THIRD SUNDAY AFTER THE EPIPHANY, YEAR C January 23, 2022
Nehemiah 8: 2-10; I Corinthians 12: 12-27; Luke 4:14-21 Panzer Liturgical Service
From a 2006 survey of the unchurched between 18 and 40 years old, David Kinnaman of the Barna Research Group wrote a book, UNCHRISTIAN, which reported the image problem of the modern church. Participants used these words to describe the way they saw Christianity – hypocritical, insensitive, judgmental – with the crowning statement: “I like your Jesus but I don’t like your church.”
While we are trained by our modern society to consider our individuality as sacred, the Bible knows nothing about individuals apart from the concept of community. Abraham was called out for the express purpose of being the father of a people. Moses was called to lead the people out of slavery into the Promised Land. And for forty years, because of the stubbornness and willfulness of these people, he struggled with them in the desert. And no matter how frustrated he got with them, and probably wanted to leave them behind, they were a community. They were in this thing together, and together they would stay.
The lesson from Nehemiah tells of the recovery of the rule of the Law of God as defined by the Torah after the Babylonian Exile. The Jews had finally been allowed to return to Jerusalem and rebuild it under the leadership of Nehemiah as their governor. One of the first things that Ezra, their priest and scribe, had to do was to re-establish the pattern of worship that had been destroyed. He understood that their service of God was radically incomplete unless and until their common worship was restored. This morning's lesson tells about the process he followed to teach the people what it meant to be Jews living in Jerusalem.
Here we are reminded that there was no such thing as an individual Jew separated from the people, their understanding of the Law & Prophets, and the worship of the temple community. Any promise of God was made to the whole people together. The Law of God was for all of them together. Their individuality was nested in their identity in being God's people. This is mostly a foreign concept to us because we think of ourselves as individuals – maybe being part of a military community can give us a glimpse of what God had in mind. Mostly, we think of ourselves first, then everyone else comes next. We are personally responsible for our acts, our faith, our relationship to God unless, of course, it goes badly and we feel the need to blame somebody else.
But this is NOT the way the Bible looks at people. The Bible always looks at individual people, even an Abraham or a Sarah or a Moses, as an integral part of the whole people of God. The Old Testament talks about being one of "the chosen people.” In the New Testament, we call this being part of the "Body of Christ." Claiming our membership in this body is often difficult because society tells us that we are most completely ourselves when we stand alone, uncommitted, uninvolved, and uncluttered by other relationships – “to thyself be true.”
When Jesus read the lesson from Isaiah in the synagogue and began to teach his former neighbors about who he was, they immediately saw him only in the context of previous relationships. Here he was, claiming to fulfill a long-promised prophecy, but they could not get past the fact that he was "Joseph's son." He had grown up among them. They knew his family. He was part of the familiar world. How could they see him any other way? How could he be anyone else?
What was it like for the people of Nazareth when this man they had known all their lives and/or all of his life, suddenly came to them not as "Joseph's son," but as "God's Son?" How were they supposed to deal with this change from the familiar to the radically other? It is very hard for us to imagine what it must have been like for them because since we have been baptized and worshiped within the Christian community, we have known Him as "God's own Son." So while we can’t step outside our own experience and our knowledge of Him, I hope we can relate to this story because we also have to redefine our own lives in the light of who Christ is to us, both as individuals and as a part of a community of faith.
Our lesson from 1st Corinthians is one of the clearest expressions of this Biblical understanding of not just community, but also communal identity. In both letters to the Corinthians, Paul is writing to a congregation he founded. But it is a congregation in conflict… lots of conflict. Some of it involves people who are interpreting forgiveness of sin as an excuse for immorality. Some of it involves people who claim to have special, “better” knowledge of God, making a hierarchy of gifts and experiences within the community. Some of it involves a quarrel between those who are more “charismatic” and those who are less dependent on “speaking in tongues.”
Wherever there was disagreement identified, Paul scolded them, promised discipline, and then called on them to live in love and charity with one another. As we read last week, he listed varieties of gifts they have received and reminds them that all these gifts come from God. They didn't make them or “deserve” them, but God freely gave them because of his great love for his creation.
In our reading today, Paul moves on to what it means for us to be the Body of Christ, driving home the point that each of us is necessary for the good and growth of the whole. None of us has all the gifts of the Spirit. Each of us has something, but it takes our working together to bring them to their best light.
Like our bodies, the community of the faithful is a mixed bag of the necessary, the nice, the ugly, and the occasionally good-looking. Paul is really smart here – he uses a readily available concept to tell a spiritual story. We need all the functions that our healthy bodies provide for us. When a part of our physical bodies fails us, we go to the doctor and try to find a way back to wholeness… medication, rehabilitation, surgery, and psychological therapy all work to bring us back to wholeness, often helping us to compensate when vital functions are gone forever.
I’m sure you all remember my 2020 knee injury – who could forget my hobbled attempts to keep it from making me even more housebound than COVID already had done. I had an uncomplicated surgical repair three months later and another three months of outpatient rehab. But at the six-month mark, I still felt like I would fall all over again whenever I had to tackle stairs or walk on uneven surfaces. I finally got a referral from my PCM and he recommended functional physical therapy –targeted not just to help me recover my strength, but to boost my confidence in my own body. Right away, my PT realized that some of the function in my knee wasn’t going to come back – arthritis can sneak up on you before you know it. But the good news was that we could train other muscle groups in my legs, hips, and back to pick up the slack. What a difference these three months have made. I finally feel like my body is my own again.
Somehow, this feels like an apt metaphor for what Paul teaches here. In the body of Christ, we need all the parts working as well as they can. We are dependent upon one another for the fullness of our life together. When one part is weak, it’s up to the others to get stronger to keep the body in balance. Also like our bodies, not all parts or gifts in the Body of Christ are beauty pageant worthy. Any attempts to make the Body of Christ beautiful or perfect by rejecting the less desirable members or gifts of the community are not only wrong but could endanger the body so that it can’t function at all.
I am reminded of a quote from Rachel Held Evans in her book Searching For Sunday when she said,
And, for me, at least, that
is the most important thing to remember:
And as Jesus proclaimed in Nazareth his call “to bring good news to the poor, to proclaim release to the captives, the recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, and to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord,” he also lays that call upon us. We are called to be the church – ekklesia – a word used by Jesus and other Old and New Testament writers to call out citizens to battle for their communities.
In Searching For Sunday, Rachel Held Evans shares her continuing journey to find meaning in her personal and communal experience of following Jesus. She writes:
So church is, essentially, a gathering of kingdom citizens, called out—from their individuality, from their sins, from their old ways of doing things, from the world’s way of doing things—into participation in this new kingdom and community with one another. I’m not exactly sure how all this works, but I think, ultimately, it means I can’t be a Christian on my own. Like it or not, following Jesus is a group activity, something we’re supposed to do together. We might not always do it within the walls of church or even in an organized religion, but if we are to go about making disciples, confessing our sins, breaking bread, paying attention, and preaching the Word, we’re going to need one another. We’re going to need each other’s help.[i]
We are called to do that using the gifts we are given – which means everyone’s call and service will be different, but important, meaningful, and necessary, even when others disagree or don’t understand our call. Our gifts are meant to help us seek justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with our God, in His Body, doing our part… whatever that may be. May we give thanks that we are called together to be the body of Christ – to love and serve God, our neighbor, and ourselves, as a living witness to God’s presence and love in the world.
Thanks be to God!
Peace, Deb
Holy God, we thank you that each one of us without exception is a part of the Body of Christ. We love that it doesn’t matter to you how young or old we are, what our physical bodies look like or how well they function in order to be a part of your family. Help us to use the gifts of your Spirit together to fulfill our function to be instruments of your love and peace in the world. We ask in Jesus' name, Amen.
[i] Evans, Rachel Held. Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church (pp. 272-273). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.
Melanie Howard
https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/third-sunday-after-epiphany-3/commentary-on-1-corinthians-1212-31a-5
Robb Mccoy & Erik Fistler
No comments:
Post a Comment