I Corinthians 12:12-31 "Be What You Are" Scott Hoezee

Whenever I read a couple of Dr. Seuss books to one of my kids, I find that for the next hour or so after finishing the books, my mind keeps tripping along in a Seuss-like cadence. Probably most of us know how that sounds. "You'll be on your way up! You'll be seeing great sights! You'll join the high fliers who soar to the heights. You won't lag behind because you'll have the speed. You'll pass the whole gang and you'll soon take the lead." Or, "If we didn't have birthdays, you wouldn't be you. If you'd never been born, well then what would you do? If you'd never been born, well then what would you be? You might be a fish! Or a toad in a tree! You might be a doorknob! Or three baked potatoes! You might be a bag full of hard green tomatoes." Now if I read that stuff long enough, the next thing I know I am saying to my wife, "It's your turn for groceries, will you get them, oh please. Buy the milk and the bread, and don't forget cheese."

Among the reasons why Dr. Seuss succeeded so hugely in children's literature is precisely because he understood what makes a story both attractive to children and also memorable. These books, like many children's books, are filled with predictable rhythms, consistent rhyme schemes, and a lot of repetition. If a certain turn-of-phrase or metaphor is worth saying once in a children's book, it is also worth saying a dozen times. So in every version of "Goldilocks and the Three Bears," the child knows that everything here is going to come in threes: too hot, too cold, just right; too hard, too soft, just right. Sometimes both children and adults learn best when there is structured repetition.

Last Monday when I read our passage aloud, I suddenly realized that in these verses, the apostle Paul is in his Dr. Seuss mode. How often in these twenty verses doesn't Paul say, "The body has many parts but it is just one body. The body is one but it has many parts." Not only is there this rhythm and refrain in these verses, Paul makes yet another move worthy of a children's book: he anthropomorphizes parts of the body, giving a voice to the ear, the eye, the hand, the foot. Paul gives us imaginary conversations between the eye and the ear! He gives us an anatomical tour of the human body, replete with coy references to private parts, and he does it all with the noble simplicity of a children's book.

But Paul wasn't writing to children, and so you could wonder if some of the grown-ups in Corinth were a little miffed at being talked down to this way. I would imagine that most people probably got Paul's point already by verse 15. But Paul keeps going on and on in the same vein for another twelve verses. This morning, in addition to pondering the ultimate meaning of these verses, we will also want to wonder why Paul wrote the way he did. Was there a subtle message being conveyed even through Paul's writing style?

A good place to begin is with a review of the situation in Corinth. As I mentioned to my 11^th and 12^th grade class last Sunday, when we read the epistles of Paul, we have to remember that we are reading someone else's mail (and only one-half of the correspondence at that). There is absolutely no doubt that when Paul wrote the letter that we now call I Corinthians, he was responding to a letter he had already received from the church in Corinth. But we don't have that letter and so must guess a bit what it contained.

Suppose you are rummaging around in the attic looking for something but then run across a box of old letters written by your great-aunt Louise. Suppose you read one such letter that says, "Dear Agatha, Thank you so much for your news-filled note. I enjoyed reading it very much but am sorely troubled by what is going on with Harold and Christine. If they get caught, the family will never live it down!"

When you are reading someone else's mail, a welter of questions crops up. Who is this Agatha to whom Aunt Louise was writing? And what is going on with Harold and Christine?! Sure sounds tantalizing, but what is it all about? If you are serious about getting such questions answered, you will need to do some research. And it's the same with something like Paul's letter to Corinth. This letter wasn't written to you or me. We need to do some work to understand the people to whom it was originally mailed.

Near as we can tell, the church in Corinth, though clearly dear to Paul's heart, was a mess. The members were fighting over just about everything. The congregation was divided into multiple factions, each with its own agenda, its own ideas, even its own theology. And as often happens, the deeper the divide becomes among various groups, the more likely it is that some people will begin to claim superiority over others. It's not just that Group A is more correct than Group B, Group A is also just plain better, more spiritual, closer to Jesus than Group B.

That uppity, snotty, stuck-up attitude was a problem across the board in Corinth. But nowhere was it more in evidence than when it came to the question of spiritual gifts. Reading between the lines of Paul's words, it becomes pretty obvious that the people in Corinth who had the flashy gifts like the ability to preach, speak in tongues, or do some kind of healing ministry were lording it over the folks who could not do so well in the public eye.

And so Mr. Thaddeus was able every week to wow people with his stellar lectures in the Adult Education class. His rhetoric was polished, his Greek style was worthy of Homer, and his insights into theology were remarkably fresh. And it went straight to his head. So when he passed by the people on the Hospitality Committee serving coffee and baklava after the service, his nose was well up in the air. Who cares that these folks promote good fellowship? The church could lose the whole lot of them and not suffer one whit of spiritual diminishment. But if Mr. Thaddeus were to go, why the whole weave of the place would unravel. In the church, as in the wider world, the "little people" just don't count.

It begins on the playgrounds of life. At school, there is always the in-crowd and the outsiders. The vocabulary changes (and so I'm not sure of the current jargon) but there are always those kids who are cool, hip, with it, hot, righteous and there are those deemed nerdy, bogus, queer, lame. It begins on the playgrounds of life but such competition doesn't end there. Turf wars in the office, staking out your own little kingdom at work is common for adults, too. In many places people base their self-worth on how many square feet of office space they occupy. The truly competitive know the dimensions of the firm's various cubicles and offices and so know precisely when it is time to grind their teeth once Floyd gets moved up into an office with an extra window or a couple more feet of floorspace.

The stratification of society, the division of people into different classes, and the attitudes we take toward one another based on that are examples of sin's effect on this world. So long as we view people, even in a church setting, as a loose collection of individuals, then attitudes of superiority will prevail. So long as any group is depicted by way of an organizational chart with hierarchy and diminishing amounts of authority and prestige the farther down you go, then there will always be room for pride, competition, and a dismissive attitude toward the "little people" who are far down the ladder of success.

That's why Paul needs to invent a whole new image for the church. The image of the body that he chooses is organic and all-encompassing. It is also highly personal yet without being individualistic. That is, every person who reads this can relate it to his or her own body. We know how much we nurture and protect every single square inch of our bodies. You might go for weeks on end without ever once giving your little toe a second thought. But the moment someone threatens to smash that toe with a hammer, suddenly it becomes of supreme value to you and you will do whatever you can to protect it. That's my toe!

We know this intuitively. So Paul's rhetoric in verses 14-26 borders on the absurd. No foot, if it could talk, would say that it is useless just because it is not a hand. No eye would want to do without an ear. And even though perhaps no one else would be able to tell just by looking at you whether or not you have a gall bladder, you yourself know that if it were up to you, you would keep also that organ safely in place right where it belongs.

We know this. So why does Paul go on and on, in children's book-like fashion, to make a point that is so obvious? There may be several reasons. First, the Corinthians were acting in childish ways. If Paul seems to be taking these folks back to spiritual Kindergarten, the reason may be that they are acting in such juvenile ways that this Dr. Seuss-like rhetoric fit them just fine. A second reason may be that this image of the body really was a new, very novel way of looking at the church. As with all brand new ideas, this concept needed some thoughtful, prolonged explanation.

A third reason may be that Paul is mocking the Corinthians by imitating the conversations the Corinthians were having among themselves. He disguised it through body-part conversations but probably at least some of the people who first heard this letter read aloud sensed that Paul was pointing a finger at them. So when the foot says, "Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body," perhaps Mrs. Arbogast realized that those were her exact words from some weeks back, even though what she actually had said was, "Because I am not a teacher, I do not belong in this church." And when Paul imagines the eye saying to the hand, "I don't need you," maybe Mr. Thaddeus' face turned red as a tomato because he had made just such a dreadful remark two months before to a widow on the kitchen clean-up committee. In other words, the longer Paul went on and on about this, the more folks saw themselves in the picture.

But the real punch comes in verse 27 when Paul plainly says, "Now, you are the body of Christ." He did not suggest that they try to act like the body of Christ. He did not say that the day may come, far off in the future, when they may yet become the body of Christ. He says, flat out and in the present tense, "You quite simply are the body." But because they had indeed been speaking to one another along the lines of the conversations among hands, feet, eyes, and ears in the prior verses, it is clear that they had been behaving not only in unChristian ways but in ways that were absolutely idiotic--as inexplicably foolish as if an ear really did think it could do without the foot.

When you kill the spirit of another member of the church by acting as though what he or she does is of little or no importance, you are killing yourself. Many of us know that for the entire body to be laid up, all it takes is one slipped spinal disc, one bad stomach cramp, one whopping migraine. If you have a really bad stomach ache, it doesn't matter how healthy your legs are or how much intelligence you have in your brain--you are not going to walk anywhere or use your brain to think any clever thoughts because you will be too busy being doubled over. It's no different with the church, Paul says. The body is not healthy in any way unless it is healthy in every way.

But since this is a youth service, let me close by directing some comments to you young people. A first thing to say is that each of you is a member of this body and even though you are young and still in the process of figuring out where your particular gifts lie, you are every bit as valuable a part of this congregation as any of the Elders, Deacons, and pastors. We love you, need you, and value you.

A corollary to that, however, is that those of us who are older need to be vigilant that we do not say things that will give a young person cause to feel disconnected. Those of us who are older have an obligation to teach those who are young, to mold and shape their spiritual sensibilities. But we also need to be cautious if we begin dismissively to label things as "their music," or "their style," and other such phrases that treat the perspectives of our youth not as something from which the rest of us could maybe learn but as something the kids just need to "grow out of." When it comes to our youth, those of us who are older need to watch that we do not become the eye who says to the foot, "I don't need you."

But speaking of feet, this shoe can go on the other foot, too: those of you who are young must not be dismissive of those who are older. If you find yourself doing a lot of eye-rolling when an older person speaks, you need to wonder why you are doing that. Remember: each of us should treat every other person with the same cherished attitude we would take toward the nose on our own face or the toes on our own feet.

Probably, though, there is an application here to the wider sweep of life. Among the things implied by Paul's words is the idea that Christians need to engage in a lifelong training process by which we come to value people who are different. But that means that no matter where you are, every time you go along with the crowd in belittling others, not only are you failing to be nice the way Mom and Dad always told you to be, you are also chipping away at your ability to be appreciative of others. We need to realize the value of those not like us and be grateful for the talents they have but that we lack.

This is not easy. "Now you are the body of Christ and each of you is a part of it." Barbara Brown Taylor once observed that as metaphors go, this one doesn't always work. Despite everything I've said, the fact is that the church does not always feel so interconnected. If someone kicks me in the shin, I'll feel the pain--my whole body will react. But if on a given week you never get around to checking the prayer line, you may well show up for church Sunday morning only to discover that six days earlier, a member of this church got critically ill, was hospitalized, and is not expected to live. That happened six days before but you didn't feel the pain. You didn't even know about it. That person is a part of this body but her suffering didn't effect you the way a swift kick to the shin would.

Metaphorically we don't always feel the truth of what Paul wrote. But as Brown Taylor said, what if Paul wasn't being metaphorical but metaphysical. What if Paul really means that whether you know it or not, whether you like it or not, you are a member of one body with all these other people. After all, Paul did not write, "Now you are the body of Corinth." Today he would not tell us that we are the body of Calvin Church. He said we are the body of Christ. It is Christ who makes us one and it is in Him that we have interconnections in ways we could not have guessed. Except for the medical doctors in our midst, very few of us are aware of what keeps our bodies humming along. I saw a diagram of the Krebs Cycle once, but I didn't understand it and sure could not talk about it now. I know there are reasons why a needle in my toe causes a reaction in my brain, but I sure can't explain just how that happens. But I don't have to understand it to live like I know it's true.

Maybe that's what it's like to be a part of the body of Christ. We are connected to each other in ways we frankly could not have guessed, in ways we cannot fully comprehend. But just because you don't understand your body's inner workings that does not prevent you from acting like you know they exist anyway. If I know my body just is a unified whole, all my actions get calibrated accordingly. The gospel challenge for you young people and for every last one of us is to treat each other with all the care, charity, compassion, consideration, and love that properly belongs to a fellow part of the same body. You don't need to understand just how each one of us is linked to every other person. God's Word tells us that this simply is true. What remains is for us to act like we believe it. Amen.