Sermon for the Feast of Nathan Söderblom Chapel of Christ the Lord, Episcopal Church Center, New York, July 15, 2015 May the words of my mouth, and the meditation of my heart, be alway acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, my strength, and my redeemer. Today is the translated feast of Nathan Söderblom in the Episcopal Church and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. It is also, fittingly—and because of the happy mutual openness of Google calendars in our respective offices—a day on which Episcopalians in this good but humid city are welcoming a group of friends from the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Bavaria. We are all honored to be a part of this ecumenical conversation, and I am thankful in my own heart that each of you are here. Söderblom was a Swede, born in 1866. His “big name” as my elder daughter would say, was Lars Oloff Jonathan Söderblom. He is always known in English as Nathan Söderblom; his last name of course means “southern bloom,” never mind that he was very much a northern bloom, and that southern flowers open just as well as flowers from the east or west or north. Söderblom was the son of a Swedish parish priest. He was ordained as a 28 year old, and began international work almost immediately, first as chaplain to the Swedish community in Paris for seven years while obtaining his doctorate in comparative religion from the Sorbonne, and later for two years as professor of church history at Leipzig. In 1914, although he was a priest rather than a bishop, he was named Archbishop of Uppsala—the first time since 1670 when the bishops were passed over for that office, and the cause of no small controversy at the time. Just four months later, what was first called the Great War began. During the course of that first world war, Söderblom began to take on the work for which he is remembered today, combining the considerable authority of the Church in the early twentieth century with the credibility and wide reach of Swedish neutrality—along with his own intellectual and spiritual gifts—to advocate for peace proposals among the combatant nations, in appeal to the Christian faith shared at least in principle by the warring parties. All were of course unsuccessful. He worked to involve churches in the care of refugees and the wounded, and called attention to the rights of prisoners of war. By the end of the war, Söderblom had laid foundations for the work of reconstruction and reconciliation that would take up the remaining decade of his life. He called on churches to lead their members in building a lasting peace, initially through a meeting in 1919 called the World Alliance for Promoting Friendship among the Churches. Next came the Life and Work Conference in Stockholm in 1925, at which post-war momentum in inter-church communication and practical common activities continued to increase in parallel with the Faith and Order movement for Christian unity. The two movements grew together to become the World Council of Churches, in whose work some of us here today have participated, in 1948.

Our Nathan was the first ordained person to receive the Nobel Peace Prize when he did so in 1930. He received it in explicit recognition of his commitment to the ecumenical movement as a direction of human activity from which a lasting improvement in worldwide peace could begin to grow among persons of good will. Söderblom teaches all of us—as a Lutheran in and toward the universal church—that the love of Jesus is not confined to one pulpit, one church, one language or one people, but that every notion of nationalism or racism in the guise of religion is contrary to the will of God revealed in holy scripture. He does so with the full awareness of the horrors of the first world war, and in the immediate decades before several ideologies contrary to the alternatives he offered took hold in parts of our world in different ways—in western and eastern European fascisms, in American imperialisms, in the Dutch, British, French, Portuguese, Belgian, and Japanese colonial empires during their finite durations, and in the disastrous experiments of Chinese, Russian or Cambodian utopianism that resulted in mass starvation, incarceration, and summary execution. These nightmares of the middle decades of the last century are behind us now, and they were mostly yet to occur when Söderblom died in 1931. It is precisely because he speaks in anticipatory reconciliation before these cataclysms of the middle twentieth century that he can be for us a prophet of Christian unity that might have made for an alternative history in which Christians—acknowledging one another’s full identity and worth in baptism—would have refused to fight and kill one another on national lines. Söderblom worked for unity and connection against the odds of language, confession, race, politics, and geography to open doors for a simple thing Dietrich Bonhoeffer later called gemeinsames Leben or “life together.” He did this because he knew about the devastating implications of the separation, segregation, mutual isolation, and self-congratulation into which our religious communities harden so often and so easily. Nathan says to us, like a parent before we have made or understood our own mistakes: children, love one another. As God loves you, without reservation, love one another. Look at one another and see yourselves as new friends whose growth in generous Christian depth, honesty, and proficiency will shape your stronger life together. Söderblom speaks to us like a gentle and knowing parent who can see that we need to share life one with another in mutuality and community, and that our deliberate and careful sharing will be excellent not just for us as individuals, but for the wider world around us. He offers us a map forward as ecumenists and as Christians, and the map is openness to the Gospel of Jesus Christ through which we can learn wholeness, from which we can draw strength, and on which we can build our personal hope each day. May God give us grace to follow in this path of the opening of hearts, the sharing of ourselves, the welcoming of difference, the cultivation of humility, and the building up of love within and among the churches. Amen.

Richard Mammana