Scriptures: |
I Corinthians 12:12-27 |
Doesn’t it give all of us who are members of this congregation a warm glow to know that we are adding folk to our ranks? Carrie and Harley last week and now Laura and Sal this week – a growing church is surely a blessing in God’s sight. For those of you who like numbers, when you look at the Annual Report you’ll see that at the end of 2009 we listed 93 congregants on our books -- which means that with these four new members we can say that we are a church of nearly 100 members. Of course, not all of these are active – some have moved away from Las Vegas but still remain on the books; some attend only infrequently if at all. Nevertheless, that’s a nice round number to roll around in our minds: 100.
Now, some of you may have started to feel a bit uncomfortable with this accounting. The church is not just about numbers and growth, after all. We are, or like to feel that we are, a community – a community that has come together for specific purposes and out of a particular commitment. As I said at the close of the sermon last week, it is our baptism that it brings us into community and breaks down walls of divisiveness, making us, out of all of our diversity, one.
We are a diverse group – we almost 100 members. And we rejoice in our diversity. When I punched the word “member” into my computer’s Thesaurus one of the definitions that came up was: “a separate and distinct part of a whole, e.g. an object belonging to a mathematical set, a clause in a sentence, or a proposition in a syllogism”. Those are, perhaps, rather stilted examples, but that phrase “a separate and distinct part of a whole” resonates with what it means to be the church. Erich Fromm in his book The Art of Loving puts it a bit more poetically: “In love the paradox remains that the two become one and yet remain two.”
But what’s more important, God rejoices in our diversity. Paul sees this quite clearly in his famous chapter about the body of Christ in I Corinthians 12. In fact he is very direct about it: “Now you are the body of Christ…..” No qualifications, no legal loopholes, no possibility of saying, “but only if…..” The affirmation is simple, specific, and all-encompassing. It includes each and every one of us. Dr. Clarence Craig puts it this bluntly: “[Paul] does not mean to say that the church is like a body; it is the body of Christ.” But the second half of Paul’s affirmation is equally important for us to hear: “and individually members of it.”
Think for a moment of what this means, you two who have just joined this body and all of you who have received them, like the two last week, into the body. You are the body of Christ learning through adult Bible study classes and individual contemplation and yet also teaching others and growing in wisdom. You are the body of Christ identifying with “the least of these” – reaching out to the misunderstood, the mistreated, the maligned. You are the body of Christ carrying the greatest hopes of a people through the gates of Jerusalem on an ass. You are the body of Christ there on that cross – the nails of injustice pierce you, the despair of being misunderstood when you stand up for what you believe in overwhelms you, the weight of suffering in a world governed by a military “might makes right” mentality and a “look out for Number 1” philosophy bears down upon you. You are the body of Christ risen beyond expectation or belief to a freedom that only becomes possible when ultimate trust is placed in God.
What exactly is a body? I’ve said this before but it’s worth repeating: a body is an organism – which means that it is alive, it has flexibility and mobility and the ability to react to external stimuli. The arm, which is a part of the body, does not have to stay like this – standing out stiffly from the body. No, it can bend at the wrist, or the elbow, or the shoulder. The hand can reach out to another – either with a handshake or a punch – and it can also receive another hand reaching out to it.
The body is made up of many diverse parts, all of which have their roles to play. It would be ludicrous to think about a hand trying to do the work of an eye. And, as we well know, when one part of the body suffers or is lost – like going blind – other parts – like our sense of hearing – step up to increase the body’s well-being and functioning. Even though those organs connected with our senses – eyes, ears, tongue, skin – along with such central organs as heart and lungs – would seem to be more important than other parts, Paul is telling us that out of our marvelous diversity all members have an importance for the well-being of the whole: “If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it.” I certainly relish – and I believe we should all take great pleasure in – the wonderful diversity of gifts that we have here among us.
So, Paul’s metaphor is telling us that the body of Christ, the church, is an organism sensitive to what is happening around it. But, as we know all too well, often the church is seen more as an organization than as an organism – something comprised of Boards and a Church Council and staff positions. Most often, an organization is characterized by inflexibility (a policy has been set and we’re going to stick by that policy), by immobility (here is where we have decided to set up shop, so here is where we are going to stay), by the inability to respond to external stimuli (our rules have been made and we’re not going to let outside forces affect them). Whenever the body of Christ falls into these organizational traps it loses the vibrancy and vitality of being a live, squirming, pulsating, relevant organism.
Now, lest you think that I’m setting up too black and white a contrast here between organism and organization, let me say quickly that the dangers of organization are potential dangers. Usually, we think of the opposite of organization as…chaos. It’s pleasant to be thought of and to think of ourselves as organized people. (Of course, too much organization can get to be obsessive and compulsive – Ann and I have been watching several re-runs of Monk recently, and if you want to see organization taken to an obsessive extreme, there’s an excellent showcase for it.) Moreover, the usual opposite of organic is…inorganic – that is, lifeless, unable to be productive, dead. So, if we are to talk about the church as the body of Christ – as an organism – we will have to walk that thin line between the necessity of some organization and the dangers of letting that organization render the body lifeless.
Much of the problem of letting the body of Christ be the organism it was intended to be is that we have lived with twenty-one centuries now of an increasingly organized church. Our secular society sees the church today largely in organizational terms. So, media commentators speak of “the institution of the church” or “organized religion”. Buildings and fund drives and a fairly rigid life style are more likely to characterize the church in the popular mind than the image of a group of people banded together for the common purpose of serving their Lord by serving the world.
Now, it may seem odd to you that I’m taking this tack when we’re about to go into an Annual Meeting that is chock full of reports and finances and elections and organizing Boards. But it is precisely when we are going about the business of the organization of the church that we need to remind ourselves of what it means to function like an organism.
The earliest Christians didn’t think in institutional terms. They thought of themselves as a movement. A movement has the same characteristics as an organism – flexibility, mobility. It can go where it has to go, be where needs have to be met, react as the occasion warrants. What’s more, a Christian movement carries with it the feeling that God is on the move – that the Lord is not confined in a little box we call a church building.
A God and a church that are on the move lead us to where the action is. Clearly, this is the same dynamic that Jesus intended – this messiah who ate with tax collectors and sinners, associated with prostitutes and thieves as well as with the wealthy and the righteous, who was called a drunkard and a wino – this was a man for all the people who knew how to be in the middle of the action of a fragmented world. This dynamic is so clear in the way the church has responded to the disaster in Haiti, especially through our denomination and thus through Church World Service, and I’m proud that our congregation has had a small part to play in that effort. And of course our on-going work with bread run and food pantry and thrift shop are also part of that same dynamic. We celebrate these activities when we gather in an Annual Meeting along with elections and Board organizing.
At a teacher training workshop once I heard the serious suggestion that we stop talking about “the church” and start referring simply to “community”, because the word “church” has so many organizational overtones that it becomes difficult to penetrate to the potentially alive community of an organism. We’ve all heard about – or maybe even talked with – people who yearn for spirituality or religiosity but who balk at joining an “organized” church. Young people have left the church in droves for cults and other expressions of religious faith. The New Age Movement touches people precisely because it is, as the name implies, a movement, not something stationary and staid. Where the church can likewise regain this sense of being a movement it is witnessing to the Galilean who asked of us that we “love one another”.
But that love needs to take very concrete forms. When Jesus appears in the synagogue in Nazareth, according to the account in Luke, a large part of what amazes those who hear him is the specificity of what he is telling them to do: “bring good news to the poor” (which means be pro-active in your help), give “release to the captives” (which means find ways to free people who have no business being imprisoned), give “sight to the blind” (which means find ways to be healers and not harmers), and “proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor”. This last declaration had a very specific meaning for Israel, which had had a long tradition of a Jubilee year every 50 years when all debts were forgiven, when restoration of land and property took place (based on their belief that the land was not theirs but God’s). Jubilee is a wonderful acknowledgement of, and response to, the way we humans get things all out of whack, and before you know it, somebody has way too much, and others not nearly enough. Jubilee is the vision that makes things right again, God's way of restoring.
Note that in his teaching in the synagogue Jesus is not being a rebel or a rabble-rouser. He is calling Israel back to one of its key visions, even if scholars debate whether the activities of a Jubilee Year ever really took place. And in such a proclaiming of the “year of the Lord’s favor” he is really summing up all of the other proclamations – feeding and housing the poor, freeing those who cry out to be released, healing by giving sight. Jesus isn't coming back home to preach a new message that offends ancient traditions, like some sort of trouble-making radical enamored of "current thinking". Quite the opposite, in fact. He is calling Israel – he is calling us – back into the community that they envisioned out there in their wilderness wanderings, so that they – we – can serve God as God wishes us to serve.
This is what it means to be a family of faith, as the choir sang about today. It doesn’t mean sweeping differences under the rug, but rather speaking the truth in love. It means celebrating our individuality as members of the body with particular gifts to bring, but then also celebrating our community – our family – because we support one another. It means proclaiming the year of the Lord’s favor by offering our service to feed, to clothe, to free, to heal. As we now head into our Annual Meeting may we experience ourselves as a family of faith – a live, pulsating organism that is on the move, ready to provide God’s mission to all the world.
Amen.
Dave Pomeroy
First Congregational Church, United Church of Christ
Las Vegas, NV
January 24, 2010