I love words. I love the way you can tell stories and paint pictures with them. I love the way that you can play with the sounds. I love the way that just the right word can perfectly capture an idea.
The problem is, of course, that words change.
400 years ago, if you said someone was “nice” it wasn’t a compliment. It meant you thought they were “silly” or “ignorant.”
150 years ago when you said somebody was a “gentleman” you weren’t making a comment about their manners, simply saying they who owned property and didn’t work at a trade.
30 years ago “gay” meant happy. When I was
in primary school in
We’re in the middle of a series on Spiritual Gifts, but we can’t talk about spiritual gifts without talking about something else that always comes up in the same context when Paul talks about gifts. Whether it’s Romans 12, 1 Corinthians 12 or Ephesians 4, whenever Paul talks about spiritual gifts, he talks about membership.
What does “membership” mean? Well, if you go to the source of all knowledge in our society (otherwise known as Google) for a definition you get, “the body of members of an organization or group; the state of being a member.” That’s a lot of help! What’s more enlightening is that when I Googled the phrase, “Membership has its privileges!” I got over 121,000 hits!
After I had knee surgery earlier this year I went through a course of physiotherapy. That’s done now, but I still have to work on getting the muscles around my knee back up to strength. I’ve thought of using the gym at the downtown Y so I can keep my knee growing stronger. But, of course, if I want to do that I have to become a member, because the facilities are for the use of members only.
It’s not too hard to become a member of the
Y. You just have to live in the
This is what being a “member” means today. It means that you’re on the inside and you have access to privileges that others don’t have. That may mean something as simple as being able to rent a video from a video store, or it may mean having access to an exclusive club. Either way, membership today is about privilege and access to services.
But the meaning has changed. The meaning
has changed so much that most of the modern translations of the Bible no longer
use the word “member” to translate passages like 1 Cor 12. The NIV uses “part.”
12 The
body is a unit, though it is made up of many parts; and though all its parts
are many, they form one body. So it is with Christ.
I don’t know about you, but for me “part” just doesn’t cut it. When I think of “body parts” I think of CSI; you know, body parts without the body? But members are more than parts; they are parts that belong together. In fact when they talk in the news about finding a body with parts missing they call it a “dismembered” body.
And anyway, we don’t talk about church “part-ship.” We talk about church “membership.” That’s why this morning I chose a translation that uses the word “member,” so it’s easier to keep in focus what it is we’re talking about.
It’s time for
another definition. The Oxford English Dictionary defines a “member” as “a part
or organ of the body.” That’s the primary meaning Paul has in mind as he writes
to the church in
12 For just as the body is one and yet has many members, and all the members of the body – though many – are one body, so too is Christ... 27 Now you are Christ’s body, and each of you is a member of it.
He says “you (plural; that means all of you
together) are Christ’s body.” He doesn’t say you are part of Christ’s
body, or related to Christ’s body. No, the believers in
Being a member the body of Christ isn’t an optional extra. You can’t choose to follow Jesus and then later decide whether or not you want to be a member of his body any more than you have random arms and legs lying around that decide one day that they want to be part of a body. Unity with Christ means community with Christians. Being united with Christ, being “in Christ” as Paul puts it, isn’t some kind of mystical union that you can have by yourself. It is, by definition, being part of the visible body of Christ. If you want a private religious experience, then the church is the wrong place to come. You can be a Buddhist by yourself, but you can’t be a Christian by yourself.
Because, (v13) “in one Spirit we were all baptized
into one body. Whether Jews or Greeks or slaves or free, we were all
made to drink of the one Spirit. 14 For in fact the body is
not a single member, but many.”
Baptism doesn’t make you a member of the body of Christ, that’s the work of the Holy Spirit. But baptism is our visible act of testimony to what God has done and is doing in our lives through the Holy Spirit. It doesn’t matter where you came from, or what your background is; Jew or Greek, slave or free, upper-class middle-class working-class or poor. It doesn’t matter if you’re a doctor or you didn’t finish high school, if you’re geeky or cool, if you’re young or old. None of that matters because “in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body.” And that body is the body of Christ, the church.
But people are still different. Even if we get over our different backgrounds, we are all differently gifted, and that’s how it should be. We’re not all trying to conform to some kind of cookie-cutter pattern of what the perfect Christian looks like. Even so, there are a couple of common responses that Paul warns us to avoid.
The first response is, “I don’t belong here.”
In April 1995 I was in
Paul says, 15 If the foot says, “Since I am not a
hand, I am not part of the body,” it does not lose its membership in the body
because of that. 16 And if the ear says, “Since I am not an
eye, I am not part of the body,” it does not lose its membership in the body
because of that. 17 If the whole body were an eye, what part
would do the hearing? If the whole were an ear, what part would exercise the
sense of smell?
It’s really easy to look at other people
and say, “I don’t have the experiences and abilities that those guys over there
have, so I can’t really be a member of the Body of Christ. I don’t belong.”
Well, my feet might not be as elegant or as flexible as my hands, but my body
wouldn’t get very far without them. Every part of the body is important and we
have no right to decide that we are somehow less useful than someone else. So,
for six years in
I couldn’t say, “Because I am not Arley
(whose Persian is phenomenal), or Len (whose understanding of Pushtun culture
is so profound), or Joey (who could start programmes out of thin air), I don’t
belong in the body.” Each one of us, each one of you, is gifted in a unique way
that is essential to the body of Christ, because, “God has placed each of the members
in the body just as he decided.”
Folks with a low estimate of their own
importance tend to look at others and say, since “I’m not as good at whatever
as he is, I obviously don’t belong here.” Folks with a high estimate of their
importance are more likely to look at people and say, “Well, they’re not like
me, obviously they don’t belong here.” But, just as we can’t exclude
ourselves, so we also can’t exclude others. 21 The eye cannot say to the hand, “I
do not need you,” nor in turn can the head say to the foot, “I do not need
you.”
If we don’t take this warning seriously our churches can become clubs for spiritual elitists; or for that matter, spiritual couch potatoes. The church of the spiritual superstars would make sure that only people who were spiritual like them could be part of the church. The church of the couch potatoes would make sure that anybody who sought to go further and deeper with God was made to feel like they were fanatics. Either way, they would make sure that everybody was just like them.
But Paul makes it clear that, “those members that seem to be weaker are essential” (v22). If we have no room for members who seem weaker, then we’re missing the mark of what the body of Christ is supposed to be. What makes a person a member of the body of Christ is the work of the Spirit in their lives, not some standard of spiritual performance.
23 and those members we
consider less honorable we clothe with greater honor, and our unpresentable
members are clothed with dignity, 24 but our
presentable members do not need this. Instead, God has blended together the
body, giving greater honor to the lesser member, 25 so that
there may be no division in the body,
When I was in
So what does this have to do with people in the church using their gifts? What it does is turn everything on its head. Our natural tendency is to honour those who have the most public ministry. That’s the way the world works. When I was at the Hamilton Roundtable for Poverty Reduction the mayor was there, as were a bunch of provincial politicians. All of them were greeted by name from the platform and thanked for coming, and honoured. Everybody else, including the folks who work with street youth and food banks and stuff like that, was greeted in a kind of blanket, “we’re glad you’re all here” way. Because that’s what you do, right?
Not in the church. Paul’s point is that those who have public gifts, or more spectacular gifts, don’t need to be honoured. Their gift brings them enough honour just in what they do. He says, “our presentable members (those who are highly visible) do not need this” extra honour. Just as the bits of our bodies that are acceptable in public don’t need the extra honour of being clothed, so those who are in higher profile public ministry don’t need any extra honour. It’s the people whose gifts lead them to minister in quiet, unassuming ways that we should be honouring. People like: Jeannette, who types up the bulletin every week and answers the phone; Georgie, who keeps the drop-in running; Helen and Sheila and their team of people who cook the meals for the drop in; Butch, who’s working hard to see that we have a library; the folks who setup communion every month, or count the offering every week. These are the ones that need to be recognised and encouraged.
That only happens when “the members… have mutual
concern for one another.” (v25) If there are two attitudes to avoid, there is one to adopt; caring for one another. For
the first couple of months after my surgery I walked with a limp, because my
left leg was compensating for my right. I didn’t have to tell it to do that. It
did it because it was part of my body and “If one member suffers, everyone
suffers with it.” (v26) My left leg was caring for my right, making sure it
didn’t take any more weight than it had to until it was strong enough. It didn’t tell my right leg that it had to be amputated and wait
until it was strong again before it could rejoin my body. Amputated legs don’t
get stronger, they die. The same happens to amputated Christians, who are
either cut off from the body, or cut themselves off from the body.
But, if the members suffer together, they also rejoice together. If you care about your brothers and sisters and something good happens in their lives, then you rejoice with them. A healthy body feels both pain and joy. So does a healthy church. It’s how we grow, as each member fulfils their part in what God has called us to as a body.
1. Unity with Christ means community with Christians. It’s not an option.
2. Attitudes to avoid, “I don’t belong,” and “They don’t belong.”
3. An attitude to adopt, caring for each other.
When we do these things we will be a healthy body and God will be able to use us in his work in the world.