Reading: I Corinthians 12:12-27
The reading is from Paul’s first letter to the church in Corinth, and two things helps us read this part of the letter with understanding.
One is that even though Corinth was a wealthy, cosmopolitan city with a lot going for it because of the gifts of so many different peoples being brought together, those different peoples did not always get along well together, with each group finding ways to assert its own superiority and its right to be in charge. This divisive, exclusionary spirit also infected the church that grew up in Corinth, and Paul has this in mind when he writes this letter to them.
The other is that even though Paul is writing specifically to the church as a body of Christ in the city, when Paul and other early Christian teachers talk about “Christ” as opposed to just “Jesus” they have in mind something as big as what the Gospel of John calls God’s “Logos” or “Blueprint” for all the world, for all creation really. So “the body of Christ” is really as small as a local congregation, but also as big as Earth and even all the cosmos, and the local congregation is really meant to be a model of how God intends and is working to make all the world and all the cosmos to be.
There is one body, but it has many parts. And all its many parts make up one body. It is the same with Christ [no matter how locally or globally, congregationally or cosmically you think about Christ]. We all share in one Holy Spirit. And by this we are formed into one body. It doesn’t matter whether we were Jews or Gentiles, slaves or free people. We all drink of one and the same Spirit. So the body is not made up of just one part. It has many parts.
Suppose the foot says, “I am not a hand; so I don’t belong to the body.” By saying this, it cannot stop being part of
the body. And suppose the ear says, “I am not an eye; so I don’t belong to the
body.” By saying this, it cannot stop being part of the body. If the whole body
were an eye, how could it hear? If the whole body were an ear, how could it
smell? God has placed each part in the body just as God wanted it to be. If all
the parts were the same, how could there be a body? As it is, there are many
parts. And only one body.
The eye can’t say to the hand, “I don’t need you!” The head can’t say to the feet, “I don’t need you!” In fact, it is just the opposite. The parts of the body that seem to be weaker are the ones we can’t do without. The parts we think are less important we treat with special honour, and special care. The parts that seem not as worthy as others are precisely the ones that need special care. That’s how God makes the body work well – giving special honour and care to the parts that might easily not get the honour or care they need. And it’s not a matter of taking sides. It’s a matter of all the parts taking care of one another. If one part suffers, every part suffers with it. If one part is honoured, every part shares in its joy.
You are the body of Christ. Each one of you is a part of it.
Meditation
When Karen sent me this reading as a suggestion for today, she added this note: “I love that last line – ‘you are the body of Christ; each one of you is a part of it.’ How much more inclusive can you get?”
A number of years ago Bruce Springsteen wrote a song called “Spare Parts.” It tells a story of a young woman whose life – and whose labour – is shaped by happy but unfortunate mistakes and broken dreams, broken relationships and a harder, more lonely life than she dreamed for herself and for her fatherless son.
Spare parts [Springsteen sings]
And broken hearts
Keep the world turnin’ around
How many others’ life stories are similar to hers? People living as left-overs at the feast that others enjoy in full measure? Living as unwanted discards? Living as nameless and faceless replaceable parts in some bigger story that they aren’t invited to be full members of?
On this Labour Day weekend and with school re-opening we think of teachers, other school staff, bus drivers and students and their parents not really invited into decision-making about the re-opening plan, and many still feeling a little in the dark and uneasy about it.
We think of underpaid workers in precarious employment, newly unemployed workers many of whom have no job anymore to go back to, some of them like a friend of mine who lost his job a month or two ago just days after getting the best evaluation of all among his peers at a conference and who has learned that some of the jobs he sees advertised don’t even exist. They’re just a cover for employers gathering resumes in advance in case they might be looking for someone sometime down the road.
Spare parts
And broken hearts
Keep the world turnin’ around
And the feeling of being a broken spare part doesn’t have to be job-related.
How many people just in general and for any of a hundred reasons under the sun feel they really don’t have a secure and important place in the world; that they aren’t worth as much as others and might just as well be thrown away and forgotten? And may already have been?
How many times and in how many ways do we ourselves look that way at others, and treat them that way, without realizing what we are reducing other people to?
Against this, I’m encouraged and challenged – in other words, inspired – by a movie I saw a week or two ago on Netflix. It’s called “Hugo” and it’s a story about a boy in Paris in the early- to mid-1900’s.
He’s the orphaned son of a clock-maker who is taken in by his uncle who lives in the clock tower and inside the walls of the Paris train station, and keeps the clocks running right that all Paris takes its time from. The uncle dies without anyone knowing, and with no one knowing and no one even wanting him, the little boy carries on his father’s and his uncle’s work, keeping the clocks in the station running right for all Paris.
It’s a lonely life until a friend enters his world – enters the walls and the clock tower of the station. One day they’re up there together, the boy is doing his daily work on the main clock, and he says,
“It’s got real purpose.
“Everything has a purpose, even machines. Clocks tell the time. Trains take you places. They do what they’re meant to do.
“Maybe that’s why broken machines make me so sad. They can’t do what they’re meant to do. Maybe it’s the same with people. If you lose your purpose, it’s like you’re broken.
“Right after my father died I would come up here and look out at the city below and the world beyond. I’d imagine the whole world was one big machine. Machines never come with extra parts. They always come with the exact amount they need.
“So I figured if the entire world was one big machine, I couldn’t be an extra part. I had to be here for some reason.
“That means you have to be here for some reason too.”
“I wonder what that is,” his friend says.
Of course, it turns out by the end of the film that their purpose together is not only to care for the clock, not only to be friends to one another, but also together to fix some of the other broken people around them, and help them work better inside themselves and together as real community.
In our time, the pandemic has helped us expand our understanding of who counts and is important – who the "heroes" of the world are, and how many different kinds of people and work and jobs are really essential.
But I wonder if we’ve gone far enough in what we’ve come to see? Or if this is only the beginning of a bigger, more completely redeeming journey of understanding than that?
I wonder if maybe we’d do well to stop talking about “heroes.”
I like how Karen put it in an email – that “the hero” is really somewhere in all of us and each of us. I also remember what another friend said, that whenever you meet someone, even a stranger for the first time, if and when you happen really to look in their eyes, you see the sign and sense the echo there of some great suffering they have survived, that you could never have endured.
it’s important to recognize the timely importance of different people at different times. But instead of talking about heroes as though they’re a breed apart, I wonder if it might be time to start talking instead about how important and valuable we all are – each one of us is -- in the grand working of the world and the cosmos, in ways we can never know or measure at any one point in time?
I think of the multiple crises we are facing now in society, and wonder if maybe in them we can hear the voice of God encouraging and challenging us – that is, inspiring us
· to be open in new ways to people different from ourselves,
· to commit to do better to support all members of the body God makes us to be on the face of the Earth – especially the weaker and those whom we are tempted to see as less worthy,
· and instead of just befriending / supporting those who are like us, to begin offering together what we can towards healing and mending others more broken than we are,
so we can all be stronger and healthier together – real community, everyone free and able to offer what they have for the well-being of all.
And … just to get practical, I wonder if one way to start towards this kind of world right in our own daily routine, is to begin a particular kind of “gratitude practice.” Honest gratitude -- not greedy gratitude, but honest gratitude -- is the start of true spirituality. And what I have in mind is a deliberate practice of every time we meet some person – regardless of who they might be and what we might think of them, choosing to give thanks to God for them, even before we know who they are and what their life is about.
I wonder what difference a starting point of gratitude for each and every other person might make.
To them. And to us.
God says to us through the words of Paul, “you are the body of Christ [no matter how locally or globally, congregationally or cosmically we think about Christ at any time], and each one of you is part of it.”
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