Grace Presbyterian Church
January 24, 2016, Epiphany 3C
1 Corinthians 12:12-31
What It Looks Like: We Need Each Other
Bodies are amazing
things. The sheer complexity of the human organism, the dynamics of
coordination that make us able to function physically and mentally are staggering.
The trouble is,
though, that bodies being so interdependent can result in one small problem in
one part of the body can cause trouble for the whole body. I received a
personal object lesson in this fact earlier this week. My body temperature was
off, just barely. Not even a degree high, but just a little bit high. Yet that
very small difference in temperature was enough to leave me alternately chilly
and hot, a bit woozy, and generally not very functional for a couple of days.
Athletes are
particularly prone to this kind of difficulty. In the 1937 All-Star Game in
Major League Baseball, the pitcher Dizzy Dean of the St. Louis Cardinals was
struck on the foot by a line drive, and ended up with a broken toe. Dean was
out for a significant part of that season, but with his St. Louis Cardinals
striving for a pennant Dean tried to get back into action before his toe was
fully healed. In trying to prevent more damage or pain in that broken toe, Dean
altered his delivery – the mechanics of his pitching motion. Unable to adjust
to a new pitching motion, Dean injured his arm. His pitching career never fully
recovered, and Dean was forced to retire from baseball four years later, only
able to win a few more games in that career. A toe seems an awfully small thing,
but in Dizzy Dean’s case, it was enough to bring his whole body down. Bodies
are amazing things, indeed – sometimes in a good way, sometimes less so.
That Paul chooses
the body as a metaphor for the interworkings of the people of God is striking
and informative in ways that the apostle himself might not even have imagined.
While Paul is the
only contributor to the New Testament to use this particular metaphor, it
wasn’t uncommon for teachers and writers in the Greco-Roman world to use such a
metaphor to describe communal life. Philosophers and political figures were
particularly fond of the body metaphor in that culture. For a politician, for
example, the metaphor of the body might well be used to suggest that every
member of a society had his or place to fill. A body needs a head; that place
was to be filled by the “elites” of society – the wealthy, the military elite,
those in power. A body also needs hands and feet; here pretty much everybody
else in society, those charged with the hard or dirty or dangerous work of
society was to fulfill his or her role.
Paul, though,
takes a different angle on this metaphor. For Paul, what matters is the utter
interdependence of the body – the degree to which the body needs everything in
good working order. Parts of the body that might be regarded as weaker, or less
“respectable,” are treated with greater care and covered or protected more
carefully. In Paul’s scheme of the body, no part can claim to be independent of
all the other parts. The eye can see all it wants to see, but without feet and
legs to move, or hands to do the work that needs to be done, the eye is
powerless. The head is useless without the rest of the body.
Many of us know
what it is for our physical bodes to fail us or betray us. We see what needs to
be done but we just aren’t capable of doing it physically. If one part of the
body suffers, the whole body suffers with it. And so it is with the body of
Christ, the church; when one member of this body suffers, we all suffer with
that member.
Paul wants us to
understand, in verse 13, that in being baptized in Christ we are baptized into
this one body, no matter the differences between us. Indeed, following on the
first part of this chapter we heard last week, the differences we bring to the
body are not accidental; they are necessary, both in a given local congregation
and in the church universal – we need all those different experiences, all
those different backgrounds, for the body of Christ to function rightly and
bear witness to the good news.
This is where it
gets tricky, though. We are not always good at dealing with difference. We
don’t always care for diversity, even as we need it. New Testament scholar
Brian Peterson puts it bluntly in noting that “We often confuse unity with uniformity, because it is much easer to
gather with people who are like ourselves than it is to reach across the
divisions which mark our culture.”[i]
We are more comfortable with a church where everybody looks like us, talks like
us, is about the same age as us, reads the Bible in the same way as we do – or
for that matter, votes like us, goes to Gator games like us, and all sorts of
other things that may have very little to do with the life of the church. It’s
a natural inclination, but it isn’t really all that Christlike.
In verse 13 Paul
refers to two of the great divisions he knew to be at work in the church – “Jews or Greeks, slaves or free.”
Admittedly, “Jew or Greek” is not a huge dividing line in the modern church,
and while slavery certainly does exist in the modern world still, such a
dividing line doesn’t run through the modern church in quite the same way it
did for Paul’s Corinthian readers. We do, though, have lots of dividing lines
among us in the church today:
Black or white, or
Asian, or Hispanic, or Native American…
Or how about
Democrat or Republican?
Maybe rich or
poor?
Native-born,
naturalized citizen, immigrant waiting to be citizen?
Straight or gay?
How about married
or single?
Progressive or
mainline or evangelical or fundamentalist?
How are we, as the
church, the body of Christ, at truly living in the diversity that makes us
work? Or are we still inclined to hole up in like-minded enclaves of
homogeneity?
Whether we
acknowledge it or not, when any part of the body of Christ suffers, whether
they look like us or think like us or sound like us or have anything in common
with us other than Christ, we all suffer, and we don’t bear witness to the
gospel the way the body of Chris is meant to do. And to the degree that we stand
by and let that suffering continue, we are complicit in damaging the body and
its witness.
Having worked
through this body metaphor, Paul now returns to the diversity of spiritual
gifts, or manifestations of the presence of the Spirit, that he had discussed
earlier in this chapter. Again the list is incomplete, but Paul now places
those gifts in the context of the church as God appoints people to contribute:
apostles, prophets, teachers, doers of powerful deeds, healers, helpers,
leaders, speakers of various tongues. And just as the body would look rather
ridiculous if it were nothing but an eye or a foot, so the church becomes
rather ridiculous if it consists of nothing but apostles or preachers or
teachers.
But as Paul closes
this thought, he actually “teases” us with something even better, a better, “more excellent” way for the church to
live or for the body of Christ to function. The diverse and distinctive
appropriation of gifts is characteristic and even needful in the church, and
the diversity of members matters profoundly as well.
And yet, there is
something else that matters more than all of these, or more precisely is the
very thing that makes this distinctiveness and diversity work. What is it that
makes the body of Christ what it is meant to be? What is it that brings all
those diverse gifts and abilities and manifestations of the Spirit together in
a way that enables us truly to bear witness to the Christ we say we follow?
Thanks be to God. Amen.
Hymns:
“Blessed Jesus, At Your Word” (PH 454);
“O Word of God Incarnate” (PH 327); “Blest
Be the Tie That Binds” (PH 438); “We
Are One In the Spirit” (GtG 300)
[i] Brian
Peterson, “Commentary on 1 Corinthians 12:12-31a,” Working Preacher (workingpreacher.org, 24 January 2016 2nd
reading), accessed 21 January 2016.
agnusday.org. Wish they'd do more epistle readings.
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