We all have a unique place in our community, with unique gifts, experiences, education, passion, and skills.
We all have a unique function in our community, with relationships, responsibilities, resources, authority, and time.
Paul makes this clear to us:
You can easily enough see how this kind of thing works by looking no further than your own body. Your body has many parts — limbs, organs, cells — but no matter how many parts you can name, you're still one body. It's exactly the same with Christ. By means of his one Spirit, we all said good-bye to our partial and piecemeal lives. We each used to independently call our own shots, but then we entered into a large and integrated life in which he has the final say in everything. (This is what we proclaimed in word and action when we were baptized.) Each of us is now a part of his resurrection body, refreshed and sustained at one fountain — his Spirit — where we all come to drink. The old labels we once used to identify ourselves — labels like Jew or Greek, slave or free — are no longer useful. We need something larger, more comprehensive.
I want you to think about how all this makes you more significant, not less. A body isn't just a single part blown up into something huge. It's all the different-but-similar parts arranged and functioning together. If Foot said, "I'm not elegant like Hand, embellished with rings; I guess I don't belong to this body," would that make it so? If Ear said, "I'm not beautiful like Eye, limpid and expressive; I don't deserve a place on the head," would you want to remove it from the body? If the body was all eye, how could it hear? If all ear, how could it smell? As it is, we see that God has carefully placed each part of the body right where he wanted it.
But I also want you to think about how this keeps your significance from getting blown up into self-importance. For no matter how significant you are, it is only because of what you are a part of. An enormous eye or a gigantic hand wouldn't be a body, but a monster. What we have is one body with many parts, each its proper size and in its proper place. No part is important on its own. Can you imagine Eye telling Hand, "Get lost; I don't need you"? Or, Head telling Foot, "You're fired; your job has been phased out"? As a matter of fact, in practice it works the other way — the "lower" the part, the more basic, and therefore necessary. You can live without an eye, for instance, but not without a stomach. When it's a part of your own body you are concerned with, it makes no difference whether the part is visible or clothed, higher or lower. You give it dignity and honor just as it is, without comparisons. If anything, you have more concern for the lower parts than the higher. If you had to choose, wouldn't you prefer good digestion to full-bodied hair?
The way God designed our bodies is a model for understanding our lives together as a church: every part dependent on every other part, the parts we mention and the parts we don't, the parts we see and the parts we don't. If one part hurts, every other part is involved in the hurt, and in the healing. If one part flourishes, every other part enters into the exuberance.
1 Corinthians 12:12-26 - (from THE MESSAGE: The Bible in Contemporary Language © 2002 by Eugene H. Peterson. All rights reserved.)
The metaphor of the spiritual body implies some practical realities about our connection to spiritual community. The thumb can’t leave the hand without ceasing to be a part of the hand, and therefore, the body. It cannot survive, much less thrive and grow, without the support of the other parts. Do we treat our spiritual growth and health as a community issue, or merely an individual one?
This also means that each part must remain subservient to the whole body. Unless the thumb works in cooperation with the palm and the opposing four fingers, it’s not good for much except hitting the space bar and one fifth of the notes on a piano. It can function, but it will never achieve the amazing complexity God intended for it unless it submits to work in precise teamwork with its peers. So, a part of the community that does its own thing separate from the community, with no importance for the community, risks its place and function within that community.
Let’s put this in more concrete terms. Now, if a people have not specified how to do a task, it is obvious that the community doesn’t care which way one might choose to do it. There is freedom. Yet, if a ministry or a church decides that a certain way is the way that they’re going to do something, then not to do the something in that particular way is to behave as if one were not a part of that community. Even if one accomplishes the same task, to ignore the authority of the community is to make oneself more important than, wiser than, and smarter than the entire community. It reeks of egotism. If one wishes to remain a part of the community and change its agreed method, then one is obligated to get the community to communally discern other possibilities and to negotiate which ones might be acceptable. Together. Not unilaterally.
So, in a real way, to decide for yourself that you can make your own rules when the community has already established certain specific rules is to violate community. What do we do then?
Think about it.
Grace and peace,
Ron
