Third Sunday after Epiphany

It’s fairly common language to speak of the church as “the Body of Christ.” It’s so common, in fact, that for many of us, we hardly even think about that term anymore, beyond the self-evident recognition that the church is composed of various people.

But this language of being “a body” comes from a specific place, namely, in the Apostle Paul’s letter to the early church in the Roman city of Corinth. What’s noteworthy about that church community is they were very young. That is to say, they hadn’t existed long as a church. Christianity was just beginning to spread in the Roman Empire. So every one of them was a recent convert; which meant they were all fairly underdeveloped in their faith – both in terms of what they believed, and how those beliefs were incorporated into the way they lived.

And Paul’s particular concern for them is that they weren’t very unified. There seems to have been a fair bit of ego and jockeying for position in their church. This was true both in terms of social status as well as spiritual status. The rich people were shown deference and privilege. And those who had highly visible spiritual gifts – like speaking in tongues – were considered “more holy.”

And so Paul’s letter to them really is something of critique. It’s done in love, of course, but it has a certain tone of (what you might call) “tough love.”

And so it’s into this context that he introduces his metaphor of the church as “a body.” And if you think about it, it really is quite a brilliant metaphor because it makes so much intuitive sense. Consider how our own physical bodies function. It’s an extraordinary harmony of roles. Muscles and tendons and organs – each doing its own thing in order to create one simple, purposeful movement.

I’m most aware of how astonishing our bodies are when I watch an infant at work. They’ve got these new bodies with all these various parts that haven’t yet learned how to function together. Heck – at first they’re not even aware that they have different parts. I remember watching one of my kids discover they had a hand – just kind of holding it up in front of their face with an intrigued expression, “Huh! Where’d that come from?”

But over time, it all becomes intuitive – all their parts working together, naturally and beautifully. The eyes doing their bit, the hands and feet doing their bit – the whole body functioning as one.

And that, says Paul, is how the church is to function. We aren’t all the same. We do have different gifts and skills, different resources, different experiences and personalities. And everyone matters. Everyone has distinctive things to contribute. And not only is it okay that we’re all different, it’s absolutely necessary that we be different. We couldn’t be a healthy church body if we were all duplicates of one another.

Someone might have a beautiful body on the outside, but if they don’t have a functioning digestive system, that body isn’t going to be around very long. The obvious gifts are just as essential as the subtle gifts.

And what happened in Corinth is just as likely to happen in any church community. Some people are going to be more prominent than others. And whether they’re being boastful about it, or others are comparing themselves to them and feeling inadequate, or it’s some combination of the two, it’s reasonable to assume that – at any given time – the church will be experiencing some degree of division that’s rooted in the fragility of our egos. Of course. We live in the world. We’re shaped by the world and the values of the world. And just because we’re Christians doesn’t mean we’re less vulnerable than anyone else.

But what can be different – what can give us more reason to hope – is the church actually does have some really clear values that guide us and shape us. The world’s just a big Darwinian hodge-podge of people scrambling to survive. And though we’re part of that world, in belonging to the church, we’re identifying with a community that is bound together by a form of worship and a form of beliefs that says it can be otherwise. Our egos may push us towards division and pride and envy and inadequacy. But our faith lures us towards God, in whose image we are made. And what do we say of this God? But that God is Trinity, a perpetual, unified community of being that is bound together by love.

And everything else we aspire to as the Body of Christ is rooted in that fundamental reality. Love, forgiveness, compassion, humility….all these core values we claim as the church find their origin in what we believe to be true of God’s character. And the pursuit of those values restores us to our unity with one another, and our unity with God. We have the privilege – especially while living in this era of division and anger – of belonging to a community where unity can flourish.

And that gives me no end of hope.

But these can be slow lessons to learn.

Growing up, I’d always been a good student. I’d always been one of the “smart kids.” So I felt a certain degree of swagger and confidence when I started grad school – which really was an exceptional school. The academic reputation of its faculty drew students from around the world. And I was excited about going there. But I tell you what – it wasn’t long before I discovered that I might be a little out of my league. I’d stumble through the reading as best as I could. But when I got to class, my fellow students were clearly functioning at a higher level than I was – asking penetrating, intelligent questions from the same material I’d read and been totally confused by. I didn’t know what they were talking about. It made be anxious and insecure, and totally jealous.

And then there was this moment of clarity. I can picture just where I was when it happened. Was it the Holy Spirit speaking? my own conscience? or some weaving of the two? I don’t know. But this is what I heard: Eric, those students you’re jealous of will be the ones who go on and get their PhDs. They will become the academics of your generation doing the deep theological work that every generation of the church requires. They will help shape the culturally engaged, theological dialogue that will filter its way into the church. You’re going to be a pastor, which is very different. You’ll do your bit; they’ll do theirs; and you aren’t in competition with each other. You each will be contributing to the life of the church in your own ways. And you each will be the beneficiaries of each other’s work.

It was a transforming moment. It allowed me to admit that – an academic level – they were smarter than I was, ‘cause they were! And in the years to come, I would be blessed by who they were.

Which brings us to quite a mystical and beautiful reality of the Body of Christ: As we enter more fully into the divine mystery, the more we discover and believe – that God is in you, and God is me, and with God between and within us, then you are in me, and I in you. Our union – our oneness – becomes the truer reality. So that, when it comes to blessing the other with whatever we have to bless, it becomes less and less about what I am doing or I am giving, but rather, what we are sharing from God’s eternal abundance.

Are we giving our time to one another, to serve or be present in some tangible way? It is God’s time and God’s attentiveness that we are entering into, together.

Are we loaning our car, our beach house, our rototiller? It’s God’s car, God’s beach house, God’s rototiller that now two of us, are being blessed by, together.

The act of sharing is equally beneficial for both us because it allows us to participate together in the very godhead in whose image we are made – this God in whom there is neither stinginess nor solitariness, at all.

And it’s the diversity of gifts that’s so essential for creating a whole and stable community. The vestry (for example!) requires at least a couple people who understand ledgers and fund accounting and payroll withholdings because they’re ultimately responsible for oversight of the church finances. But that same vestry requires daydreamers who may bring no practical skills to the table at all, but whose idealistic vision of God’s kingdom and God’s care of the poor, will keep us on track to be a compassionate, sacrificial church. Both of those voices are essential. Both have a gift. They need each other. And the church needs them both. The efficacy of the church will be affected by its institutional management and by the clarity of its mission.

And if our shared intent is to become like Jesus, and if we are learning to value the differences within our community, it can be so freeing! We’re free to be confident of our strengths and honest about our deficiencies. We can lay down our drive to insist on our own way. And in its place, a gracious spirit can grow within us, grateful for the other and mindful that by the merging of our gifts, God’s kingdom comes forth.

That’s what we’re after.

But as Paul saw in Corinth, and as we know by our own experience, we are so vulnerable to an incessant impulse to sift people out – to rank who’s ahead and who’s behind. And the great sorrow when we do this in the church, is that (in our culture, anyways) most people rank themselves as “behind,” convinced that there’s always someone who is more gifted, more faithful, more whatever. So they’re the ones we regard as more responsible for making the church work, and little is needed of us, because we have so little to offer.

And it’s just not true.

What makes for a healthy and vital church? When everyone feels that they belong, that everyone’s presence and contribution matters. And if we are to foster such a culture in the church, it will require two things: One, that each of us believes it to be true of the other, and two, that each of us believes it to be true of ourselves.

And that may be the bigger work. Everyone matters. Everyone.

And if I can (just in closing), I’d like to make one very clear distinction. The church is a small, non-profit, organizational system. It does require a fair number of volunteers with certain skills to keep it stable and functioning. The system can’t be maintained without enough capable people willing to say, “I can take this responsibility on for a season.”

But (!) the reason we maintain the system, is to create a community that can live out the mission of the church: loving, forgiving, being attentive to the well-being of each other and our neighbors. Rarely does someone leave a church because the organizational system was underdeveloped. They leave when they feel unloved or unnoticed.

And so I guarantee, that somewhere between the maintenance of the church’s system and the goodness of the church’s mission, everyone has a place to belong and to contribute and to discover, that we are one body through whom God is blessing the world.