1 Corinthians 12:12-31a

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As many of you know, I am a big movie lover. With the announcement this week of this year’s Academy Award nominations, I am reminded of the award winning movies that I have loved, those that were completely overlooked, and those that received awards only to fade quickly from memory. Then there are the movies that become embedded in the culture, offering a common shorthand of shared experience. Mention ruby slippers and most people know what you are talking about. Lines like, “leave the gun, take the cannoli,” or, “you had me at ‘hello,’” or “Frankly, my dear…” 

In our house there are a couple of movies that are something of a second language. The first, of course, is The Princess Bride. “You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means.” “Hello, my name is Inigo Montoya,” and “as you wish.”  

The other one that gets plenty of play is the original version of Mean Girls. For instance if someone is having a bad day, they might hear, “you wanna do something fun, you wanna go to Taco Bell?” That’s usually good for a smile, particularly if the person can offer the response. What may look on the surface as nothing more than a simple teen comedy is actually Tina Fey’s brilliant fictionalization of a work of non-fiction titled, Queen Bees and Wannabees. Fey tells the story of Caty, a girl who has been homeschooled all her life by her zoologist parents while living in Africa. Suddenly, she is thrust into a whole new jungle, a public high school on the north shore of suburban Chicago. It’s there that she lears that the most dangerous students are not the ones that populate most parents’ nightmares- the gang bangers or the burn outs. No, the most dangerous ones are the girls who sit like teen royalty at the popular table in the cafeteria- the mean girls.  One day, Caty is invited over tot the house of their queen bee, Regina George, to hang out in her room. Soon enough, Caty, Regina, and their two friends Gretchen and Karen are gathered in front of the floor length mirror reciting a litany of dissatisfaction. “God, my hips are huge.” “Oh please, I hate my calves.” “At least you guys can wear halters, I have man shoulders.” “My hair line is so weird.” “My pores are huge.” “My nail beds suck.” I used to think there was only fat and skinny, Caty thinks to herself, “apparently there are a lot of things that can by wrong on your body. Apparently. Of course it isn’t just teenaged girls who are afflicted by negative attitudes about their bodies. A while back, the writer Anne Lamott noticed that her book on prayer had reached the top ten on the New York Times’ bestseller list for self-help books (take in that irony for a second). While she was happy for the book’s success, what stuck out to her was that of the top 15 on the bestseller list, only two-including her own- were about something other than diet and weight loss. The reason so many young people, and young girls in particular, are self-conscious about their bodies is because so many adults are self-conscious about what they think is wrong with their bodies. Now, it’s one thing to want to be healthy. It seems like every week we hear about the health risks associated with a poor diet, lack of exercise, and growing obesity. But it is something far more dangerous and unhealthy to think that we deficient if we don’t look like some airbrushed image of how we think we’re supposed to look. That kind of negative body image doesn’t just hurt individuals, it can injure a whole community. Paul wasn’t the first writer of his day to invoke the body as a way of thinking about what it meant to live with other people. But what he does here in his letter to the church in Corinth is to take all that body talk, and to borrow a phrase, turn it on its ear. You see when most people talked about the makeup of a community in bodily terms, they did it to reinforce the pre-existing social distinctions and stratifications. The lower extremities represented working people at the bottom, then the merchant class in the middle, and then finally those at the top who made all the important decisions and dictated the movement of the whole. But that isn’t what Paul describes at all. Instead of privileging one group of people over the rest as somehow better, or more important, he talks about how every part of the body is indispensable to the whole. But more than that, he says that- far from being a problem that we have to solve- these differences are a part of God’s design. Difference (diversity, if you will) is a gift of the Spirit that is integral to whom we are called to be as people of faith. It isn’t even a question of tolerance. That’s a word that the world uses to talk about our differences without taking God into consideration. The world sees differences, is able to acknowledge that they aren’t going away, and talks about tolerating them instead of ostracizing, marginalizing, and outright hating people. Although there certainly appears to be plenty of that these days too. Tolerance may be the most some folks can muster, but it sure doesn’t rise to the high calling of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Jesus doesn’t command those who follow him, those who belong to him- that’s you and I by the way- he doesn’t command us to tolerate our enemies. Jesus doesn’t tell us to simply tolerate those who might persecute us. No. He commands us to love them. Difference isn’t something that we’re supposed to pat ourselves on the back for putting up with. Difference, diversity, is the way that God works. It is the design plan for everything that God creates. Diversity is what God’s heart desires. Don’t take my word for it. Look around. Look at the world and all that is in it. God doesn’t make one kind of ANYTHING. That’s what makes it so awesome. Variety isn’t just the spice of life. Variety is life. And it is what makes up the body of Christ on this earth according to Paul. But if that is so, if this plurality of life is more than some aberration, but instead is God’s very deliberate gift to us through the Spirit, why would God do such a thing? Is God just easily bored, thinking it sure would be nice to have a nearly infinite number of genetic combinations so that no two human beings (ever so-called identical twins) will ever be alike? I don’t think so. Paul certainly doesn’t think so. Each on of us is an irreplaceable part of an integrated whole. Each one of us has a valuable role to play.   

A friend of mine took her five-year-old son ice skating for the first time. It went pretty much the was you’d expect it to go the first time you strap a set of blades on someone’s feet and send them out onto a sheet of ice. He son was pretty disappointed by the whole thing, quite frankly. It wasn’t as though he was unfamiliar with the concept of ice skating. You see, he had seen footage of Olympic speed skaters, and couldn’t understand the disconnect between what he’d seen them do, and what had happened to him. He thought that that was what it meant to go ice-skating; it meant gliding along with speed and grace. Jead just stumbled and fallen on his backside. It happens in faith communities too. I can’t tell you the number of conversations I”ve had, or overheard, in which someone was invited to do something in the life of the church- teach Sunday School, lead worship, volunteer with vacation bible school, sing in the choir- only to hear that person explain that they didn’t know enough about the Bible, or didn’t feel right standing on the chancel, or weren’t sure about all those kids, or really wasn’t much of a singer. It’s good to know what one’s gifts are, and what they’re not. But sometimes we think that if we don’t know what the pastor knows, or can’t read the ways we’ve heard someone else read, or haven’t spent a lot of time around kids, or don’t think we have a good enough voice; that we’re somehow not meant to do ministry. Or worse, we decide that because our faith is so tenuous and we really can’t affirm everything in the creed, that if we don’t exhibit the kind of certainty seen in other corners of the Christian world, that we simply don’t belong in the church. To those hesitations and doubts, Paul would say, that just because you don’t do something the way someone else does, that doesn’t mean you don’t belong to the body, that doesn’t mean you don’t have a role to play. 

The truth is that church wouldn’t be the same if you weren’t here. It certainly wouldn’t be the church that it could be. Similarly, it also means that as much as there may be people within the larger Christian witness in the world with whom we may strenuously differ about what it means to follow Jesus, we cannot write them off. Even though we might like to. As much as it pains me to say this, I cannot say to the person advancing Christian nationalism- I have no need of you. Truthfully, as antithetical as that ideology is to my understanding of the kingdom  and kindom of God, such voices require that we speak up and be clear about the way we express our faith in the good news of Jesus Christ that blesses the people of every nation on this earth. One of the sad consequences of the Reformation is the way in which brothers and sisters in Christ have said to one another over the centuries- I have no need of you. Each and every person baptized into the body of Christ in the Spirit of the living God is essential to its witness in the world. Everyone. So, what does that mean? First, it means that who you are is a unique gift from God to the people sitting in this room. I’m not talking about the abstract you, not the you that gets projected to people on the internet, the one you want them to see, the one you hope to be one day, but the one God made, the one who stared back at you from the mirror this morning. That person has something to offer the rest of us that no one else can. It also means that the person who gets on your nerves, who taxes your last ounce of Christian charity and good will- you know the one, we all have at least one. That person is a unique gift also. Whether we see it, or not, that person has something to offer the rest of us too.  

And finally what it means, is that when we come to regard ourselves and those around us as that important, then when one person suffers, the rest of us suffer too. Just like when you have a migraine, or a toothache, or an ulcer, or a sprained ankle, it doesn’t just put that part of your body out of commission, it effects what your whole body does.  When the pain of those conditions gets resolved, it feels like the dawn of a whole new day.  

That’s what it means, says Paul, to be Christ’s body. No one is more important than anyone else, and no one is less important either. Everyone gets included because everyone has something to offer and no one is expendable. In that one body we belong to something far greater than anything we could do or be on our own.