God’s Gifts are for the Common Good
Jesus is Lord!
Last Sunday we began our reflections on the gifts that God gives to Christians by His Holy Spirit with this rousing statement: Jesus is Lord! There is no other context within which we can understand God’s gifts. If taken out of the common expression of that faith in our beloved Lord Jesus Christ, God’s gifts are not really God’s gifts. They are meaningless, or worse - twisted aberrations.
So Paul begins his reflection on the church as a body with many and varied gifts with the same central focus. BUT he doesn’t call the body the church. Rather, he says, ‘The body is a unit, though it is made up of many parts; and though all its parts are many, they form one body. So it is with Christ.’ NOT, ‘So it is with the church…’ – ‘So it is with Christ!’ In order to accomplish his work on earth, Jesus had a body made of flesh and blood. In order to accomplish his work today, Jesus has a body that consists of living human beings. When we say, ‘Jesus is Lord!’ we are willingly saying that he is our head, not my head. It is a corporate acknowledgement of His Lordship. As no body is made up of only one part, so the body of Christ is unable to function without all of its parts. Neither is any body able to function without the head – Christ, our head, is the person who joins us into one functioning unit. Our connection to Him is what makes it possible to forget ourselves and just ‘be’ who we are! Much of our own body functions without our conscious thinking about it – so it is with Christ! And that’s how it should be with the body of Christ.
Being ‘baptised’ by/in/with one Spirit in v.13 means that we are completely submerged in Jesus. When it says that we drink of that one Spirit, it means that the Spirit of Jesus soaks us inside and out, like when a ship sinks in the ocean and the water gets into every nook and cranny of the vessel. If we allow anything but Jesus, our creator, to direct us, we are in effect creating our own ‘gods,’ so that we ourselves become the controlling mechanism – the ‘head’ – and while human beings are creative, we are limited in our creativity – even our efforts to control ourselves will fail, let alone everyone else around us! And Jesus as Lord allows freedom for interdependent individuality – not individualism that separates us one from another.
The Body is Diverse
When I look around at everyone in St Mellitus I praise God for the expression of that diversity here in this little corner of ‘Christ.’ When we know how much God loves us it will not even enter our minds to want to be anyone but who we are. Most of us have gone through a stage sometime in our lives, and maybe right this very moment, when we’re not very happy with ourselves. When I first went back to the U.S. when I was 11 and started in a huge junior high school of 1,500 students on the outskirts of Washington D.C. I was miserable. Having grown up in Latin America, I was very different – and I was bullied. I didn’t wear the right clothes, I was naïve about relationships between girls and boys and so on. Jerry and the switchblades.
Needless to say, I wanted to be just like everyone else, so that I would not have to suffer the abuse! When I became a Christian it was wonderfully freeing to just ‘be’ myself!
There is an element of evil in the desire to have everything be uniformly the way we want it that denies not only God’s outrageous creativity but also the joy in someone else’s difference. It is a desire to control that goes against God’s very nature, in his willingness to give us – his creatures – free will. It is idolatry.
One of the most chilling descriptions that I have ever found of the effects of such idolatry is in the book A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle. It is a novel purportedly for children, but she says, ‘When I have something to say that I think will be too difficult for adults, I write it in a book for children!’
She describes the visit of Meg, her brother Charles Wallace and their friend Calvin to the distant (very dangerous) planet of Camazotz in search of their father – all of whom have travelled (or rather ‘tessered’) there via a wrinkle in time – a ‘tesseract.’ On their way, they become aware that their own planet, Earth, is becoming shrouded with a smoky haze, but Camazotz is already completely dark. When they get there, this is what they see: bottom of p.99-bottom of p.101. The book goes on, describing many other effects of headship by IT.
Each of you is unique, distinctive, irreplaceable and unrepeatable. And God Himself made you and loves you that way! THIS is the glory of the body of Christ! Instead of allowing ourselves to be cast in any one mould, we ought to relish the differences and learn to capitalize on them. It is in those differences that God can be glorified by moulding us into a special unity that is demonstrably His own doing.
Interdependence
Interdependence is the radical alternative to both the tyranny of totalitarianism and the empty dreams of personal fulfilment through individualism. Both are evil because they separate us from our loving God. Just as none of us can say that we don’t need God, none of us can say that we don’t need each other. We are neither completely dependent nor independent but rather, interdependent. It is then natural to rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep, because they are one with us. Although sometimes it is more difficult to rejoice with those who rejoice, because it requires the grace of true humility to be genuinely glad when another is being blessed, used and praised!
The underlying concern of the whole chapter is that we love and honour one another. The Corinthians were in the habit of competing with each other over what they viewed as the superior gifts. They tended to have a league table of gifts that prized the more dramatic above the more ordinary. The competitiveness of the Christians at Corinth is often repeated today. Gifts of the Spirit are discovered and used, but where there is no awareness of the fact that the body can only survive when there is true and loving interdependence, churches can become hard and full of criticism. It is the underlying attitude that is of most importance. Rejoicing in our own weaknesses/vulnerabilities as Paul did (II Corinthians 12.7-10) draws us closer together and allows God’s power to be manifested.
The anointing of the Spirit on Jesus in the Gospel for today was for ‘preaching good news to the poor…proclaiming freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.’ Jesus’ body is made up of all those who acknowledge their weaknesses, who know themselves to be poor, imprisoned, blind, oppressed – it is when we allow Jesus to free us that we realise that none of us is worthless or unimportant – it is for us that Jesus came – that we might have LIFE together – LIFE in all its fullness – TOGETHER!!