“Body Parts”

I Corinthians 12:12-31a

Pastor Melanie Hammond Clark

January 24, 2010

            I have heard and preached numerous messages over the years regarding this image of the body of Christ.  It’s not a new image to us; in fact, sometimes when it comes up, I’m afraid I sort of drift through the words myself, having heard the image so many times.

            In truth, if you took any philosophy courses in school, you probably know that the image of the body as a symbol for unity and diversity wasn’t even new to the Apostle Paul.  Even in antiquity, Plato to Plutarch, in the writings of Cicero and Josephus, the human body was used as “a metaphor for the necessity of political unity and the danger of protest and sedition.”

            But in Paul’s letter to Corinth he shifts the image from one of subjection to the state to the illustration of the value and variety each person adds to the community of faith.  He moves from Aristotle’s “principle of proportionality” (in which “less honorable members” are treated accordingly while higher honor is granted to superiors) to what Benjamin Farley describes as “a principle of indispensability”, a radical concept in which Paul places the emphasis on the incredible worth of each person and their role in caring for one another.

            But all this talk may remind us of the oft-quoted line in the Charlie Brown comic, “I love humanity; it’s people I can’t stand.”  Or the conversation between two ministers where one says to the other, “We’re both doing the Lord’s work, you in your way, and I in his.”  Or perhaps you prefer Catholic priest Henri Nouwen’s now famous definition of community as “that place where the person you least want to live with always lives.”

            Barbara Brown Taylor has a knack for telling it like it is and in her sermon “Deep in Christ’s Bones” she says, “This whole unity and diversity thing is fine when it is my liver or my kneecaps you are talking about.  I rejoice in the difference between them, and I would not want either of them trying to do the other’s job.  I count on all my parts to maintain their independence while they are working together, but the truth is that I do not think about them very much.  It is all me in here, and I am largely unconscious of the intricate cooperation required to keep me alive.

            “The problem begins when you put me in community with a bunch of other people who look, smell, think, talk, and act differently from me.  One is perfectly cheerful but she can talk for 30 minutes straight without stopping to breathe, while another has been so beaten up by life that everything he says comes out as a sneer.  One speaks so intimately of God that everyone around her feels like a spiritual slouch and another is a complete imposter who prays big hot air balloons on Sunday mornings and then goes home to knock his family around.  ‘Now you are the body of Christ,’ Paul says, ‘and individual members of it.’

            “I liked it better,” Taylor continues, “when we were talking about the liver and kneecaps.  Why?  Because I do not handle the infinite variety outside of me nearly as well as I handle the infinite variety inside of me.  Because other people challenge my established routines.  I start doing something one way and suddenly I get lots of advice about doing it another way, or several ways, until I lose my appetite to do anything at all.

            “Do you know what I mean?” she asks.  “You join a community looking for – What? – closeness, support, some measure of safety – and nine times out of ten what you get instead is this holy struggle to live and work with people who are just as angular as you are.  The brains want everyone to act like brains, and the hearts want everyone to act like hearts, and there is always a hangnail who brings out the hangnail in everyone else.”

            Yes, living in community, being the body of Christ has its own aches and pains to be sure.  But there are ways we can tend the body and do preventative health care that will allow us to live with the annoyances of body change or diversity with much more grace and agility. And these ways focus on the importance of the process as much as the product.  It is focused not only on what we produce, but on the character of the persons producing.  It is focused not only on common goals but on the common good.  It is about being a body that is shaped, made fit, by the Holy Spirit of God. 

            We are all thoroughly human, and that is why we need God.  The sin of pride and the sensitivity it creates keeps us from allowing God’s Spirit to hone us, to refine us, through the insights, irritations, and gifts of others.  The brains need the hearts, and the hearts need the brains, however irritating or humbling it is to come to terms with that.

            One writer whose work I read a number of years ago, Mickey Anders, (“Remember What John and Paul Said”) mentioned a New York Times Magazine special report on children with Asperger Syndrome, which is a strain of autism.  Unlike the typical autistic child, these children can communicate quite impressively.  According to the article, it is not uncommon to hear these children explaining that their Happy Meals were prepared in a Sigma Model 3000 deep-fat fryer, that the patella is one of 206 bones in the human body, or explaining the intricacies of atomized optics at a science museum.  But these same precocious boys and girls are like other autistic children in that, because of their autism, they have the challenge of very minimal social skills.

            Hans Asperger, who discovered this phenomenon in 1944, said that children with Asperger Syndrome “become fixated on things that evoke their curiosity, but not always in a life-enhancing way.”  They fail to see themselves as part of a whole community.

            Anders observed, “I think we all suffer from a sort of Asperger Syndrome at times, because we, too, focus on things that interest us, but ‘not always in a life-enhancing way.’”

            When we get fixated, we get frustrated, and we also frustrate the work of God in our midst.  When we develop intellectual, emotional, material, or spiritual turf, we consciously or unconsciously send up a sign that says “Keep off the grass” or “No trespassing” which has a way of threatening anyone who comes near. This is profoundly uninviting to the Spirit’s creativity, to our growth, and to amazing things happening in and through a faith community.

            What’s really ironic and further debilitating for the body of Christ is that we can always see when someone else is pridefully defending their emotional, intellectual, physical, or spiritual “turf”, but we rarely notice the problem in ourselves.  In fact, my guess is that so far in this sermon most of us have had other people’s fixations and irritating ways come to mind and few of us have actually been reflecting on our own!  Again, normal human nature, but we are called to take on the mind of Christ, to live in the awareness of God’s Spirit at work.

            Throughout my ministry I have always loved working with people who are new to the church as much as working with life-long Christians, and I learned years ago of the difference between “assimilating” new members and “incorporating” new members.  If we say we are assimilating new members, we are saying that we absorb them into our church’s life as it is, that we help make them fit.  But if we say we are incorporating new members, we are saying that we make them a part of the body, and as we do that we allow them to positively change our body.  It is a subtle but significant difference.

            So all these body parts affect each other, change each other, and, yes, sometimes annoy each other.  Yet, God calls us together, in all our personality differences and preferences, our qualities and quirks, to live and function as one body. To seek out Christ’s purpose for each part and to persevere in healthy life together.  So what is God’s goal with us?  To breath the Spirit’s maturing, creative, dynamic life into a world whose body parts are strewn like refuse all about -- rejected, uncared for, unredeemed.

            Make no mistake about it.  However foolish we think it is, the Church of Jesus Christ is God’s plan for breathing new life into God’s creation.  Here in our own small body at Covenant, we are called to practice good spiritual health together -- invited to exercise care in dealing with each other, valuing each other, learning from each other, speaking the truth in love with each other – so that, having practiced it here we can breathe Christ’s love more freely out in the world.

            John Courtney Murray once described the early church as a “conspiracy.”  I like that.  By that he meant that ancient believers “breathed together” (con: “with”, and spire: “breath”).  It wasn’t sinister behavior, of course, that held these Christians together.  It was their shared sense of grace, their breathing together as the body of Christ.  As Christ’s Church in these days, at this time, we have the same potential and also the same defining principle.  We are to be God’s people who, in all our diversity, are breathing together, “modeling a common way of life that is good for the world.

            As preacher and writer Peter Marty says, “It is the rareness of such a body that captures the attention of the world.  The manner with which this body or organism begins to move together has more than eye-catching appeal.”  It also happens to be God’s vision for transforming people, for transforming the world.

            All together now… Breath in…breathe out.  Amen.