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After this I looked, and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and before the Lamb. They were wearing white robes and were holding palm branches in their hands. And they cried out in a loud voice: \u201cSalvation belongs to our God, who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb.\u201d (Revelation 7:9-10)

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There is a picture that cycles through as a background on my laptop. \xa0It\u2019s a picture of the global church at worship.\xa0 I was in Geneva, Switzerland at a meeting of the World Council of Churches\u2019 Central Committee, consisting of around 150 Christians representing six continents, working in four main languages, and coming from around 320 denominations from around the world.

Now, some of you may have negative connotations with the World Council of Churches, but I ask you to suspend those judgements for a moment, especially in light of so much good work that has been done around their tables by the likes of Lesslie Newbigin and Hendrik Berkhof.\xa0

For me during those nearly three weeks I was there while still a seminarian, it was the worship that really grabbed my heart.\xa0 On one particular Sunday, they carted us off on buses to a small Swiss village with a great, stone cross-shaped cathedral in the middle of it.\xa0 The bells clanged on and on as we walked up the cobbled path to worship.\xa0

Inside the dark old grey-stone cathedral during worship, we were invited to partake in the Lord\u2019s Supper together: the single most visible sign of the divisions between us all.\xa0 Many of our churches practice closed communion, barring Christians from other churches or denominations from partaking.\xa0 The table that ought most to signify our union as the one, singular body of Christ, is the place where we are most confronted with the sins of our division.

But on that day, we gathered in a big circle under the dome at the centre of the cross.\xa0 Representing different nations, different ethnicities, and many different Sunday-best clothing colour schemes\u2014in that circle we saw one another.\xa0 We sang with one another.\xa0 And we passed the bread and wine: \u201cthe body of Christ, given for you,\u201d \u201cthe blood of Christ, shed for you\u201d echoed in all different languages around that great, grey hall.\xa0 Bishops, metropolitans, priests, pastors, Salvation Army officers, Quaker meeting leaders, lay preaches, and ordinary ol\u2019 folks like me.\xa0 There we were: reconciled in Christ, the Lamb, who had broken down the dividing walls of hostility between us.\xa0 If only for just a moment, we were one body, his body.

Never have I had a clearer vision of these words from Revelation 7.\xa0 We could\u2019ve been wearing white robes and holding palms.\xa0 Perhaps we were.\xa0 The Spirit seemed to lift our hearts to heaven.\xa0

When Christ comes again: all division will cease.\xa0 He will come to claim his own.\xa0 All of us.\xa0 And we will be together around his throne and around his table.\xa0 The sin of our hostilities and divisions, our grievances and our grudges will be once and for all, washed away.\xa0 That too, is our hope in Christ.

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