Healthy Body Sermon
Can the Church be an effective body? (1 Corinthians 12)
The hell and the heaven of Haiti:
We’ve all experienced the images and the stories in the media this last week about the terrible tragedy in Haiti. And no doubt we’ve felt some of their anger and despair at the seeming inability of a world full of resources to share these and get enough of them to the people who are desperate for water, food and medical aid. And yet we have had some good news stories, of the incredible efforts of rescue teams to drag children and adults from the rubble of homes, offices and shops to the possibility of new life out of the destruction of the old. And much that has been achieved has been done as a result of the resilience of people working together, of teams from around the world divided by language and culture. Medicins sans frontiers (MSF), the Red Cross and Christian Aid, and many other, bringing together people of faith and no faith, in the shared and united act of compassion, suffering with the people of Haiti, as God though Christ suffers with his people in this calamity befalling one of the poorest nations on earth. And in our giving we are putting ourselves behind this enormous and ongoing relief effort.
The Holocaust
Over 60 years ago, another calamity befell peoples nearer to us as millions of Jews were sent to the gas chambers of central and eastern Europe. And as rescuers found the few survivors of Belsen and Auschwitz they too were sickened by such destruction of human potential and the forces of evil enleashed. We remember them this week on Holocaust Memorial Day. This last week there has been a significant meeting in Berlin, the Headquarters then of the Nazi regime in Germany, a meeting between the cabinets of the Israeli and German governments of today, Angela Merkel and Benjamin Netanyahu, each in their different ways trying to come to terms with past history and how they deal not only with each other, but also the relationships that they have with their neighbours today. They are starting to learn that it is better to talk and collaborate with each other and with others with whom they still have innate differences than to resort to violence and hatred.
Love among the Nations (and the Churches)
There is at the Fitzwilliam Museum at present a small but remarkable exhibition of paintings and drawings by three early 20th century artists, Sargeant, Sickert and Spencer. And its one of the paintings by that quirky eccentric artist, Stanley Spencer, that caught my eye. Spencer has frequently come across as a quaint village innocent, inextricably tied to the small-town England characterized by his attachment to Cookham, the riverside settlement by the Thames, and the visionary challenge to traditional religion in his exploration of religious themes, particularly new life and resurrection which he found in the everyday streetscape and lives of the environment he loved. Forgotten has been the shock and controversy that his works originally provoked. Love Among the Nations (1935) depicts an interracial, all-ages love-feast (not the Methodist sort!), intended to call the world to reunite in peace, breaking down the barriers which separate us. It was this frank treatment of his unconventional views and lifestyle coupled with the progressive panache of his technique that outraged art-world traditionalists of his time and still has the ability to shock today.
This is the end of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. I guess many of our churches have engaged in token acts of welcome and generosity with other Christian churches in this city and elsewhere. But has there been real and messy bonding between Christians of different understandings of worship and doctrine? Not many I suspect. So what does it mean to be a really effective body of Christ in the light of our reading from Paul’s 1st letter to the Corinthians?
The Body of Christ
How often have we heard when people speak of working together with other churches: “What we need is something practical, grass-roots, down-to-earth, not more unity schemes and theories.” What form should a mission-shaped church be in order to focus our vision for the future, to build local partnerships, to share our faith and values, to nourish these in daily life with prayer and worship, to encourage shared leadership, to become ‘learning communities’ alert to our context?
The fact is, we are called to be church in an impatient society. Our culture trains us to expect solutions, to value things we can measure or own, and to suspect introspection, church navel-gazing. Of course such pragmatism can be a virtue, just as ‘more theories’ can be a defence against the threat of actually doing something! But pragmatism, muddling along as best we can, can also be an excuse to avoid the truth that ‘being church’ well is necessarily messy and difficult. So, we have to ask ourselves, who are we, exactly as the people called Methodist gathered here in the heart of the city of Cambridge? Or, what is this ‘church’ for whose health we strive?
So we look around and scrutinise the churches in our locality. You’ll notice that they are large and small, ritualistic and non-ritualistic, tightly gathered and widely dispersed. Some are good at evangelism – or at least, they give it first priority, which may not be quite the same thing. Others stress social ministry and community engagement in the name of Christ. Some (fewer) do both, and some neither. A number put huge emphasis on prayer, or worship, or the Bible, or teaching, or service, or the gifts of the church tradition out of which they came. Many blend a number of these attributes and more besides. There are churches which operate in relation to a particular catchment area and those who don’t. Those that galvanise particular kinds of people and those that attract an odd mix, and so on. Gifts, temperaments and preferences differ widely. And that’s very clear of us in relation to others as I understood again in reading Nicola’s Orientation Project that all students of placement have to do.
But defining the essential ‘health’ of a church always means much more than looking at the social indicators. It means, in fact, ‘discerning the Body’. In spelling out one of his central metaphors for ekklesia (those ‘called out’, changed, then sent back into the world with a purpose), Paul speaks of the Christian community as being established in two ways. First, through the invited presence of the Spirit and indwelling the Word, the church becomes an extension of the incarnation, the continuation of the crucified and risen Body of Christ in the world. Second, it is a ragged Body whose unity is given by God as it participates in Christ’s life through word and action; yet it is remains comprised of parts that look and function remarkably differently, the eye and the ear, the arm and the leg, and so on. All parts need the others. Think about this: it isn’t ‘theory’, it’s a methodology – rooted in a theology of the body, not the latest technical fix or jargon from sociological approach. Its how God in Christ intends us to be.
In these terms a healthy church is, quite straightforwardly, one that is seeking, in its own particular way, to offer Christly words and gestures to a fractured world – ones that present the reconciliation generated by God and show people just how radically new the world would look if it was understood as part of the broken and restored body of Jesus. Among other things, Paul suggests, the Gospel is lived through the Body by finding hands-on ways of bearing pain (as well as joy) together, rather than dumping it on one another. Just imagine how different things could be if a few people took this seriously! This new way of life is what God offers in Christ. The healthy church, no matter how vulnerable, welcomes it. The unhealthy church, no matter how big, ‘sound’ and successful, refuses, avoid or denies it.
Health and fitness is a big industry right now. All of us get adverts encouraging us to take up aerobics or get down to the gym. But what that industry mostly sells is external beauty, physical patch-ups for our sagging shapes, and the postponement of death. I’m not knocking this out-of-hand, but it hardly constitutes the scale of transformation that becomes possible when we decide instead to unite our brokenness to that of the Crucified One so that we can be raised to a new dimension of life with him.
What does that then mean for us as a church?
- It means we attend to how we use the gifts of all in the church, complementary as they are, to the benefit of all
- It means we give more attention to our relationships with other churches and community organizations who equally have gifts, different gifts, to serve God in this city
- It means we seek to use these for the greater good of the wider body of Christ, thinking particularly of sisters and brothers in Haiti and other poorer countries who desperately need our support and who can offer us important perspectives on faith and faithful living.
We have a unique opportunity to use the gifts of Jason, as our newly appointed Community Outreach Worker starting next week. But he and the rest of us need to work together, conscious that alone we can do nothing effective to make the body healthy. But together we can make the church a community of persons who know themselves to be undergoing transformation, a transformation which involves change which is sometimes difficult and painful as we start to do new things. When we ‘get’ this, we will recognise that accompaniment is an essential component of being part of the Body of Christ, not an add-on programme. So let us journey together in our task of building up the body of Christ in this place.
