An Open Table where Love knows no borders

Bodies, Churches and Countries

A sermon on 1 Corinthians 12:12-31a by Nathan Nettleton

I went to the soccer last night, and to get there I rode my bike along the Yarra bank path, and all the way along it was wall to wall barbecues, mostly with flags flying, in honour of Australia Day. And then out on the pitch before the game began, they held one of the many citizenship ceremonies that took place around the nation yesterday. I quite like the fact that citizenship ceremonies are becoming one of the major ways of celebrating Australia Day, because citizenship ceremonies are less about defining ourselves against anybody else and more about defining ourselves by who we can include. So that seems like a good focus for the day, and there out on the soccer pitch with some 26,000 people watching on, about 60 people took an oath and officially became Australian citizens. The ceremony did leave me with one niggling question though.

The dignitary who conducted the ceremony finished by saying that these 60 people now called Australia home, and I wondered whether that was really supposed to be the point. It is probably not that hard to call Australia home, and I suspect that most of them already did. What is probably much more of a challenge is to get the rest of us to regard each of them as truly one of us. It is not just about how they see themselves in relation to Australia, but how the rest of Australia sees them in relation to us. I know my good mate Goran struggles with this. He has been an Australian citizen for a few years now, and he even works for the Australian defence department, but he feels torn at times. He knows that if he goes back to Macedonia, he will be treated as one who belongs. Here, he knows he will always be treated as something of an outsider, no matter how long he’s been here. He knows that his kids will be fully accepted here, because they’re growing up here and their accent doesn’t identify them with somewhere else and they don’t have much sense of some other country also being home. But no dignitary saying that Goran now calls Australia home is going to stop the rest of us from daily reminding him that we think of him as belonging to somewhere else.

There are some similar issues at play in the reading we heard from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthian church. I’m sure many of you are familiar with Paul’s description of the body and how we are all parts of the one body in Christ. What you may not be aware of though is that Paul didn’t invent this image himself, but that he is employing and subverting an image that was already well known to his hearers because it was commonly used to describe the nature and make-up of the nation. I don’t know whether the Corinthian national day was celebrated with barbecues along the banks of the river and citizenship ceremonies at major sporting events, but you can be sure that the politicians, dignitaries and philosophers who made speeches on such occasions would have made reference to the nation-state being like a single body and every citizen having their rightful place in it. So it would be easy for a preacher to take this passage on Australia Day and fly the flag and say that we all belong in the church and we all belong in Australia and the church has its proper part to play in our national life and good citizenship is good discipleship, and we’d all feel good and the preacher would be seen to have done his or her patriotic duty. But that would be to misunderstand and misuse what the Apostle is saying. Paul doesn’t simply rehash the usual patriotic version of the body metaphor. He subverts it.

You see, in Roman times, when the politicians or philosophers used this image and proposed that the nation or society was like a human body, they were not usually just saying that we all depend on one another. They were usually also suggesting that there is a necessary hierarchy in the social body, and that everyone has their place and should be content with their place. You may remember the heretical verse of the old hymn “All things bright and beautiful” that said “The rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate, God made the high and lowly and ordered their estate.” This is what these Roman orators were also expressing. Some people are more important and rightly have the more valuable and honourable positions. Other people are of a lower class and there are less honourable and less important tasks available to them. And the nation or society is ‘naturally’ more careful to protect and care for those more important people because they matter more.

But Paul turns this on its head. He doesn’t pretend we are all the same. In fact at the end of our reading he points out that there are different ranks in the church and different people have different roles and that’s all fine. But he leads up to that by saying that every part of the body matters and that nobody can be regarded as expendable. The eye cannot say to the hand, “I have no need of you,” nor again the head to the feet, “I have no need of you.” There might be differences of role, but there are no distinctions of honour or dignity or importance or expendability. Even when he agrees with the usual line about some parts of the body being less publicly presentable than others, he turns that argument upside down as well by saying that our modesty about those members should in fact be understood as giving them greater honour, not lesser.

Now perhaps one of the most radical and important things about what the Apostle is arguing here is also one of the most subtle and most frequently missed. You see, very often this passage is heard and preached on as an essentially pragmatic argument. Everyone has some sort of gift to contribute and the the body will be healthiest when everyone’s contribution is valued and utilised, and by contrast the body will lose out if some people’s contributions are marginalised and neglected. So that pragmatic argument is a bit like saying that just because eating spinach is healthy it doesn’t mean that you will be healthy if you eat nothing but spinach. A balanced diet is required in which spinach has its rightful place alongside sources of other essential vitamins and nutrients. Now that pragmatic argument is no doubt correct, and I don’t think for a moment that Paul wouldn’t agree that we will be a healthier church if we value and benefit from everyone’s contributions. It’s just that I don’t think that is really the main point he is making.

You see, that pragmatic argument ultimately gets stuck in the mire of valuing people for the benefits they bring to us, and so even if we do our best to believe the theory that every one has as much to contribute as anyone else, we can never quite see it in practice, so we always fall back into giving the most attention and the most honour to those whose contributions seem most important to our collective interests. You see exactly the same thing in the national immigration debates. Those of us who want a more welcoming stance towards asylum seekers usually have to make the case by appealing to national self-interest on the pragmatic grounds of how much these people can contribute if welcomed and given the opportunity.

Paul’s argument, on the other hand, is not a pragmatic or self-interested one. The reason we are to value and dignify everyone equally is not because it will be beneficial, though it might be, but because of who Jesus is and what Jesus is doing. The first line of our reading gave a strong hint about this. I’m guessing that if I read most of it out and asked you to complete it, most of you would get it wrong. It says, “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 ….” the Church? No, it doesn’t say that. It says “so it is with Christ”, with the Messiah. It doesn’t even say “with the body of Christ.” It just says “so it is with Christ”. We are to be a unified body in which all members are valued and treated with honour and dignity, not merely because it works better, but because we are called to be a reflection of Jesus Christ and that is what he is like and what he is on about. In the next line, Paul spells out the basis of this further. He says “For in the one Spirit we were all baptised into one body — Jews or Greeks, slaves or free — and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.” So in baptism we all began on the same footing, and in our day to day experience of being nourished and refreshed by the Spirit we are no different to one another, and all this cuts across all the usual social divides: Jew and Greek, slave and free, rich and poor, male and female, black and white, gay and straight, old and young, productive and unproductive.

So the primary reason why we seek to include young children as fully as we can in the life and experience of our church is not because there is something in it for us, although there undoubtedly is, but because to exclude them or hide them away until they were able to contribute in more adult ways would be a betrayal of who Jesus is and what he is on about. And the primary reason that we seek to welcome and include people whose disabilities limit their productivity is not because they have other important contributions to make, although they undoubtedly do, but because to fail to welcome them and honour them as part of our community would be a betrayal of who Jesus is and what he is on about. And the primary reason why we hang in there with bitter and fractious members is not because we hope to rehabilitate them so we can make use of them later, it is because Jesus not only hangs in there with them, but hangs on a cross for them, and for us to give up on them and toss them aside would be to add insult to his injury. And the primary reason we cannot participate in the exclusion of gay people from the church has nothing to do with how much creativity so many of them can bring, although that is undoubtedly true, but it is because to scapegoat and exclude anyone on any such grounds is a betrayal of who Jesus is and the whole grand mission of reconciliation in one new humanity that he was on about.

When we come to this table in a few minutes to eat of one loaf and drink of one Spirit we are not engaging in a bit of social engineering with the pragmatic goal of producing a more cohesive and efficient and productive community. We are simply offering ourselves to Christ to continue the work he began in our baptisms of fashioning us into a new humanity, resurrected from the death of the old humanity, to fully reflect and embody the extravagant mercy and welcome and inclusion that is his nature and purpose, his being and his mission. And as we are able to surrender to that and become that new humanity, we will indeed become citizens of a new kingdom where everybody truly belongs, and we will really have a model of open inclusive citizenship to hold up to the nation around us as a challenge, an invitation, and something worth celebrating.

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