1 Corinthians 12.12–31
Over the past few months I am sure you have noticed a drop in numbers at this service. I thought of this story.There was once an old monastery that had fallen upon hard times. Centuries earlier it had been a thriving community of faith where many dedicated monks lived and worked and had great influence in the area.
But now only five monks lived there and they were all over seventy years old. This was clearly a dying order. A few miles from the monastery lived an old hermit who many thought was a prophet of God. One day as the monks agonized over the impending demise of their order they decided to visit the hermit to see if he might have some advice for them. Perhaps he would be able to see the future and show them what they could do to save the monastery. The hermit welcomed the five monks to his hut, but when they explained the purpose of their visit, the hermit could only sympathize with them. Yes, I understand how it is, said the hermit. The spirit has gone out of the people. Hardly anyone cares much for the old things anymore. Is there anything you can tell us, the abbot inquired of the hermit, that would help us save the monastery? No, I’m sorry said the hermit. I don’t know how your monastery can be saved. But I can tell you this: one of you is a mighty, special apostle of God. For months after their visit the monks each pondered the significance of the hermit’s words. One of us is a special minister of God? Did he actually mean one of us here at the monastery?
That is impossible. We are all too old. We are too insignificant. On the other hand, what if it is true? And if it is true, then which one of us is it? Do you suppose he meant the abbot? Yes if he meant anyone he probably meant the abbot. He has been our leader for more than a generation. On the other hand he might have meant Brother Thomas. Certainly Brother Thomas is a holy man – a man of wisdom and light.
He couldn’t have meant Brother Andrew.
Andrew gets grumpy at times and is difficult to reason with. On the other hand he is almost always right. Maybe the hermit meant Brother Andrew. But surely he could not have meant Brother Phillip. Phillip is so passive, so shy – a real nobody. Still, he’s always there when you need him. He is loyal and trustworthy. Yes, he could have meant Phillip.
Of course, the hermit didn’t mean me. He couldn’t possibly have meant me. I’m just an ordinary person. Yet, suppose he did? Suppose I am a special minister of God? Oh, God, not me. I couldn’t be that much for You. Or, could I? As they contemplated in this manner, the old monks began to treat each other with extraordinary respect on the off chance that one of them might actually be a special minister of God.
And on the off, off chance that each monk himself might be the special minister of God spoken of by the hermit, each monk began to treat himself with extraordinary respect.
Since the monastery was situated in a beautiful forest, many people came there from time to time to picnic on its tiny lawn and to walk on its paths, and to go into the tiny chapel to pray.
As they did so, without even being conscious of it they sensed the aura of extraordinary respect that now began to surround the five old monks and seemed to radiate out of them, permeating the atmosphere of the place.
There was something strangely attractive,even compelling about it.
Hardly knowing why, people began to come back to the monastery more frequently for picnics or meditation and prayer.
They began to bring their friends to show them this special place.
And their friends brought their friends. As more and more visitors came some of the younger men started to talk with the old monks.
After a while one asked if he could join their order. Then another and another. Within a few years the monastery had once again become a thriving order and thanks to the hermit’s gift, a vibrant centre of faith and spiritual growth throughout the region.
I love this story because it illustrates what could be!
‘You are Christ’s body’ says Paul to the Corinthian Christians and just as much to the Grahamstown Christians – ‘and each of you a limb or organ of it’.
But jf the message is too familiar, the original shock of the image lost, then perhaps I had better try to revive it.
We talk of the ‘leg of a chair’ or ‘the neck of a bottle’. Now we are so used to the words that we don’t hear the strangeness of them. It’s like that with the phrase the ’body of Christ’ – the meaning of it whizzes by us. Yet when Paul spoke about the church as a body it was a very odd thing to say.
This idea that Church is like a living organism – not a machine where if one part breaks, it can be replaced, but a living thing in which all the parts are so interrelated that if one hurts, the whole hurts.
In the same way Paul wanted to tell the Corinthian Christians that they all needed each other. It was no use pretending that some were better than others or that some were not so important. He was protesting that people were tending to get together only with their friends.
So to persuade them to behave differently he compared the church to a living body, to your body and mine.
Look, he suggested, at your physical body. It’s made up of many parts . Happily, you’re not all hearts and hands, all stomachs and spleen, all brain or bottom.
Why?
Because it takes all sorts of different parts working in harmony if the body is to be a body, if it is to be human.
The eye cannot say to the hand ‘I have no need of you’ or again the head to the feet ‘I have no need of you’. So it is with you in the church, says Paul. You cannot do without each other. Not everyone is a prophet or Minister, not all are singers or secretaries, not all are elders or educators. Every single Christian matters if the church is to be a church – just as every part of the body matters. We cannot say to anyone in the church ‘I have no need of you’ – just as it’s hard to walk again if we lose even the smallest toe and our whole body hurts if even our little finger were to be severed.
We are interconnected, interdependent – just like the various parts of the body.
Well that’s a familiar enough message.
As more and more in our world we meet in groups defined by things held in common (‘our kind of people’) rather than in neighbourhood communities of the varied and various, the church has to be different.
Yes, we’re all Christians, but there is something very particular about church communities that makes us want to hold on to people who are different from us, who don’t fit easily, who rub us up the wrong way. Because just as bodies need all sorts of different parts, so the church needs all sorts of different people.
And not just so that there’s always someone who can sweep the floor and someone who can count the collection, but so that something of the fullness of humanity (and the fullness of God!) can find expression and celebration.
You might think this is still too obvious.
We are used to celebrating the church as a community in which black people and white people, men and women, children and adults come together and find a place.
We haven’t quite got there yet with those distinctions.
But at least we name them and encourage each other to include them – to recognise that the body has different parts.
But there are other categories too.
The church is the body of Christ, which is sometimes brave and loud and sometimes quiet and shy.
There is room in the church for introverts and extroverts, for people who think about everything and people who act on intuition – for people who plan everything down to the last detail and people who act on impulse, for people who love numbers and people who love words, for people who have a feel for rhythm and for people who love being still, for people who love bellowing out hymns or choruses and for those who would rather sit quietly alone in the silence with God.
We are not all the same and, thank God, this is how we are made and how we can be for each other.
And of course, we don’t all stay the same throughout our lives.
Just as parts of the body change, grow and develop, so do we, but we’re still a part of the body.
So no one in the church can say ‘I have no need of you’ to any brother or sister, not preacher to pew, not young to old, not riches to rags, not Presbyterian to Catholic, not Anglican to Orthodox. We all belong to one another in a sense, whether we like it or not. Even the ugly or the shameful bits of the body, says Paul, should be treated with equal respect. If being part of the church is about being part of something living, growing, diverse and interdependent, then this is different from being part of an institution.
Many people these days are not keen on institutions.
All over the place, institutions, with their organisation and hierarchies and systems are losing support. The church is one of the institutions which is not doing well – at least in the Western world. The church as institution is losing members and status – fast.
To be an ordained minister of the church is no longer to be somebody in the world, in fact it is a dying breed!
The church is losing its power as an institution.
Like many of earth’s proud empires it is passing away.
In many ways there are things to be regretted here and mistakes which must be confessed, which includes me.
We have said we wanted things to happen but when push came to shove – our efforts at reform were sometimes really mediocre at best.
We have preferred the safe “same as last year” method, rather than exploring new possibilities of being Church in a different society than what we grew up in.
We were generally not inviting for young people unless they accepted our ways.
Our building is old and cold (freezing in winter) and we close doors and curtains so that we don’t have to look at decay and neglect – or we just don’t ask questions.
We have left far too many things up to a faithful few. We sometimes have concerned ourselves with maintenance over building the Kingdom.
A few years ago we invited Rev Dave De Kock from Howick to speak to us about Church Growth and when we completed a survey with us the results showed “we are a dying church”. Most people were aghast. They did not believe it and we basically ignored what he had to say after that – because that was not what we wanted to hear. What he predicted came true – we are desperately in need of a fresh move of the Spirit.
I know too that we got things right. It was not all bad. God was gracious. We remained and still remain a light in the community.
There is wisdom There is still hope here There is love There are amazingly faithful people There is a genuine concern and care There is good news here too.
It is my conviction that the church was never supposed to be an institution like all others – not here, not anywhere. It was never supposed to be an organisation with a hierarchy and a structure and a powerful elite.
As some would say ’Christianity has been smothered by Churchianity’.
Churchianity, the creed of the religious institution, has been antithetical to the gospel and we are more blessed than cursed by its decline.
The church is not an institution – it is a body with all the diversity, fragility and interdependence and movement that the image implies.
Sometimes Christians have used the body image in a hierarchical way. They speak of a body in which the limbs and organs are controlled by one head and if there is only one body and one head then there can only be one point of view. It is a centralising authoritarian image.
But Paul, in 1 Corinthians, describes a community in which all are valued and find a place of honour, and in which the toes are valued no less than the brain or the wrinkled no less than the smooth.
So as a body, we need each other.
We cannot say ’I don’t need you’.
Already the body is separated enough.
And even if some people did leave our Church, they and we would still be part of the one body of Christ.
You can walk out of an institution but you can’t leave the body if you still belong to Christ.
And I suppose that’s the main point about being part of the body – it’s not just any body – it’s the body of Christ.
The most striking thing about our faith as Christians is that we believe that God was embodied in Jesus Christ.
And not just his flesh, his blood, his bones. God in Christ was a person who learned how to shape an idea and to talk in Aramaic, to love and dance and pray and suffer and even die. In his body God was found.
And God in Christ may be found again in our so many different bodies.
There is a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins called “As Kingfishers catch fire.” It was written in the 1800’s so to read it to you – I would not be able to do it any justice. Nevertheless, he writes ’Christ plays in ten thousand places, lovely in limbs, lovely in eyes not his’.
Christ plays in your limbs, in your eyes, in ten thousand places and many more, lovely in a new and risen body, the wonderful diverse community of his people wherever they may be found in the church and in the world.
Christ does not act through institutions so much as play through bodies, and his body in its risen and vulnerable life is here among us and within us.
The risen Christ is now embodied within us, in our bodies all so different from one another and in the body of which together we are a part.
It is our hands which will bring healing for pain and hunger, our arms, which may embrace the lonely and our bodies which will feel love’s embrace, our voice that will speak for justice and integrity and our voices that will give praise to God.
Is there some wrong which must be made right? How will God do it without us?
Is there some fear to be faced in a troubled soul? How will God do it without you?
God needs your body to touch and embrace the world with God’s love.
God offers you, the body of Christ, beautiful, brave, wounded, but risen, to touch every pain and joy of yours.
And God invites you to become a part of that risen body bringing his saving love to all the world.
I shared this with the ladies group on a Tuesday.
We know from historical records that St. James was put to death by the High Priest around 62AD.
There is a tradition that says that he was decapitated and that his head was buried in Jerusalem and that his body buried in Spain Santiago de Compostela, the way of St James.
Whatever the truth of that, I was struck by the deep emotions it has stirred in me. It might seem sometimes as though the body of Christ is torn apart and bodies when they are torn in bits can only decently be buried.
But Christ’s body demands to live and to live in wholeness and unity in thousands of places and people around the world.
Only when a body is united, understanding its difference and diversity, but together in spirit and in life, can it truly live. Institutions may thrive on fragmentation but bodies live when they are held together, living and moving and complicated and struggling and suffering maybe, but still together.
So today God invites you to respond to the love he has shown you through the body of Christ, a body born and alive, dying and rising.
God invites you to be part of the body of Christ in the church and in the world, not an institution but a living body.
And God invites you to use your own body, your voice, your soul, your hands and feet, all of yourself, to carry Christ to the world. May it be so, here and everywhere you carry Christ this week. Amen.
