No Interchangeable Parts
Preacher: The Rev. Andrew Van Kirk
Passage: 1 Corinthians 12:12-31a
Like many of you, I’m sure, I attended Sunday School as a child. I remember little of the content. I mostly remember the coloring sheets. We always had a coloring sheet to go with our Bible story, and on the sheet would be Jesus (probably smiling) surrounded by some disciples. The little group was usually among standing among rocks and trees, maybe with a stone wall or small house behind them. They were all wearing robes, and it was chiefly my job to be sure that by the time Sunday School was over, they were wearing different color robes.
Otherwise, the disciples were indistinguishable from one another. Maybe the main character was identifiable — Zaccheus was the short guy, the blind man was the one whose eyes Jesus was touching — but if you’d asked me who among the little band of apostles standing by was Andrew or Philip or Nathaniel, I had no clue. I’m not even sure the person who drew the coloring sheet knew. Unless it was Peter’s turn to do something either brave or stupid, Jesus was surrounded by a mostly interchangeable set of men wearing the technicolor dreamcoats I imagined for them.
Which is actually not true. Their clothing didn’t have nearly so much color, and I way over estimated the prevalence stripes and polka dots as design elements.
Nor, and this is really my point, were they interchangeable. You know this because you can look around this room this morning and know that you are all following Jesus, but you are not interchangeable.
In our reading from First Corinthians today, Paul explains this point using his most famous image for the Church, the body of Christ. There is one body, he says, but many members. “Just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ.”
Part of what Paul is trying to get is concerns the functioning of the body.
We need people who are good with money; people’s whose heart breaks easily for the poor; we need those who are handy with power tools, those who can sing, and those with the gift of prayer. Everyone can’t be the same — “If the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be?”
You can’t replace your kidney with your ear. You can’t switch out an elbow for a knee. You can’t move your back hair to the top of your head. This last one’s a bummer, I know.
This is true of the church too. You can’t put me in the choir. The Daughters of the King aren’t going to take the youth to play laser tag. We are not interchangeable parts.
This is essentially the driver bit model of church. You need a certain variety of driver bits to stick in your drill or impact driver to get basic tasks done. Sometimes you need this one. Sometimes that one.
If you go to Home Depot, you can buy a small set — these are little churches — enough of the basics to get the job done. You can also buy the huge set with 128 different bits in a huge range of lengths and styles. We’re like a medium sized set, the sort that go on sale at Father’s Day. Though right now our drill bit set looks a bit like mine at home; a number of them are God knows where.
This functional take is a fine reading of Paul’s ‘body of Christ’ metaphor, but it’s incomplete.
Let’s look deeper at this text. It’s on pg. 2-3 in your bulletin, but I’m really most interested in the parts on page 3. If you scan that big paragraph at the top, there are these words: “honor,” “respect,” “no dissension,” “care,” “suffer,” “rejoice.”
These are not functional descriptions. These words are about relationships within the body of Christ. These words describe the way we relate to one another, and how that way of building relationships leads to Christ.
For all the extended metaphor, its eyes and noses and hands, what Paul means that our relationships with other people are what make the Church the Body of Christ. And these relationships are necessarily with people who are different than us, not just different skills, but different ways of thinking, believing, and understanding the world.
All this honor, respect, suffering, and rejoicing with one another, we have to do this not just with people who have different gifts, but people who are just plain different than us. People with strange taste in music, people who fall victim to different sorts of temptations than us, people of the opposite political party, people whose experience of suffering is different than ours.
The church is a gymnasium of love, part of what makes the exercise hard all is all the different people we love within it. If we’re going to learn how to love like Jesus, we’re going to have learn to love the children of God. You have to cross train in love.
Our online landscape is not setup well to learn how to honor, respect, suffer and rejoice together. It’s setup to reinforce our love of those like us, so that our circle of affection becomes ever smaller and self-reinforcing. And it’s setup to make us suspicious and angry of those who think differently from us.
This is why it’s relatively easy to put a church service online, but much, much harder to put the body of Christ online.
We do not plan to stop our livestream services at any point. Online worship is life-giving gift to those who are unable, either temporarily or permanently, to attend and an on-ramp for newcomers to get a taste for our life together. Online worship a gift and an on-ramp.
If you don’t need the gift and you’ve already traveled the on-ramp, there will come a point when online worship moves from being a stopgap borne of necessity to an excuse for sleeping in. And I beg you, for your sake spiritually and for our sake spiritually, don’t make peace with making excuses.
We are about building relationships that lead to Christ, and that’s really, really hard to do in the comments below the video feed. Also, we miss you and we love you — and that missing you is the proper name for this feeling is a good indicator that the online thing isn’t the same.
St. Aelred of Rievaulx has this beautiful description of heaven. He wrote, “[In heaven] everyone will love the other as himself and thus enjoy the other’s happiness as much as his own. In this way, everyone will possess the happiness of everyone else, and each individual the totality of happiness.”
That’s as good a description of heaven as I’ve ever heard, and the gift of the church, properly functioning as the body of Christ is that we begin to approximate it.
As Paul writes, “If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it.”
The world outside these walls is beset by alienation, loneliness, and estrangement. We know this, of course, for we live there too; and the pandemic has only made it worse.
We have the greatest cure for our ailing, lonely world. We have each other in the body of Christ. To live into that gift we not only have to share our gifts: evangelism, teaching, power, healing, assistance, leadership (to paraphrase Paul), but we also have to share our lives, our hearts, our stories with honor, respect, care, suffering (for yes, that too is part the Christian life), and rejoicing.
Those are the sort of relationships we’re about building St. Andrew’s, relationships that lead to Christ.
If you’ve been hanging out on the edges here, at worship or online, I want to invite you today to make a commitment to build relationships here, build connections in the body of Christ. And if you’re already well-connected, or once were, recommit. Sign up for a Super Group; make it a priority to attend Bruce’s Sunday morning study; sign-up to serve with Hands&Feet; get that other parent’s phone number and schedule a play date; get your kids to SAY; invite someone to brunch after church (or, if you’re new here, come to brunch on February 6).
St. Andrew’s will be healthier, sure. A little rehab on the tendons and ligaments that hold this body together will make us as a body stronger, more flexible, and help us grow. And as your pastor, I care about that.
But you’ll be healthier too. The members do not exist just for the sake of the body. The body also exists for the sake of the members. Isolation in the church is like a tourniquet for the soul.
We are building relationships that lead to Christ. And as we do so, we will live ever more deeply into our calling as the body of Christ, filled with his love, doing his work in the world, and knowing ever more deeply that there are no interchangeable parts in this body. We have need of you. Amen.
