“Living together – body talk”
1 Corinthians 12:12-31 (January 26, 2025)
I came to a shocking realization last week. I should have known, but somehow it eluded me, that there weren’t going to be many more opportunities to preach here at FMC. Potentially, just three more sermons in your midst! So I looked at the lectionary readings for these next three Sundays. Was there any particular theme that emerged?
The prescribed passages from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians all have to do with living together in the community of faith. They’re familiar ones. Many of us have heard these things before. But that doesn’t make them any less relevant. Some of the most important truths deserve to be repeated, in the hope that maybe we can hear them again, in a different time, perhaps in a different way. And maybe this time they’ll stick.
So what we’re going to be doing these next three Sundays is remind ourselves of things we already know. Or should know.
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Living together – that’s our theme. But let me say right at the start: It ain’t easy to live together. Even though that’s exactly what God has made us for.
It didn’t take long for good old Adam, living in that ancient garden of bliss, to grow lonely, poor guy. He had everything he could want. But one thing was missing: another human being.
So God made a second person, a partner, a companion fit for him. And that’s where things get interesting. Because here, right at the very beginning of the human race, we start listening to those slippery, snake-like voices that whisper in our ears.
And we end up making a mess of things. Plagued with all sorts of family disfunction. Including envy, blame, violence and even murder!
Despite the passage of millennia, and great strides of progress in human civilization, this brokenness is still with us. It ain’t easy to live together.
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That’s exactly why Jesus came. To fix this mess – healing our destructive tendencies, and our discord, and drawing us back into right-relationship with God. And with each other. The two can never really be separated.
The apostle Paul writes to a particularly flawed gathering of believers in Corinth, whose community life had been so distorted by boastful arrogance and competing factions, that they’d forgotten the reason God had called them together in the first place.
We all know that churches can be that way. And it’s not hard to recognize the terrible irony of it: The community of Christ, breaking apart, fragmenting. Two thousand years later, not much has changed.
But the call of God remains as well: To rise above all that. To put aside our sinful selves and – by the grace of God, empowered by the Spirit, led by the person of Jesus – to walk in newness of life. “For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body – Jews or Greeks, slaves or free …”
Paul skillfully sketches this image of what our life together is meant to look like: The body of Christ.
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In our current culture it seems that everyone is in pursuit of the perfect body. A body that is slim, trim, curvaceous, rippling with muscle. A kind of body that’s beautiful to look at.
But my body has never really lived up to that ideal. And as I age, I’ve given up hope that it will. It’s scarred in places. There are bulges, and saggy bits. But I don’t want to get into that. I take comfort in the knowledge that good health doesn’t always coincide with cultural ideas of beauty.
The church is the body of Christ. Think of that for a moment: God made manifest in the world through human members like you and me! It’s a miracle, surely.
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We were all baptized into one body. All of us. Regardless of our ethnic identities. Our social statuses. Our physical capacities. Jew or Greek, slave or free – it matters not a whit.
The body has many members, Paul reminds us. Exactly how many, I had no idea. So I decided to Google it. It’s hard to get a straight answer. Our bodies contain roughly 30 trillion cells. It boggles my mind!
“The internal human body includes organs, teeth, bones, muscle, tendons, ligaments, blood vessels and blood, lymphatic vessels and lymph.”[1] All linked together by complex systems of connection and coordination.
The body has so many members, I wouldn’t know where to begin listing them all.
And the thing is, the whole creation is like that! Full of endless diversity. The stars in the sky. We shovel snow by the bucket. And every snowflake in that bucket is different from every other one.
God seems to revel in diversity and difference. How many kinds of trees in the forest? How many varieties of grass in the field? How many species of fish in the water, or birds in the air, or bugs, or animals … or human beings?
Each has their own unique place in the web of creation. And each is necessary to the well-being of the whole. Bio-diversity is a healthy thing.
So too in the body of Christ. When everyone begins to look and think and sound and act like you, that’s when you should worry!
The body of Christ thrives with a variety of spiritual gifts, each one of us doing our own God-given thing. Shovelling snow, offering rides, preparing food, playing music, attending meetings, leading Bible study. Yes, even preaching a sermon. We all have a place.
“God arranged the members of the body,” says Paul, “each one of them, as he chose.” As God chose. It’s all God’s doing. So who are we to say to any other member of the body, “You don’t belong here.”
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The Corinthians were big on flashy gifts. Things that get lots of attention. And that created, in their minds, a kind of hierarchy. “My gift is better than yours.”
And so there were some in the church all puffed up with pride. Instead of valuing cooperation and interdependence and community, they thought they could walk the road alone. “I don’t need you,” they said, dismissively.
Now let me see – where might we have heard this recently? Whenever any of us say such things about another church member, a neighbour, a political opponent, someone from a different background, who speaks another language, who sees the world in different way … whenever we dismiss anyone out of hand, the whole of God’s creation is diminished.
“The eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I have no need of you.” Yet sometimes that’s what we do. “The head cannot say to the feet, ‘I have no need of you.” Yet isn’t there part of us that craves the security and comfort of a community where everyone is the same?
Paul says the members of our bodies which are less honourable, those weaker members are, in fact, indispensable. He claims that God gives greater honour to the weakest members of the body of Christ! All of us are made in God’s image. All of us are to be valued and respected.
So if there’s someone who’s a little slow, who can’t keep up, or doesn’t understand, or dresses differently, or has weird ideas, or doesn’t fit in with your concept of what is good and proper … Well maybe God has put that very person here for a reason.
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And while we’re talking about not dismissing others, let me also caution you about dismissing yourself. Sometimes we put ourselves down. We diminish our own gifts. We think we’re not good enough. We have nothing to offer.
We look at some other incredibly talented person, and we think “how can I compete with that?” But it’s not a competition. It’s all about community. And God has put each one of us exactly where we’re meant to be. Can you believe that?
I think as we grow older, sometimes our confidence begins to wane. Because, once again, the culture around us says that we’re dispensable. That we don’t matter any more. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth.
Don’t dismiss others. Please don’t dismiss yourself!
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But now, let me turn from all this emphasis on individuals, and remind us that we are meant to be part of a greater whole. We are baptized into one body, says Paul.
I worry that in recent years we’ve put so much emphasis on the individual – all the rights and freedoms that we claim – we forget our collective identity. Because each one of us is 
in loving relationship with Jesus we are called, therefore, to be in loving relationship with one another.
Martin Luther King Jr. called this God’s “beloved community”.
“It really boils down to this,” King said. “That all life is interrelated. We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied into a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”[2]
The apostle Paul put it this way: “If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honoured, all rejoice together with it.”
We have this solidarity in the community of faith. If misfortune comes to any of us, then all of us feel the effects. No one exists in isolation.
And to the extent that any of us are raised up, healed, restored, made whole – well, that is a gift for the whole community to celebrate! One person’s success or accomplishment serves to enrich us all.
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The trick is to keep our focus on Christ, who is at the very centre of our life. The centre of all our lives. The centre of creation itself!
This is the final day in the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. Too often we focus on difference, which leads to fragmentation.
Let’s focus, instead, on that which draws us together. Let’s lift up those things we hold in common. Let’s put aside division and embrace the unity that is God’s gift. Let’s be a different kind of church. One that shows the world we can live in newness of life.
I know “it ain’t easy.” But we are the body of Christ, baptized by his Spirit. And so our lives are being drawn together, not split apart. The closer we get to Jesus, the closer we grow to one another.
After all this, Paul tells the Corinthians “I will show you a still more excellent way.” So now that I’ve wet your appetite … well, that’s for next Sunday. Stay tuned!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_body, Accessed Januaryt 25, 2025.
[2] Martin Luther King Jr, A Letter from Birmingham Jail, 1967. https://blog.nwf.org/2024/02/diversity-in-nature-diversity-in-action/, Accessed January 23, 2025.