Part of the Body
Text: 1 Corinthians 12:31a
If you’ll indulge me, I want to start with a couple of contrasting stories for you.
I’m sure that even if you weren’t here last week, you’ve no doubt heard about my daughter’s rather loud drum solo in the midst of Kelta’s children’s story. I think I’ve recovered from the personal embarrassment, but not fully.
When I spoke to Megan on the way home after the service, I was trying to get a sense as to why she did what she did. I asked her that question that I suspect I’ll be asking more and more as she grows up, “What were you thinking?” You know what she said? “I was twying to help.”
She was trying to help. After all, she sees Daddy up at the front talking to everybody else, and she wants to “help.” On weekends that she’s not here, she sees her mother doing the same thing, and she wants to help. Unfortunately, her “help” can sometimes be to her mother and father’s great personal embarrassment… I’m sure I will get my payback when she is a teenager. But the key thing for her, in her own way, she wanted to help, she wants to be a part of things… and doing what Daddy is doing. She just hasn’t quite figured out that they best way to help Daddy right now is to sit with the rest of the children. We’ll be continuing to work on that.
Let me throw in a contrasting story for you.
After sharing Megan’s story with my wife, she shared the experience that she had last Sunday, but there’s a lot less to laugh about. The sermon last Sunday was shared between Sarah and her two other colleagues in ministry in her congregation. Tag-team preaching as I like to call it… During the sermon, there were two older ladies in up in the choir, in full-view of the entire congregation, who were obviously and audibly carrying on a conversation, and not paying attention to anything any of the three ministers had to say. As their nattering continued, one of the other choir members turned to them to get them to quiet down and stop being so disruptive, to which the two individuals told her to go sit in the congregation if she wanted to listen to the sermon that much.
I was stunned. Apparently it’s not the first time it has happened either… but maybe not quite so obvious. What is obvious is that these two did not consider themselves to be part of the congregation, and that somehow they could remove themselves from what was going on and do their own thing. They seemed to value their own role more important than anything else. After all, their part was done, and they were putting in time until the service was over. Clearly they weren’t interested in helping or being a part of things at all.
Talk about a contrast… and it had me asking the question… which of these two incidents was worse? A four year old trying to be part of things and helping, but not really getting what was an appropriate way of doing this… or two adults who should know better?
Maybe it’d be helpful to set these two stories against backdrop of Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians… particularly on our gifts, and how we are all part of the Body of Christ…
Last week, I preached on the first part of this passage where Paul reminds the early Corinthians church that everyone is blessed with a gift for the glory of God. Many gifts given by the one Holy Spirit… everyone has a gift that can help make the world a better place.
This week, Paul goes on to show how those many different gifts fit together. In writing this, he uses a metaphor that is well ahead of his time: the body of Christ.
“For just as the body is one and has many members, and all of the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body –Jews or Greeks, slaves or free –and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.”
For a congregation as divided and split as the church in Corinth, this was the perfect metaphor, the perfect image to try and bring people together.
The Corinthian church was very much a product of the culture around it. Being a very cosmopolitan place, and because of trade, it was a very wealthy city. A Roman Poet once said “Not everyone is able to go to Corinth.” less than a century before Paul would help found a church there. Even from an early stage Corinth’s own culture was one of class, privilege, and rank. This kind of thing could not help but to make for a very difficult cultural backdrop to found a church into. Money was never a problem with the Corinthian church… or rather it was… because rank, privilege, class, heritage, were all factors that played into how one “fit” within Corinthian society. It couldn’t help but creep into the culture of the church, and on more than one occasion Paul had to address it before it got out of hand and tore the fledgling congregation apart.
But Paul had his work cut out for him. A careful read of both 1st and 2nd Corinthians is Paul trying to pull this apart… trying to get the people to leave all of that class arrogance, the we-are-better-than-you attitude at the door.
His approach? To talk about the church, but not as an organization, or a ship with a crew… he creates an object lesson using something that everybody has… a body!
After reminding the Corinthians that God has given everyone gifts and talents to make the world a better place… for the glory of God… he then goes on to describe how they fit together. No one gift is or should be considered to be superior to the other, because they all play an indispensable role in the whole. When any of these parts are compromised or lost, the health of the whole suffers greatly. This is a biological reality, something that in theory, we should implicitly understand… which is why this Biblical image is so powerful… a hand or an eye cannot function or even live without the rest of the body.
But somehow we have lost that connection to the church community. We fall into one of several traps… that our gifts don’t count so we don’t belong, or that only certain people count, so we can ignore everybody else. This is where we really connect to the Biblical Story. Like it or not, at some point or another we have fallen into these ways of thinking. More often than not we dismiss our own value… but perhaps we are just as bad for dismissing someone else because we make the mistake that they have nothing to contribute.
But as Paul points out, eyes and hands may be fundamentally different in every way… but both are incredibly important to the body as whole. Without eyes, the rest of the body has no sense of direction, without hands, the rest of the body cannot reach out to work. Paul was trying to show that nobody is expendable… and that all are necessary for the continued health of the church.
Unfortunately for Paul, it would continue to be an issue. Otherwise all the different parts of 2nd Corinthians would not have been written, and Paul would not have had to make several trips to this congregation to try to get at the core of this issue. It is a reminder to us that the church is a very human organization, and we need to be constantly on our guard to make sure that these petty things don’t creep in on us. Two thousand years later, we are still learning these lessons, because we make the same mistakes. There is a great deal of wisdom that emerges out of reading and experiencing these Biblical accounts of the trials of the early church. They were just as human as we are… and we have the benefit of learning from their mistakes… if we’re willing to learn them.
If we are part of the church, we are part of the Body of Christ. It seems to be a challenge for us, to realize that we’re in this together, and that we need to value the gifts and skills that each of us have because they all play a part in the health of the whole. That’s what Paul was after, and I hope it’s a lesson that we can really learn.
Amen.
If you’ll indulge me, I want to start with a couple of contrasting stories for you.
I’m sure that even if you weren’t here last week, you’ve no doubt heard about my daughter’s rather loud drum solo in the midst of Kelta’s children’s story. I think I’ve recovered from the personal embarrassment, but not fully.
When I spoke to Megan on the way home after the service, I was trying to get a sense as to why she did what she did. I asked her that question that I suspect I’ll be asking more and more as she grows up, “What were you thinking?” You know what she said? “I was twying to help.”
She was trying to help. After all, she sees Daddy up at the front talking to everybody else, and she wants to “help.” On weekends that she’s not here, she sees her mother doing the same thing, and she wants to help. Unfortunately, her “help” can sometimes be to her mother and father’s great personal embarrassment… I’m sure I will get my payback when she is a teenager. But the key thing for her, in her own way, she wanted to help, she wants to be a part of things… and doing what Daddy is doing. She just hasn’t quite figured out that they best way to help Daddy right now is to sit with the rest of the children. We’ll be continuing to work on that.
Let me throw in a contrasting story for you.
After sharing Megan’s story with my wife, she shared the experience that she had last Sunday, but there’s a lot less to laugh about. The sermon last Sunday was shared between Sarah and her two other colleagues in ministry in her congregation. Tag-team preaching as I like to call it… During the sermon, there were two older ladies in up in the choir, in full-view of the entire congregation, who were obviously and audibly carrying on a conversation, and not paying attention to anything any of the three ministers had to say. As their nattering continued, one of the other choir members turned to them to get them to quiet down and stop being so disruptive, to which the two individuals told her to go sit in the congregation if she wanted to listen to the sermon that much.
I was stunned. Apparently it’s not the first time it has happened either… but maybe not quite so obvious. What is obvious is that these two did not consider themselves to be part of the congregation, and that somehow they could remove themselves from what was going on and do their own thing. They seemed to value their own role more important than anything else. After all, their part was done, and they were putting in time until the service was over. Clearly they weren’t interested in helping or being a part of things at all.
Talk about a contrast… and it had me asking the question… which of these two incidents was worse? A four year old trying to be part of things and helping, but not really getting what was an appropriate way of doing this… or two adults who should know better?
Maybe it’d be helpful to set these two stories against backdrop of Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians… particularly on our gifts, and how we are all part of the Body of Christ…
Last week, I preached on the first part of this passage where Paul reminds the early Corinthians church that everyone is blessed with a gift for the glory of God. Many gifts given by the one Holy Spirit… everyone has a gift that can help make the world a better place.
This week, Paul goes on to show how those many different gifts fit together. In writing this, he uses a metaphor that is well ahead of his time: the body of Christ.
“For just as the body is one and has many members, and all of the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body –Jews or Greeks, slaves or free –and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.”
For a congregation as divided and split as the church in Corinth, this was the perfect metaphor, the perfect image to try and bring people together.
The Corinthian church was very much a product of the culture around it. Being a very cosmopolitan place, and because of trade, it was a very wealthy city. A Roman Poet once said “Not everyone is able to go to Corinth.” less than a century before Paul would help found a church there. Even from an early stage Corinth’s own culture was one of class, privilege, and rank. This kind of thing could not help but to make for a very difficult cultural backdrop to found a church into. Money was never a problem with the Corinthian church… or rather it was… because rank, privilege, class, heritage, were all factors that played into how one “fit” within Corinthian society. It couldn’t help but creep into the culture of the church, and on more than one occasion Paul had to address it before it got out of hand and tore the fledgling congregation apart.
But Paul had his work cut out for him. A careful read of both 1st and 2nd Corinthians is Paul trying to pull this apart… trying to get the people to leave all of that class arrogance, the we-are-better-than-you attitude at the door.
His approach? To talk about the church, but not as an organization, or a ship with a crew… he creates an object lesson using something that everybody has… a body!
After reminding the Corinthians that God has given everyone gifts and talents to make the world a better place… for the glory of God… he then goes on to describe how they fit together. No one gift is or should be considered to be superior to the other, because they all play an indispensable role in the whole. When any of these parts are compromised or lost, the health of the whole suffers greatly. This is a biological reality, something that in theory, we should implicitly understand… which is why this Biblical image is so powerful… a hand or an eye cannot function or even live without the rest of the body.
But somehow we have lost that connection to the church community. We fall into one of several traps… that our gifts don’t count so we don’t belong, or that only certain people count, so we can ignore everybody else. This is where we really connect to the Biblical Story. Like it or not, at some point or another we have fallen into these ways of thinking. More often than not we dismiss our own value… but perhaps we are just as bad for dismissing someone else because we make the mistake that they have nothing to contribute.
But as Paul points out, eyes and hands may be fundamentally different in every way… but both are incredibly important to the body as whole. Without eyes, the rest of the body has no sense of direction, without hands, the rest of the body cannot reach out to work. Paul was trying to show that nobody is expendable… and that all are necessary for the continued health of the church.
Unfortunately for Paul, it would continue to be an issue. Otherwise all the different parts of 2nd Corinthians would not have been written, and Paul would not have had to make several trips to this congregation to try to get at the core of this issue. It is a reminder to us that the church is a very human organization, and we need to be constantly on our guard to make sure that these petty things don’t creep in on us. Two thousand years later, we are still learning these lessons, because we make the same mistakes. There is a great deal of wisdom that emerges out of reading and experiencing these Biblical accounts of the trials of the early church. They were just as human as we are… and we have the benefit of learning from their mistakes… if we’re willing to learn them.
If we are part of the church, we are part of the Body of Christ. It seems to be a challenge for us, to realize that we’re in this together, and that we need to value the gifts and skills that each of us have because they all play a part in the health of the whole. That’s what Paul was after, and I hope it’s a lesson that we can really learn.
Amen.
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