Those darned
Corinthians! What an apostolic pain in the neck they must have been to poor old
Paul! It's clear from reading his two letters to the Church at Corinth
At the beginning of I Corinthians, Paul gives them all a
piece of his mind.
…you're all
picking sides, going around saying, "I'm on Paul's side," or
"I'm for Apollos," or "Peter is my man," or "I'm in
the Messiah group." I ask you, "Has the Messiah been chopped up in
little pieces so we can each have a relic all our own? Was Paul crucified for
you? Was a single one of you baptized in Paul's name?" Frankly I thank God
that I never baptized any of you!
A great deal of hard
feelings had arisen between these competing factions. So Paul was writing to them in an effort to
cool down all this internal rivalry, as well as to point out the errors they
had all fallen into. In addition, Paul was writing to encourage the faithful in
dealing with the tremendous amount of secular and pagan temptations present in
the city of Corinth
In the Roman Theatre
It's a real tribute
to Paul's compassion and pastoral instincts that he didn't simply "shake
the dust off his sandals" when it came to the Corinthian congregation.
Instead, with a great deal of patience and love, Paul wrote the magnificent I
and II Epistles to the Corinthians.
In this morning's
reading, Paul begins by talking about the nature of spiritual gifts, and their
proper role in the church. The Apostle
addresses that specific question, and then enlarges upon it. He broadens and deepens
the discussion to a larger discourse on the real nature of the church and the
universal issues of equality and unity within it.
Paul says that the
Christian church-- you and I together-- are a body. Like a body, the church is a living organism.
Like a human body, the church is made up of inter-dependant, interacting parts,
each fulfilling its own separate and absolutely necessary role. Just like each and every organ of a human
body-- each and every member of the church must work in harmony with all the
others in order to ensure the survival and growth of the Body itself.
Paul isn't just
drawing an analogy here. He literally
believes that the church is the physical--
not just spiritual-- Body of Jesus Christ on earth. And each and every one of us is a part of that Body. Each of us was
brought into that Body through our Baptism. Each of us, like the organs of a
body, has our own unique and irreplaceable functions to perform.
There's a true story
that occurred at a party where the wife of Oscar Hammerstein II and the wife of
Jerome Kern were both in attendance. As
you know, Hammerstein was the lyricist and Kern the composer of Showboat,
which was playing on Broadway at that time. A woman came up to Mrs. Kern and
gushed,
"O my goodness,
your husband is the man who wrote that wonderful song, 'Old Man River
"No dear-- my husband wrote 'Old Man River'. Her husband wrote dum-dum-dum-dum, da-dum-dum-dum-dum."
Where do we come off,
Paul seems to be asking, in thinking that any one of us has a more important
role to play than any other of us? How
dare we deride or discriminate against any of our sisters and brothers in Jesus
Christ because of their race, tongue, ethnic background, or social status?
Is the Pastor of the Chicago Temple
The answer to those
questions might well seem self-evident to all of us. I certainly hope it's self evident! But for his day
and age, this was a tremendous and radical insight on Paul's part. Tolerance
for others, the acceptance--much less the affirmation-- of people of differing
language, color, class, culture, gender or way of worship is really a very new
idea in our world. And it is still all too rare and precious on this planet
today.
A week ago
we celebrated the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Dr. King said
basically all those same things in our land only fifty years ago. It’s easy,
all too easy for us to forget the degree of anger and denial with which Dr.
King's message was initially greeted in this country.
If concepts like
equality and justice and equal rights seem self-evident to both liberals and
conservatives today, it is because yesterday, people of faith were willing to
lay down their lives to win those things.
And I would argue, that one reason they were empowered to open their
lives to that struggle, was because they had previously opened their Bibles to
passages like this one.
Paul is very clear. "By one Spirit we were all formed into
one Body in our Baptism. Whether Jews or
gentiles, whether slaves or free, the one Spirit was given to us all to
drink." Paul is affirming the variety, first of gifts and then of the
people who receive them. In affirming that variety, the Apostle is then able to insist on the equality
among them.
Our individual differences
are a gift from God! Our diversity as people and as Christians is to be
celebrated, not steamrollered! The healthy differences between you and me are
reason to rejoice! How dull it would be if we were all alike. A church that is
uniform in nationality, in race, in language, in practice, even in belief is a
church that can only grow so large. It
is in effect, a church that is half-dead already. A dream that has limits is a
dream that will eventually perish.
If Paul had lost his
on-going debate with James and the ex-Pharisee elders of First Church
Jerusalem, no Gentiles could have ever heard the Gospel, no non-Jews could have
entered the early church without first being circumcised and converting to
Judaism. And the church itself would likely have died in 70 AD when the Romans
destroyed Jerusalem.
If Luther had lost
his argument with the Pope, Roman Catholicism would have likely remained the
state church in most of Europe, for at least a few more decades. But it would
be effectively dead today. Personally, I wonder if one of the the ways that our
Maker chastises a particular denomination isn’t to allow them to become an
officially sanctioned state church. Years ago I met a priest in the Church of
England. He told me that they refer to
themselves as God's frozen people.
The church have
always been at its best and noblest in times of
exile, ridicule, struggle, and persecution-- at those times when it has
been on the cross. The greatest growth of
the Biblical faith has always come in times and places when cultures and
languages and peoples have met and cross-fertilized and been enriched by new
insights, new energy, new integrity.
The Biblical faith
has always, and can only been renewed and transformed and proclaimed in new and
exciting ways at such moments. And those
are the moments when our Faith has spread and grown and reached new places and
peoples in the world. Moments like this
very moment in Africa and South America and the former Soviet Union. And
those are the moments in which we have truly earned the title of Body of
Christ.
The core message of
Biblical faith itself is, and always has been straight-forward, and clear, and lucid.
"Hear
O Israel, the Lord is One" "Do justice, love kindness and walk humbly
with your God." That’s pure and simple. That message stands on its own. It is not a message to be limited or linked
to any nation, or culture, or
language, or style of worship, or era, or style of music, or way of praying.
The Gospel
is not cultural. It transcends culture. It is not national.
It is supra-national. "Love
God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your minds, and
love your neighbor as yourself" And yet, each culture, each people
inevitably expresses and shares the Gospel in their own creative and
distinctive ways. We are, as Paul keeps
insisting, a Body.
Have you heard of the
time the big yellow IDOT truck came rolling down LaGrange Road? Every few
yards, the truck would stop. Then a worker would get out, and dig a large hole
in the ground next to the road. He'd then get back on the truck.. A few minutes
later, a second worker would get off the truck.
walk over to the hole, carefully fill it in, and tamp the dirt down.
An elderly woman had
been watching them. After seeing them repeat this procedure four or five times,
her anger and curiosity got the better of her. She walked over and cornered
them.
"What in the
world are you people doing?"
"Oh, we're on a
beautification project."
"A
beautification project! What's so beautiful about a bunch of filled-in holes?"
"Well you
see," comes the answer, "The guy who plants the trees is home sick
today."
Different people play
different but absolutely necessary roles.
And when one of us doesn't do his or her job, there's a hole. That's
true when it comes to beautifying highways. It's true in a local congregation.
It's also true when it comes to the Church of Jesus Christ in the world.
None of us can deny our own importance. Neither can we deny our
importance to others or others importance
to us. Until we figure that out as a
people, as a church, as a congregation--
untill we really do learn to guard each one’s dignity and save each
one’s pride, we’ll never be able to walk
hand in hand or work side by side--
we’ll never truly be one in the Spirit.
We are a Body. And
Jesus is our head. Our very existence depends upon Him, our
Ruler and Redeemer, our Savior and Sustainer. Yet He has no hands to help
and heal in this world except ours.
And we have no purpose and direction in this world without Him. We fill the hole left in the world
with his physical departure from the earth. He fills the hole in our lives. We
are many, He calls us and makes us one.
He is our direction, our purpose, our vision.
Listen again to verse 16. "If
the ear would say, because I am not an eye I do not belong to the body, that
would not make it any less a part of the body."
We are a Body. But any body needs leadership. It must have a
compelling over all, inclusive direction or none of its parts can function
well. And when we learn to listen together
for it, Jesus provides that crucial vision. Jesus is our head, our heart, our
brain, our intuition.
There is a direct relationship
between the church’s effectiveness in mission and ministry and her faithfulness
to Christ’s vision. "Where there is no vision, the people
perish" reads Proverbs
29 There is a direct relationship between our physical well-being
and our personal horizons The human body’s immune system will malfunction when
there is a failure of vision.
Each cell in the human body has DNA that contains all the messages of all the functions of our
body. There's something in each cell that says to it, "You are not the
heart. You are the finger." Its toxic and invasive when a cell forgets who
it is. That cell becomes cancer. By the same token, when you and I forget who
we are, we can become toxic and invasive.
Are we one? Are we
truly about the business of being Christ's Body? How have we brought good news
to the poor? Have we brought release to
those in captivity to sin and death and addiction and discrimination? Have we
brought recovery of sight to those blind with their own greed or hate or anger
or lust or fear? How many have we freed
from oppression, exploitation, or manipulation?
How have you and I proclaimed in our work and our play, in our
relationships, in our commitments of time and energy and resources that the
acceptable year of our Lord begins now? Here? In our hearts and lives?
Are we each carrying
our fair share of the task of witnessing and sharing, mission and outreach and evangelism
in a spirit of charity and unity? Are we reaching out as individuals to one
another and as a congregation to the community with love in our hearts? Are we one?
Are we one? Results
for their own sweet sake-- a larger attendance, a more active outreach, a
balanced budget, the fellowship of others who agree with us will of course,
make us feel content and self-satisfied. But they are not the true
criterion of success in the church of Jesus Christ. The only real criterion is simply, "Are we
one?"
Each of us must
answer that in our own heart. Amen.
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