This week our text is I Corinthians 12:12-28 and the subject is our need to recognize that the Church, God’s people and the relationships we have is a gift of God. There can be no wise living without living in community with a group of people one loves unconditionally.

Somewhere around 1960 a group of young couples in their 30’s formed a Sunday school class at Westminster Presbyterian Church in Springfield, Missouri. The last Sunday my mother attended church, that class was still meeting although it grown quite small and very old. Throughout fifty years, this group of people had met together, studied the Bible together, prayed together, had fellowship together, raised children together, developing deep lasting relationships. I can remember Sunday school picnics that occurred over fifty years ago.

Last week, while we were in Houston, we were talking about a Sunday school class at First Presbyterian Church of Houston. My in-laws were members of this class. This particular class began in another form during and after the Second World War and still exists as the Fellowship Class today. Once again, while the members are old today, the class began as a group of young couples who were getting married, forming families, having children, raising families, putting children through college, and then losing spouses to old age and death.

When Kathy and I got married, the first Sunday after we returned from our honeymoon we joined a Sunday school class known as the “Carpenter’s Class.” The Carpenter’s Class was formed by couples in their late 20’s and early 30’s. Once again, we enjoyed our young married lives together, had children together, went through the problems of middle life together, until that class disbanded during a church conflict. Nevertheless, to this very day, if we returned to Houston, we have dinner with members of that class. We remain close to this very day.

This blog is about the gift of one another we receive from God by the Holy Spirit. If the first gift of the Holy Spirit is the gift of our salvation, the second gift of the Holy Spirit is the gift of Christian community. There is nothing so important in the Christian life than a deep, personal relationships with other Christians. The church is not an organization. The church exists as an organism as people live together in what Paul calls, “the Body of Christ.” The church is a living thing made up of relationships among real, living people.

The Body of Christ.

In First Corinthians, the apostle Paul uses one of the most famous metaphors for the church. He calls the church the “Body of Christ.”  If the phrase, “Kingdom of God” emphasizes the church as the place where Christ rules, and the phrase “Family of God” emphasizes the church as a family, a phrase “Body of Christ” emphasizes deep peaceful, relationships that should constitute the church. Paul wrote First Corinthians to a church that was in danger of falling apart. Therefore, he emphasized for them the deep personal relationships that ought to characterize the church.

Listen for the Word of God as it comes to us from the voice of the Apostle Paul:

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 one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and all were made to drink of one Spirit. For the body does not consist of one member but of many. If the foot should 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 should 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 be the sense of hearing? If the whole body were an ear, where would be the sense of smell?  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 parts 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 parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and on those parts of the body that we think less honorable we bestow the greater honor, and our unpresentable parts are treated with greater modesty, which our more presentable parts do not require. But God has so composed the body, giving greater honor to the part that lacked it, that there may be no division in the body, but that the members may have the same care for one another. If one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honored, all rejoice together.  Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it. (I Corinthians 12:12-27).

Prayer: God of Community, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, who has called us into community with one another, come by the power of your Holy Spirit this morning that we might be bound together in a community of love with other Christians.

The Gift of One Another.

It is sometimes hard for contemporary Christians to think of a church of 1,000 as a “Body of Christ.” It is much easier to realize that my Sunday school class or small group is a body of Christ. I know who the heads, hands, and heart of my small group are. I know how much I care for people I know intimately. I can feel that I’m a part of them and they are part of me. This is why we urge every member of our church to be part of a small group. It is in these kinds of groups that we first and most powerfully experience the power and privilege of Christian fellowship.

At a couple of meetings recently I asked people to think about the time they grew the most in their spiritual life. Interestingly, it was almost always in a relatively small and intimate group of Christians on a military base, in college or high school, in a small group Bible study, or a prayer and support group. This week, one of our staff members wrote me the following email: “I was intrigued by your question at staff mtg. “what group of Christians made the biggest single difference in my life”. After thinking a lot, I think it was my youth group experience growing up. We were a tight knit group that sang together, did mission trips together and had Bible classes in age groups. We laughed, played, studied, experienced new places TOGETHER. . .all in the name of Jesus. Even though I drifted away from my faith foundation for a while (although I still attended church!) these experiences were so impressive that it made me want to return to a lifestyle where community in Christ.”

In America we often speak of “joining the Church.” At Advent before most people “join the church” we have a new members class that they attend. When we talk like this, we open ourselves to two mistakes:

• We begin to think of the Church as a volunteer organization, like any other that I choose to join or not join.
• We eliminate any hope of understanding that the Church is a gift from God.

Often, when our young people go away to college, they stop attending church. I think most of them stop because they either (1) never understood that the church was a gift, that their Sunday school class is a gift, that their Christian friends are a gift, that their small group is a gift, and so they treat the church is something they can give up or (2) they forget that great truth. Unfortunately, I think we give the impression that the church is like the Kiwanis Club: I enjoyed being a member for a while but now I don’t. We can never be the people God intends us to be or experience the life God wants us to experience without the Body of Christ. Part of living wisely and lovingly is belonging to the Body of Christ.

God never intended for any of us to think of the church as optional or as a club to which we belong so long as we get something out of it. When Paul says, “You are the body of Christ,” he is saying that, at the moment of our salvation, we have become part of Christ’s mystical body, which is also really and physically present in the persons who surround us and make up our little church. We are meant to remain a part of that body, as it exists on this earth, as long as we live.

Last week, we had a Men’s Great Banquet weekend. This week, we are having a Women’s Great Banquet Weekend. I have been on the women’s team this year, but we meet together with the men’s team to prepare for the weekend. On the men’s team, there was a man, Robert Rooks, with whom I have been friends and in ministry since the first day I came to West Tennessee in 1994. For a time, we met every week in Brownsville on Sunday mornings. Although it’s been almost eighteen years since I left Brownsville, Robert and I are still bound together in the Body of Christ in a real, important, and life-transforming way. The people God brings around us are not incidental or an accidental parts of our Christian walk. They are the very body of Christ of which we are a part.

Different Folks, One Body.

A large part of First Corinthians 12 deals with  problems that can occur in the Body of Christ if people do not exercise their gifts and/or if people do not respect the gifts of others. If every Christian does not use his or her spiritual gift, then the body of Christ cannot function in the best possible way. It is like a human body that is missing one or more of its members. This is the problem most preachers spend most of their time talking about. However, there is an equally dangerous problem. This is the problem of a lack of mutual respect. This is like a body that has lost its ability to coordinate action and function in a healthy way.

In the church in Corinth, there were a lot of spiritually gifted people. People were speaking in tongues, interpreting tongues, prophesying, leading, teaching, and the like. The problem that concerned Paul most was that there was no coordination or mutual respect. For example, those who spoke in tongues were speaking in tongues in an uncontrolled way. They were disturbing the worship of others. Those who were gifted in teaching were fighting among themselves as to who was the better teacher. Those with the gift of leadership were dividing the church into cliques, each following their chosen leader. The result was chaos.

Therefore,  Paul goes out of his way to make two important points:

• First, whatever my gift might be it must be coordinated with all other gifts.
• Second, whether my gift is large or small, is important and deserves respect. In fact, the least important gifts are to be given a greater respect.

Giving respect to all gifts is an essential element of servant leadership. Whatever my gift is, I didn’t get it for my own benefit. My gift is for the common good. If I’m truly serving the interests of others, then in humility I consider their gifts to be just as important as my gift. In fact, the Gospel teaches us that they are as important as my gift. Why? Because all of the spiritual gifts were given to bring glory to Christ in the body of Christ not to give glory to any individual person. The gifts were given to us to use for the common good, not for our own good or our own advancement.

The Great Need for Caring for One Another.

One of the greatest needs in our culture is for caring community. Every week at Advent we have the opportunity to help someone enter by modeling caring community. This week was no exception. Our members were visiting people in the hospital. Some members were helping people financially. Other members were counseling people that needed help with budgets and other items. Still others were running carpools to help families in trouble get their children to school and attended church events.

One of the most powerful witnesses we make as Christians in our culture is when we love one another. People today often live a great distance from family members. Young couples often have to raise children and navigate the early years of their marriage without the kind of social support that was available in prior generations. Single parents, in particular, have to juggle multiple responsibilities, making parenting very difficult. Children grow up with less social support than in prior generations. All of this creates a need for caring mission in the church.

It has been eight years since the financial crisis. Although the economy has grown, many people are still without savings, without equity in their homes, and without the financial resources to withstand a crisis. Because of the materialism of our culture many families are economically stretched. At Advent, we have sponsored Financial Peace and other programs to help people learn to deal with their finances. We even have a few people who sit down privately and help people who need one-on-one attention. This is an important carrying ministry in our church and in every congregation.

America has experienced a loss of community over the last fifty years or so. The growth of extremely large metropolitan areas, and the migration of many people into large cities, has caused a loss of real community. It’s important for people to have friends who’ve known them over a period of years, who understand their problems, who accept their failings, and to support them in times of need. Small towns and small churches used it to supply this caring ministry. Today, many people live lives of quiet loneliness. They need a caring community. In most cities, the church is the only body that can possibly meet this need.

Caring within the Body of Christ.

Jesus commanded us to love one another (John 13:34). Jesus also told us that he wanted us to have a special kind of love for one another—self-giving love—what the Bible calls “Agape Love.” On his last night on earth Jesus reminded his disciples that the greatest kind of love is the kind of love in which we die to ourselves so that others may live a more abundant life (John 15:13). For Jesus, this meant physically dying. For us, it’s physically easier, but perhaps morally more difficult. We have to learn to die to our own selfish egos so that we can build the kind of community that will shine like light in our world and draw people to Christ.

Amen.

Copyright 2016, G. Christopher Scruggs, All Rights Reserved