You Have a Part in God’s Plan

Transcribed from the Sermon preached January 15, 2006            

The Reverend Max Lynn, Pastor

 Scripture Readings:  I Corinthians 12:12-26

          The Church as the body of Christ is a beautiful image.  It reminds us that we are not just isolated individuals on our own spiritual journey.  God has given each of us our own unique identity.  We are individuals with autonomy, with special gifts.  Yet we are part of a community which is not just the sum of its individual parts.  The community itself is a living entity, the embodiment, the ongoing incarnation of the Holy Spirit or the risen Christ.
 
            This is a very important idea for Presbyterians.  For we believe that Christ is not represented by one person, by a patriarchal leader, a priest or a pope or a minister, but by each and every one of us.  Each of you has a role to fulfill.  Each of us with all our quirkiness, our particular personalities and propensities and gifts has evolved with a purpose. What part is God calling you to be?  What part is God calling St. John’s to be?
 
It probably wouldn’t do us much good to try and carry the analogy out to figure out who gets to be which body part.  It may be nice to consider yourself the head or the backbone, the hand, eyes or brain.  But what about the other parts?  I mean, do nosey people get to be the nose?  Nervous people the nerves?  The minister has a number of roles.  At times we could be analogous to the head, and at other times, like when we are forced to reduce staff hours to balance a budget, some may see us more analogous to the glutimous maximous.  As you can quickly see, we wouldn’t want to take this too literally.
 
            Paul wants everyone to feel included, but he also uses this analogy to make some qualifications.  He wants them to know they have a place, but he also wants them to know their place.  Paul begins in verse 12 and 13 with a revision of the baptismal formula:  “For by one spirit we were all baptized into one body whether Jews or Greeks, whether slaves or free, and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.”  In Colossians 3:11 and Galatians 3:28, Paul uses a negation to erase social distinctions.  “There is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”
 
            First you may notice that Paul chooses in the Corinthians letter not to mention gender in this baptismal liturgy.  This may be because he is trying to reign in the Corinthian women prophets.  Women have found new freedom in Christ.  Slaves also have found this idea of equality in Christ to their liking.  Such a radical idea, that the grace of God through Jesus Christ erases social distinction is a huge threat to the social order.  The Church is threatened with severe persecution if it doesn’t back off.  It is quite possible that the Church would have been wiped out if it didn’t back off its radical claims.  Paul may have also felt that his own authority was slipping.  So Paul had to qualify the early church’s vision, he compromising on his own radical vision.  In Corinthians he instructs women to play their part, which is not the “head”, to not speak in church, to cover their heads and to obey their husbands.  He tells slaves to obey their master.
 
By switching from using “neither” to “either” Jews or Greeks, either slaves or free, says Anne Wire in Corinthian Women Prophets, “Social distinctions are not overcome but integrated into Christ.  The principle that distinctions between people are for the common good, which Paul has just claimed in connection with the Spirit’s differential distribution of gifts, is thus carried over to legitimate social distinctions.”
 
            Even as we recognize that one of the results of this integration of social distinction is a compromise of the radical vision of equality, the integration of social distinctions into Christ is not all bad.  For it also leaves room for affirmation of difference and the movement of God across cultures.
 
By the grace of God through Jesus Christ we are all equal in the hands of God.  On the other hand our cultural difference and diversity is not erased.  We are equal but we contribute differently.  For instance, it is not expected that becoming Christian means becoming like Billy Graham.  And we don’t have to think that Billy Graham has a complete handle on the truth of the Gospel to acknowledge he has gifts that God has used.  He is a part of the body of Christ.  The same goes for Interplay dancers, or classical music, or a Korean church.
 
            And the interesting thing about the nature of Christianity, the face on the head of Christ is always changing.  Paul can’t quite close the door on his earlier radical vision.  A frequent historical error of our secular friends on the left is assuming the Church is simply the product and religious propaganda of imperialist Western culture.  The head of the Church does not have a permanent face and has made several shifts over the centuries.  Korea sends more missionaries to the Untied States than visa versa, and Africa has more Christians than Europe.  European theology has long lost its place as the head in Africa and is now just an appendage.  Also, within each culture the body of Christ has had different parts, even different faces.
 
            I love this quote from Lamen Sanneh from Yale, in his book Encountering the West (p.146, 147).  “Detailed attention to indigenous particularity fostered unprecedented cultural pluralism within the general scheme of world Christianity…The Psalmist may declare that god is a shield or a rock, or Luther that God is a mighty fortress and bulwark, or a Western existentialist liberal that god is the God of motivation without any of them excluding other descriptions of God, such as the dewy-nosed One of a cattle-owning culture, the One of the sacred stake of a pig-herding people, the nimble footed One of the sacred dance, and the long-necked One of the hunting group…We also use polarities to speak about God: contradictory things may equally validly be said of God, such as that God creates and destroys, guides and leads astray, fills us with abundance and afflicts us with adversity at the same time, brings terrifying judgement upon us and also surrounds us with tender care and love, strikes us blind but also unseals the eyes of understanding, and so on.  So the Nuer speak of God being in the new moon and in the hurricane…The cultural signs and symbols which differentiate them in their respective particularities unite them in relation to God.”  In all our diversity, we are still a part of the one body of Christ.  And while there was one Jewish Jesus of Nazareth, the risen body of Christ becomes incarnate throughout the world in many different forms.
 
            This truth about the diversity of the Church allows me to affirm the feminine face of Christ or the place of gays and lesbians in the body of Christ here at St. John’s and in PC(USA), even though my fellow Christians in other places or cultures may have a different perspective.  I would not necessarily champion these insights if I were the pastor of a church in Guatemala or Rwanda.  For it may be that within those churches I would have a different part, a different function to play.  Those churches, in their time and place have their own particular part to play.
 
            It is quite common for a congregation to wish to be something other than what it is, or to be a little resentful of those congregations that seem to get more face time or popularity.  It may help to recognize our humble place in the body of Christ.  As we wish Paul would not have compromised, and call him on it, there is some truth to the idea that the Church cannot hope to remain radical forever in all places and survive over time.  There is an ebb and flow where the radical implications of the Gospel break out and stretch the Church and culture, and then they hit the limits of the particular time and place and are compromised and incorporated into dominant culture.  And we are never radical on everything.  The radical Luther chickened out when it came to the Peasant Revolt.  The abolitionists had to back off of their connection to women’s suffrage.  Tens of thousands of Latin American peasants were empowered and excited by liberation themes in the Gospels, yet soon grew tired of their government’s ruthless murder and suppression of the faithful.  Many have since begun to turn to a more individualistic, otherworldly salvation of evangelicalism, or have succumbed to the admonitions of the Catholic patriarchy.  The same has happened in North American Protestantism.  As mainline Protestants were brought to a new look at the radical truth of the Gospel by such Christians as Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., Archbishop Romero, and feminists like Rosemary Ruether and Janie Spare, the implications became too burdensome for many.
 
 
I will admit that in an attempt to prove our sanity to our rational, scientific friends we have tended to hide our spirituality.  And this did not serve to gain us more scientist members but to lose people, even scientists who were looking for an experience and relationship with the mysterious divine.  And we can freely admit that there have been some unfortunate, personal mistakes, and relational errors in the life of St. Johns.  And we mainliners may have idolized our bureaucracy.  Still, much of the loss of mainline Protestantism, both to more conservative churches and to entertainment culture has been because people really didn’t want to live out the full implications that the Gospel dream requires.  St. John’s lost perhaps four hundred members to white flight following the integration of schools in Berkeley.  Each time the congregation made a conscious choice to affirm the political and social implication of the Gospel it lost more.  This doesn’t mean we have been wrong, just that our role in the body may not be the most popular.  Now if we renew our prescription for a dose of the great and gracious mystery of God to balance ourselves out, then, regardless of our numbers, let us take this role of the proclamation of the inclusive justice of the Gospel of Jesus Christ all the way to heaven.  If we play this role, this part in the body of Christ that the Holy Spirit has given us, then any growth will simply be a bonus to the joy we receive from knowing exactly who and what God calls us to be.  God is calling you.  Can you hear God calling?  Speak Lord, for thy servant hears!