Well, we're in a three-week miniseries looking at several hot topics in our culture, I guess, things which our culture spends a lot of time talking about and thinking through and debating for which we need theological, biblical wisdom and insight to respond. We've been looking at the issue of care for creation, often called the environment. We looked at the issue of sexuality last week. And this week, we're going to be looking at transgender and intersex and gender dysphoria and issues like that. How do we, should we, can we best love and respond to people whose experience of their gender, in other words, how they think about and experience their sex, doesn't correspond to their biological sex in physical reality? How do we help people? How do we serve and love people for whom that's true? How do we serve and love people who have taken measures perhaps to change their biological sex, or perhaps whose biological sex is unclear? which it sometimes is at birth and on after that. What does love look like when faced with people with issues and questions like that and with a culture in which these things are very controversial and often quite angrily debated in the public square? How do we handle all of these things? It's a huge issue, so we're just going to jump straight into the Word of God, and I'm going to read from Matthew chapter 19. If you've got a Bible, you can turn that, it'd be helpful. Matthew chapter 19 and verses 1 to 12. I should say up front, this is not a passage about transgender or intersex. That's not, although there is actually a bit of it is about intersex, as we'll see, I think to some degree, but it's not about transgender persons, but it is a very helpful text in which Jesus gives us totally foundational insights for handling this issue and serving such people. So we're gonna read Matthew chapter 19, beginning at verse one. Now, when Jesus had finished these sayings, he went away from Galilee and entered the region of Judea beyond the Jordan, and large crowds followed him and he healed them there. And Pharisees came up to him and tested him by asking, is it lawful to divorce one's wife for any cause? He answered, haven't you read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female and said, therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife and the two shall become one flesh. So they're no longer two, but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate. They said to him, so why then did Moses command one to give a certificate of divorce and to send her away? He said to them, because of your hardness of heart, Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so. And I say to you, whoever divorces his wife except for sexual immorality and marries another commits adultery. The disciples said to him, if such is the case with a man with his wife, it's better not to marry. But he said to them, not everyone can receive this saying, but only those to whom it's given. For there are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by men, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Let the one who is able to receive this receive it. This is the word of God. Obviously, this is a story about divorce and remarriage. The Pharisees are trying to test Jesus with a sticky question that might get him into trouble, and he answers brilliantly, drawing on the garden and the law and his own authority and so on. But as he does, he makes two points that are of enormous importance, I think, when it comes to responding wisely and lovingly to questions about transgender and intersex. The first point he makes in verse four is this. Haven't you read, he says, that from the beginning, he made them, God made them, male and female. That's the first thing Jesus says, which is really important foundation for this discussion. From the beginning, God made human beings male and female. In other words, the male-female binary is part of God's good creation. Jesus doesn't say, from the beginning God made some people 90% male and 10% female, some people 10, 90, some people 60, 40, some people a million. That's not how God created it. God created people male and female and that binary sexual dimorphism, the idea that there's two sexes and they come together to produce life, that's part of God's good creation. He didn't create one sex or 11, he created two. And that's good, and so is marriage. And we're not actually free, as the Pharisees for other reasons were trying to do, we're not free to mess around with it. That's how God made it. And that's part of God's good creation. That's foundation number one. The male-female binary is created by God, given by God, and it's good. The second insight, which is of huge importance when it comes to this conversation, is in verse 12. Jesus says, for there are eunuchs who have been so from birth. And there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by men, presumably by castration. And there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven, which most interpreters take to mean being celibate and single, as we said last week. But that insight pairs with the first insight in a very important way. In the first comment, in verse 4, he's saying, the male-female binary is given by God. It's part of God's good creation. But in the second comment in verse 12, he's saying, there are also such things as eunuchs or people who in various ways don't fit quite the male female binary as we understand it. Now, Jesus is not saying that eunuchs are neither male nor female, because the Bible always speaks of eunuchs as male. But what he is saying is that there is also a category of person we don't very often think about in the church or in scripture, which is there are eunuchs who have been so from birth. There are people, Jesus is saying, who are effectively, whose biological makeup doesn't quite fit their biological sex. In certain ways, their genitals or their gonads or their genes don't line up in some way that means you can speak of them as being a eunuch. And they were born that way. That hasn't happened as a result of castration. It hasn't happened as a result of something humans have done to them, which happened a lot in the ancient world, much less now. But there are some who are actually born like that. And that insight is also very important to hold alongside the idea that the male-female binary is good and created by God. So God made us male and female on the one hand, but on the other hand, there are a few of us who don't quite fit that category in quite the traditional customary way, and they were born that way, and through no fault of their own, that is the way they experience this life. And both of those things need to be held alongside one another as we approach this pretty complex and sensitive pastoral topic. And so I think that a culturally robust and clear, yet pastorally loving and sensitive response to transgender and intersex involves both of those insights together. Creation is good. God created us male and female. Biological sex is good. It's given by God. And there's two of them. And we live in a fallen world. And there are a few people who, through no fault of their own, do not fit neatly into the categories that most of us do. And that actually presents a whole bunch of challenges. So what I then want to do is to take those two insights and apply them to three groups of people who are related but are not at all the same. in this conversation. The first group of people is intersex people. I've used that word a couple of times already. An intersex person is someone whose biological sex is ambiguous because their genes and or their gonads and or their genitals do not line up with each other in some way. So it might be that their chromosomes are XY, so they're biologically male, but they don't have some either male genitals, male gonads. That may be true for them, and there might be other variables as well. So I'm going to apply these two insights, firstly, to intersex people, secondly, to transgender people, to people whose experience of gender internally, in their mind, in the way they think, in the way they feel, is different from their biological sex in physical reality. There is perhaps a mismatch between the way the person experiences gender in ear and the way that their biological sex is expressed physically in their body. And very simplistically, sex is male or female, gender is masculine or feminine. So sometimes people say, what's your gender? Male. Technically, that's not quite the way we should use that word. That sex, what's on your passport, male or female, that's a biological statement about your body, whereas gender might be more of a statement about the way you think about and experience biological sexuality. And so a bucket term that's useful here is gender dysphoria. which is the idea that there is some degree of mismatch between the experience of gender you have internally, emotionally, mentally, and so on, psychologically, and the biological reality of your body. There might be a mismatch between them, which we call gender dysphoria. And then the third group of people I want to apply this to, which is important to bear in mind, are not the same as the first two. are the people in the culture at large, perhaps activists, journalists, media, students, educators, Twitter mobs sometimes going for JK Rowling or whoever it is, but people who are using transgender people and the challenges they face to try and destroy the male-female binary altogether. to try and say, actually, there's no such thing as binary male and female. Actually, we're all a little bit this, a little bit that. You need to stop being so bigoted and thinking that there is such a thing as a man or a woman. Actually, we're all varying degrees of who knows what. And sometimes attacking not just the binary, but attacking anyone who believes in it. And that third group is in quite a different category to the people who are experiencing it themselves. There are people who are intersex, there are people who are transgender, and there are people who may or may not have one of those other two challenges, but are nevertheless using the issue to say, there is no such thing as male or female, and the gender binary, the sex binary has got to go. And so we're going to respond to those three in slightly different ways, because they are, importantly, different issues and perspectives. Now in some ways our response to intersex people is the easiest and by the grace of God when I've preached on this subject before I have had people I don't even know who are intersex online getting in touch with me having heard the message and saying thank you so much. I'd literally never heard a message about this subject and I love Jesus and this is my story. And it's been a powerful thing. Actually, intersex people can often just get completely missed. And an intersex person whose biological sex is ambiguous, our response to that kind of person, it might be you, that kind of person is actually quite straightforward, I think. God loves you. We love you. We'd like you to tell us, help me understand what it is like to live in your shoes. Because you must face some challenges that I don't. Life must be challenging for you in ways that it is not for me. If we can help, please tell me. What do I need to know? What would help me best love and serve you?" That's really the response to a person who is intersex. For many years, what doctors would do is, when faced with ambiguous genitals or gonads, would take a decision at birth and say, I think this child is primarily male or primarily female, and then they would sometimes, often, remove the genitals or gonads that did not correspond with the judgment they'd made about sex. That can be hugely harmful. It's extremely damaging for people. But the more we've learned about intersex conditions, sometimes genitals don't form properly, or hormones are resisted when they come in at a certain stage in the womb, or whatever it is, the more we've learned about that, the more prepared doctors have been to wait and see how things turn out for that person. Now, some Christians, of course, can feel quite frightened by that or threatened by the idea that someone's sex might be ambiguous because they're worried, hang on a second, if this person's sex is ambiguous, then does that mean that the whole male-female binary will implode or disappear? But in this text that we've just read, Jesus shows that that doesn't follow. He says, some were born eunuchs. But he also says in the beginning, God made them male and female in the same passage, in the same debate. So for Jesus, he's not troubled by the idea that there might be someone who was born a eunuch, born with, at the very least, sexually ambiguous genitalia. But nevertheless, he doesn't see that as a reason to say male and female is no longer a thing. Do you see? He's very happy affirming both of those things in the space of eight or nine verses. Both are true, and that's okay. And so the response to an intersex person is simply to say, God loves you. We love you. Please tell me what's it like to be you? What do I need to know? How can I best serve and love you? The second category we mentioned is how best we serve and love transgender people. And the response here is actually very similar to the previous one, but there are a few more practical issues to think through, I think, as well. So I think fundamentally our response to a person here with gender dysphoria, a person who's got some degree of dissonance between their biological sex and their experience of gender, is again to say, God loves you. We love you. Tell us, what's it like to be you? What challenges do you face? How can we best serve and love you? So in other words, the outline of the response is the same. Now, at the same time as saying that, because of the third group I mentioned, which is the broader cultural, let's take down the male-female binary altogether people, there are some complexities with transgender people which we need to think through and understand a little bit more to avoid putting either ourselves or them in very unhelpful and difficult positions. So for example, there can be pressure to define a young person as trans too early rather than to wait and see. There can be pressure culturally to do that. It's great, yeah, wonderful. You feel a challenge lining up your perception of your own masculinity with your physical body. Okay, maybe you're trans. Maybe you need to experiment. Maybe you need to think about what it's like to be like a girl. And of course, a lot of teenagers may do that, take that advice, and it may not be helpful for them at all. Because as those of us who've lived through being teenagers know, it can be pretty confusing sexually and it's not necessarily the best. In fact, I don't think it is at all the best advice to diagnose someone too early and then encourage them to try and transition or whatever. So most children or teens, statistically speaking, who struggle with gender dysphoria will revert later to their biological sex after puberty. That's quite a normal thing that we now know happens quite a lot. People feel very confused at a certain age, but actually after puberty things settle down and they actually express and live out life quite happily in their biological sex. Another complexity might be that there is an assumption in the culture, again, that the best way to help a person if their mind and their body are out of step with each other is to conform the body to the mind rather than the other way around. Now that's kind of a gnostic thing, if you know what I mean by that word. It's an idea that really the body is fallen and messed up and doesn't really matter so much, and what really matters is who you are on the inside. And so there is a tendency in our culture to say, if your body does not match your mind, your mind stays as it is, and we need to conform the body to fit the mind, rather than say, no, we need to get the mind to come to terms with the body. And the Christian, of course, believes both mind and body need to come together in lockstep. But what happens a lot in the culture is people are quick to say, let's fix the body. We can make a change to the body to line it up with the mind. But actually, that as a mindset can often be very unhelpful for a trans person and for many others. You take that mindset with somebody struggling with anorexia, you're going to make their problem worse. Somebody says, but in my mind, my mind believes that I am shaped this way. My physical body in reality is shaped this way. Now that dissonance is a problem. It's deeply painful for people. Friends of mine who've walked through that, very painful. But the answer is not to say, oh yeah, you know what? We just need to affirm what your mind is telling you and then conform the body to meet it. That's not the best way of helping such a person. And the same is true in an issue like this. And of course, there are pastoral sensitivities. So somebody says to, I've been asked, how would you counsel a man who says he experiences life as a woman? or a woman who says she experiences life as a man? And my answer is, well, until I've met them, I don't actually know. I just want to start by talking about it and saying, okay, God loves you. I love you. Tell me your story. Tell me what it's like. Tell me how it's expressed itself. How has it made life harder? What helps? What doesn't? How can we help? That doesn't mean I'm going to throw all of my biblical understanding out the window, but it does mean I'm going to say, I want to understand this person before I say, right, here's the answer for you in this particular situation. with the challenges you're facing. And there are also not just pastoral sensitivities, but practical ones. I remember reading this line a few years back, no matter how compassionate the people and the pastor are, if there isn't a family bathroom, things get complicated fast. And so sometimes the simple reality of having unisex toilets can actually be quite freeing for people, just to say, on this particular area, the first thing you experience on coming into church is not being forced to do something that you feel deeply uncomfortable doing. So there are a whole load of complexities which make this one a little bit more tricky. But having said that, those complexities must not obscure the central point, which is God loves you, and so do we, and we want to understand what it's like to live in your shoes and help you. And some of that help is going to take the form of discipleship and clarifying what it's like to live in this sex, and there's probably going to be some medical help, some therapeutic help, all sorts of things might be involved. And we're not going to throw the male-female binary out the window at all, but what we are going to do is try and love and serve this person rather than responding to it as if it's an issue that needs to be dealt with in an abstract way. But for many people in the church, the way that we have encountered this issue or this question is actually through the third group of people. It's not through knowing an intersex person. It may not even be through knowing a trans person, but it's through knowing or encountering or having met at work or training or something the activists and journalists and students and media and educators who are using transgender and intersex people to try and destroy the male-female binary altogether. That's how you might have expressed it. or it might have encountered it in your life. That's a lot of what's going on in local schools on this issue. That's a lot of debates about bathrooms or about who competes in the Olympics and whether or not a biological male can compete in the Olympics as a woman and whether or not you should be allowed to continue to have a position in government or as a famous author or whatever if you don't believe that. If you're a woman, as Sharon James or J.K. Rowling are, who speak out against this and say, no, women should compete with women, men should compete with men, then you get in big, big trouble. And there's people who absolutely hate people like that for the things they say. And that might be how you've encountered this issue. Rather than through meeting it in the form of a real person, it's been through just it coming in in the culture more widely in the news or at work or perhaps somewhere else. And the logic there goes something like this. There are exceptions to the male-female binary, therefore God did not create us male and female. So we're all on a giant spectrum, and anyone can sit anywhere they like on that spectrum and sleep with anyone they want, to be honest, and Christians should shut up about it. So a friend of mine got in touch with me, she rang me and she said, my daughter has just been, she was at school today. Oh, I think it was actually a few days later, school a few days ago. And they said it was rainbow day. And then they got all of the children, they drew a line across the middle of the floor and they asked all the kids in primary school to decide where on that line from male to female they felt they were. How do you respond to that, right? That's not the same question as how am I helping a transgender person who's talking to me right now. That is, hang on a second, that is deception and that must not be allowed to take rid in my heart and in my family and what on earth am I going to do about it when it's facing me in my kid's school. And so in some ways what's happening when people are framing things that way is they're doing the opposite of the way some people respond to intersex people. See, some people respond to intersex people by saying, God made us male and female, so there's no exceptions. But the third group do the opposite, and they're saying, there are exceptions, therefore God didn't make us male and female. And Jesus says, yes, there are exceptions. And yes, God did make us male and female. And that reality has not been undermined by the existence of people who, for various reasons, don't quite fit. The way Jesus says this, he uses the phrase, haven't you read? He's talking to the Pharisees, haven't you read your Bibles? Don't you know from the beginning God made male and female? What are you talking about? Saying that this is not a reality. So while I want to be very understanding and careful and loving towards an intersex or transgender person, I think my response to the sort of fashionable activists and cultural influencers who are saying, there you go, everyone's just on a spectrum, should be a combination of robust rebuttal and disagreement, mixed sometimes actually with outright ridicule of the idea, because sometimes they're just saying things that are plain silly. For example, I'm male, I'm 5 foot 11, 12 and a half stone, white British, 43 years old. If I felt like I was a 7-year-old blind 6 foot 2 inch black girl, the best way of you loving me would not necessarily be for you to affirm that all of those things are true. It might be for you to say, okay, we need to work through this because you clearly seem to believe it and there's some issues there, but that's not necessarily the same as saying those things are all true and I will allow you to believe that you can be whoever you want to be. Some of you may have seen this little clip before, but I found it quite a helpful expression of this idea and how sometimes ideas can get a little bit out of hand. And there's a place for respectfully engaging and saying, actually, I'm not sure that's actually true. So just have a little look at this video and see what you think. Are you aware of the debate happening in Washington state around the ability to access bathrooms, locker rooms, spas based on gender identity and gender expression? I think people should be able to have access to the facility. I think bathrooms could and potentially should be gender neutral because there doesn't need to be a classification for differences. I think people definitely should have the ability to go into whichever locker room they want. I feel like at least public universities should do their best to accommodate for those who do not have a specific gender identity. You know, whether you identify as male or female and whether your sex at birth is matching to that, you should be able to utilize the resources. So if I told you that I was a woman, what would your response be? Good for you, okay, like, yeah. Nice to meet you. I'd be like, what? Really? I don't have a problem with it. I'd ask you how you came to that conclusion. If I told you that I was Chinese, what would your response be? I mean, I might be a little surprised, but I'd say, good for you. Like, yeah, be who you are. I would maybe think you had some Chinese ancestor. I would ask you how you suddenly came to that conclusion, and why you came to that conclusion. I would have a lot of questions, just because on the outside I would assume that you're a white man. If I told you that I was seven years old, what would your response be? I wouldn't believe that immediately. I probably wouldn't believe it, but I mean, it wouldn't really bother me that much to go out of my way and tell you, no, you're wrong. I'd just be like, oh, OK, he wants to say he's seven years old. If you feel seven at heart, then so be it. Yeah, good for you. So if I wanted to enroll in a first grade class, do you think I should be allowed to? Probably not, I guess. I mean, unless you haven't completed first grade up to this point and for some reason need to do that now. If that's where you feel like mentally you should be, then I feel like there are communities that would accept you for that. I would say so long as you're not injuring society and you're not causing harm to other people, I feel like that should be an okay thing. If I told you I'm six feet five inches, what would you say? That I would question. Why? Because you're not. No, I don't think you're 6'5". If you truly believed you're 6'5", I don't think it's harmful. I think it's fine if you believe that. It doesn't matter to me if you think you're taller than you are. So you'd be willing to tell me I'm wrong? I wouldn't tell you you're wrong. No, but I'd say that I don't think that you are. I feel like that's not my place as another human to say someone is wrong or to draw lines or boundaries. No, I mean, I wouldn't just go like, oh, you're wrong. Like, that's wrong to believe in it. Because I mean, again, it doesn't really bother me what you want to think about your height or anything. So I can be a Chinese woman. Sure. But I can't be a six foot five Chinese woman. Yes. If you thoroughly debated me or explained why you felt that you were 6'5", I feel like I would be very open to saying that you are 6'5", or Chinese, or a woman. I don't show a video like that to ridicule anybody, actually. I do think some of the responses of the students are quite funny. But in part, I'm trying just to make the point that it's not always true that people have even thought through the implications of their own position. Can a 17-year-old identify as a 22-year-old in order to buy a beer? Would you serve them in a pub if they did? What about sport? Can somebody who's biologically male identify as a female and compete in sport? This made me laugh. It was just a satirical newspaper ran this, but running across the top where it says, motorcyclist who identifies as bicyclist sets cycling world record. It was like a way of saying, it doesn't matter. In reality, if you're driving a motorbike, it doesn't matter whether you identify as driving a pedal bike. That doesn't stop it from not being fair. This is not the same as saying, we need to shun that person at all. It's just saying, no, no. But there are certain realities to that that mean we don't now just treat you as the thing you identify as. They actually mean, for fairness in sport, we might need to do something else, which, of course, has been much debated in the last few years. Now, you might think this is all a bit silly. Come on, Angie, no one's actually doing that. And you think, well, OK, people are doing it when it comes to male-female sport. But there are clearly some people who are trans-abled. That is a phenomenon. Some people identify as disabled who are not. Some people identify as blind, even though they can see. You may have come across the story of Rachel Dolezal, who was the president of the NAACP in America. So a very senior position in a black civil rights organization who identified as black, and it later came out that she was actually white. And there was a massive outcry, and often an outcry from the same people who were, in some cases, saying, oh, a man can identify as a woman, but a white girl can't identify as a black girl. My point isn't simply to say there's an inconsistency there. that you can't say, oh, what matters is who you are on the inside, and then not apply it to all sorts of other areas as well. Here's a much more severe example. Richard Hernandez is a 55-year-old former banker who identifies as a dragon. This is a picture of him. I actually find the picture quite upsetting in its way. He has a forked tongue. He has horns on his forehead. He has a surgically flattened nose and surgically removed ears. So how do you help Richard Hernandez? I suggest that we help him not by affirming his dragon-ness and empowering him to become one, but by treating it as a challenge that he faces and loving him anyway. And we certainly don't help him by denying that there is any clear difference between humans and dragons. What we do is we say, okay, haven't you read? He, in the beginning, made them male and female. He, in the beginning, made them like this. And we need to not allow some of these examples of people who genuinely, for all sorts of reasons, have come to believe that what's in their mind is out of step with what's in their body. That's a struggle, that's a source of a lot of pain and discomfort for many people, and we want to be as loving and sympathetic as we can, but that does not necessarily mean affirming that the things that person believes about themselves are biologically reality, because often they simply are not. So what does love look like? We're in a society that appears to present only two options. One, you affirm the givenness of male and female and insist that everybody fits neatly into one of them. Or two, you deny the givenness of male and female, you make a giant spectrum and say everyone can pick where they are on it. And you prioritize feelings over bodies. Jesus gives us a third option, as he so often does. You affirm emphatically that God made the male and female, that creation is good, that biological sex is good, and you affirm emphatically that there are eunuchs. There are exceptions, whether from birth or disfigurement or from self-inflicted changes, and that it is possible to be a eunuch for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. In many ways, Jesus lived that both and himself. Now, I'm not saying Jesus is trans or Jesus was intersex, but Jesus was a tradesman, a construction worker, a circumcised male, who nevertheless didn't fit the normal expectations of what maleness looked like in his culture. He abstained from sex and marriage and family expectations. He was in some ways a eunuch for the kingdom of God. And the funny thing is, of course, that all of us, every person here, lives with some degree of dissonance between what we are and what we feel ourselves to be. That is a phenomenon that any professing Christian should understand very well, because Christian discipleship is all about conforming what we feel to what is actually true. We're all doing this. Now, we might not be doing it about our biological sex, admittedly, but you and I are doing this all the time. I feel like I'm this, and then I hear the Word of God say, no, you have been created like this. I feel like I'm a hmm, and God's Word says, no, you are a hmm. And I have to conform my feelings to keep them in step with reality. The beauty of the gospel is that it is the word and the work of Christ that define who I am, not the way I feel about myself or the kinds of things I've experienced. Ultimately, the feelings and experiences matter, but they need to be brought in line with the objective reality spoken over me by God in his word, by his spirit. And one day, that dissonance that you and I experience, the dissonance that every trans or intersex person experiences, is going to disappear, swallowed up by life. Heaven will be joined to earth. New Jerusalem will come down from heaven. Christ will join with his bride in marriage. All sorrow and sighing, all the waiting, all the grief, all the pain of living with gender dysphoria or an intersex condition or whatever it is, gay people, trans people, single people, divorced people, married people, all of the sorrow and sighing will flee away and we will inherit new creation together. risen in glory. But for now, we wait. We wait for that future. And that's why we're now going to finish this little mini series and this message by coming to communion together and breaking bread together, because this is a meal of waiting and a meal of longing. It's a meal in which we come and say, Lord, things are not yet as they will be. But I'm holding fast to your promise that you're going to make all things new. And we have the promise of Jesus ringing in our ears when he says, I tell you the truth, I will not drink again of this fruit of the vine until the day when I drink it anew with you in my father's kingdom. We're anticipating a day when all will be right. And so was he in everything he did as he went to the cross. And so I'd invite you to come to the table in a moment as we lead this section of the meeting and to receive the gifts of his body and blood that make us clean and that promise a future in which death is swallowed up in life. Let's pray. Father, we thank you for your Word, we thank you for your Spirit, we thank you for the Lord Jesus in whom all of these things are so beautifully expressed and resolved, in whom we see such love and grace and compassion and clarity and wisdom and insight for everything we need. Lord, we pray as a family of God that you would help us walk in love and in wisdom in all of the issues we've touched on today. but that as we come to your table now, Lord, you would unite us, for though we are many, we are one body, because we all share in one bread and one cup. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.