Sermon for Third Sunday after Epiphany – 1 Corinthians 12:12-31a

Well, it’s official. I’m middle aged. And it’s hard! I was initiated this week – my first colonoscopy. Actually, the prep wasn’t that bad. But I learned something. Jello is like manna from God. I was good all day beforehand, but by 10pm I was starving. And after they remove a few polyps and tell you about them, you kind of miss not knowing. And then there’s my shoulder that locks up. And my sciatic nerve that likes to remind me its there. So apparently middle age is just God’s way of making sure I learn to appreciate all those secret parts of my body that I didn’t know before. Because when they act up, it’s breathtaking.

When you think about the human body like this, it puts a whole new spin on the Body of Christ, doesn’t it?

Now, “The Body of Christ” means a few different things. It can mean Jesus himself, who lived and died as one of us. It can mean the sacrament, where Jesus comes to us in, with, and under the bread and wine. It can mean all Christians throughout the world. And it can mean the Church which draws us all together for worship and fellowship and service. Remember, the Church isn’t a building. The Church is this mystical thing that appears whenever we gather together in Jesus’ name. Though I admit that a building does make that a lot easier on a frigid morning.

So, this morning I want to talk about what happens when we call ourselves the Body of Christ. It’s a lot like the human body, where we’re like the bones and skin and organs that all function together to keep things going. Some days are great. We worship together. We support each other. We feel like friends. But sometimes things don’t go so well. People are complicated. We can’t all be eyes, ears, or skin. Someone’s got to be the gall bladder or leaky sinus or colon. Which means they matter, but maybe we don’t think they fit in, or we don’t feel like we can relate to them, or maybe they just kind of scare us. That’s the challenge, right? They push us out of our comfort zone. But we get intimidated, or it just feels like too much work. So we gravitate to some folks and not others. It’s easier. You can see this if you watch a narthex or fellowship hall after worship. Little cliques and a few folks on the sidelines. Now, at the moment we’re a small group. But I remember when we were larger and had fellowship after worship, and seeing who sat with who. Which isn’t necessarily bad. Who could be friends with everyone?

But it can also be a huge problem. This morning, we read a letter from St. Paul to the church in Corinth, and it’s a hot mess. Now, it wasn’t always. When Paul started the congregation, it was like a spiritual explosion. Folks learn fast. They suck up everything Paul teaches them. The Spirit gives them words and they start speaking with power. They keep on growing, so Paul moves on because he’s got more churches to start. But he leaves behind a vacuum, so a few step in the fill the void. They’re charismatic. Folks start gravitating to one or the other, and now it’s like rival teams. Team Apollos (the innovators). Team Cephas (who is Peter, so these are the conservatives). Team Paul (Paul’s not even there, but these are like the ones who love the good old days). Even Team Jesus (whatever that means, fundaentalists?). Think denominations and turn up the heat. The church starts breaking apart. Folks ignore each other. Communion’s a joke. Now, it’s not like these are just hateful people. I don’t know anyone who suddenly wakes up one morning and decides, “hey, let’s start a schism today.” Yet this happens all the time, and it’s even got a name – “church-sect cycles”. Whenever a church keeps getting more popular, little cracks start growing until they split everything apart.

So Paul loses his mind. He basically says, “What’s wrong with you people? The eye can’t say to the hand ‘I don’t need you.’ The head can’t say to the feet ‘You’re useless to me.'” Now, Paul’s not talking about folks who lose hands or feet and learn to live without them. What he’s talking about, is like someone hacking up their own body because they see imperfections. My mom used to say “cutting off your nose to spite your face.” But here’s the thing. When you start down that path, you don’t stop with a few blemishes. You obsess about the perfect body, and all you see are more imperfections. More to cut out. It’s a real affliction. This is what Paul sees happening to folks in Corinth. Each faction thinks it’s the real deal and everyone else needs to be cut out. So Paul warns that they’re hacking up the Body of Christ for something they think is better. And Paul’s afraid for anyone who’s desperate for a word of hope and wanders into this. Paul knows how quickly they’ll learn that they don’t belong. “The foot says ‘I’m not a hand, I guess I don’t belong.’ The ear says ‘I’m not an eye, I guess I don’t belong.'” For anyone in all their God-given beauty who ever felt the pain of exclusion, they leave empty and broken-hearted. And Paul sees the body of Christ wounded and dying.

How does the Body of Christ look for us? Is it healthy and thriving or just as wounded? 2000 years later and we’re still fractured. We keep our distance from folks who just don’t seem to get Jesus the way we get Jesus. Folks who we don’t really want to empathize with because of their politics or their behavior, or because they just seem like a lost cause that’s not worth our time. Or maybe we grit our teeth and push down our disgust in order to act like good people, but our hearts remain unmoved. St. Paul says that in the body of Christ, “if one member suffers, all suffer together with it.” But if we aren’t really feeling these folks that we barely tolerate on our best days, then are we really in the body of Christ?

Well, Paul knows the answer. “Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it.” And that’s not a metaphor. Jesus literally makes us into his living body in the world by re-membering us. Because he knows what it’s like to be dis-membered. In his crucifixion, his body was broken and his blood was poured out. He died and was cut off from everything. Yet, God raised him from the dead to re-member him in his resurrection, with a new eternal body. A glorious body that can never be broken again. This is Jesus’ mystical body that transcends heaven and earth. The body that came to Mary Magdalene at the empty tomb and called her by name. The body that came to his disciples to give them peace and to breathe the Holy Spirit into them. The same body that meets us at his table in his gift of bread and wine, so that he can re-member our bodies to his own. And nothing will ever separate us from Jesus.

Or separate us from each other. Jesus binds us to his body in order to bind us to each other, whether we like it or not. I mean, he knows our divisions and disagreements. He knows all the folks we try to avoid. He knows how often we say one thing and do another. But this just makes Jesus more determined to not let any of that be the last word. So he makes sure we can’t get away from the folks we’d rather avoid. And he puts his own Spirit into our hearts. A Spirit of humility to remind us of our own foolishness when we witness others’. A Spirit that doesn’t hold back on forgiveness, because his unconditional forgiveness feels so amazing that forgiving others seems like the least we could do. A Spirit that makes us curious. Because we want to know what’s going on underneath all the politics and drama that we hate, and it might just be the same fear and loneliness that we’ve felt before. We can do something about that. Like hand over the same good news that lifts our own burdens.

Of course, none of us are miracle workers. This kind of ministry is risky. It can take a lot out of us. Sometimes we just don’t have the right gifts. But the Body of Christ always reminds us that it’s not all up to you or me. We have countless brothers and sisters who have the gifts that we don’t have. St. Paul asks, “Are all prophets? Are all teachers? Do all work miracles? Do all heal?” No. But thank God that Jesus knows where to find them.