21 January 2007
I Corinthians 12.12-31a
Now you are the body of Christ
© J. Christy Wareham, 2007
I don’t actually remember this happening, but my mother does.
I was eight or nine years old. We were packing a rented travel trailer for a two-week vacation, a week of it in Yosemite. We lived at the top of an extremely steep hill—San Francisco steep, even though it was in Los Angeles, and we had to park the trailer at the bottom of it—and every armload of clothes and food and gear required a trip down the hill from the house and a trudge back up. Those were the days of LA’s worst smog, before pollution controls, and between sweating in the heat and choking on the air, my family members were in various degrees of physical distress.
Well, most of them were. I was fairly comfortable. My job required sitting in relative stillness at the table of the trailer. As my mother remembers it, I sat at length, deep in thought, working out important concerns for the trip we were undertaking. This did not require legwork. I was not frantically stowing items in an organized way, making lists or planning meals. I was not cleaning. I was not making any effort to stay out of the way of those who were doing these things. Sometimes I went back to the house, but I made haste to retake my post in the trailer. What I was doing was very important to me, whatever it was, and, in addition, I had to contend with the persistent complaints of my siblings, busied, as they were, with their more menial tasks.
It turned out great fun visiting Yosemite, one of the nation’s first national parks, as of 1890, and for the previous 8,000 years the home of American Indians. President Kennedy had just months before visited the Ahwahnee Lodge, so my brother and I scurried to sit in every chair of the public area to be sure to have sat in the same place as our president had. We saw Half Dome, Mirror Lake, Bridalveil Fall and El Capitan. In the evening, we waited outside at our campsite until just after dusk, when park rangers shoved an enormous pile of embers over a cliff for what was then the famously popular “Fire Fall.”
The Fire Fall lasted just a minute or so, and after it we started over to the bath house by ones and twos to wash up for bed and brush our teeth. Some member of my family—I won’t accuse my younger sister, it isn’t worth the grief—had come back and left the tube of toothpaste on the table for the next person, and the next person came out and said, “Hey, who lost the cap to the toothpaste?!”
Everybody looked around accusingly at everybody else. My parents went in search to the bath house, the men’s section and the women’s, but they came back without the cap. Everyone else was standing around outside blaming others for a problem the magnitude of which was such that it would impact the entire family multiple times a day, threatening to ruin an entire family vacation. What about disease? What about the hard plug that would form in the end of the tube? It was already a disaster.
While others were thus engaged in finger pointing, I sprung to my feet and dashed into the trailer, where I was heard to be rummaging through our gear and supplies. There was the usual headshaking of my parents, and the tongue wagging of my siblings. (Such was their custom during my moments of purposeful, if eccentric, activity.) But when I emerged to stand in the flickering light of the flames dancing in our fire pit, there my family beheld me, my arm extended, and, pinched between my thumb and forefinger, the bright glint of a small cap, about the size of a coat button.
“I knew we’d need an extra cap for the toothpaste!” I shouted in triumph.
Yes, because of my deep pre-vacation contemplations and my prescient deliberation, my family had with them, unbeknownst to all but me, a spare toothpaste cap. In this small way, the Wareham Family Expedition to the vast, hostile wilderness was saved. We would not end our days like the Donner party, succumbing to unforeseen perils and wondering if we would taste like chicken to each other. Because of me and my gift of forethought, my family and I were restored to our joyous and pleasant summertime adventure in peace and ease.
The value of one person’s gift is not always obvious to the family—the family of our original home or the family of the church—but whoever you are and whatever you’re blessed to do, your particular service will be required, even if you’re the only one, at times, who realizes it. My parents and siblings didn’t always appreciate my gift. Until some benefit materialized from it, they didn’t even know it existed, but they never supposed I wasn’t part of the family. (They sometimes wished it, but they never did suppose it.)
In church, we are all part of the family. Or we are all, in Paul’s metaphor, part of the body. The trick is to figure out how we each of us with our gift play our role. All of us, different as we are—unable as we are, oftentimes, to see each other’s gifts—all of us have gifts made to be incorporated into the life of the church. I’m not sure we truly believe this, but it is so, at least according to Paul.
We believe all gifts matter to some degree. Can you cook a meal for a hundred people? We know what to do with that gift. Can you organize a project, replace a water heater, devise a meeting agenda or visit someone in the hospital? We have a job for someone like you. Can you whip up enthusiasm for a challenge or settle the jaggled nerves of a parent facing a crisis? There’s a place for you in front of an eager crowd or over a quiet cup of coffee.
There are other gifts we don’t know exactly what to do with. Has a trip you’ve taken to visit the profound degradation of poverty somewhere in the world changed your perspective on what really matters in life? We will understand your momentary moral awakening and can patiently wait while it goes back to sleep. Can you see the dysfunction in the way decisions get made? Maybe some other church could use your insight. Has a voice told you to do something new in your life? We, your friends, will listen to you without judgment, but we really don’t know what to do about something like that. Has a whole new realm of spiritual discipline opened up before you and given you deep spiritual connection with God? Please accept our compliments, but we don’t want, by comparison, to feel deficient in what serves for us as a simple, but adequate, occasional prayer life.
But, you see, these are all spiritual gifts—Paul also describes them as spiritual activities—that are shifting around in churches like ours through the coffee hour. Chances are, you will brush shoulders with someone, today, who bears a spiritual gift and is undertaking a spiritual activity like these—perhaps actually some of these gifts and activities—but you do not know it and are not likely to find out about it, because it may not seem safe to tell you.
So we blithely pass by one another without knowing or noticing or even wondering about the very marvelous spiritual gifts—perhaps precisely the very essential ones that would transform and enliven our church—and we fail to bring ourselves even to the point of curiosity about them. It may be that someone sitting here right now is figuring out what the spiritual equivalent to the toothpaste cap is for our congregation, and we may be ignoring, or even resenting, that activity. And I know the pragmatist will say, “Yeah, well, I’ll wrap a piece of tinfoil over the end of the tube, and everything’ll be fine without the stupid cap.” And, okay, we can make do for many little deficiencies, maybe even for a long time, but even little deficiencies tend to add up to trouble. It was famously for lack of the seemingly insignificant nail that the horseshoe, the horse and ultimately a kingdom was lost. If only we were at least curious about such little things. We could be more curious about the spiritual gift of the person next to us.
And we could be curious about our own spiritual gift.
St. Augustine wrote:
[Mortals] go forth to wonder at the heights of mountains,
the huge waves of the sea,
the broad flow of the rivers,
the vast compass of the ocean,
the courses of the stars,
and they pass by themselves without wondering.
At the very least, as we might be curious about each other, we can practice wondering what spiritual gifts and activities we have ourselves.
Think about this common experience in a church community. Someone has unexpectedly lost a loved one, and we all saw how shaken this person’s world was, and how torn the fabric of faith and hope was. We watched and waited with compassion for some relief and peace for their heart. We watched and waited a long time, and then we saw the change we’d waited for, prayed for. Perhaps, we think, now, it was time that healed the person, as it “heals all wounds.” Perhaps we think our prayers helped. Perhaps we assume the cards and casseroles and caring conversations soothed the sorrowing soul of our friend. Let’s say all that is true.
But the question that is also worth asking—the thing for us to wonder about—is, What is it in my friend’s own soul that enabled healing, recovery and hope to come? I believe that nothing done for us from the outside provides the full explanation for the spiritual changes that occur on the inside. I believe that something in each of us is activated by all the praying, caring and casseroles, and it is worth it for each of us to find out what that is. It may be the ability to pray with a sense of fervent connectedness to God. It may be the ability to meditate with dreamlike active imagination—perhaps with scriptural images, or perhaps with imagery that takes on a life of its own. Your ability may be to make your mind so still that in the silence of the universe you hear the bell-like song of the Spirit. Your ability may be something as seemingly ordinary as journaling, though people like me who keep trying to keep a journal would find that a miracle. Each of us can and should ask what it is about who we are, how we’re uniquely made and what it is that we have done, in times of spiritual and emotional restoration, that has contributed to our becoming whole again.
So we see here, already, two things that are important for appropriating and integrating the unique gift of the Spirit we every one of us has to contribute to the life and health of the body of Christ, the church. We on the one hand can learn to be curious about each other’s gifts, opening ourselves to the difference and newness we have overlooked, or even avoided, in each other. On the other hand, we can look inward and discover what in our own self, our soul, is spiritually active and alive in a way that heals wounds to the heart and cures the sickened soul. The balm in Gilead may be found in the stirrings within your own breast.
Finally, once you know what your gift is and what the gifts of other members of the body are, how do we all of us, members of the body, live and breathe and work as a unified whole? How is it that bodily functions become an organism?
What I’ve been noticing in my grandchildren is that their limbs and organs just start in. Things are pretty wacky for a while. The arm goes this way; the leg goes that way. The fingers grasp and the wrist flings. The mouth takes in food, just like it’s supposed to, but sometimes more food goes down the chin than down the gullet. When, likewise, we start doing things in the church we haven’t trained ourselves for, it could look pretty messy.
I mentioned, last week, the potential for what would surely have been an uncomfortable demonstration of speaking in tongues, and when I said that, there was about a half of one percent hope in me that it would happen, that somebody would be on their feet any moment, blurting out syllables the rest of us could make no sense of. It would have been weird. It might have been scary. Someone would no doubt blame it on me, and that way we could, in any event, turn it into a pastor controversy, which is at least something familiar and, to that degree, comforting.
All the same, I’d rather that than nothing at all. At least someone would be letting something spiritually novel and real happen. I believe whatever happens will develop into real progress. A baby looks jerky and wacky for a while, trying out all the nerves and muscles in her body, but eventually, things start to work together, and pretty soon there is smiling. There is crawling and walking. Later there is speaking and drawing and creative play. Only much later is there fitting puzzles together, and building with blocks and Legos, and making stories with dolls and action figures. Something like a real life begins to happen. It takes time, and patience is needed.
I believe it is a time in the church when we can learn from Paul’s metaphor of the body and the way the body learns how it works. We need to each of us figure out our unique spiritual gift. We need to trust the gift in our self and to honor the gift in each other. It is too soon to ask what each gift is going to mean and how different gifts will all work together. It is enough to trust that in practicing our gifts, we will learn how they work together. If we are able to believe in the miracle of a baby, we can find a way to believe in the miracle of the body our Christ, of which we are all members.
The joy of who we are and how we are is enough right now to inspire boisterous songs of praise and thanksgiving. As we sing and enliven the body with the practicing of our gifts, we will soon enough come to clarity about what we, as a congregation, are here yet to do. We will know we shall do it. We will know, as we are about to sing in the next hymn, our vocation as Christ’s body for our day in this place:
To live according to [God’s] word,Amen.
And daily learn, refreshed, restored,
That [God] is Lord of all
And will not let us fall.
—Fred Pratt Green, 1981
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