As I sat down to write this morning’s sermon it dawned on me that today is the sixth anniversary of
my ordination to the priesthood. I suppose it will betray some details of my early adult life to quote
from a song called “Truckin’” by the Grateful Dead. “What a long, strange trip it’s been.” (So far!)
If pressed for an assessment of what I’ve learned these past six years, I suppose one of the top
things would be how many things have to be held in tension to hold a church intact. Congregations
pretty much run the full range of people. There are Republicans, Democrats, Independents,
theologically conservative, theologically liberal, those who want mainly to be convicted, those who
want mainly to be comforted, high church, low church, and on and on. And of course one of the big
things we have to keep in tension is our aspiration to be more Christlike and to follow his commands,
while understanding that we’re all flawed and will not ever do so perfectly in this lifetime.
But whenever I’m inclined to entertain any self-pity about the difficulty of all of this, all I have to do is
look at what Paul was dealing with in his early church leadership, and I realize that none of this is
uncharted territory. In his first letter to the Corinthians, Paul writes to a First Century church that is
deeply troubled. This fledgling congregation is struggling with widespread sexual immorality, some
messed up theology about the resurrection, abuse of the Lord’s Supper, general spiritual
immaturity, and divisions within the church. I’m wondering if any of this sounds at all familiar.
In today’s reading it’s this last feature that Paul addresses—the factions in the Corinthian church
and the strife between those factions. As we proceed, I encourage you to ask yourself to what
extent Paul’s words to the Corinthians ring true when applied to the problems we face in our own
church today.
To make his point, Paul uses the metaphor of the human body. He describes members of Christ’s
church as people baptized into one body. Paul emphasizes that this one body has many different
parts, and here is where lies the problem. Because the different parts of the body, following the
predictable pattern of fallen human nature, begin to separate, and to striate, and even to judge
each other. The sextons are muttering about the Altar Guild, the lay readers are muttering about
the deacon, the contemplative introverts are complaining about the expressive, hand-raising
extraverts.
And please know that I don’t think that this is a major issue here at Hope. In my experience this
community has a refreshingly high degree of harmony and mutual kindness. So maybe Paul’s words
to us this morning are more on the order of inoculation than medication.
We live in a time of great frustration and distrust. And this sometimes results in seeing the church
through the eyes of a consumer rather than through the eyes of a missionary or fellow sojourner
among the brotherhood and sisterhood of sinners saved by grace.
Consequently, and sadly, we Christians have been at our most creative in finding ways to divide
from and leave each other. And our motives for doing so can range from the obvious to the dubious.
There’s a story about a man who’d been shipwrecked and stranded alone on a desert island for 20
years. Just as he’d about lost hope, he spotted a ship on the horizon. He quickly lit a signal fire
and caught the ship's attention. When the ship arrived at the island, the captain came ashore and
noticed that the man had constructed three buildings.
"Excuse me," the captain said, "but you’ve been alone on this island for 20 years. Why did you build
three different houses?" The man replied, "Just the one on the left is my house. The one on the
right is my church."
The captain, impressed but now even more curious, asked, "But what about the building in the
center?" The man answered, "Oh, that's the church I used to attend!"
Our reasons for leaving are often less than compelling. Within the Episcopal Church, we tend to
divide along specialties. High church vs. low church. Hymns vs. praise music. Rite I vs. Rite II.
Evangelizers vs. social action people. But what Paul is saying is “how can we think about any one of
these not being part of the body?” What he’s calling for is unity in diversity.
Now, “diversity” has become a buzzword or even a codeword in parts of the modern church. It must
be emphasized that the diversity of which we speak is a diversity of people and their gifts and their
weaknesses, and not an anything-goes grab-bag of beliefs, doctrines or practices. Christian
standards must be within certain definite parameters or the result is chaos. Bishop Frey has said
that Anglicanism, for instance, is like a broad river. But it is a river with banks. In fact a river without
banks becomes a swamp. We’ll revisit this problem in a few moments.
But Paul says, “If the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be? If the whole body were
hearing, where would the sense of smell be?” No, all parts of the body are crucial, and they’re
interdependent. One writer tells the story of a friend who had a promising career as a football
player. He’d broken some records as a running back, and was highly recruited by large university
football programs. Then one summer he was working in a lumber camp, and he lost part of his big
toe in a freak accident. It ended his athletic career. Because he found that losing that one part of
his toe cost him his ability to accelerate and maintain his agility. It completely impaired his old way of
functioning on the football field. I trust you can see the metaphor.
Every person, every function, every specialty, every gift is precious in this interdependent body we
call the church. When we dismiss a person or group as a “big toe” (or some worse body part…) it
really is an act of self-destruction. We are an interdependent body, and our responsibility is not
only to not demand that everyone be exactly like ourselves, but to appreciate the gifts and
personalities God has given our brothers and sisters in his church, loving them unconditionally as
Christ has loved us.
Second, Paul is teaching us that what affects one member, affects all. We’re not a religion of
rugged individualists and we never were. All our feelings, thoughts, actions and prayers are
supposed to keep the good of the whole body in mind, and are accountable to the whole body. This
is one of the consequences of our interdependence. Paul says, “If one member suffers, all suffer
together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it.” All you have to do to
emphasize the truth of this statement is to remember how debilitating a headache, or even a
stubbed toe, can be. If one member suffers, all suffer together with it.
Just last week we embodied this in a way by rejoicing together in our first anniversary of this new
church. And in the same service we came together on behalf of those suffering in Haiti. I’m pleased
to announce that last week we raised over $1200 to be used toward disaster relief there.
But again, this concept applies to the larger Church as well. We’re accountable to each other, and
when that accountability fails, we suffer together. This is one of the concepts we’ve painfully found
out in our own denomination. We’ve unilaterally made a series of decisions and statements that
have alienated us from much if not most of the rest of the Anglican Communion. The repercussions
of these decisions are continuing to echo around the world.
This leads to a third and final point which may be gleaned from the metaphor of the church as a
body, and one of which I’m confident that Paul would fully agree. That point is this: that the body
has a Head. Every image we have of being united in one body must be illuminated with this one
truth: The Body has a Head. One bread, one body, one Lord of all—we as a church are under the
headship of Christ. Not simply the Christ of our preferences or our pet projects. Not exclusively the
Christ that reflects only our own projections of who we think he should be, but the Christ portrayed in
the divinely inspired documents that bring us the true and clear picture of Jesus, his love, his
teachings, his death, resurrection and ascension: the Holy Scriptures of the Bible. If you want to
know who Jesus is, and if you want to know who God is (because Jesus said, “If you’ve seen me you’
ve seen the Father”) this is what you’re looking for, and this is what gives meaning and coherence to
any notion of the Body of Christ. Any idea that opposes or contradicts the moral and spiritual truths
given to us here by God through his prophets and apostles threatens the health of that body.
As the head of his Body, through His Spirit and through His word, Jesus sends the nerve impulses
that cause the body to work properly. To coordinate with each other, to signal the heart, the
cleansing organs, the hands that do the work, everything. The thought of hands, organs, and
hearts functioning independently of the head is ludicrous. The flow of life from our Head keeps our
heart pumping, and supplies every part of our body with the life-sustaining breath of the Holy Spirit.
The question for us and for all believers is this: Are we in danger of cutting off the flow of life-giving
oxygen by not making space for the Lord to work in our individual lives through prayer, Bible study,
meditation and the other spiritual disciplines? Are we placing ourselves in danger by rebelling
against surrender to the good, perfect, and loving will of God? Are we impeding the good contagion
of that life by not noticing the needs of our fellow human beings?
There’s important point to be made here. And that is that, as important as it is, it’s not simply proper
doctrine that gives us life. The Pharisees in most ways had proper doctrine, but Jesus describes
them as “whitewashed tombs.” No, we need to place Jesus in the position of lordship, make him the
head that drives our personal and corporate bodies, yielding to His life-giving will, following his
directives regarding our thoughts, words and deeds. The Body has a head. This is what unites us
into a common mission—a common understanding of what it means to be, act, think, and pray as a
Christian.
My friends, in closing, part of the genius of Paul’s use of the metaphor of the human body to
describe the church of Jesus Christ, is this: It illustrates the nature of love.
The Scriptures are very clear that the core of God is love. Not just the airy, feel-good human
emotion that makes us all want to collapse into a giant group hug, and sing “kum ba yah,” but the will
to want the very best for each other in the light of the priorities of God’s pure eternal nature as
clearly expressed in Holy Scripture.
Are we to we reject fellow believers who have moral or spiritual struggles? Of course not. We’re not
to shoot our wounded. Jesus certainly didn’t. If we decided to exclude people because of their
particular sins, moral and otherwise, I’m afraid this church would be pretty empty. Are we to we love
each other unconditionally? Yes, we are. And in that love we support each other and help each
other to grow increasingly into the will of God, the way family members in the body are supposed to.
Then, as long as we keep the Jesus of the Bible as our head, and the truths of His Holy Scriptures
as our roadmap, as a body we’ll grow into maturity and unimaginably fulfilling love in God’s eternal
kingdom.
My prayer is that each and every one of us increasingly experiences the strength and health that
come from a nurturing relationship with God and with our brothers and sisters in Christ, and that one
day we’ll all regard each other with perfect joy and love as completed members of his Body. Amen.
my ordination to the priesthood. I suppose it will betray some details of my early adult life to quote
from a song called “Truckin’” by the Grateful Dead. “What a long, strange trip it’s been.” (So far!)
If pressed for an assessment of what I’ve learned these past six years, I suppose one of the top
things would be how many things have to be held in tension to hold a church intact. Congregations
pretty much run the full range of people. There are Republicans, Democrats, Independents,
theologically conservative, theologically liberal, those who want mainly to be convicted, those who
want mainly to be comforted, high church, low church, and on and on. And of course one of the big
things we have to keep in tension is our aspiration to be more Christlike and to follow his commands,
while understanding that we’re all flawed and will not ever do so perfectly in this lifetime.
But whenever I’m inclined to entertain any self-pity about the difficulty of all of this, all I have to do is
look at what Paul was dealing with in his early church leadership, and I realize that none of this is
uncharted territory. In his first letter to the Corinthians, Paul writes to a First Century church that is
deeply troubled. This fledgling congregation is struggling with widespread sexual immorality, some
messed up theology about the resurrection, abuse of the Lord’s Supper, general spiritual
immaturity, and divisions within the church. I’m wondering if any of this sounds at all familiar.
In today’s reading it’s this last feature that Paul addresses—the factions in the Corinthian church
and the strife between those factions. As we proceed, I encourage you to ask yourself to what
extent Paul’s words to the Corinthians ring true when applied to the problems we face in our own
church today.
To make his point, Paul uses the metaphor of the human body. He describes members of Christ’s
church as people baptized into one body. Paul emphasizes that this one body has many different
parts, and here is where lies the problem. Because the different parts of the body, following the
predictable pattern of fallen human nature, begin to separate, and to striate, and even to judge
each other. The sextons are muttering about the Altar Guild, the lay readers are muttering about
the deacon, the contemplative introverts are complaining about the expressive, hand-raising
extraverts.
And please know that I don’t think that this is a major issue here at Hope. In my experience this
community has a refreshingly high degree of harmony and mutual kindness. So maybe Paul’s words
to us this morning are more on the order of inoculation than medication.
We live in a time of great frustration and distrust. And this sometimes results in seeing the church
through the eyes of a consumer rather than through the eyes of a missionary or fellow sojourner
among the brotherhood and sisterhood of sinners saved by grace.
Consequently, and sadly, we Christians have been at our most creative in finding ways to divide
from and leave each other. And our motives for doing so can range from the obvious to the dubious.
There’s a story about a man who’d been shipwrecked and stranded alone on a desert island for 20
years. Just as he’d about lost hope, he spotted a ship on the horizon. He quickly lit a signal fire
and caught the ship's attention. When the ship arrived at the island, the captain came ashore and
noticed that the man had constructed three buildings.
"Excuse me," the captain said, "but you’ve been alone on this island for 20 years. Why did you build
three different houses?" The man replied, "Just the one on the left is my house. The one on the
right is my church."
The captain, impressed but now even more curious, asked, "But what about the building in the
center?" The man answered, "Oh, that's the church I used to attend!"
Our reasons for leaving are often less than compelling. Within the Episcopal Church, we tend to
divide along specialties. High church vs. low church. Hymns vs. praise music. Rite I vs. Rite II.
Evangelizers vs. social action people. But what Paul is saying is “how can we think about any one of
these not being part of the body?” What he’s calling for is unity in diversity.
Now, “diversity” has become a buzzword or even a codeword in parts of the modern church. It must
be emphasized that the diversity of which we speak is a diversity of people and their gifts and their
weaknesses, and not an anything-goes grab-bag of beliefs, doctrines or practices. Christian
standards must be within certain definite parameters or the result is chaos. Bishop Frey has said
that Anglicanism, for instance, is like a broad river. But it is a river with banks. In fact a river without
banks becomes a swamp. We’ll revisit this problem in a few moments.
But Paul says, “If the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be? If the whole body were
hearing, where would the sense of smell be?” No, all parts of the body are crucial, and they’re
interdependent. One writer tells the story of a friend who had a promising career as a football
player. He’d broken some records as a running back, and was highly recruited by large university
football programs. Then one summer he was working in a lumber camp, and he lost part of his big
toe in a freak accident. It ended his athletic career. Because he found that losing that one part of
his toe cost him his ability to accelerate and maintain his agility. It completely impaired his old way of
functioning on the football field. I trust you can see the metaphor.
Every person, every function, every specialty, every gift is precious in this interdependent body we
call the church. When we dismiss a person or group as a “big toe” (or some worse body part…) it
really is an act of self-destruction. We are an interdependent body, and our responsibility is not
only to not demand that everyone be exactly like ourselves, but to appreciate the gifts and
personalities God has given our brothers and sisters in his church, loving them unconditionally as
Christ has loved us.
Second, Paul is teaching us that what affects one member, affects all. We’re not a religion of
rugged individualists and we never were. All our feelings, thoughts, actions and prayers are
supposed to keep the good of the whole body in mind, and are accountable to the whole body. This
is one of the consequences of our interdependence. Paul says, “If one member suffers, all suffer
together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it.” All you have to do to
emphasize the truth of this statement is to remember how debilitating a headache, or even a
stubbed toe, can be. If one member suffers, all suffer together with it.
Just last week we embodied this in a way by rejoicing together in our first anniversary of this new
church. And in the same service we came together on behalf of those suffering in Haiti. I’m pleased
to announce that last week we raised over $1200 to be used toward disaster relief there.
But again, this concept applies to the larger Church as well. We’re accountable to each other, and
when that accountability fails, we suffer together. This is one of the concepts we’ve painfully found
out in our own denomination. We’ve unilaterally made a series of decisions and statements that
have alienated us from much if not most of the rest of the Anglican Communion. The repercussions
of these decisions are continuing to echo around the world.
This leads to a third and final point which may be gleaned from the metaphor of the church as a
body, and one of which I’m confident that Paul would fully agree. That point is this: that the body
has a Head. Every image we have of being united in one body must be illuminated with this one
truth: The Body has a Head. One bread, one body, one Lord of all—we as a church are under the
headship of Christ. Not simply the Christ of our preferences or our pet projects. Not exclusively the
Christ that reflects only our own projections of who we think he should be, but the Christ portrayed in
the divinely inspired documents that bring us the true and clear picture of Jesus, his love, his
teachings, his death, resurrection and ascension: the Holy Scriptures of the Bible. If you want to
know who Jesus is, and if you want to know who God is (because Jesus said, “If you’ve seen me you’
ve seen the Father”) this is what you’re looking for, and this is what gives meaning and coherence to
any notion of the Body of Christ. Any idea that opposes or contradicts the moral and spiritual truths
given to us here by God through his prophets and apostles threatens the health of that body.
As the head of his Body, through His Spirit and through His word, Jesus sends the nerve impulses
that cause the body to work properly. To coordinate with each other, to signal the heart, the
cleansing organs, the hands that do the work, everything. The thought of hands, organs, and
hearts functioning independently of the head is ludicrous. The flow of life from our Head keeps our
heart pumping, and supplies every part of our body with the life-sustaining breath of the Holy Spirit.
The question for us and for all believers is this: Are we in danger of cutting off the flow of life-giving
oxygen by not making space for the Lord to work in our individual lives through prayer, Bible study,
meditation and the other spiritual disciplines? Are we placing ourselves in danger by rebelling
against surrender to the good, perfect, and loving will of God? Are we impeding the good contagion
of that life by not noticing the needs of our fellow human beings?
There’s important point to be made here. And that is that, as important as it is, it’s not simply proper
doctrine that gives us life. The Pharisees in most ways had proper doctrine, but Jesus describes
them as “whitewashed tombs.” No, we need to place Jesus in the position of lordship, make him the
head that drives our personal and corporate bodies, yielding to His life-giving will, following his
directives regarding our thoughts, words and deeds. The Body has a head. This is what unites us
into a common mission—a common understanding of what it means to be, act, think, and pray as a
Christian.
My friends, in closing, part of the genius of Paul’s use of the metaphor of the human body to
describe the church of Jesus Christ, is this: It illustrates the nature of love.
The Scriptures are very clear that the core of God is love. Not just the airy, feel-good human
emotion that makes us all want to collapse into a giant group hug, and sing “kum ba yah,” but the will
to want the very best for each other in the light of the priorities of God’s pure eternal nature as
clearly expressed in Holy Scripture.
Are we to we reject fellow believers who have moral or spiritual struggles? Of course not. We’re not
to shoot our wounded. Jesus certainly didn’t. If we decided to exclude people because of their
particular sins, moral and otherwise, I’m afraid this church would be pretty empty. Are we to we love
each other unconditionally? Yes, we are. And in that love we support each other and help each
other to grow increasingly into the will of God, the way family members in the body are supposed to.
Then, as long as we keep the Jesus of the Bible as our head, and the truths of His Holy Scriptures
as our roadmap, as a body we’ll grow into maturity and unimaginably fulfilling love in God’s eternal
kingdom.
My prayer is that each and every one of us increasingly experiences the strength and health that
come from a nurturing relationship with God and with our brothers and sisters in Christ, and that one
day we’ll all regard each other with perfect joy and love as completed members of his Body. Amen.
One Body
1 Corinthians 12:12-31
1 Corinthians 12:12-31
January 24, 2010
Fr. Dan Tuton
Fr. Dan Tuton
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