MEMBERS OF THE BODY

Rev. Dr. Mary Lou Howson

Cor 12:12-31, Epiphany 3C

January 24, 2010

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. God has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.
Jesus began his ministry with these words from Isaiah, proclaimed in his hometown synagogue where he had lived most of his life. These words not only initiate his ministry, they also frame, shape, and define it. They are who he was and what he was about. And for those of us who claim to follow the risen Christ, they need also to frame, shape, and define who we are as individuals, as a congregation, and as a church. We are to walk this pathway together with Christ. To be sure, we receive insight, faith, and release individually, but we travel together. We need one another. The Spirit of the Lord comes upon us, not so that we can feel good, but so that we may be about Christ's work of healing, reconciling, and setting free.
Such was the message that Paul preached. And the church at Corinth (which he founded), took it seriously, seeking the power of the Spirit to inspire and empower them most diligently. Nevertheless they were a contentious and quarrelsome congregation, frequently writing to Paul for help and guidance in resolving their battles. It seems that there were several groups in the congregation – all jockeying for power. Some, apparently, insisted that the gift of speaking in tongues had made them superior. They also fought over whether people baptized by Paul were better than those baptized by Cephas or Apollos; they had sued each other in court over church issues; they argued over whether the wealthy who came to church suppers had to share their food with members who didn't have as much; they had serious arguments over sexual morality; they bickered over whether or not they could eat food previously dedicated to idols, over whether or not women had to cover their heads in worship, and over how to celebrate the Lord's Supper. You get the picture. Paul is both patient and exhausted with them. He recognizes their spiritual power, but he also sees that it is diverted in ways that lead them away from Christ rather than ever deeper into his pathways.
In today's text Paul reminds them and us that the church is not just a collection of people, like pebbles in a box, but that we are a unity of interrelated and interdependent parts. There really cannot be "us" and "them" in the church, only "we." For after all, when even the smallest part of the body such as a toe or a tooth hurts, all the rest suffers as well. We are part of a whole interconnected system in which all the parts are intimately related. While we, as parts of the body, may be distinct from one another, we are not separate from one another. We may not be uniform but we are in union with each other. And we are in union in our diversity, our differentness. For what good would a body of all feet do? We could walk but we wouldn't know where we were going – we need eyes.
No, To each is given the manifestation of the spirit for the common good. Not one of us can be whole by ourselves. If the eye or the feet kept their gifts to themselves, the whole body would be disabled.
But sometimes I think that we modern believers would rather that the church be more like a gelatin salad than a body. It would be so much easier. First of all, we wouldn't have to work – to use our gifts to keep things going. Gelatin salads only have to sit still, look pretty, taste good, and jiggle. None of the ingredients even have to touch each other – and they certainly aren't responsible to each other for the whole salad. The walnuts owe each other nothing and they certainly don't need to have any relationship with the mandarin oranges.
And the gelatin that holds all this together is soft and sweet, often with a kind of gentle or friendly flavor. It doesn't ask anything of the orange sections or walnuts; it just embraces them in flavor and holds them together in firm but jiggly delight. Isn't that the way we want the Holy Spirit to be - no demands, no requirements, flavorful enough to keep us from getting bored but basically nondescript enough to offer no challenge. Love should come like jello – sweet, neither too soft nor too firm, but embracing everything and needing nothing in return. Well, - no such luck. Churches didn't come that way in Paul's time and they don't seem to 2,000 years later, either.
We are called to bring good news to the poor.
to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.
This is not a gelatin salad life or ministry.
Why does Paul use the imagery of the body for the church? What is he trying to get at?
I think he is harkening back to the beginning of Genesis that says we embodied human creatures are made "in the image and likeness of God." Our bodies, our very being is created to be the image and likeness of God – both as individuals and as the body of Christ, the church. We are not a club, a jiggly gelatin salad, not even a religious club. Rather we are a community committed to giving form and shape to Christ in the world and to doing the works of Christ in the world, the very commission he accepted when he read the words from Isaiah. We are to give form and flesh to the Spirit's call
to bring good news to the poor. to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.
"Our aim," says Jacob Needleman (What is God?, p. 197) "is the full-hearted engagement in the everyday life of the world, culminating in the capacity to love and serve the genuine needs of [humanity] and of the earth." "Made in the image and likeness of God our goal is to make straight the ways of the Lord," as did Jesus.
Striving for this goal means that we as a spiritual community need to be doing two things: 1) actively nurturing the spiritual maturity and transformation of our members and friends – because this is the foundation for any meaningful work. Until we begin to get beyond our egos so that we can be open enough to experience the Spirit's liberating and transforming touch and to hear the Spirit's call to us, we remain locked in ourselves, smaller than we need to be. So without the transforming power of the Spirit within us, we may, indeed, perform good works, but they will often be just that, good works but not necessarily God's work. There are good works and none of us deny their value. But there are also life-giving and life-transforming works. These are the ones that set the Spirit's power loose in the world. The primary reason our churches are denying is because no one sense the Spirit's power alive in them or flowing from them. They feel just like every other club and organization that we belong to. It is not sufficient to be a gelatin salad, however tasty and eye-pleasing.
If we are going to follow Jesus' call people who visit us will come away using words such as compassion, justice,mercy, peace, wholeness,unity, energy, life-changing, non-egotistical love, wonder, empathy, humility.
Notice that none of these words is egotistical. Rather, there is a way in which these qualities are the image and likeness of God. When they accurately describe us then we embody, enflesh, and incarnate the Spirit's power of life – thereby making it present and powerful in the world.

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