Jan 26, 2025

Sometimes, we’re stuck in a rut.  Maybe it’s happened to you.  There’s something we’re struggling to wrap our minds around.  We need new angles on familiar ideas.  When that happens, we can use metaphors – creating connections between things that seem unrelated – to help us think through complex concepts or abstract ideas.  And that vivid imagery often brings a new understanding that opens the door to fresh ideas.

This morning the apostle Paul gives us one of the most famous metaphors in Christian history.  As part of the church, Paul says, we are members of something called the “Body of Christ”.  So on this morning of our annual parish meeting, I want us to think about what it means to be part of the Body of Christ.

Paul wrote to a Christian community in Corinth that could easily be described as “the church with problems”.  Many of its problems can be traced to its diversity.  First century Christian congregations were radical in their diversity.  Throughout human history, people who worshipped together shared more than just a set of beliefs.  They shared an ethnicity, and usually a social class, and often were even members of the same family. 

But this church in Corinth welcomes everyone who professes Jesus as Lord of creation, and as a result became spectacularly diverse.  No shared ethnicity – these are mostly Gentiles from all over the Roman Empire, with a minority of Jewish Jesus-followers.  No shared social class – while the congregation was mostly lower-class citizens or slaves, some members were well-educated and wealthy, like Gaius, who had a house big enough to host gatherings of the whole church, or Erastus, who was the city treasurer.  The Corinthian church was a group of people who would never have associated with each other under any other circumstances.

This unique diversity is causing some serious problems.  Paul’s letter tells us the Corinthian church has broken into factions which follow different leaders.  Differences in class are also fracturing the community – for instance, those who can arrive early to the communal meal – typically the wealthy, who don’t need to work – seem to be eating most, if not all of the food before lower class members can even arrive.  And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Throughout his letter, Paul’s condemns this fracturing of the community.  To help them get out of this rut – to help them better understand the problem and how it might be solved – he invites the congregation to imagine themselves as a part of the “body of Christ”.

Now, Paul’s comparing of a human community to a physical body wasn’t original.  Writers of this era did it all the time.  But Paul gave the idea a revolutionary new twist. 

Before Paul, people used metaphors comparing a group of people to a human body to reinforce traditional hierarchies.  Political, military, and economic leaders were the most important parts of the body – the eyes or the ears or the nose.  They had the most important gifts – the only gifts worth having.  The lower classes and slaves – the less honorable parts of the body – were to accept their place and do as they were told.  Their gifts had little, if any, worth.

For Paul, though, our baptism into God’s family radically overturns this understanding.  “For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body – Jews or Greeks, slaves or free”, he writes.  We come to the waters of baptism as individuals, but we come out of the water changed.  We’re more than just ourselves.  We’re in unbreakable relationship with our brothers and sister who have shared death and new life in Christ.  The Spirit now moves among us and within us all to form and restore community.

And it’s that centrality around Christ – that relationship we share – that defines the community.  Not our social class, or our wealth, or our education, or anything else.  In the Body of Christ, God is at the center of conversation and God shapes the community’s focus and work. 

But within that Jesus-shaped environment, each congregant’s individuality is honored – our diverse gifts and abilities are welcomed and cherished.  Within that Spirit-shaped environment, each believer serves the body in a distinct – and in a neither less nor greater – way.  And so, Paul says, even the weakest members of the body are indispensable.  All members are equally important to the Body of Christ’s well-being.  No one brings anything “less”.  Every gift should be honored, because every gift comes from the God who brings the Body of Christ into being.

We’re not the Corinthian church, but as the 21st century church we have our set of challenges.  So what does this Body of Christ metaphor mean for us as followers of Jesus today?  I think there are two takeaways for us:

First, as the Body of Christ we have to allow ourselves to be led by the Spirit.  Paul condemns the Corinthian church for placing too much attention on mere human beings.  For placing too much attention on our own wishes or desires, which turn us away from Jesus’ Great Commandment to love God and love our neighbors as ourselves.  At baptism each of us were changed – brought into one body as we share new life through the Spirit. 

So our primary identity – the identity we own in our hearts – has to be as people who are gathered around Jesus’ message of Good News.  The Good News that he has come to transform the entirety of our world not in some distant future, but here and now.  The Good News that the death and despair which rule the present age can be overcome with the Spirit’s help by patterning our lives after Jesus’s teachings.

Second, the Body of Christ gives everyone a place to belong.  Where they are loved and cherished for who they are.  And my friends, this might be the most important thing the church has to offer the world in this era.  An era where social media and instantaneous communication promise greater connection, but where in reality people are lonelier than ever.  More isolated than ever.  The world around us is starving for community.  And people look at the church and they ask the same question Jesus did when he came into this world as a baby: is there a place for me?  Is there a place where my gifts will be loved and nurtured?  Or will you just try to assimilate me?  To tell me I’m welcome, but only if I look and think and act like you?

As Paul proclaims at the end of our passage today: “Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it”.  Through God’s grace, we are already the body of Christ.  Our call today is simply to live out this amazing reality.  Amen.