Unity Then and Now

1 Corinthians 12:12-31a

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 Christ. For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and we were all made to drink of one Spirit. Indeed, the body does not consist of one member but of many. If the foot would say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. And if the ear would say, “Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be? If the whole body were hearing, where would the sense of smell be? But as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose. If all were a single member, where would the body be? As it is, there are many members, yet one body. 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.” On the contrary, the members of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and those members of the body that we think less honorable we clothe with greater honor, and our less respectable members are treated with greater respect; whereas our more respectable members do not need this. But God has so arranged the body, giving the greater honor to the inferior member, that there may be no dissension within the body, but the members may have the same care for one another. If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it.

Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it. And God has appointed in the church first apostles, second prophets, third teachers; then deeds of power, then gifts of healing, forms of assistance, forms of leadership, various kinds of tongues. Are all apostles? Are all prophets? Are all teachers? Do all work miracles? Do all possess gifts of healing? Do all speak in tongues? Do all interpret? But strive for the greater gifts.

We’re in the midst of and nearing the end of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, a yearly observance in which we turn our thoughts and prayers toward the unity of the Christian church.  There’s not usually much fanfare about it; you don’t see clips on the local news about it; there’s no big front-page story on our ever-decreasing newspapers; nobody came to your door to collect donations for it.  It’s a quiet celebration, but one worth noting, nonetheless. 

It’s especially worth noting by those of us in the Disciples of Christ, a denomination founded on the idea that the church is one and we are in unity, or should be striving toward it at the least.  It was just a little over 200 years ago that one of the founders of our denomination, Thomas Campbell, issued his Declaration and Address in which he made the bold declaration that we repeated in our Call to Worship: “The church of Christ upon the earth is essentially, intentionally, and constitutionally one.”

Now if you think that Thomas was coming out of some pie-in-the-sky, idealistic setting in which all the denominations of his day on the frontier of the United States were working happily together, you must remember that Thomas, as a Presbyterian minister, was brought up on charges because he served communion to the wrong Presbyterians.  Plus, he came from Ireland where Presbyterians alone were divided and carved up in a variety of sects and separate denominations.  Thomas did not make his statement casually or without ruffling some feathers.

So here we are 200 years later and things don’t really look that much different.  Someone seeking a church home has a wide variety of options from which to choose.  There are still various denominations, some of which one is hard-pressed to distinguish from another.  And there are plenty of non-denominational churches.  There are large churches and small ones.  We’re no closer to being that ephemeral “one” than Thomas Campbell and his lot were, are we?

Yet, we continue to hold weeks of prayer for Christian unity.  And talks among and between various denominations continue, not so much seeking organic union so much anymore but laying the important groundwork of trying to understand one another, trying to get a grasp on our differences as well as our similarities.

In the midst of all this confusion and yearning for unity, it sure would be nice if we could find something in scripture to speak to our situation, wouldn’t it?  It’s sure too bad that the early church was so unified and together in its mission and operations, isn’t it?  I mean, if only there was some dissension amongst those in the congregations that were spreading throughout the Middle East and Asian Minor all the way over to Rome.  But no, they were all happy and got along famously, right?

Well, no.  They argued and fought and picked sides as badly as we do, if not worse.  Sure there weren’t divisions that made you choose among three different types of Christian churches on any given street corner.  Cities had their Christian fellowship that was part of the greater whole but there weren’t options within cities.  But once you got inside those early churches, watch out!

We know this because Paul, the author of our letter to the church in Corinth, was working hard to set those Corinthians right.  Corinth was a wildly diverse city.  It was an important trading center, spanning an isthmus in what is modern-day Greece.  Ships were pulling up to either side of Corinth all the time bringing not only goods from around the world, but also foreign ideas and people.  It was diverse and that diversity ended up showing up in the Christian gathering there.

Nowadays, we’ve come to value diversity.  We come to appreciate that we are all different and not the same and that’s a good thing.  But with diversity comes challenges; with diversity comes the potential for misunderstandings and quarrels; with diversity comes work.  And clearly the church at Corinth was working through their diversity and on the misunderstandings that went along with it.  Much like we’re doing these days, except on denominational levels usually.  That’s not to say that individual congregations don’t have their disagreements and misunderstandings, goodness knows.

Paul compared the church to a body and pointed out that no one part of the body was more important than any other.  No part of the body has the right to say it’s the most important part.  Nor does a part have the right to say it’s not important.  And that’s an important distinction to pay attention to. 

No one has the right to claim superiority in the body.  But no one has the right, either, to say they’re not a worthy part of the body.  Too often we discount our own worth and think too little of ourselves.  But Paul doesn’t let us get away with that.  Paul says we’re all important.

Our diversity, be it in our own congregations or throughout the wider church, is an organic growing thing.  It’s not a melting pot, for sure, in which we lose our identity to the greater product, but neither is it a box of pebbles in which the relation between the individual components is loose or nonexistent.  No, we are not pebbles, but connected to one another.

As I prepared for this sermon, I read about a commentator’s mother who, decades after a car accident needed back surgery. It seems that the accident affected her leg and year after year she compensated for the injury to her leg so much so that her back needed repair.  What happens to one part of our body affects other parts, without a doubt.

Likewise when part of Christ’s body suffers, the whole body suffers.  When one part of this immense church, spread across our earth, is in pain, the pain is felt throughout the whole of it.  We cannot escape it.

I have been spending a good bit of time lately reading the blog, or online journal, of a pair of our Global Ministries missionaries who are in Haiti.  Somehow they are able to connect to the internet and have been writing of their experiences and thoughts of that earthquake ravaged country.  I am strangely drawn to them and their plight, as they seek alternate housing after the collapse of their home, as well as the care of orphans and hoping to hear from the students at the medical school where they teach.  The pain of Haiti has affected many of us.  Even though we are thousands of miles away, we feel that pain in our own way, knowing part of the body is suffering.

Yes, this is the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, but it is a unity through and celebrating the diversity of the church.  From small pockets of Indonesian Christians to the mega-churches of this country, we are all part of the body that Christ claims as Christ’s own.  And we are called to be united with the other members of that body, united through our Christian call to service and love.

The end of this chapter from 1st Corinthians actually points us to the next chapter: “But strive for the greater gifts,” Paul writes and then goes on to say, “And I will show you a still more excellent way.”  Paul’s “still more excellent way” is his stirring chapter about love.  Certainly love is the sinews and tendons that connect us to the other parts of the body.

With Haiti on Our Minds

Dear Friends,

An odd thing happened the other day while Allen & I were shopping for the different parts of the kits for Church World Service to go to Haiti.

As we shopped to complete a baby kit, we found everything we needed at a store, including good old-fashioned cloth diapers, except we couldn’t find diaper pins.  When I asked an employee, we found out that they no longer sell diaper pins.

I wanted to press her on the logic behind selling cloth diapers but not diaper pins, but thought better of it since it certainly wasn’t her decision about what the store carries.  Fortunately, we found another store that did carry diaper pins and our kit was complete.

But for a moment, the plight of some family in Haiti rested on whether we in California could find diaper pins.  Church World Service is very specific about what is contained in their kits and without those pins there would be no kit.  If we hadn’t searched harder to find those pins, there would be no kit.  No baby clothes and blankets and other infant necessities for someone recovering from the rubble of an earthquake-shattered life.

And so it is.  Our actions affect the life of someone half a world away.  Most of the time it isn’t that stark a connection perhaps, but often it can be.  The choices I make at the supermarket…where I get my hair cut…whether I leave a light on or not…each of these actions and a myriad of others have the potential of greatly affecting the lives of people I don’t know and will likely never meet.

Sometimes the decisions are pretty clear in their effect.  Often times they are not.  We do what we do and never really think about it.

But that’s the whole idea of community; that’s the idea of connection.  And with God, through God, we are connected to all of creation, including our brothers and sisters who are digging out in a country I’ve never even been near.

We are connected to those hundreds and thousands of miles away.  We should make sure we act like it.

PS--If you'd like to read a great blog from Haiti, read this one from the Global Ministries Missionaries to Haiti: http://kimandpatrick.blogspot.com.

PPS--If you're interested in creating your own kit to send to Church World Service, here are the instructions on how to do so.

The Miracles We Don't See

John 2:1-11

Without a doubt, across our country today, in sermons much like this one, attention is turning to the fact that this is the Sunday prior to Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.  Martin Luther King was, undoubtedly, one of the prophets of the 20th century who, because of his prophecy, became a martyr to the cause of civil rights.  So it is appropriate, moreso than at other national holidays, to focus our thoughts on this great man of faith because he was a man of faith and a prophetic voice in our midst.

Of course, King is now on a pedestal, untouchable and unassailable.  He is honored even by those who, during his lifetime, turned a deaf ear at best or denounced and hated him at the worst.  Of course that hatred spawned fear and anger which is what impelled a bullet into him that April day.  They say that hindsight is 20/20 and that is true for many when it comes to our views of Rev. King.  What some considered wild prophecy and non-violent hysteria at the time, now is revered.  What was disparaged and feared is now accepted fact.

King stood for nonviolence in the quest for rights, fashioning the civil rights movement of the 60s on the work of Gandhi a few decades earlier in India.  I’m not an expert on King certainly and recall little about him from his lifetime, though I have vague memories of his assassination in Memphis in 1968.  Little about the civil rights movement filtered through to rural northeastern Pennsylvania when I was 11, it seems.  So I suppose I could be accused of that same 20/20 hindsight in this sermon.

But great efforts, I know, were made to discredit King during his ministry.  He was wanting too much, too fast, some said.  He was a radical, a communist, said others.  Even fellow clergy, usually white clergy, turned away from him and distanced themselves from his prophetic orations.

It’s amazing what we can look at from the distance of some 40 years and accept without any qualms that at the time we missed completely.  With history swirling all around us, it sometimes difficult to know what’s important and what’s not.

In the reading for today, Jesus performs his first public miracle, according to the gospel writer, John.  It’s an odd story, without a doubt.  Jesus is reluctant at first.  Anyone who has been a parent, in fact, anyone who has been an offspring, which I’d bet is most of us, knows the way these conversations go.  Mother or Father wants something and expresses that to son or daughter only to be rebuked.  “What are you asking me for?”  Jesus’ response to his Mother, “Woman, what concern is that to you and to me?” is so typical of something any offspring would say to their parent that it echoes easily across the centuries and halfway around the globe and sounds all too familiar, some form of it having escaped from our very own lips.  His next comment though is a bit more quixotic, “My hour has not yet come.”  We can imagine Mary, along with the rest of us, thinking “whatever” as she then busies herself giving instructions to the servants.  The water becomes wine, the marriage feast is saved, and the host comes out looking pretty good, serving his best wine, which he didn’t even know he had, last of all.

The interesting thing about this sign is that no one sees it happen, including us.  John gives no description of the actual miracle as it occurs.  We get no actions that Jesus makes.  He just tells the servants to fill some large stone jars used for the Jewish rite of purification with water and the next thing we all know they’re filled with wine.  We get nothing of what Jesus said or did to make this happen.  No one saw it … it just was.

How many miracles happen like that all around us?  However you define a miracle, isn’t it quite possible that they occur each and every day without our noticing?  Isn’t it feasible that miracles occur and we don’t realize it until later missing the actual event of the miracle, as all those party guests did, including the steward and host, when Jesus kept the party going with a few large jars of wine.

It’s that same thing of hindsight being 20/20.  We look back and wonder at the miracle that has occurred right under our noses.  We look back at the words of Martin Luther King, Jr. and wonder where we were; how did we miss that particular miracle while we now enjoy the fine wine of King’s rhetorics.  Dr. King’s devotion to nonviolence and his commitment to justice were miracles at the time.  Yet many missed those miracles happening right in front of them, choosing instead to be fearful and critical.  Many couldn’t see the water turning into fine wine right in front of them.  Their vision was clouded by prejudice, racism, anger, and hatred.

I do think that Dr. King would today ask us to look for the miracles happening all around us each and every day.  There are many who work tirelessly for justice and rights in this day and age.  Many are responding to disasters such as the earthquakes in Samoa and Haiti.  Many are giving of themselves to further God’s commonwealth here on earth.  These are modern day miracles and all around us are new prophets whose voices are ignored.

Watch for miracles each and every day.  Watch for the work that Dr. King started and the miracles he performed to continue to this very day. 

Elemental Baptism

Luke 3:15-17, 21-22

Martin Luther, the great reformer of the church, is known, among other things, for a few sayings:  “Here I stand, I can do no other” for instance.  And a favorite of mine: “If you sin, sin boldly” which gives me great license at times.  From watching the movie “Luther” during Advent, some of us learned that a theme in his life was a prayer he repeated: “I am yours. Save me.”

He is also said to have repeated the phrase “remember your baptism” to himself and his followers.  I don’t believe, since infant baptism was the standard at the time, that he was actually urging them to remember the moment they were baptized.  I think the essence of Luther’s phrase in this case is to remember that you are baptized; that you are already one of God’s beloved children.  You need do no more to earn any more grace or love or attention.  You are God’s already through your baptism.

Luther wrote, “A truly Christian life is nothing else than a daily baptism once begun and ever to be continued.” (http://www.ucc.org/worship/samuel/january-10-2010.html)  Luther wants us, and himself, to recognize that this is not a one time event.  We are to know constantly who we are and whose we are.  Baptism claims us as nothing else can or does.

The baptism of Jesus was very elemental--water, wind, & fire were all wrapped up in it.  And when you get those three together things are bound to happen.  The earth is shaped by water, wind, & fire.  It is carved and mutated by these strong forces.  And these are the exact forces that show up in our scripture this morning.

John said “I baptize you with water; but one who is more powerful than I...will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.”  The Greek word for ‘spirit’ which is used here is pneuma, which can also be translated as wind.  

All this occurs at the end of the third chapter of Luke.  Luke takes three whole chapters and then some for us to get to the start of Jesus’ ministry.  Three chapters of angels appearing and not one but two special births and shepherds and children getting lost in the Temple and all sorts of events that the other gospel writers just ignore.

Three times prior to this point, Luke is telling someone to not be afraid.  “Do not be afraid” is heard by Zechariah (who is John’s father), Mary, and those shepherds.  Angels have a way of frightening people it seems, with good reason.  The sudden appearance of a heavenly being in one’s life would be fearful, at least it would be to me.  As frightening as water, wind, and fire.

We don’t need much in the way of reminders of the power of these elements:  Water pouring down a valley wreaking havoc in its wake;  Wind toppling buildings, bursting windows; Fire ravaging homes, homes of people and of animals, as well as everything else in its wake.  We only need to think of recent tsunamis, hurricanes, tornados, and wildfires to be reminded that we aren’t talking about a gentle, easygoing event here.

Baptism is elemental; it claims us at our very base.  And, if we forget the white outfits and happy receptions that follow, they are indeed frightening affairs; frightening not only for the ones being baptized, but also for the whole church.  We’re calling in the whole of creation to participate through water, wind, and fire when we perform a baptism.  And just as sure as those elements carve out the earth and reform it into another likeness, so too those who are baptized are carved out and reformed into a new being not to mention what happens to the church along the way.

Baptism isn’t about one person or even a small group of people.  Baptism is something that affects the whole of the church; all of Christianity is changed through a single, solitary baptism.

The early church performed its baptisms once a year at Easter.  Lent was a time of preparation for those who sought baptism. It was a time of learning and of being deprived of worldly comforts.  Those seeking baptism knew that they would face this frightening, awe-filling event but would do so with the church behind them.  Because the church was as intricately involved as they were.

Baptism, if you think about it, is a brush with death.  As one dips beneath water, one is cut off from the air that sustains life.  Below the water, there is no way that we humans can keep breathing.  Of course, most baptisms are a quick affair that in no way endangers the participants.  But to be immersed completely in water at the control of another is indeed a frightening prospect.

And it’s frightening for the whole church because without this individual’s brush with death, the church faces its own brush with death.  Without baptisms, there is no way that growth can happen.  It’s an irony: Near death brings growth. 

We come through this frightening, near-death event precisely because it is a blessing.  We are beloved and blessed through this process.  Isaiah had it right; God is with us through thundering water and raging fire.  Isaiah was preaching to an exiled Judah reminding them that whatever came, God was their God.  And it’s no accident that a few centuries later, a wild preacher out in the wilderness who was baptizing with water spoke of one who would do so with fire.  It’s because God will remember us through all of it and call us God’s own.

Blessed.  Beloved.  Baptism.  We are reminded of God’s great love for us as we enter the waters and fire, each and every day.  Luther’s continual, day after day baptism got it right; we are once and always baptized … we are once and always blessed … we are once and always beloved.

Water, wind, and fire: forces that constantly move and shape the world around us as they shape our very selves, our very beings.  The waters of your baptism still flow, all around and through you.  Whether you can recall that moment or not, remember your baptism each and every day.

Image is The Baptism of Christ by El Greco, 1568, found at the Web Gallery of Art.