The Body of Christ is a Growing and Changing Body

Sermon by the Rev. Matt Kennedy

1st Corinthians 12:12-27

The Church of the Good Shepherd

I hate going to the DMV. For my first three years in Binghamton I drove around with Texas plates. Partly because I love Texas and couldn't bear parting with my Texas plates. But mostly, it was because I can't stand the DMV; the long lines, the paperwork, the unhelpful staff. I know I'm not alone. You don't see smiles at the DMV. You see bored blank stares. Or you see rage when someone waits for two hours only to be told that they don't have the right paperwork. The DMV is a place of boredom broken by fits of rage. But there's one interesting thing about the DMV. Everybody has to go there. Rich people, poor people, people from every imaginable background all brought together, one big happy family, by the need to drive legally in the state of New York .

Philip Yancey wrote that a good church, if its doing its job right, ought to look like the DMV. People from every background: rich people, poor people, respectable citizens, dropouts, life-long members and people who've never darkened church doors in their life together in one body. Now there's a big difference between the DMV and the Church. At the DMV, people are temporarily united by the law. They don't form deep lasting relationships and they're not there because they love state bureaucracy. The togetherness of the DMV is a false togetherness. But in the church, believers are bound and brought together by Christ to love Christ and to love each other forever.

This binding has nothing to do with how long we've known each other or even how well we like each other. It's just a fact. Since Jesus lives in my heart through the Holy Spirit and he lives in your heart through the Holy Spirit we're related to one another at the spiritual level, the soul level. The believer you meet on the street for the first time is bound to you more closely than even your blood relatives. The spiritual bond between believers is thicker than blood because it's an eternal bond and because it's God himself who does the binding. He knits our hearts together. We are distinct and separate but One body.

“The body” Paul says, “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. For we were all baptized by one Spirit into one body.” Stop there a moment and notice something very important.

Paul isn't speaking about water baptism. We're not all bound together because we've been baptized by water. Look at that again, “For we were all baptized by One Spirit” Water Baptism may make you a member of a church. But if you've not surrendered your life to Christ, you're not a member of The Church. The body to which Paul refers is made up only of those who've given their life to Christ because it's only then that you're filled with God's Holy Spirit, or you're “baptized” by the Spirit. But once that happens you immediately become part of the body, a member of an eternal family. And it's a strange family. Look at the rest of verse 13:

“For we were all baptized by one Spirit into one body whether Jews or Greeks, slave or free, and we were all given one Spirit to drink.”

This is why Churches should look like the DMV. The gospel is that God so loved the world that he gave his only Son that whosoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. God meant it when he said whosoever. God wants his gospel to reach every corner of the world. Jesus' did not commission his disciples to construct a nice little white chapel for themselves and hire a kindly pastor to say nice things and make them feel comfortable until they die. They were commissioned to go out into all the world making disciples of all nations.

And they did and it radically changed the face of the church. And if we're a church, a real church, we do the same. Sometimes believers get comfortable in a church surrounded by the same people every Sunday, the same sights, the same smells, the same words. The church becomes like a nice comfy pillow. They rest their heads every Sunday and they make every effort to ensure that nothing and nobody makes their pillow lumpy; that everything stays just how they like it. When a majority buys into that vision, the focus of church becomes not “what has Christ called us to do? How can we reach out to the lost.” The focus becomes making sure nothing ever changes in my church. That's not biblical. In the New Testament the Church is described as a body. What can we say about a body? I want to focus on two things specifically relating to bodies this morning.

First, bodies are interconnected. I slammed the car door on my fingers the other day. When I slammed the door on my fingers, technically speaking, the rest of my body was fine. My legs weren't damaged, my face was fine, my toes, my internal organs…every other part of my body was just fine and yet everything in my body and mind cried out with pain? Why is that? Because even though the members of my body are distinct and separate they're not independent. They're deeply connected by nerves and blood vessels and all the rest. In the same way, believers in the Church, the body of Christ are bound together. Look again at verse 12…“The body is a unit, though it is made up of many parts…they form one body” skip down to verse 26, “If one part suffers every part suffers with it. If one part is honored every part is honored with it.” This is a description not a command. Paul's telling us what the body is like, not what it should be like. What you do, what you feel, what goes on your life, has a ripple effect throughout the body. This is hard for Americans to understand. We're used to thinking of ourselves as utterly independent of everyone else and that our actions and words and experiences are ours alone. But what happens the church when someone's marriage breaks apart? What happens when someone dies? What happens when people are gossiping? What happens when people leave? Every believer here feels the loss. Why? The Church is a body and if you're a believer you're bound to it. We're not only called to suffer when our brother or sisters suffer, we do suffer. You can't help it. God has wired you to the body through his Spirit. The same thing happens when people come into the body, they get wired in and it has an effect throughout the whole body.

That leads directly to second thing we need to notice about bodies. They change. There's always something new going on in you or to you. The only time your body stops changing is when it's dead and the flesh decayed and you're just a bunch of bones. The body of Christ, if its alive, changes too. God built change into the church. Here's why. If we're going out into the world and making disciples like Christ commissioned us to do, then it's inevitable that we'll grow.

Different kinds of people from different backgrounds will be added to our body. And as they are added to the body, the body will change. The Church is not made up of cyborgs. God doesn't bring people into a church so that he can make them look exactly the same. He brings them in, he saves them and he sanctifies them. As he does, they become more themselves than ever before and because they're connected with everyone else, the body changes. It's especially important to notice here that God doesn't care to ask us whether we like the people he brings. In fact, he assumes that as new believers are brought in there will be conflict.

Verse 21, “The eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I don't need you!' And the head cannot say to the feet, ‘I don't need you!' On the contrary those parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable and the parts that we think less honorable we treat with special honor. And the parts that unpresentable are treated with special modesty.” (1 Cor 12:21 -23) Sometimes people who seem like the “non-presentable” parts will be added to the body. What parts of your body do you hide? What sort of insults do people use to characterize people who annoy or irritate or enrage us? Don't they usually associate the person in question with an “unpresentable” part of the body? Maybe the rear end? Sometimes “rear-ends” will join the body. And how does Paul say to treat them? Do we cast them out or shun them no? We nurture, care for and embrace them.

I think in this section he's not only talking about non-presentable additions to the body but he's speaking of babies in general, those weak in their faith, new Christians. They're weak. They're messy. They bring their problems with them. And that's a good thing. They're to be cared for and nurtured and brought up by the strong. Verse 24: “God has combined the members of the body and has given greater honor to those who lacked it so that there should be no division in the body but that its parts should have equal concern for one another.” This mutual love and concern require sacrifice. New believers sacrifice addictions, behaviors, relationships and cherished habits for the love of Christ and so that they can be one with his body. Mature believers make sacrifices to help them do that. To bring them up and in the process the mature believers, likewise, are made more mature, more Christ like.

So as the body grows and incorporates more members it necessarily changes. God built change into the body. This doesn't mean everything changes. God's Word, his truth, will never change, but so long as we are in it and preaching and teaching it and living it, we will grow and because we grow we will change.

Churches die when they reverse that order. Dying churches elevate non-essentials and devalue essentials. Tradition, decorum, words, bells, smells, ritual actions, cliques', and in-groups and power-plays become more important than Jesus Christ, the Word of God, and the message of salvation. Dying churches fight about bells and vestments and service times while lost people outside their walls die in their sins. Dead churches never change. Everything stays the same; the same people, doing the same things, in the same way, year in and year out never concerning themselves with the Word of God or the great commission. Thank God Good Shepherd is not like that.

If you took a snapshot of this parish 5 years ago and compared it with the church today, you'd see a totally different body. That's good. It means we're alive. It also means a lot of tension. The early church was made up of Jewish Christians. Jews despised the Greeks. So guess who God starts bringing into the body? Greeks. God loves to stir things up. Several times I've seen people get saved and then a year later, their worst enemy walks through the door. That's not an accident.

And here's where we come back to the church looking like the DMV. People from all walks of life are made brothers and sisters interconnected at the deepest level. What's God's purpose in all of this. When humanity rebelled against God in the beginning, we didn't just break fellowship with him, we broke fellowship with each other too. Humans were alienated from God and each other. At the cross God put this alienation to death and began to put the world back together. God reconciles not only sinners to himself, but sinners to each other. That is why the church grows and that's why growth is painful. But it's also beautiful. God remakes world person by person right here.

And so we have a choice. A choice we have to keep making over and over again. Will we take part in God's plan or not? Will we be the body of Christ; alive, living, Growing, changing, or will we die and become like dry bones.

The choice is ours.

Amen