In last week’s text, Paul urges the Corinthians to view their spiritual things as gifts from God, for the common good. Sometimes, though, using our gifts for the common good sometimes isn’t enough. Imagine a church that truly wants to use their gifts for the common good. The music team is busy rehearsing for Sunday. The building and grounds team is working hard to repair the building. The care team is baking cookies to take to the visitors who came to worship Sunday. This is a great picture of using our gifts for the common good, but imagine if they were all happening at the same time. The music team can’t hear for all the hammering, and can’t concentrate because of the sweet smell of fresh-baked cookies. The maintenance team can’t do the stuff they need because the power has to stay on for the ovens. The care team has to throw away the last batch of batter because it is filled with sawdust and other debris. Sometimes the pursuit of the common good isn’t enough.
This week’s text picks up where we left off last week with 1 Corinthians 12:12-31. Hear the word of the Lord.
We believe that the church is “the community that confesses Jesus Christ as Lord.” Paul prefers to define the church as “the body of Christ.” This image further demonstrates the point he made last week. All of us have unique gifts to give in the service of the body. Just imagine if the foot would try to succeed from the body because it doesn’t think it has any gifts. Imagine if the eye, because it wishes it were an ear, would decide not to be a part of the body. No one is giftless. Each of us has a gift to contribute.
The body language also emphasizes the idea put forth last week that no gift is inferior. All gifts are important and all gifts are needed. Paul says we should image the head saying to a hand, “you really aren’t that import. Surely not as important as the heart, so you can go ahead and leave. We don’t really need you.” How absurd! Every gift, like every part is needed. No gift is better than any other. We all have a gift necessary for us to be the body Christ has called us to be.
Consider the intricacies of the body. The body truly is an amazing miracle. Consider everything that makes up the body and everything that goes on so the body can function. I’ve lost count of how many “systems” there are in the body. It seems like when I was in high-school biology there were something like nine of them. Now, though, it seems there are more. Consider some of them: the circulatory system (heart, arteries, veins) pumps the blood throughout the body; the digestive system (esophagus, stomach, intestine) breaks food down into usable nutrients; the immune system (skin, membranes, hair) keeps disease out, and fights it when it gets in; the muscular system enables us to move; the nervous system (brain, spinal chord, nerves) control the body and its senses; the respiratory system (nose, trachea, lungs) take in oxygen and expel CO2; the skeletal system (bones, tendons, ligaments) gives us form and protection; the excretory system gets rid of all the stuff we take in and can’t use. Those are just some of the systems and some of the things going on within the body.
Each one has its own task for the good of the body. Imagine if one decided it would just go around doing its task independent of the others. Your heart might explode! Its task is to beat. It starts beating just as fast as it can, and then it explodes because the nervous system was unable to regulate its rate. Or imagine the digestive system taking in just as many nutrients as it can get a hold of: donuts, fast food, lots of desert! We’d all be stay-puffed marshmallow people if we didn’t have the excretory system to get rid of what is unusable. Imagine the muscular system trying to move without the aid of the skeletal system. We’d be blobs of goo oozing around on the floor.
The body cannot exist and fulfill its purpose if its systems just go about their task independent of the others. And so, Paul says, “as it is, God arranged the members in the body.” God has created the body to give us a certain quality of life. For that purpose to be accomplished each part has to do its job, but it must do its job in cooperation with all of the others. It must work together. Every part of the body must not only do its job, but must also depend on every other part to do their jobs. It takes the whole body, and all the parts working together, cooperating and communicating within God’s arranged structure to fulfill its purpose to bring about quality of life. “There may be no dissension within the body, but the members may have the same care for one another. If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it.”
“For 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. ...Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it.”
The church is just like the body. First, the Church is one. The church is Christ in the world. Christ is no longer present in the world in his physical body, but he is present in the church, his mystical body. Just as the Spirit came upon Christ at his baptism empowering him to fulfill his mission, so to the Spirit came upon the church at Pentecost empowering it to fulfill his mission. Though we are many, yet we are one. Unified in Christ, and unified in Christ’s mission.
It is a mission revealed in this morning’s gospel reading. It is a mission of preaching good news to the poor. It is a mission of proclaiming release to the captives, and healing to the blind. It is a mission of setting free the oppressed and proclaiming the Lord’s favor. It is a mission of salvation to the world. In Christ, salvation was given to the world. The church still carries out that mission today. It is a mission that we still carry out today. It is a mission that is carried out only when we exist in the unity of Christ, united in his mission.
In that unity, however, like the body, we are made of many systems or parts. We have a church board, or as I like to think of it, the Congregational Leadership Team. We have Sunday School. We have Ladies’ Ministry and LIFT. We have Men’s Ministry. We have Caravan and NYI. We have the choir, and our audio-visual workers. We have VBS. We have Missionary service. While we are unified in Christ for His mission, we have many parts that contribute to our fulfilling of His mission.
The question before us this morning is how we all connect. How do our ministries relate to one another? How and where does each ministry fit within the mission? Two words are going to be key in our understanding of how we all fit. The first is synergy. It simply means, “combined action.” When things are working synergistically, they are working differently, but together to accomplish a specific goal. Take walking for instance. It takes many systems working in synergy to walk from the parsonage down to Roxanne’s for a bowl of soup. Our skeletal system keeps us upright. Our nervous system helps us to see where we are going. Our muscular system is making us bend at various places: hips, knees, ankles, shoulders & elbows just for starters. The increased work means we need more oxygen so the respiratory system kicks in and the circulatory system has to work harder to get the blood flowing. Synergy is all the different parts working together to achieve a goal.
The second word that is key to our fulfilling Christ’s mission is interdependence. It means we need one another, we rely on one another, we trust one another. Just like none of the systems of the body could exist without the others, neither can the church, or any of its parts, be what it was intended without the others. Evangelism and discipleship maximize worship because they bring more worshippers into the church and they make the ones we have better. None of us grow as much as we can if our lives are not focused on Christ in worship, or on carrying out His mission in evangelism. None of us can be the share Christ’s salvation if we don’t experience him in worship or learn about him in discipleship. Interdependence means that the NYI needs the choir and the choir needs ladies' ministry and ladies' ministry needs our hard working maintenance team. We all need one another if we are to carry out the mission Christ has for us.
The Church is the body of Christ existing in unity in Him and for His mission, yet as diverse parts of the whole that work together with synergy and interdependence. This is the image Paul paints of the church, and it could not be a more fitting message for us. One of the big questions that I have struggled with since coming here has been how all the different groups are connected. How do we work together? How do we keep in touch and communicate? How do we know that we are all on the same page, working together for the same things?
Most of you are also aware that we recently did a survey to help us see what our strengths and weaknesses are. Strengths are those areas where we are well equipped to fulfill the mission of Christ. Weaknesses are those areas that keep us from being as effective as we might be in fulfilling His mission. In the near future, we will be all getting together to look at those results - to celebrate our strengths and look at our weaknesses. I would like to share with you today the area that we will be working the hardest to improve over the next year. That area is our structure. The survey results seem to suggest that we have a hard time when it comes to this connectedness, this working together, this synergy and interdependence.
There are certainly many things that play into this, but I want to challenge you all to think and reflect on why this particular area might have emerged as an area of concern. Why would the survey suggest that we feel most inadequate and most in-equipped in our structure and connectedness? I want to also challenge you to think about creative ways we can improve and positive steps we can make together in this area over the next year. Feel free to give me a call or an email, or to even drop by some afternoon to share your ideas. I would cherish the opportunity to listen to your thoughts and to your heart.
Paul’s message this morning is that God desires us to be the best church we can be. God desires us to be the body of Christ. That means we must be unified in Christ and for his mission, but that we must also exist and contribute the gifts we’ve been given, working together synergistically, and interdependently, just as God exists, three in one, to the glory of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
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