The Body of the Spirit

If you watch sports, especially team sports, it becomes clear which teams play together well and which teams are simply a collection of All-stars. It always amazes me when I look at professional football and watch teams that either win year after year, or stay in the hunt and make the Playoffs year after year.

One thing about those teams is that they play as teams. Players seem to have one another’s back. They play together so if a position player is a rookie, or somewhat banged up, or lacks certain skills, then others help out. So when a no-name undrafted player is acquired during the year, we see that often they become overnight stars and we say, “Where were they hiding?” Often the secret is the system that gets individuals playing as a team, strengths maximized and weaknesses supported, where everyone has everyone else’s back.

Paul had that kind of thing in mind when writing the church at Corinth, where the folks were a bunch of individuals and not a team. They said to each other, “We don’t need you,” or as the scripture says, “I have no need of you.” (1 Corinthians 12:21)

They were, as some say, ‘one hot mess.’ They made the Kardashian family look good. Pastoral counseling and conflict mediation sessions did not work. When they came together things fell apart. They were the Humpty Dumpty church—they fell and no one could put them back together again, so many factions and divisions and cliques. No coffee hour after church. No genuine communion. No sense of the common good. This was because many assumed that their being the Body of Christ did not matter. They believed that, if they were gifted with the angelic gift of speaking in tongues, they had reached the height of Christian spirituality and nothing else mattered, including how they treated one another. They were so beat-up from the feet up that they didn’t realize they had feet, had a Body. They didn’t realize that the Church was a Body, the Body of the Spirit.

The Spirit has a Body, Jesus, and Jesus has a Body, us. We are not meant to do ministry alone. We cannot do our faith alone from the couch on Sunday mornings saying, “I don’t need those others.” This Spring theme is “Doing together what we can’t do alone.” I can’t give all the support money to all the missions our church supports -- we need each other. I can’t fix the boilers alone -- we need to pool our funds, called a pledge, and do it together.

The choirs have more than one voice; the bells have more than one bell, the Work Areas have more than one person. Because most good things in life require doing together what we can’t do alone.

Paul stresses unity and oneness. “Out of many, one.” One body with many body parts. Eyes and ears and mouth and nose, head and shoulders, knees and toes, knees and toes. There’s a foot in the body. Someone’s a hand or an arm. Someone may be an eyelash or even a toenail (now don’t go looking around to see who looks like a nail). All of these parts form a body, and without any of them there is no body. But there is one body made up of diverse parts that work together.

All are connected, not over Facebook but in the Spirit. The Christian life is not meant to be lived in isolation from one another. But we come together as a body made up of different parts. Diversity does not destroy the body. It is what makes the body beautiful. “If the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be?” “If the whole body were...” well, you get the point. Everyone can’t do ministry, everyone can’t play music, everyone can’t administrate, but everyone is a body part and we need every part. Small eyes, long arms, strong hands, big mouth (yes, we need those too!). Parts you may have never considered to be important. We all need each other for the body to be one. I cannot be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be.

For the body to be One, every part has to do its part, even if someone does something in a different way than we would do it. We are a unified body, not an uniform one. To use Paul’s words, “you are the body of Christ.” And what a body!
We cannot do ministry alone. That’s why the Lord’s Prayer doesn’t contain the word “I” but keeps using “our” and “us.” It’s how the Spirit comes, it comes in bodies coming together to do things together that we can’t do alone.