Once there was a very famous and wealthy judge, who had to travel to the next town, to hear a court case. It was a long and arduous route through a mountain pass, during the winter, It was cold and snowy, and the roads were often dangerous for violence and thievery. On the return trip, the judge was attacked, and his horse stolen. Nevertheless, he escaped with his life. A violent snowstorm came up, and the road ahead of him disappeared into swirling and blowing drifts of snow. The judge became lost and disoriented. Yet he had to keep going, or he would fall asleep in the snow and never wake up. So, he struggled on, getting colder and more tired with each step. Just when he thought he could no longer go on, he saw a faint light off in the trees. As he got closer, he realised it was a small shack he had passed on his way through to the next town. He reached the door of the shack and knocked, asking “Please let me in, or I will freeze to death.” The door opened, and he was welcomed into a tiny and poor place, with a table, a small place for sleeping, and a small fireplace. As the judge warmed himself by the fire, the old man who opened the door offered him some tea. Carefully, the man brought down a cracked and chipped cup, and an old pot for tea. He apologised to the judge for the poverty of his place, and the condition of the tea cup, but explained that it was all he had. The judge, touched by the man’s honesty, responded “Out of your poverty you have offered me the very best of what you have. You have honoured me with your generosity. I will not forget this.”
Human bodies are amazing. An adult person has somewhere around 60,000 miles of blood vessels, and about 15 million blood cells being produced and destroyed every single second.
There are 640 muscles in your body which account for about half of your weight. There are about 200 in your buttocks and about five in each eyelid, which keep you blinking, even when you are not aware.
Did you know the average adult is covered with twenty square feet of skin, enough to cover a queen-sized bed - and it’s constantly renewing itself. If it were all stretched out flat, it would be enough to blanket a queen-size bed. Seventy percent of the dust in your house is your old skin. Over an average lifetime, a person loses forty pounds of skin—and yet most of us still seem to be gaining weight. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that we still have enough fat in our bodies to produce seven bars of soap.
With all the intricacies of the human body, however, a strikingly small change can have drastic results. Just after I turned 30, I got Bell’s Palsy - one of the symptoms of Bell’s Palsy is a loss of motor function on one side of the face, including the eyelid muscles. You can no longer blink - and without blinking, what happens? What happens if a child accidentally takes several iron tablets? Or not enough? The tiniest of things can make such a difference in the body. If you lose your little toe, what happens to balance? If you lose an eye, what happens to vision and depth perception?
In one of today’s lessons, Paul addresses his remarks to the congregation in the Greek city of Corinth. There was a controversy over what kind of role women should be allowed to play in the church. There were arguments about whether or not meat had to be kosher, or whether Gentiles had to be circumcised. There was still a large gap between the rich and the poor. The rich ate their own food before the communal meal because they had better food than the poor people, and didn’t want to share. There was tension and conflict between people of different ethnic backgrounds. Those who were Jews thought new converts should adhere to “the way we do things here”. In other words, it wasn't entirely a lot different than a lot of churches today.
We think we understand this passage, to the point where we may miss some of the deeper connotations of the metaphor. Before Paul talks about the church as a body, he first spends some time discussing the importance of the Spirit. The first verses of the chapter are about the gifts that are given by the Spirit. Paul was writing in Greek, something which is important for this text. In Greek the word for "spirit" is the same as the word for "breath." Today, we've made a distinction between “clinical death” when someone is unable to breathe or maintain a heartbeat on their own and “brain death” when there is complete and irreversible cessation of brain activity. In Paul's time, one just checked to see if someone was breathing. The breath, the spirit, gave a body life. Absence of breathm absence of Spirit, meant death. Paul's analogy of the church as the body of Christ must have the Holy Spirit in order to be alive. Without this Spirit, the Breath of God, the body of Christ is dead. The parts of the body, and the abilities the body has are, in Paul’s description, gifts given to the church to be used. Paul says that the church needs to keep itself focused on the Spirit that gives life, and to allow that Spirit to infuse every part of the body of Christ. For if that Spirit is not with us, then none of the parts of the body are able to do what they are meant to do.
Just as that occurred in Corinth in the first century, so it happens all the time in North America in the twenty-first century. Granted, circumcision or kosher meat are not big issues for most of us. Instead we debate homosexuality and abortion. Yet some of the issues do remain the same. We have not reached consensus completely on questions like the role of women in church leadership. We still have a hard time including the poor, and ethnic minorities in an institution that is largely dominated by fairly well off white leaders. In either time - then or now - the division within the body plays itself out in a very similar way: people divide into groups, create labels, and pit themselves against those who don't fit. For Paul it was the Jews versus the Greeks and slave versus free. Today, we have the fundamentalists versus feminists, liberationists versus literalists, the premillenialists versus the postmodernists and so on.
Paul’s advice is to view one another not as opponents, but as members of the same body with different gifts and functions—gifts that are complementary rather than contradictory. And, says Paul, since the gifts are given to us by the Spirit, we are also called to offer those gifts, regardless of how good, or how poor we think they are.
Paul makes it clear that it shouldn't be that way. The church should be a place where all of our divisions are left behind, where political affiliation and income bracket and educational level simply don't matter, a place where the bonds of unity through the Holy Spirit take precedence over divisions of race or age or creed. The goal of the church is not to make everyone look the same and do the same things and think the same ways. Rather the church is a place where all of our different gifts can be affirmed and used for the glory of God through the Body of Christ. There is no gift too small or insignificant that it cannot be offered to God.
The hymn this morning “As with Gladness”, includes the line “All our costliest treasures bring....”. What does that mean? Money? Expensive pianos or pipe organs? What do we have that is most important for the church? The poor man offered the judge all of the very best of what he had. If the situation had been reversed, would the judge have offered the man tea out of his best cups? Not likely. Yet the man gave without restraint from his own meagre resources, in a cracked and chipped cup which was the best of what he had.
So, given that we have been given these wonderful gifts of the Spirit, we are also to give the best of what we have - of time, of talent, or wealth, of our very selves. What is our costliest treasure? Isn’t it this? Our selves?
Sources:
1. All Our Costliest Treasures, based on 1 Corinthians 12:12-31 by Fran Ota, January 2010.
2. Body and Spirit based on 1 Corinthians 12:12-31 by Rev. Richard Gehring
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