January 23, 2022 “Membership” – I Corinthians 12:12-31

I Corinthians 12:12-31
“Membership”
January 23, 2022 – Third Sunday after Epiphany

Art turned white with pain. He slipped from his chair at the table and lay on the floor moaning. Next thing we knew, our fellow pastor was in the hospital. Some of you too have had kidney stones. You have a window on our text. Miniscule difficulty in a tiny body part you never think about, and the result is excruciating agony. Paul says the Christian church is like that, a body in which what happens to one part, even a little one, affects all the rest.

Human social organization conceived as a body and its parts was an image known in the Roman world. Drawing on the Roman writer Livy’s account, Shakespeare opened his play Coriolanus with a scene of wild rebels armed with staves and clubs surging toward Rome. Senator Menenius stands and calms the mob by telling a parable of how parts of the body rebelled against the stomach because it received all the food. The other parts did not recognize that the stomach distributes food to all the rest of the body. By attacking the stomach, they would starve to death. By attacking the government of Rome, the rest of the empire, including the rebels themselves, would suffer.

So in I Corinthians 12 Paul picked up an idea that might have been familiar to his readers: the body and its parts as a picture of human society as interdependent. But for Romans, this metaphor was just a striking image, useful on occasions like Menenius’s calming of the mob. It was not yet how common citizens saw themselves. No one then regularly called himself or herself a “member,” whether of society, a club, or a religious association. In Greek, Paul used the word “member” here 12 times. To the original readers it meant only one thing: body parts, limbs and organs, physical members of an organism.

It’s only because Christianity spread Paul’s use of this metaphor far and wide that you and I use the words “member” and “membership” for our own social relations without thinking of body parts. In order to grasp “membership” in the church, you and I need hear again that original meaning. We may need to hear the word “dismembered” and visualize that horrific sort of physical injury. The most vivid translation may no longer be “members” or even “parts” but “limbs” or “organs” in the Body of Christ.

You are a member at your credit union, and at Costco. You’re a member of an auto club or a political party. You’re a member of an HMO and of a cheese-of-the-month club. All those watered-down, non-organic “memberships” conspire to make us forget the deep significance of what it means to be a member of the Body of Christ. People sometimes ask me if being a member here at Valley Covenant really matters. Isn’t it good enough just to attend and participate? Why should I be a member?

We are members of a local congregation because it helps us recall that we belong to Jesus like our limbs and organs belong to our bodies. We join as members because the connection between us is meant to run so deep and strong that we simply cannot get along without each other. Our individual presence in the church is not simply a matter of our own convenience or our needs being met. It’s a deep and abiding bond which ties us to each other like your eye resting in its socket or your arm swinging from your shoulder. Tear that bond loose, and the result is horrible. The whole body will suffer. Keep that bond strong and care for each limb and organ, and the whole body will enjoy good health.

After initially proposing this picture of a body and its limbs and organs in verse 12, Paul says, “so it is with Christ.” The Holy Spirit of Jesus holds the Church “body” together. In verse 13, sacraments of the Church are instruments of the Spirit’s unity. “For in one Spirit, we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slave or free—and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.” By baptism and by eating and drinking together at the Lord’s Table we become one body and know that we are one body. Those Sacraments hold us together in the Spirit.

Yet, despite being one in Christ, we remain diverse. Paul spoke of Jews or Greeks, slaves or free. Today the Church is still diverse, both racially and socially. Beginning in verse 14, Paul extended the classical parable of the body into two perennial lessons for how the body of Jesus Christ works. The first is that unity does not mean sameness. In delightful fable-like pictures Paul tells us in verse 15 that a foot doesn’t need to worry that it’s not the same as a hand. It’s still part of the body. An ear shouldn’t get uptight because it can’t see like an eye. Where would a body be without both hands and feet, both ears and eyes?

That is why our Covenant Church has especially emphasized racial diversity and justice. It’s not to be fashionable or progressive. It’s to be biblical. Churches cannot be true expressions of our Lord’s Body until we reflect the diversity God built into humanity. For Paul’s churches it meant including both Jews and non-Jews, both free citizens and bonded slaves. For us it means much the same, but in modern terms. Our churches wish to reflect ethnic diversity in the culture around us: African-American, Latinx, Asian and white all together. We want to embrace the economic diversity of our world, homeless and homeowner, food-stamp user and cheese club member. We belong together, sharing in the Sacraments, listening to the Word, praising God and serving each other.

Diversity in the Church of Jesus is more than ethnicity and economics. Even within a race or social class there are distinctions. The most visible is gender. Liberal culture may try to ignore ageless differences in a genderless unisex society or else multiply them until we lose track. Conservative culture, on the other hand, may exaggerate gender difference, as if men and women are from different planets. Scripture supports neither of those approaches to gender. Instead, God-created differences of men and women are blended in Jesus Christ into healthy families and healthy churches in which both sexes participate with equal status and authority. In the Covenant Church we welcome both men and women into all levels of church leadership, including pastoral ministry. Our churches, ministries, and missions are richer and better because of it.

Gender does not exhaust our diversity. We are each created unique. Some of us are extroverts and needs lots of conversation. Others of us are introverts and enjoy quiet time alone. Some us love to sing while others would rather read a book. Some are naturally cheerful. Others tend to be a little gloomy and grumpy. Some like Bach and some like Beyonce. Some get excited when a preacher parses a Greek verb. Others perk up at a joke or a good story.

To be the Church of Jesus Christ is to be in unity, but it does not mean to be all the same. If we start down that road of sameness, if we want everybody to like the same music or have the same politics, or even all share exactly the same theology, we are not only doomed to failure, we have ceased trying to be the Church as Jesus Christ called it to be.

So in verses 17, 18, and 19 Paul offers us a comical depiction of a body part trying to be the whole, an eye or ear or nose making its way through the world in glorious unity, seeing everything there is to see or smelling everything there is to smell, yet ignoring the rest of experience. My wife tells me there’s a Shostakovich opera called “The Nose.” A nose detaches from a face and lives a life of its own. But that’s satire. It can’t happen with body parts nor with church members. Verse 20 says, “there are many members, but one body.” There is unity, but there is difference. Unity does not mean sameness.

Unity does not mean sameness. Diversity is crucial to a healthy body and diversity is crucial in the Church of Jesus Christ. But the second lesson here, beginning in verse 21, is that diversity does not mean division. We grin as Paul imagines an eye saying to a hand, “I have no need of you,” or a head saying to the feet, “I have no need of you.” But it can’t work. We’re not all the same, but we’re all connected like limbs or organs of a body.

In verse 22, Paul pushes the lesson still further, considering how some differences among Christians actually work out. There is strength versus weakness, leading versus following, succeeding in life versus struggling. We cannot simply lop off body parts that are weak or contributing less or not doing so well. Seemingly weaker parts of our physical bodies are crucial. Parts which are less visible deserve special respect. Paul wrote, “members of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable.”

You likely give more attention to your hands than you do to your liver. But you could lose a hand and go on living. Lose your liver and you will die. A liver seems weak and insignificant in comparison to a hand, but you can’t do without it. The same is true in the church. A seemingly insignificant person may be the one whose prayers are essential. A quiet, unnoticed individual may contribute in vital ways none of us know.

Verse 23 Paul subtly refers to modesty and care for certain body parts. A football or basketball player who has gotten a knee or elbow in a delicate spot has felt it. We clothe and protect seemingly weak parts of our bodies because they are dear to us. We who seem strong and visible in the church are to care for and protect those among us who are helpless and invisible. They mean more to our health than we may know.

Paul states it in verse 25, we honor weaker members “that there should be no dissension within the body, but the members may have the same care for one another.” Diversity without dissension. “Dissension” here does not mean mere disagreement. It means the kind of hateful, dissenting speech which divides us. We can disagree over theology or music, but we do not want to be divided from each other.

Of course, we mess it up all the time. As weak, fallible limbs and organs, we let things divide us, from race to music, from interpretation of Scripture to vision for ministry. Our differences come between us and sometimes they separate us. Those divisions break our hearts and they break the heart of our Savior whose Body we are. They grieve the Holy Spirit who would make us one. They pain the Father who loves us all as His Children.

Because we’re all connected, we all hurt and feel responsible if someone gets angry and leaves us. As verse 26 says, “if one member suffers, all suffer together with it,” especially when that member is removed, like an amputee feels phantom pains in a limb that is no longer there.

Yes, we mess up the Body of Christ all the time, just as we each mess up our own physical bodies with food we shouldn’t eat or substances we shouldn’t use, failure to exercise, or just carelessness like slamming a finger in the car door. Yet just as most of us aren’t prepared to give up on our individual bodies, I pray that most of us are not ready to give up on the Body of Christ. Take a brisk walk on a nice day or eat a piece of chocolate and you find that for all its weaknesses and failings your physical body can still bring you joy. So Paul says, “if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it.” We rejoice with Sara in her new job and with Terry in the awards his books receive and with Harry in his new apartment. Their honor and joy is ours too.

The Body of Christ needs each of us. And the world needs the Body of Christ. Unity and diversity need to be held together. The One and the Many. It’s the original philosophical problem going back to the pre-Socratics. It’s still the question to be answered about the world and human life. Science wishes to comprehend the multiplicity of the universe in a single theory. Human beings wish for peaceful harmony between all their ethnicities and languages and desires.

Christian faith is the only ultimately satisfying answer to the One and the Many, the only way to both unity and diversity. We affirm that God Himself and is both One and Many, one God in three blessed, holy divine Persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. We affirm that in Jesus we are brought into the same kind of diverse unity God enjoys. We are many believers, but one church. This is what our world seeks. All the different factions in Ethiopia, Jews, Muslims, and Christians in the Mideast, Republicans and Democrats in our own country—we all need, whether we know or want to admit it or not, the unity in difference which is founded in God the Trinity and comes to us in Jesus Christ.

We talk about what the world needs and sometimes we just wish for Jesus to show up and make it all good, all just, all right. But look at verse 27. “You are the body of Christ and individually members of it.” We may be praying for Jesus to show up while the apostle reminds us that He has. We, you and I, are His visible presence, His body now in the world. The world needs Jesus and so here we are. Our roles as members in His body is not just a gripping metaphor, it’s sober truth about God at work in the world.

In verse 28, as I said last week, Paul makes body part imagery real by naming actual roles in his churches, “God has appointed in the church first apostles, second prophets, third teachers, then deeds of power, then gifts of healing, forms of assistance, forms of leadership, various kinds of tongues.” Please don’t turn that into a church hierarchy or form of government. Paul mentioned a few body parts to illustrate his point about diversity in unity. Now he names a few sorts of church members in order to help us see how it actually works out. The Bible doesn’t name all spiritual gifts and it doesn’t give us a list of all roles in the church. The point is that there are many different kinds of Christian ministry and service. No one does all of it and there are many roles which not everyone does.

You are all essential and indispensable in the Body of Christ. A congregation needs leaders, but leaders need each other and need their congregations. I’ve said before how weird it was at the beginning of the pandemic to preach to a camera at home and wonder if anyone was listening. I know now that many of you were and still are, but the very feeling of suddenly being alone in it all made me question if I could go on being a pastor. As you may have read, many of my colleagues felt the same way and some did not fare as well.

Yes, church on YouTube and Zoom is hard. It’s not as much fun. The body of Christ is physical and aches for physical presence. Yet please hang in there. We will be back together in-person again. We will one day even get to take off these masks again. Right now, though, we are respecting and honoring the weaker members among us. And God has been gracious because of it. Some of us have lost family or friends in other places, but we haven’t lost anyone to COVID-19 here in our local body. Thank you for that. You have understood and served each other well through it all.

After worship today, we’ll have a fellowship time on Zoom once again. We thought we were done with that last year, but here we are again. We’re going to be on-line like that for our annual meeting next Sunday. I’m even thinking of offering a class for new members on Zoom in weeks to come. It’s not the same as coffee and cookies and conversation in our sanctuary. It’s not as fun as a pizza and salad lunch around tables in the Gathering Place. But it’s still being members together, honoring and respecting both the strong and the weak among us, being different and yet together in Jesus. Thank you for that.

Paul tells us in verse 31 to strive for the greater gifts. He doesn’t say which those are, but we might remember what he said about the weaker, less respectable body parts deserving more honor and care. Finally, he promises to show us “a still more excellent way.” If you’ve been paying attention to what he’s taught us about membership, you won’t be surprised at all next Sunday to hear that the more excellent way is love.

Amen.