What is the Body For?

November 11, 2012 1 Corinthians 12:4-12

I was struck, in the wee hours of last Wednesday morning, by the invitation implicit but clear in President Obama’s acceptance speech to think deeply about what it means to be American, about what it means to be part of the body politic in this nation, and about what that body is for.

It struck me, in particular, because in various contexts and conversations this fall I have been hearing over and over the same kinds of questions with regard to the church. What does it mean to be a Christian, to be part of the body of Christ, and what is that body for?

I mention the president’s speech here not simply to acknowledge the obvious news of the week, but more importantly, to situate what might seem, at first blush, an “inside baseball” kind of churchy conversation in a broader cultural context. Doing so, I want to underscore that how we choose to be the body of Christ – the church – has a profound impact on how we choose to live as the body politic, that is to say, as citizens.

I’ve heard some deep concerns recently about the meaning of membership in a congregation. These concerns keep rising up to the surface in conversations about things as varied as politics, peacemaking and basic participation in fellowship gatherings. So this month of concern with stewardship – with basic support of the mission and ministry of this congregation – seems like a really good time to talk about the meaning of membership – about what it means to be, in Paul’s words, a member of the body of Christ.

I want this to be mostly a conversation, but I want to name up front a couple of concerns that I think we must be mindful of as we talk together about what it means to be a member of the church, generally, and what it means to be a member of this congregation, specifically.

So let’s recall briefly our context: being church, as a membership institution, in an era that is increasingly unchurched and, to coin a phrase that aims at the deep suspicion of institutions in general that marks our age, “a post-membership age.” Put those two well-known and widely acknowledged social trends in a local (and national) context that is increasingly diverse culturally and in terms of religious heritage and you have at least a triple-whammy that strikes at the heart of traditional congregational life.

Moreover, all of that is happening as we live into post-modernity, and while there is no consensus on just what that means, at the very least “post-modern” means that the very notion of “certainty” is no longer certain or stable – at least insofar as “certainty” rest on unassailable notions of “truth.”

So, in that volatile social-cultural-political mix, we pose the question: what does it mean to be a member of the church of Jesus Christ?

The Book of Order, which is the constitution of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), lists about a dozen “marks of membership,” or areas of involvement that are part of each member’s commitment to the church, to be exercised according to gift and call and context. These are listed on the back of this morning’s bulletin.

Take a moment to look at them.

·         What questions do these raise for you?

·         What resonates with you? Speaks to you?

·         Are there gaps in this list in terms of your understanding of church? Is anything missing?

·         What surprises you about this list?

As I looked back over this list, and especially as I did so with Paul’s words to the church at Corinth ringing in my ears, I was surprised by one thing:

This list says absolutely nothing about what one must “believe” in order to belong to the church. Given what I said to begin with about the cultural context in which we move these days, I find that refreshing and promising.

At the same time, I find in it a challenge to us as we continue to work to build a more vibrant congregation, and, especially, as we try to learn together both what exactly that might mean and, just as importantly, how we might speak of it to others along the way.

That is to say, if the core of your church commitment revolves around the conviction that “believing in Jesus Christ as the only begotten Son of God assures your eternal salvation,” and that it is, therefore, your moral and Christian responsibility not only to confess that faith publicly but to invite others into a “saving relationship with Jesus,” then you have pretty clear “talking points” about what church means and how to speak of it with others.

But what if church means something different than that? What if the meaning of church is much more deeply bound up in being a community committed to following the way of Jesus than in offering our intellectual consent to a set of propositional statements about Jesus?

In that context, I hear in the Book of Order’s “marks of membership” also a deep challenge and invitation to think again together about how we define membership, how we mark membership, what rites of passage we invent to incorporate individuals into the body.

Let me put that just a little differently. Every time we welcome new members or baptize people into the church we ask a set of questions that come from a completely different era of church life, beginning with the first one: “who is your Lord and Savior?”

That question, by itself, is a huge stumbling block to a whole lot of people who are otherwise very much attracted to the idea of following Jesus, of trying to live out the way of Jesus in the world in the context of the community of the church. So, here’s another set of questions:

·         Using Paul’s metaphor of the church as the body of Christ, are there new ways we might incorporate folks into the body?

·         Are there specific “affirmations of faith” that should be part of that incorporation? Or, are there “affirmations of intention to follow the way of Jesus” that we might imagine, instead?

This is only the beginning of a community conversation that I think we need to have. We’ll touch on a few additional aspects next Sunday, but these two brief conversations in the context of Sunday-morning worship are nothing more than invitations to engage a much deeper, richer and fuller conversation about what church means in our time. I hope you will want to engage that both for your own soul’s satisfaction, but also because, whatever church has meant in the past that meaning is fast fading away. If we do not work out, in fear and trembling, the meaning of church for a new day then there will be no church when that new day dawns.

Whatever else we may be, and whatever we may believe about it along the way, one thing we have long been here is a community that prays together. So let us close our time together this morning with the prayers of the people.