1) I have my sermon text for this Sunday. I spoke on how we form the body of Christ, and how we love one another. I invite you to consider answering the question: where do I best embody the love of Corinthians 13?
2) Here's a fascinating link that provides a sense of scale from everything from electrons to the Milky Way. I think its worth thinking about how big and how small the world around us really is. http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/525347
from http://authenticmike.wordpress.com/Welcome: Good morning! I hope this Sunday find’s you well. I’m happy to be here-I’ve been traveling this past week- I was at Pastor’s Week at the Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary in Elkhart, Indiana, my alma mater, gathering with good friends, forming new networks, and learning new techniques for Bible study and worship. It was altogether a good time, though I am a bit exhausted now that I’ve returned. Thank you, as always, for allowing me to take time for events like this. I honor your willingness to let me practice continuing education.
Our scripture text this morning comes from the heart of Paul’s letter to the Corinthians. Chapter 13 is easily the more famous of the two, since it is read at a not insignificant fraction of weddings, but Paul’s metaphor of the body is also well known.
What I think is a little more obscure is that these two texts are really part of the same argument that Paul is having with the people of Corinth. Paul has a serious point he wants to make not about the love of two people getting married, but about how the church balances power within the community.
In the church in Corinth, there were lots of people with a tremendous amount of spiritual energy. Paul makes it very clear that they are passionate about the gospel, committed to Christ, and filled with spiritual gifts like prophecy and most particularly speaking in tongues. However, these early Christians apparently also fought like cats and dogs with one another, and with Paul, because each was convinced that they had a special revelation from God, and that their particular spiritual gifts ought to give them authority.
So Paul writes them, basically telling them in a number of different ways to knock it off. This morning, we have two key framings of why and how we ought to be the church-because we are the body of Christ, we are called to love one another.
So, first, the body of Christ. Paul’s instructions are clear. All people baptized into Christ are members of the same body, and while some of us are hands, and some of us are feet, and some of us are other unmentionables, none of us can be a complete body without the rest.
This image from the body is like all metaphors, limited, but it is also tremendously useful as we think about our own roles in the church. This image invites us to remember the interconnected nature of our community-that we are not sufficient and complete as individual believers without a collection of gifts and people. There are three things I’d like to highlight-what it means to be interconnected, that all people have value, and the tensions between our practice and our theory.
The first thing I’d like to draw out of this image of the body is to point out that diversity is necessary for proper functioning. In some ways, its easier to admit that no person is an island, that we can’t do it all ourselves than to acknowledge that we actually lack a sufficiency of gifts to flourish by ourselves. Often I think we look at the church and acknowledge that we cannot do everything because of limits in time and space, our lack of energy for all tasks, but focus less on actual differences in giftedness, and in acknowledging the superior gifts of our neighbors in particular aspects of their lives. Consider our committees-if you hang around the church for a long enough period of time you are likely to be asked to serve on most every committee, which sort of hints that we are interchangeable-rather than this image of the body, where we are invited to acknowledge that there are deep differences in people-that we think differently, our bodies work differently, function differently in relationship, and part of our calling is to recognize our own gifts and skills, as well as those of others, and honor and call out those particular strengths. Equally, Paul’s image of the body also invites us to remember that despite our doubts, all people are useful parts of the body. This is easier in theory than practice-there are always people that we mesh with better or worse as individuals, who are easier or less easy to connect with as brothers and sisters in Christ. Many scholars of church growth encourage churches to find a particular niche-a type of person they will evangelize, and then let birds of a feather flock together. And I don’t really want to badmouth this system-the diversity of a congregation like the one in Corinth, or the diversity that is easily enough seen when we compare all of the different ways of being Christian around the world makes for conflict and sometimes chaos, and there is something to be said for acknowledging that we are brothers and sisters in Christ that have established different systems of governance so that we do not have to be constantly fighting with one another.
But these chapters of 1 Corinthians commend to us the nitty gritty of politics, the struggles we face to engage each other both as brothers and sisters committed to right and proper relationships with one another and also individuals with goals, desires, and conflicting wants and needs.
That’s one of the reasons I like church meetings, despite their tensions, their systems, their propensity to blow up in painful reactivity sometimes. Last week we had a business meeting, and we practiced again the tricky dance of finding consensus, decision making in the church.
For those of you who were not there, we came to agreement that being in a same sex relationship will not serve as a barrier to membership at Saint Louis Mennonite Fellowship, we decided to work with Plowsharing Crafts to form a separate corporation from the Fellowship, and we decided to buy furnaces to replace the aging, inefficient system currently in our basement. Now, that’s a lot of stuff for one meeting, and not all of it are things that everyone’s excited about. We’ve developed our own system about how to move the body, and how structurally to protect one another’s interests, but its complicated and potentially messy.
Sometimes we wrestle with the stark differences between our goals-that is, a smoothly functioning body where everyone moves together with the power of the spirit, and our reality-that our processes are usually only slightly better, and often worse than any other group of human beings getting together and trying to make decisions. There is a reason that people think Christians are hypocrites.
But Paul is well aware of this tension. That is exactly what he is talking about in these passages. Its not like he outlines which things are legitimate differences within the body, and which are things that no good Christian should do. He too is willing to say some issues are open to compromise-where the strong and the weak should acknowledge together that both belong in the kingdom, and others where he is ready to throw people out of the congregation. Community is complicated.
But community is something that we work at, knowing that we’re more closely bonded that we really think-that if we think about ourselves as part of the same body, our behavior will be different than if we are more ready to sever off those who disagree in any of the multitudinous ways that Christians love to disagree with one another.
But Paul also shows a still more excellent way-which is what the love chapter of Corinthians is all about.
Paul certainly wasn’t thinking about the sexual, or even the spiritual love formed between two people who covenant for life with one another when he wrote that 4Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. 5It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. 6Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. 7It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Rather, Paul was talking about the character required to function in a community that always will by its very nature tug at the edges, that will usually cause trouble, and will be often divided, because it is constructed in a world full of people who are difficult, capricious, confusing, and careless.
It is in this context that we are called to patience, to kindness, to working against envy, pride, and truth-to work to be a functioning as opposed to a dysfunctional part of the body.
I spent time this last week at Pastor’s week at a seminar on being a pastor to families facing long term mental illness. Obviously, a one day seminar is not at all sufficient for what is a lifetime’s work, but it was a good continuation of my education.
Gayle Gerber Koontz, instructor of theology reflected on both the struggles and the triumphs of the church. She shared of the challenges of offering love-of living out the more excellent way when we fail to care for those with serious mental illness.
We fear saying the wrong thing, so we say nothing at all-we are unfriendly, since we are unsure of how to handle a relationship that requires a different set of skills, because of our survivor’s guilt, we feel uncomfortable around those who we label as broken or different. We say the wrong thing, by being judgmental, offering advice or explanations for other’s pain, hinting that God wants people to suffer, that it is part of some larger plan. we limit positions in the church to those who most fit the norm. We can be paternalistic rather than cooperative, our pastors are not prepared to respond, we do not have the time in our busy culture to love. These are the ways in which she has heard families with mental illnesses speak of the brokenness of the church, and its failures to be the body.
But she also talked about how we care for one another well-by offering opportunities for lament in worship, by acknowledging the particular pains of life in the congregational setting, by giving opportunities for ritual and pattern that might be sustaining, rather than presuming that words can solve things. By offering visual stimulation, engaging other senses and ways of knowing, so people have space to be whole people. We offer love by engaging in uncomfortable conversation, by being present in normalcy (bringing a meal, for example), by ignoring the lowered affect of many people suffering, by training those who care, either in Sunday School classrooms, or ushers at the back of the church or those who create support groups to surround people with love.
When things go well, the church can hope when other’s can’t, it can help break stigma and preserve dignity, providing Sabbath space to those who are in need.
When the rubber hits the road, this is what it means to be part of the body of Christ-to wrestle with love-paying more than lip service and deeper than difference connections that shape our lives together and at the most fundamental, make us the church.
As we continue to walk together into the future, it is my prayer that in all we do, we might continue to recognize our connection as one body, and seek first the greatest of gifts. Faith, hope and love, which endure.
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