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The Rev. Richard Floyd Ridgefield-Crystal Lake Presbyterian Church 1 Corinthians 12 Ordinary 3: January 20/21, 2007 The human body is an amazing thing. Sometimes when you crawl out of bed in the morning and look in the mirror, it doesn’t seem all that amazing. But consider this: “One human body contains a hundred times more cells than there are stars in the galaxy. There are 100 trillion cells in your body and about 200 different kinds of cells. These 100 trillion cells are all orchestrated into one magnificent whole, communicating with each other for the sake of the whole body.” Amazing. Let me give you an example. Raise your right arm. Simple, right? But to make that seemingly simple thing happen, the following must occur: “The fibers in the deltoid and the upper trapezius will contract to produce the primary motion, while the fibers of the pectoral major, the pectoral minor, and the latissimus dorsi must simultaneously extend to allow it. But the contraction of the right trapezius will not only raise the right arm, it will also tend to pull the neck towards the right; therefore the left trapezius, along with other muscles of the neck, will have to contract as well in order to stabilize it. Furthermore, the extended right arm will overbalance the torso to the right, so the erector muscles on the left side of the spine must contract to brace the whole torso and keep it erect. And since this contraction of the erector muscles on the left side of the spine will tend to pull the left side of the pelvis up, the gluteus medius and minimus of the left side must also brace to hold the pelvis level. Since not only the torso, but the body as a whole is threatened with tipping by the overbalancing weight of the extended arm, the right leg must brace as well, using fibers in the hip, the thigh, the calf, the feet, the toes. And of course our arm-raising subject continues to breathe, so all of the muscles which cooperate to fill and empty the lungs must now make the asymmetrical adjustments necessary to continue their rhythm without disturbing the pose. Muscle fibers from the head to the toes, and from both sides of the body, all must cooperate to ‘raise the right arm.’” [this and above adapted from Matthew Fox, Sins of the Spirit, Blessings of the Flesh, pp. 72, 75-76] All these muscles groups from all over the body— all these trillions of cells working together to make even the simplest of actions possible: the human body is an amazing thing. It’s also a fragile thing. I know this all too well, as the stomach flu visited the Floyd house this past week. And Emily was conveniently in California at the time. The body is an amazing thing, but it’s a fragile thing, subject to viruses and bacteria and cancers and system failures and just plain getting old. We should keep this in mind as we consider our scripture reading today. Paul imagines the church as a body, the body of Christ. And like all bodies, the church body is an amazing thing. Just like the human body the church body is made up of trillions of different cells all working together—ideally, anyway. Consider all the amazing diversity of churches and practices that claim the name Christian. “From the majestic pontifical High Mass in St. Peter’s to the quiet simplicity of a Quaker meeting; from the intellectual sophistication of Saint Thomas Aquinas to the moving simplicity of spirituals such as ‘Lord, I want to be a Christian’—all this is Christianity.” [adapted from Huston Smith, The World’s Religions, pg. 317] Theology professors at Harvard Divinity School and snake handlers in the Ozarks, the Patriarch of Constantinople and the president of the Southern Baptist Convention— all these are part of the body. Of course our own little body right here has its own amazing diversity. Men and women, young and less young, political conservatives and political liberals and people who don’t care a whit about politics, well-off and not-so-well-off, married and single, gay and straight, Bear fans and Packer fans and even a few Gator fans— I understand the Gators are the national champs in both basketball and football—impressive. We’re all here, sitting right next to each other. Some of us have been Presbyterian our whole lives and some of us can’t even spell “Presbyterian” and wouldn’t want to. Some of us can check off that we believe all the right stuff and some of us aren’t sure we believe anything anymore but we keep coming anyway. Some of us like to worship in the classic way, the way we worshiped as kids and the way our parents and our grandparents worshiped— calls to worship and prayers of confession and organs and hymns and all that jazz. Some of us are tired of classic worship, or never experienced it in the first place, and instead want something new and different, with rock music and PowerPoint. Some of us like all different kinds of worship. Some of us don’t like any kind of worship and only come because our spouses or parents make us. We are a diverse congregation. And that diversity is a good thing, because it allows us to be strong and to be creative and to reach out to all different kinds of people and to accomplish all different kinds of things. But our diversity, which is our great strength, can also be our great weakness. The body is amazing, but it’s also fragile. Viruses and bacteria and cancers and system failures and just plain getting old— these things can threaten church bodies as much as physical bodies. In our scripture reading Paul talks about one of the viruses that can infect the church body. One part of the body starts to think all the other parts should be like it. The eyes think everyone should be eyes; who needs ears? The hands think everyone should be hands; who needs feet? Every church body deals with this. People think their way is the way— their way of believing, their way of behaving, their way of worshiping— and they cut themselves off from anyone who believes or behaves or worships differently. That’s one of the ways church bodies become unhealthy. Another way church bodies become unhealthy is they forget what it’s all about in the first place. Our scripture reading is from the 12th chapter of I Corinthians. The very next chapter is one of the most famous chapters in all of scripture. If you’ve ever been to a wedding, you’ve probably heard it. But listen again: “Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never ends.” How sad it is, and how unhealthy they become, when churches forget that love is the blood that flows through the body, love is what holds them together, love is what keeps them alive, and love is what they have to offer the world. Barack Obama announced this week that he is forming a presidential exploratory committee. Something he said in his announcement caught my ears. He said, “challenging as they are, it’s not the magnitude of our problems that concerns me the most. It’s the smallness of our politics.” I’d like to echo that for our congregation. It’s not the magnitude of our problems that concerns me. We face challenges, but we have more than enough resources and energy and creativity to meet those challenges. It’s not the magnitude of our problems; it’s the smallness of our vision. God calls us to great things, to change lives and change the world, to be a beacon of faith and hope and love in our community. Are we up to that challenge? Do we have the passion to pursue it? Or are we too unhealthy as body, too busy fighting over who’s a hand and who’s a foot, too short on love to do anything but nurse grudges and protect our turf? Kathy Galloway writes, “Without the ability to imagine, even just for a few moments, what life looks like seen through another’s eyes, without the capacity to empathize with the pain or delight of another, without the courage to go beyond the boundaries of our own self-interest, prejudices, cares, needs, and meet others without defenses, how can we affirm, with Paul, that ‘if one part of the body suffers, all the other parts suffer with it; if one part is praised, all the others share its happiness’? It is not just that we have bodies, we are a body, in which the divisions are the illusion and the barriers and the disease. Life is kinder than we let it be, for there are so many occasions for love, if we don’t let fear overpower us. So many opportunities for healing, for wholeness, all of them signs of the grace of God that desires to go on loving us and healing us and calling us home to ourselves and to each other. But without the facing of fear, even stumbling, even trembling, even sick to the pit of our stomachs, without jumping off the cliff into the arms of God, then we can only armor, repeat, re-trench, self-protect, and whine at anyone who is different from us. And face lives without passion, without grace, without love.” [adapted from Resources for Preaching and Worship, Year C, pg. 57] Of course it doesn’t have to be that way. We can choose to love one another. We can choose to set aside fear and self-interest. We can work together with passion, sharing God’s grace in our time and place. “Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it.” That is our challenge; that is our calling. And, if we will let it be, that is our joy. |