'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.'
--I Corinthians 12: 14-26
In the classic comedy Anchorman Will
Ferrel’s character Ron Burgandy, the legendary San Diego news reporter, is confronted
with the reality that the network sees a lack of diversity around his station
and wants to correct that oversight. One
problem: hardly anyone in this 1970s male-dominated organization even knows
what diversity is. But Ron Burgandy knows:
He's kind of a big deal.
To which Ron's boss comments that he'd be surprised if the network were concerned with the lack of an old, old wooden ship. We laugh at stories like Anchorman because they show us the absurdity of misogynistic, patriarchal systems, but we still live in a world that has real trouble with fully
embracing diversity. Whether it is women
in positions of leadership or appropriate representation of LGBT folks in tv
and film, we still have a ways to go before diversity is seen for what it
really is: a gift from God (not an old, old wooden ship!).
The church in Corinth was a place that struggled with embracing
diversity. People were divided along various
lines such as religion, gender, nationality, and even which spiritual gifts they possessed. Corinth was a community that stressed
uniformity and hierarchy. Certain individuals
were simply seen as better because of the spiritual gifts they were given or because
of where they came from, and everyone else was just supposed to fall in
line. New ideas and customs were not
welcomed, which may explain why both Paul and Clement felt the need to write to the Corinthians, not once but twice. To illustrate his
undercutting of such customs, Paul compares the community of the faithful to a
body, and just as a body does not consist of one member but many, neither does
this community. An eye cannot hate an
ear; after all, if the whole body were just the one member—just an eye—then where
would the hearing come from? One member
cannot say to another, ‘I have no need of you.’ God has so arranged the body,
says verse 18 of this letter, which means that such diversity is, in fact, a
gift from God and should be embraced by the community. Because God has
arranged it so, when one member of the body suffers, all suffer, and if one member is
honored, all rejoice. To put it quite
simply, Paul is saying to the Corinthians:
you’re all in this together.
It might seem rather basic and even a bit elementary, but
remembering that we are all in this together, that we are all part of the same
body and that we all need each other, is a lesson that we should hear over and
over again. That gift of diversity that God
gave us is one that we still have not fully embraced, sadly, and one place where this is best seen is in the Church.
Last week I attended several events in my part of North Carolina that honored the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The last of these event was a worship service at a local Pentecostal Church put on
by the Randolph County Ministers of Reconciliation, a group that I had never heard
of in my almost 4 years in this area.
When I asked a clergy colleague about them I was informed that
they were, as it was put, “the black ministerial association.” You see, for almost 4 years I had been under
the impression that there was only one group—the Greater Asheboro Ministerial
Association—which, encompassed all of the churches in my area. Unfortunately, that group has not had any kind of gathering or put on
any event in over 2 years! In a place as small as Randolph County, North Carolina there is no reason for two groups of clergy—all of whom are
Christians, by the way—to exist independent of each other, especially when the
only thing separating them is their skin color.
I wondered if perhaps someone along the way forgot Paul’s words about
all of us being members of the one body. When I struck up a conversation with the vice president of the Ministers of Reconciliation at that service and told
her I wished to join, she got choked up and said, “We’ve been praying for this!” The “this’ was that their white clergy
brothers and sisters would take notice of what they were doing and join them. We
still have a ways to go.
Everywhere we look we see division, discord, and members of the body cast one another off or say outright, “We do not want you to
be part of us!” God’s gift of diversity
is being squandered, replaced by fear and mistrust. Now the feet are ganging up on the
hands. Now the right arm has said to the
left there is no need of you here and has cast it off. Now the body is splintered and broken, and in some places even bloodied and left for dead.
What we fail to understand, whether we are talking about a
church, a community, or a nation, is that we are all in this thing together. The suffering of one of us affects all of us.
Think about a migraine headache. A migraine doesn’t just hurt your head, but
it makes it painful to see, to walk, and even to listen to music. Pain in one part of our bodies disturbs and
distorts the rest. A long time ago the Greek
philosopher Plato put it this way: “We
do not say, ‘My finger has a pain,’ instead we say, ‘I have a pain,’ thus, there
is an ‘I,’ a personality that gives unity to the many and varying parts of the
body.” Leave it to the ancient Greeks to make sense all of these years later!
Plato got it.
God has blessed our churches, our
communities, and our nation with the holy gift of diversity, of a blending of many
members to make up one great body. Today the apostle Paul speaks through the ages to people who, like those in Corinth,
struggle with the idea of embracing that which is different. Fear sets in because it takes tremendous
vulnerability to open oneself up to a person or an experience that is not like our own, but the more we reject those other members, the more the body will be
broken. Whether the rejection is along
the lines of religion, race, nationality, sexuality, gender, or economic status, the
more we cast off the members, the more we all suffer. The good news that is there for us today is
that we can—we must—embrace that sacred gift that God has given to us. For when we do, we can make this world look
more like the Kingdom Jesus proclaimed was already here.
