfaith experience of the last twenty or thirty years has demonstrated that people with widely divergent views and convictions can come together, that they can discuss the issues dividing them and together, look for solutions, and that they can join hands and celebrate what they have in common.

We must build upon the sense of fellowship which is the fruit of our ecumenical and interfaith endeavors. We must pray for unity and discuss both the insights we share in common and our differences. But we must also act. We must collaborate in our service to the larger community. This is not merely the task of religious leaders; it must also take place at the grassroots level. Each of you has a role to play!

Such collaboration is not only a matter of practical necessity, given the enormously complex problems which we all face. More importantly, it is what the Creator has always intended that we do—that we live and work in peace, harmony, justice and unity with one another to build up God’s New Creation.

Walt Whitman once wrote that "A great city is that which has the greatest men and women." Chicago—and all other cities in this country—have tremendous potential to be truly great cities because there is much goodness, energy, and creativity in the wonderful women and men who live in these communities. These gifts need to be channeled if we are to realize our dream of a harmonious, life-giving community.

If Jesus, who is Lord, became a servant to show us how to express our love, then we can do no less. We who are his disciples must learn what washing one another’s feet means—in practical terms in our contemporary society.