One Body, Many Gifted Members (A Sermon from First Church in Cambridge)

First Church in Cambridge, Congregational UCC
25 January 2003

Mary Luti

One Body, Many Gifted Members

Each year, our Annual Meeting offers us the chance to do our congregation's business in an atmosphere of fellowship and with an eye to the whole, to the common good. The reading from Paul's first letter to the Corinthians, appointed for the universal church by the Common Lectionary, seems extraordinarily apt for us on this local occasion. As I meditated on it during the last few days, it struck me that it would serve us well as a communal examination of conscience on this important day for our congregation.

I propose, then, that we listen to Paul anew and that we ask ourselves how we are doing on three of the important points he makes in this ancient appeal to a gifted, spiritually ambitious young church. Here are the three points for us to ponder:

There is one body—the church—which is somehow in fact Christ's own Body, and we are all members of it.
All the members of the Body are spiritually-gifted.
The Spirit's gifts given to the members are for the up-building of the common good.

Paul says that the Corinthians were baptized into one body, they were, in other words, introduced into a unified life, a life of solidarity with Christ and other Christians. For Paul, the church is shared life, or as Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it, " life together," and the life we share is the life of Christ's own Body.

Now, if you don't know exactly what that means, it's OK. No one else really does either. Paul was the Howard Dean of his day, always shooting off his lip from the hip in big bursts of mixed metaphors. Chances are good that Paul himself didn't know precisely what he was urging on us with this Body of Christ imagery. It's a poetic utterance, and as such we don't so much analyze it for intellectual understanding as explore it with our imaginations: we feel it, live into it, wonder at it. But whatever it means exactly, we affirm generally that to be in the church is to belong to Christ and to each other in such a way that it is as if we have but a single life shared by all.

Paul says that one consequence of this solidarity is that the sufferings and joys of one member are the sufferings and joys of all. The members feel for each other in this intimate way because they are joined to each other in the one Body. What happens to a part affects the whole. It's also because they are transparent to each other. They live, in a sense, in such close proximity that it is easy to see that they are fellow-sufferers and fellow-rejoicers, easy to know that they are all weak and strong, that they are able and not so able.

Moreover, because in the Body " they is us," no one is ashamed of or surprised by the sublime, ridiculous, sinful and sorry array of human experiences and behaviors. No one pretends that his or her life is untouched by them. No one feels more or less a part of the church because of them. And all can call each other to deeper truthfulness and accountability in Christian living because of this shared human reality; they purposefully help each other grow and change. For Paul, the church is a community of solidarity, teeming with help and healing, truth-telling and forbearance, celebration and thanksgiving.

And so I ask us all: Is this true of us? What would it take to become this kind of church? What can you and I do with God's help to make it so?

Paul also says that all the members of the Body of Christ are gifted. Now, when we talk about being gifted in the ordinary sense (out there " in the world" ), we usually think of it as an individual matter. In the words of my colleague, Martin Copenhaver,¹ each one has gifts to nurture so that individually one can reach one's full potential. If one is exceptionally gifted, one expects to be able to make his or her way in the world successfully, to compete and to prosper. Any obligation one feels about being gifted is often an obligation to the individual self to make the most of one's gifts.

Not so with Paul. His discussion of gifts is inextricably linked to his understanding of the community, the Body, the church. For him, gifts come from God's Spirit. We could even say that they are the Spirit making itself tangibly present in the multiple and diverse gifts of the members of the church. Paul thinks of these gifts in practical terms, to be sure—after all, he insists that they are given for the ordering of the church's life.

But to limit Paul's idea of " gifts given for upbuilding" to " skills useful for running the CE programs or managing the congregation's portfolio" is to do Paul's insight about the nature and purpose of gifts a disservice. Paul understands the community's giftedness most profoundly as the infallible sign that it is the very Spirit of God that is animating the body. For Paul, the church's giftedness is the way we know that it is being nourished and guided not by human vision, skill and power, but by God's. A church without gifts is a " dis-spirited" church. It lacks breath, inspiration. It is dying or already dead.

Now, if all the members are gifted, it follows that the church already has within itself all that is required to be the church and carry out Christ's mission. God, Paul implies, has not given us less than we need; God has given us all we need. We lack no resource or possibility, no energy, skill, imagination, or spirit. And so it also follows that the only thing standing between us and the thriving, wonder-working, world-changing, life-altering, truth-telling, risk-taking and extravagantly-hospitable church God intends us to be is faith—bold confidence that the free and faithful exercise of all the Spirit's gifts will indeed make us such a congregation. In short, the work of the church is to free up its members to know, claim and use their gifts.

But here's the rub: we often don't know what our gifts really are. Or we think we do, but it turns out that we are not always the best judges of our own gifts. And sometimes we think we have no gifts at all. Martin points out that the same was true of many biblical leaders, prophets, and disciples. They did not put themselves forward; God took the initiative and called them. But when they heard God calling, they acted like God had dialed a wrong number. "I'm inarticulate," Moses stuttered. "I have unclean lips," declared Isaiah. " I'm too young," said Jeremiah. "But, God, you know that I hate the Ninevites! Why send me to them?" whined Jonah.

"Who, me?", many of our ancestors in the faith said. Only rarely in the Bible does someone line up at the Nominating Committee table to sign on for committee work. As Martin suggests, maybe we need to rethink the idea of volunteerism in the church—it is definitely not a biblical concept! The central figures of the Bible are not volunteers. They get drafted into the Lord's service, sometimes kicking and screaming.

Most of us don't hear God call us as audibly as our biblical ancestors did. We do believe, however (and our congregational way is based on this conviction) that the Holy Spirit works in and through the community. The current UCC identity campaign affirms, " God is still speaking," but the ordinary way we hear God speak is by listening deeply to each other. The discernment of gifts is, then (or should be), a communal matter. It's in the Body where we have an opportunity to discover our spiritual gifts.

Now, this may seem like a nice, if airy idea, only an abstract theological possibility. But it is meant to happen, and it really does. I know firsthand that some of you have indeed discovered gifts you did not think you had right here in this congregation, in the course of engaging in its ordinary life of worship, service, fellowship and learning, and I know that that discovery has changed your lives. In the ideal congregation that Paul envisions, everyone would know what their gifts are, everyone would know that their gifts are needed, all gifts would be welcomed as manifestations of the Spirit, all would be needed for accomplishing God's mission.

In Paul's ideal church, people would actively call gifts out of each other, help each other find the right use for them, challenge each other to stretch and grow. No one would withhold his or her gifts, and no gift freely given would be refused, unappreciated or abused. Burnout in service to the church would be unknown, because everyone would not only give generously, everyone would also receive abundantly, and thus all would be treasured and fed.

And so I ask us all: Is this true of us? What would it take to become this kind of fellowship? What can you and I do with God's help to make it happen?

III

Now, to be sure, Paul did not write this letter to congratulate the Corinthians on the faithful use of their gifts. He wrote instead to chastise and correct them. The Corinthians, it seems, were creating all sorts of divisive hierarchies in their church based on who had which of the Spirit's many gifts. Paul had to remind them that the Spirit's gifts are given to the members for the up-building of the whole Body, for the common good. They are not personal possessions, rights, badges of virtue, signs of holiness, guarantees of authority, or tickets to power. They are instead vital signs, signs of the Spirit's life in and for the whole Body.

Thus there are no elite gifts, there is only (as we shall see next week) love. When, in other words, the gift of serving tables or counting money trustworthily is exercised with an eye to loving, selfless service, it is as indispensable a gift as the teaching of scripture or the utterance of prophecy. There are no elite gifts, and there are no elite members either. All are vital body parts, and the whole Body of Christ thrives when each does what it is called to do in willing complementarity. The Body suffers gravely, even mortally, only when it is convulsed with the self-importance, envy and contempt of some parts that say to others, " I have no need of you."

The Corinthian situation which Paul writes to correct is not unique. Every church has some folks who think that their gifts are better, more needed, indispensable; who use them to consolidate power or keep things from changing; or who vastly under-value the gifts of others. Every church has people who think they have gifts for one thing, but don't, yet cannot be dissuaded from trying to carry out endeavors for which their actual gifts are inadequate. All congregations have people who think too highly of their gifts.

But it also works the other way around, and perhaps more often. Too many people in our congregations fail to recognize and value their own gifts, or they compare their own gifts unfavorably with others,'or they extol the gifts of others and denigrate their own. My aforementioned colleague also tells the story of a retreat he went on with his deacons. Its theme was spiritual gifts, and he asked the deacons to name their peculiar gift by identifying it with a human body part. Nobody had anything to say. They could think of all the body parts they were not, all the gifts they lacked. But a spiritual gift that might build up the church... No. Who, me?, they seemed to say.

Since that approach flopped, he asked them to talk about the gifts they saw in one another. After a brief pause, someone said, "Well, I'd say that Liz is an ear. When my husband died, there she was. She sat with me and created a quiet place for me to grieve." "Me?" Liz asked. "I didn't do anything. I just listened." Someone else chimed in, "Dick here, he is a strong hand. Whenever we go to the soup kitchen, he hauls everything in and out of the car and stays late to sweep the floor." "Me?" said Dick. "I only did that because I wasn't comfortable doing anything else."

The conversation went on like that for some time. The deacons, Martin reports, were shocked to learn what others saw as their gifts and their unique ministry. Everyone kept protesting, " Oh, that's nothing special... We're not spiritual or gifted. Just a bunch of well-meaning stumblers. Just a collection of ears and eyes and arms and mouths and brains and hearts." Look again, Paul says. When you are brought together you are the Body of Christ, equipped with the gifts needed to do ministry in the world. By yourselves you don't have all the gifts needed to lead a full Christian life. But in community God gives you to one another, and everything becomes possible.

And so I ask: Is this true of us? What would it take to become this kind of fellowship? What can you and I do with God's help to make it happen?

I promised only three points, but bear with me now for a fourth and concluding word about the annual meeting. This letter of Paul can also help us appreciate the genius of our congregational way and the polity of the UCC. Embedded in his discussion of the unity of the Body, the diversity of gifts, and the equality of all the members, you can feel the great confidence Paul had in God's confidence in the church. Paul believes that God has willed to form a people of sovereign conscience, a people able and willing to enter covenants of mutual respect and deference, a people worthy to share the one ministry of Jesus Christ and to do so faithfully, maturely, with creativity and vision, and without authoritarian intrusion.

Those of us who have been adopted by the UCC and who knew other polities that do not share this enormous confidence in the grace of God working in and through egalitarian communities approach each annual meeting, I think, with a particular reverence for the one Body with its diverse gifts. I know that I at least experience a certain awe when I contemplate the free-church Protestant way of uncoerced discernment of a common pathway and democratic self-government, no matter how messy, inefficient, exasperating and occasionally disastrous this way of ordering the church's life together can be.

And so today, as I examine my own membership in the Body of Christ that is FCC, as I evaluate the use I've made of the gifts God gave to me for its good, and as I invite us all to do the same, I also and especially pray that God's Spirit will refresh in us all—those who are latecomers and those for whom the congregational way was a cradle—a profound gratitude for this daring thing we do, for this beloved community God has made of us by grace.

In Jesus' name. Amen.

1This and other insights or illustrations identified as Martins' are borrowed from Martin Copenhaver, "Gifted, One and All", a sermon delivered on January 28, 2001.