I Corinthians 11:17-34 "Recognition" Scott Hoezee

Russell Banks once wrote a short story titled "The Fish." Once upon a time a giant fish lived in a lake. But the authorities decided this fish was a menace that needed to be eliminated. So a certain Colonel Tung ordered his soldiers to line up along the shore, ready to fire their semi-automatic weapons as soon as the fish came near the surface. When the fish appeared, the soldiers opened fire, boiling the water with their deadly spray of bullets. But the fish survived unscathed. So the next week Colonel Tung ordered them to place mines into the lake, resulting in a huge underwater explosion which killed most everything in the lake: eels, perch, plants, shrimp, clams, frogs, and snails all floated dead on the surface. But the giant fish survived unscathed.

By now the reputation of this "magic" fish had grown. People began to feed the fish, believing it had charms it could confer on those who treated it well. So Colonel Tung disguised his soldiers, letting them join the throngs who threw bread into the water. Once the fish had gained their trust, they tossed in hand grenades painted white to look like bread chunks. The grenades went off, but the fish went on swimming unscathed.

Now a whole religious community built up around this magic fish. People began to bring fruit jars to the lake, filling them with the water, which they believed had healing powers. So Colonel Tung finally gave up, deciding that instead of destroying the fish, he would profit from it by imposing a water tax on all who wanted to take a sample home. But poachers would come in the night, siphoning thousands of gallons to sell on the black market. The water level of the lake began to get alarmingly low. At last a morning came when there was too little water left to sustain the great fish, and though people tried to toss water onto the fish's now-exposed body, it was too late and they buried the fish that evening.

When I read this story, I thought of the church. The Christian church is, as someone once put it, the anvil which has worn out many of history's best hammers. From the Roman Empire to the Soviet Empire, from Nero to Fidel Castro nations and rulers have tried to hammer away at the Christian church. The faith has been outlawed, believers have been martyred, the Bible has been burned. Yet through it all the church has gone on.

In Moscow cathedrals which Stalin dismantled have now been re-built. Leningrad has gone back to being called Saint Petersburg and the Russian Orthodox Church once again is showing signs of vibrancy. Stalin is dead, but the Word of God lives on. Statues of Lenin and Marx have been ground into powder but the cross of Jesus is still lifted high.

Like the magic fish in Banks' fable, so with the church: it keeps swimming. Alas, also like that magic fish, it seems that the greatest damage the church has suffered has come not from the outside but the inside. The worst ecclesiastical wreckage in history is not what those bent on destruction have done but what the faithful within the church have done to each other. Like the religious water collectors in the story, when individual Christians grab only what they can get for themselves without giving back, others begin to suffer.

That seems to be Paul's concern throughout his long first letter to the church at Corinth. At that time in history the church of Christ was actively persecuted in many places. The city of Corinth was a cess pool of corruption, idolatry, wanton sexuality, and greed. Yet in and through all of that the greatest harm that was coming to the Corinthian congregation was not from the outside but from the inside. Paul laments that members of the congregation were sick, some had died, and still others seemed spiritually stagnant and weak.

But all of this unhappiness was the result not of persecution by the world but of the selfishness of church members. Like many places in the early church, so in Corinth the celebration of the Lord's Supper had become tied to a larger church potluck. In Corinth, however, these "love feasts" were marred by thoughtless class distinctions.

It would appear that the wealthier members, by virtue of having flexible work schedules, would arrive first, their high-class haute cuisine of foie gras, caviar, and braised leg of lamb in tow. These members would then take the best seats in the dining room of whatever house they happened to be at that evening and proceed to tuck into this good food without waiting for the working class folks to show up. So by the time the blue collar crowd arrived they had to sit in the kitchen and, since the really good food was long gone, they would be stuck with at best a tuna casserole. Then they would pass around the bread and wine of the Lord's Supper as though they were one big church family!

Small wonder that in response Paul wrote, "Now regarding your love feasts: I don't have a single positive thing to say! You can call it the Lord's Supper, but what you are doing is most certainly not connected to our Lord!" This, then, is the setting for Paul's well-known call, "Let a man examine himself before he eats the bread and drinks the cup."

In the past we have tended to turn this into a reason for personal navel-gazing. In our own tradition we have launched from this verse to the notion of our needing to have an entire week's worth of self-examination as a kind pre-communion preparation. We are called to make sure we are not sinning in any willful way. We are called to make sure we've confessed all our sins and double-checked to make sure we have faith.

All of that, however, may well misapply this verse. Certainly we do have to take our sins seriously. Certainly the Lord's table is no place for anyone who believes he doesn't even have any sins in the first place. But nevertheless you do come as a sinner, not as someone who has managed to put such a fine shine on his or her faith through a week of preparation that you have secured your own place at the table. Examining yourself as Paul recommends is not about making sure you have targeted all of your personal sins but rather it has to do with what Paul writes in the very next verse: namely, discerning the body.

I Corinthians 11:28 is not about your personal relationship with Jesus. Just the opposite: Paul is trying to make people more concerned about others! You examine yourself not for your own sake but for the sake of the community. When Paul urges us to "recognize the body," he means seeing that in Jesus we are all webbed together in what should be mutually edifying relationships of love, encouragement, generosity, and grace.

This morning we have installed new elders and deacons and we are about to come the Lord's Table. Both events present a great challenge: the challenge to recognize that this great big, diverse bunch of people that is Calvin Church just is the body of Christ. In the next chapter Paul claims that in God's sight we are as connected to each other as body parts. Your fingers may be a long way away from your toes, but they are connected and must work together. The nose on your face is far more obvious than is your spleen, but both are vital parts of who you are. You may not think about your spleen much on the average day, but you need it and would surely take steps to protect it if it were somehow threatened .

We need a similar attitude toward the body of Christ. Most of us do not know everyone in this room this morning. I am sometimes struck when I mention to other members of this congregation the name of a certain person whom I visited in the hospital only to hear people reply, "Who's that? I'm not even sure what she looks like."

Of course, we cannot all be each other's best friends. We cannot realistically attempt to have a different member over for dinner each night. It is inevitable that we establish circles of friends to whom we are closer than we are to others. And in a congregation with close to 800 names on the ledger, it is not likely we could immediately come up with the name of every Calvin member whom we might happen to run into at Woodland Mall.

Nevertheless, we have Paul's solemn charge to discern this whole place as the body of Christ. As we pass those trays from hand to hand in a few moments, you are supposed to see in your mind's eye tendrils of thread, like silk from a spider's body, trailing from the platters and so connecting person to person until we are a mass of connected fibers.

But doing that requires imagination. Barbara Brown Taylor once noted how good at imagining little kids are. They drape towels over their shoulders and become grand kings and queens wearing ermine capes with toilet brush scepters. Whole universes get created between the exposed roots of an oak tree with acorn currency and oceans made from fruit jar lids filled with water. Children believe there is always more to see than what is obviously in front of your eyes.

Taylor recalls that her favorite childhood picture books were the ones that included pages with the caption, "How many animals can you find in this picture?" So she would stare at the image of a meadow to discover the zebra outline tucked into a tree's leaves or to find that the pile of boulders off in the distance really was in the shape of an elephant.

How wonderful to be able to confront ordinary scenes with the desire to find the extraordinary. Just that is the challenge before you new elders and deacons, but really it is a challenge for all of us as we eat the bread and drink the cup of our Lord this morning.

We need to think of Calvin Church and recall not just our closest friends but all the members. We need to sit here before the service starts, look around at the people sitting in other pews, and whether or not we know every one of them personally, we need to keep the eye of our imagination open to look for the hidden pictures in this place.

We need to see each other as cherished brothers and sisters. We need to know that just below the surface of our Sunday best is often a world of hurts. We need to take note of not just the folks who are as obvious as the nose on Calvin Church's face but those who do vital work in quiet corners of the body.

You Council members need to be as imaginative as you are diligent, seeing this congregation through the eyes of a little child who always believes there is more here than meets the eye. But the same goes for all of us. To eat and drink judgment to yourself is, of course, a fearsome possibility. But if it happens, it is not because you are a sinner. There's no other reason to come to this table except that you are a sinner! No, if you fall under this judgment it will be because the sins of your personal life are the only thing you are concerned about!

We call this sacrament "communion" because through it we thicken our union with Jesus. We call it "communion" because through it Jesus binds us closer together. The least we can do is cooperate with the Spirit by opening up the eyes of our imagination to see, really to see, the hidden presence of God in each other. As we come to this table, we do this in loving remembrance of Jesus but also in loving awareness of one another. Amen.