Sunday Morning Service
August 10, 2008
“One, Though Many”
1 Corinthians 12:12-31
That legendary comedian George Burns,
who lived to the ripe old age of 100, liked to tell a story of how he got
started in show business. I want to
share a sketch of his, taken from The
Friars Club of New York Notebook, as an introduction to this morning’s
message. He writes:
When
I was seven years old, I was singing with three other Jewish kids from the
neighborhood. We called ourselves the
Pee-Wee Quartet. Now there was a big
department store, Siegel and Cooper, which threw an annual summer picnic on
Sunday and the highlight of the affair was an amateur contest with talent
representing all the churches in
Right
around the corner from where we lived was a little Presbyterian Church. They had no one to enter the contest so the
preacher asked us four kids to represent the church. That Sunday there we were, the Pee-Wee
Quartet, four Jewish boys sponsored by a Presbyterian Church, and our opening
song was “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling.”
We followed that with “Mother Machree,” and we won first prize. The church got a purple velvet altar cloth
and each of us four kids got an Ingersoll wristwatch worth about 85 cents.
Well,
I was so excited that I raced all the way home to tell my mother. When I got there she was on the roof hanging
out the wash. I rushed up to her and
said, “Mama, I don’t want to be a Jew anymore!”
If
this shocked her, she certainly didn’t show it.
She just looked at me and calmly said, “Do you mind my asking why?”
“Well,” I said, “I’ve been a
Jew for seven years and never got anything.
I was a Presbyterian Christian for 15 minutes today and already I got a
watch.” I held out my wrist and showed
it to her. She glanced at it and said,
“First help me hang out the wash and then you can be a Presbyterian.” While I was hanging up some clothes, water
ran down my arm and got inside the watch.
It stopped running, so I became a Jew again.”
I
share that amusing story because for many people, Christian unity is that
fickle and opportunistic. I mean,
they’ll buy into anything that promotes the warm, fuzzy sentiment of being
together, by overlooking and down playing what still divides Christians into
adversarial camps. On the other hand,
there are other Christians for whom there never will be unity unless and until
everyone else submits to their particular doctrine, affirms their
narrow-mindedness, and is cloned as one of them. It’s what one scholar calls a “cookie cutter”
unity.
Is
there hope that somewhere in between we can overcome the differences,
prejudices and traditions that separate the Christian Church and scandalize the
oneness for which Jesus prayed and which the early church sought to embody,
although not without struggle and contradiction? Today, not all Christians can worship
together and kneel at the same Lord’s Table, because certain groups deny others
the sacrament. Not all Christians can
pray together, because certain groups deem as false the prayer of other
groups. Not all Christians can lovingly
speak together of Jesus, because some believe they’re the only ones who possess
the true understanding of who Jesus
is, why Jesus died and for whom Jesus died. Not all Christians can share the joyful
promise of eternal life because certain ones have made themselves “the gatekeepers”
and have determined that other believers will not enter God’s Kingdom.
In
the face of such elitism and divisive claims, one easily despairs of church
unity, yet the yearning for it abides, especially when the inclusive love of
Jesus is real within us. This
unstillable yearning is something like Mark Twain’s description of spring
fever: “You don’t know quite what it is you do want, but it just fairly makes
your heart ache you want it so!”
Actually,
we do know the kind of unity for which our hearts ache. It’s unity in diversity, not as
uniformity. We don’t want a church to be
a bunch of look alikes, who think and speak and act in lockstep, like some kind
of robots. Some Christian groups may
seek that kind of sameness, but they achieve it at the great loss of a
fellowship made strong, rich and challenging through individual differences,
thoughts, responses and gifts.
The
apostle Paul in his letter to those early Christians, makes clear that from the
very beginning there was a desire for unity of focus, of spirit and
mission. Yet Paul and other leaders
recognized such oneness emerged out of diversity, which by the power of God’s
Spirit, the fellowship of the church was strong enough to hold together persons
of contrasting opinions and ideas, personalities and temperament, economic
status, cultural background and ethnic origin, talents and skills.
So, Paul used the analogy of the human
body to underscore the dynamic tensions and the inter-relatedness that comprise
the unity of the church. And so he
wrote:
For just as the body is one
and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one
body, so it is with Christ. For in the
one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and
we were all made to drink of one Spirit.
Indeed, the body does not consist of one member, but of many ... Now you
are the body of Christ and individually members of it.
Paul emphasized how important each member was to the
body’s proper functioning, how necessary each part was to the whole and how all
parts in interdependent relationship created a larger meaning of the whole, and
how the whole was diminished when any part was excluded, neglected or cut
off. He then made application of that
truth to the understanding of how the church functions best. We need each other and we need the power of
God’s Spirit to draw us close together so that we can be the body of Christ.
We’re still struggling with this. We still prefer people around us in the
church who think, act, respond, believe and talk as we do. We want to abolish differences between us by
making everyone the same, or by getting rid of them. But I’ve discovered repeatedly, that not only
is the church blessed, but so am I by persons I may have considered out of step
and out of place. I think of a woman in
a church I served who contradicted all canons of polite church behavior by the
eccentric way she dressed, by the outrageous questions she raised in study
groups, and by the off-the-wall comments she made in church meetings. Some members came to me and asked what were
going to do with her. As her radical
views on social issues were made known, other members came and asked me to get
rid of her. But it was this woman who
showed up when a difficult task had to be done, and who quietly went the second
and third mile for persons in need. Moreover,
it was this woman who, in a highly charged meeting called to consider a major
decision about the future of the church, stood up at a critical moment and humbly
spoke the needed word that inspired people to move ahead with faith and
vision. I gratefully remember how she
touched my life and think of her often.
Unity doesn’t mean uniformity, for our oneness in Christ is forged out
of diversity. We are one, though many!
It
follows that our unity in Christ has more to do with the way we actually live
our lives than with the philosophical or theological thoughts we hold. True oneness in Christ is something that can
be seen and touched and has the smell of life on it. That’s why the unity in Christ to which God
calls us has broken through on mission fields and where people serve together
at the intersections of human need. I
remember a certain war correspondent’s story of a wounded soldier named
Stavros, raised in the Orthodox Church, being held in the arms of a medic who
was Pentecostal, while a Roman Catholic priest anointed the dying man and
prayed with him. Or I think of a young woman rushed to the emergency room of a
hospital after being pulled out of a burning car following a grinding
crash. Through her pain she asked to be
baptized, and so while an emergency room nurse who was a Roman Catholic held
her hand, a staff doctor who belonged to the Presbyterian Church placed water
gently on her forehead and baptized her.
During recent fires, floods, and in the
aftermath of earthquakes, tornadoes and hurricanes, Christians worked side by
side who might never have stepped inside each other’s church, bringing relief
to the suffering and the stricken with Christlike love. Love doesn’t have a particular sacramental
theory or denominational tag. “Doctrine
divides, but service unites,” is how one ecumenical leader put it. He was right!
Our oneness in Christ is best experienced when side by side we respond
to human crises in the name of Christ, for in such moments the Holy Spirit
draws us together in a special bonding.
Jesus himself made it plain:
I am the vine, you are the
branches. Those who abide in me and I in
them bear much fruit … As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide
in my love … This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved
you.
In
such love the walls between us fall down.
Serving with Christlike love where the crowded lives of people cross and
collide, we discover there’s more that unites than divides us. As we serve together, we experience the
presence of Christ within and between us, moving us to love each other more in an
oneness where we can feel God’s mighty power and God’s grace, hear the brush of
angel wings, and see glory on each face.
Anna Quindlen, widely read syndicated
columnist, wrote her last piece for the New
York Times just before Christmas a few years ago. I want to share some lines of her column in
closing:
The
most important thing (she writes) that I’ve learned in the newspaper business
is that our business is one another.
Time after time, story after story, I have learned it from everyday
angels … I’ve walked the streets, seen goodness in dark places, I’ve visited
the Holy Apostles Soup Kitchen in Manhattan where every day volunteers feed
1,000 hungry people, and the York Street Project in Jersey City where women
look for a second chance. I’ve been to
schools where teachers bring imagination and intellect to life, and hospitals
where the nurses bring comfort and joy.
There, everyday angels
dazzle by the spectacle of unabashed humanity, but their message is the same as
the angel who scared the wits out of the shepherds in the Christmas story:
“Fear not!” That’s what I’ve learned from
its contemporary counterparts—the rape counselors, the good cops, the nuns, the
librarians. Life will be hard, politics
will be mean, money will be scarce, and bluster will be plentiful. Yet somehow good will be done … So I leave
you with good tidings of great joy: those who shun the prevailing winds of
cynicism and [rootlessness] can truly fly.
So
be it. God calls us to oneness in
Christ—to a ministry of love, peace, justice, goodness and kindness, where the
kingdom of God breaks open, you can feel God’s mighty power and God’s grace,
you can hear the brush of angel wings, and see glory on each face! Let us pray:
O Giver of every good and perfect gift, we thank you
for the gift of life, the freedom of worship, and the invitation to share in
your love. You call us to courageous
discipleship, but come to us when we fall short. You offer us the heart of Jesus, but we often
choose the cunning of Judas. Still, you
won’t give up on us! Empty our cups of
poisonous pride and pour into our hearts and minds the sweet wine of wonder and
worship, gratitude and grace, humility and hope. And teach us to hear and believe and share
the good news of Jesus Christ. Amen.
Hi-nei ma-tov u-ma na-im Sheh-vet
a-chim gamy a-chad.
How good it is, and how
pleasant, Whenever we dwell together in unity.