One Body

One Body

1 Corinthians 12:1-12

January 27, 2019

And the apostle Paul said to the church at Corinth: “Head, shoulders, knees and toes, knees and toes …” This is the word of the Lord, thanks be to God.

That’s the quite completely revised, not quite at all standard, preschool translation of First Corinthians. We are one body, and individually members of it. Every member brings something to the whole, and each one of these gifts matters to the whole. Indeed, without them, the body is not actually whole. It is fractured and broken and not able to function as intended by the One who created it.

So, whatever part you play matters. There are no small parts, as they say in theater, only small actors.

We all know that it’s wise to get regular check ups to assess the health of our bodies, and so it is with the body of the church. We go to a physician to get our head, shoulders, knees, and toes; eyes and ears and mouth and nose checked up. We know that there are standards to measure our vision and our hearing, our heart rate and blood pressure, our strength and flexibility, and we trust medical experts to assess our health according to such standards.

What are the standards against which we judge to health of the body of Christ, the church?

At the congregational level, the traditional measure of institutional health used for the better part of the past century has been “butts and budgets.” That is to say, congregational and denominational health has been measured according to membership, worship attendance, and budgets.

By those measures, let’s be honest, we are a marginally healthy part of a dying body. That is to say, Clarendon Presbyterian Church has a reasonably stable membership, some significant questions about attendance, and a decently healthy budget – all of which we’ll look at in more detail together in a few minutes.

Meanwhile, lest we forget our context, we are a congregation of a denomination that has lost about three quarters of it total membership since 1965, and whose membership has continued in decline every year for decades from a peak of about 4.5 million in the mid-60s to the current total that is a bit less than 1.5 million. The denomination is barely more than half the size it was when I entered seminary in the mid-90s. Denominational budgets have, of course, tracked membership.

We are a part of a body that is dying. Moreover, many, perhaps most, of the individual parts of the body – that is to say, the congregations that make up the denomination – are also dying. Locally speaking, there are six Presbyterian congregations in Arlington County this morning. I would be shocked if more than half of them remain as stand-alone congregations 15 years from now. In fact, I’d be somewhat surprised if more than half of them remain by the time I retire. And, oh, yeah, I turn 60 this year.

We are a part of a body that is dying.

We can weep and wail and gnash our teeth. We can huddle together and sing songs of lamentation. We can wax nostalgic and dream of by-gone days.

Or, we can rise up and live into the fullness of our faith as a resurrection people.

That is to say, the heart of our faith beats with the conviction that God can bring new life out of death; that God can speak a creative word into the chaos and call forth the ordered creation itself; that God can breathe into the dry bones and then watch those bones dance.

We are a resurrection people!

What does that mean for us? What does that look like in our context? Where can we look to see signs that God is already bringing forth new life in our very midst?

To some extent, those questions beg us to think differently about how we assess the health of the body of Christ in our context. Thinking differently does not mean ignoring traditional metrics and measurements.

We are right to be pleased with the shape of our budget; we are also right to be concerned with dips in attendance on Sunday mornings.

But we ought also to be thinking about what it means that so many of us participated in last summer’s CAT assessment that the folks at Holy Cow, the consulting firm that administers the assessment tool, did IP address checks to make sure someone wasn’t stuffing the virtual ballot box. We also ought to be thinking about what it means the almost a hundred folks were gathered in the sanctuary last Thursday evening to talk about green energy, and that about a third of them were young adults. And we ought to be thinking about what it means that way more people tuned in to at least part of our Facebook worship service two weeks ago in the snow that ever come in person on a Sunday morning.

These are also signs and signals about the health of the body. We just don’t fully understand what they are signaling and how they might be signs pointing toward a future of new life.

One year ago in this “state of the church” sermon, I suggested that we are being called into a larger story, and we launched a season of discernment that led us, last summer and fall, to create a new staff position and set out to raise funds to support it. This winter and spring we will conduct the search and hiring process to give life to that vision cast one year ago.

That, also, looks to me like a sign of vitality.

But, I confess, I’m not always sure about such signs nor about the various ways we endeavor to measure and assess the state of the church.

I’m not sure that my confusion is anything new under the sun.

When we were in Rome a few weeks ago we toured the Vatican. Standing beneath the 430-foot dome of St. Peter’s is an awe-inspiring experience. One cannot help but look up, and, clearly, that’s the point. Human beings are invited in grand cathedrals to gaze upward toward the heavens to catch a sense of the divine existing on a plane far above human toil.

There is nothing at all wrong with that, but gazing upward is only one way to catch a glimpse of the divine.

We did not have enough time to get out to see the catacombs when we were in Rome. While the history and meaning of those burial sites remains contested, it’s fairly well accepted that they were used at certain periods in the first centuries of Christianity as worship spaces for Christian communities under persecution by Roman authorities.

I’m guessing that their worship attendance figures were unimpressive. Indeed, I’m guessing they didn’t keep much track at all. I’m guessing their budgets were – well, I’m guessing they didn’t have any budgets at all. I’m guessing their membership figures were equally unimpressive.

But I am also guessing – no, this is not a guess, this is preaching: the faith of those early Christian communities was so vibrant, so alive, and so clearly counter cultural, that they were perceived as threatening to the entrenched and absolute power of an empire that spanned most of the known world.

They didn’t just cast their eyes upward for signs of the presence of God. They cast their eyes down, into catacombs, and there, in the eyes of their Christian friends they saw the presence of God in the body of Christ.

Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Is any entrenched power threatened by us today?

If the answer to that question is no, well perhaps then it’s best if we do simply fade away.

But I do not believe God is finished with us yet. I do not believe that the body of Christ in the world is merely a corpse awaiting last rights and burial.

I believe God is calling forth new life in our midst precisely because entrenched, concentrated, and corrupt power still exercises dominion over the lives of far too many people around the world, including in many places in our own country, and I believe that the body of Christ in the world is called to disrupt that power whenever and however we can. For when we are about that life-giving, death-disrupting work in the world, then the body of Christ is vibrant and healthy. Let us be about that work, in our time and place, for, whenever and wherever we are, then the state of the church is strong. Amen.