This summer we witnessed a number of intriguing religious forays into the public realm. In early September, for instance, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, the prefect for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, speaking for the Vatican, offered to the world a document entitled, "Declaration the Lord Jesus-On the Unicity and Salvific Universality of Jesus Christ and the Church." In that decree Cardinal Ratzinger asserted that non-Christian religions "are gravely deficient" and that most non-Catholic Christian denominations, because they do not accept the papacy, "suffer from defects" that disqualify them as churches in the proper sense." He said we in the free churches can be labeled, "ecclesial communities" but not churches in the full sense.

Of course, the document received some immediate reaction. George Carey, the Archbishop of Canterbury said the edict subverted significant progress in recent ecumenical discussion and he refused to accept the judgment that Anglican priestly orders and Eucharist integrity bore deficiency in any way. Paul Wilkes, a regular Catholic religious commentator wrote an article in the Globe the following Sunday, under the headline: "Only Catholics Need Apply."

At the same time, more than 160 Jewish leaders, as US News and World Report describes it, these Jewish leaders "signed a landmark statement acknowledging Judaism's shared roots with Christianity and called on Jews to give up distrust of Christians." The statement acknowledges significant differences in Judaism and Christianity, but also tries to come to terms with concurrence: we read the same book, worship the same God, rest on the moral principles of Torah. The Vatican statement, however, compelled two Italian rabbis, one them the chief rabbi of Rome, to postpone further interfaith conversation because of the Vatican's implication of Judaism's illegitimacy.

In addition to this ecumenical fiasco, we read of some Episcopal Churches pulling out of their dioceses and forming a new denomination where only men qualify for the priesthood and gay people are granted second class status. The Methodists and Presbyterians are split over the place of gay people in their seats of authority; and just the other day, I received in the mail-at my request, I must add-a new hymnal for the United Church of Christ published by the First Congregational Church of Houston, Texas, edited by a woman-capable and gifted-who left the New Century Hymnal Committee I chaired, furious over our committee's altering of texts which stirred up our memory banks but which we hoped were consonant with the Gospel of justice, inclusion, and welcome.

Are you familiar with this religious log-rolling and name-calling? Have you stopped reading about it because you believe that all churches really do is scrap with one another about who is right and who is wrong, about whose church, as Cardinal Ratzinger nicely put it, whose church is really entrusted with "the fullness of grace and truth," the argument over who can claim to be the One True Church?

Well, these denominational and church rumbles might be called, in our modern slang, "the same old same old." Indeed, what else is new? That little passage we read this morning, from Mark's Gospel, is cut fom the same cloth, identical to that providing Cardinal Ratzinger's indictment of defects in other church bodies, and indeed bears similarities to most church squabbles and put-downs.

You see, these presumptuous, drag-out, self-righteous, horror stories find their prototype right in the Gospels. As Mark faces the issue of inclusion and welcome in his own little church forty years after Jesus died, Mark couches it in a Jesus story. Remember? John, to be known later as the beloved disciple, John saunters up to Jesus, as Mark describes it, and tells Jesus there is another character out there healing people making claim to Jesus' name. "He is not one of us," John carps. "He has all the trappings, he talks the talk, he slings the doctrine, he has a certain touch, he gets results, but he ain't one of us. We told him to stop. He wouldn't. We failed. We insisted God entrusted our church with the 'fullness of grace and truth.' We told him we were the one true church. We pointed out his defects. And yet he goes on his merry way."

And how does Jesus, in Mark's scenario, handle this problem? How does Jesus answer John's concern? "Hey," he says. "This character appears to be doing good things. He heals people. He restores and recreates them. They find peace and reconciliation; they know courage and joy. What's not to celebrate? It occurs to me that those who are not against us are for us. Those who go about doing good in my name may count themselves among another denomination, their religious code language may be different, their liturgies may follow a differing order, their structures may be episcopal, or presbyterian or congregational, but if for my sake, they organize for healing and reconciliation, for justice and peace, if they combine worship and mission and meet over there, or around the block or across the square, if they are not against us, by God they are for us!"

You see, Mark wrestles with loyalists in his church, the likes of John, those who want to claim the truth for themselves, who believe they, for whatever reason, possess ultimate orthodoxy, represent the properly ordered, bear supreme doctrine. And Mark is fed up with those competing claims. Mark shows us Jesus telling John to put his doctrinal and denominational worries aside and to celebrate the fact that someone out there happens to be operating off the same page. "Don't resist it," he, contends, "Embrace it. Don't fight it; join it. Don't belittle it; welcome it."

Now, on World Wide Communion Sunday it seems to me this tilt of Mark's toward inclusion expresses really Good News to our divided and fragmented world. To share this sacrament with our neighbors across the square and down the block, with those who burn incense and tinkle bells, those who go to the rail, those who receive by intinction, those who use wine and those who share unleavened wafers, for us to engage with them reflects the true hope of the world. Today we share with traditions who see the unity of the church dependent upon a papal figure and those who see unity in the grounding of our common faith in Jesus as the Christ. We share this sacrament with Serbs and Croats, with Hutus and Tutsis, with Ulster Catholics and Protestants, with Greeks and Russians, with churches in Kinshasa and Cape Town, Brasilia, and Sydney, St. Louis and St. Petersburg, and, most desperately, in Jerusalem and Gaza City. We share it with Blacks and Yellows and Reds and Browns and Whites. All of us bound by the wide embrace of the love grounding this sacrament.

Have you been reading the results of these fascinating Genome projects now going on across the globe? Well, one among many of those-what will we call them? discoveries, affirmations, revelations, confirmations? -these projects disclose what every world religion of any depth and power proclaimed from the beginning of time: that we are 99.9 percent the same, regardless of skin color, gender, sexual orientation, nationality, continent, locale, city, genetically making race and ethnicity moot, diverse to be sure, but humanely speaking 99.9 percent alike, an affirmation we people of the Book, whether Christian, Jew or Moslem, consider the bedrock of our faiths, confessing our common humanity as our being created in the image of God and loved by our God.

All of us in the image of God! All of us, of whatever race or tribe or nation, included in our God's embrace, our God's welcome. The other day Donald Murray, who writes a column for the Globe entitled, "Over 60," Murray composed a touching reflection illustrating the genius and grace of true welcome. I assure you, you do not have to be over sixty to read and appreciate Donald Murray's gentle and courtly wisdom. This story neatly tells how the so-called "other" serves in love truly as an ally, how "welcome" of the outsider can bring personal renewal. I am certain some of you may have read it; I hope you don't mind hearing its essentials again.

In this journey into his teenage memory, Donald Murray tells of his Quincy, Massachusetts, childhood: he, a Scots Baptist, conservative, fundamentalist Protestant living amid a broadly Irish Catholic neighborhood. His mother and father, he writes, tended toward severity and coldness. He remembers a childhood household lacking affection, intimacy, tenderness, benevolence, humor. He recalls, as well, a neighborhood sounding almost like contemporary Belfast, where Catholic and Protestant-the Scotsman and the Irishman-detest and fear one another. He describes one Catholic household across the street "with a black funeral wreath permanently on the door. Each Sunday the daughter would return with her husband, then one baby, then another, then a third, but the door was forever closed to her. She had married a Protestant." Murray informs us his mother thought The Rev. Ian Paisley deserved the Nobel Peace Prize for leading Protestant forces in Ulster.

But a friendship develops. He meets an Irish Catholic boy named John Devine, and over time Donald Murray becomes part of John Devine's family. The grandfather, as he says, "from the old country," initially finds Donald's presence difficult, but over time they slowly become friends. And in the Devine household he learns what a family can be. He tells of warmth and affection at their dinner table he never knew at his own. "I took mental notes," he writes, "as a visitor might in a foreign country where he hoped to live someday. Mr. Devine was a father in a way my father never could be, reveling in the role and kidding me the same way he did his five children. He served family style in the grand manner. Mrs. Devine offered me a maternal warmth my mother never could achieve."

Donald Murray finds himself embraced by this apparently alien family. The girls become virtual sisters, the boys his brothers, their intimate stories shared with him and his stories with them. And he closes his reflection this way: "Today, the grandfather from the Old Country, Mr. and Mrs. Devine, the girls and John are gone, but when I became a father I consciously tried to achieve the warmth and loving humor I experienced at the Devine home when I was a teenager. I never sit at the head of the table with my children and grandchildren, without hoping I have in my own way become Mr. Devine."

Is this what Mark is getting at? A welcome dissolving barriers? A love offering kindness, goodness, grace, miracles, really, wherever kindness becomes evident? Is this what Mark envisions for us and for our churches and for the human family? I find myself constantly returning to Martin Luther King's illustration in his little book, "Where do we go from here, Chaos or Community." Remember? "Some years ago a famous novelist died. Among his papers was found a list of suggested plots for future stories, the most prominently underscored being this one: 'A widely separated family inherits a house in which they have to live together.' This is the great new problem of human kind," King writes. "We have inherited a large house, a great 'world house' in which we have to live together-black and white, Easterner and Westerner, Gentile and Jew, Catholic and Protestant, Moslem and Hindu-a family duly separated in ideas, culture and interest, who because we can never again live apart, must learn to live with each other in peace."

He's got it! So, today, whoever you are, wherever you are from, welcome to this little outpost of the world house, and yes, welcome to this Holy Table. As we insist week upon week in our morning bulletin, in an invitation designed by our Deacons, "Following the One whom we believe is Sovereign and Savior, we affirm each individual as a child of God, and recognize that we are called to be like one reconciled body with many members, seeking with others of every race, ethnicity, creed, class, age, gender, physical or mental ability, and sexual identity to journey together toward the promised realm of God. On the threshold of Christ's open door, we rely upon the healing, unconditional nature of God's love and grace to be our help and guide as we all move forward with the work of this church in the world."

Just who is welcome? Without exception, you!

SCRIPTURE READING