Now, you may have heard this before from Fr. Bill or perhaps from one of your other supply clergy because, whatever school we went to, this is a standard seminary Old Testament truism: one of the essential characteristics of a true prophet, as opposed to false prophets who seek only to further themselves or the status quo; one of the essential characteristics of a true prophet is that in their forth-telling of God’s word, their message “comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable.” True prophets comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable...which is why true prophets get very few repeat dinner invitations!
While I’m not necessarily assigning her the status of a prophet, we all saw a bit of this dynamic last Monday as the Rt. Rev. Mariann Edgar Budde, the bishop of the Diocese of Washington, DC since 2011, made a bold plea for compassion in the face of power. Whether or not Bp. Budde had a reputation before Monday, she definitely has one now -- God bless her.
Jesus too has been gaining a reputation and in today’s Gospel reading, his reputation has preceded him to Nazareth. Looking back, God’s Spirit had come upon Jesus at his baptism; and then this same Spirit had driven him into, and sustained him through, a time of testing and temptation in the wilderness. Now, filled with the Spirit’s power, Jesus has returned to Galilee. He’s beginning to teach in the synagogues and so far, unlike Bp. Budde, he’s been praised by everyone.
He hasn’t done any healings yet, he hasn’t yet performed any miracles as Luke tells the story – there’s no changing of water into wine here I’m afraid – although there will be parties – but the 12 year old who amazed the scribes and the elders with his knowledge of Scripture at the Temple in Jerusalem has grown up; and he’s beginning to teach. Filled with the power of God’s Spirit, Jesus is beginning to open up the Scriptures is a whole new way.
Now he’s back in Nazareth, his home town, the place where not only does everyone know his name, they know his parents too (or at least they think they do). They know his siblings and they know his own habits and quirks, because they’ve watched him grow up. They’ve known him his whole life – which is why, when he says in the synagogue, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing,” they all look at him in shock.
Jesus catches his neighbors completely off guard; and the reason he catches them off guard is that by making this seemingly simple statement, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing,” Jesus is claiming everything he’s just read from Isaiah for himself. Most importantly, most shockingly, and most dangerously, in this statement he is specifically saying that the Spirit of the Lord is upon him; that the Lord has anointed him; and because “anointed one” is the literal translation of the word “messiah,” in this statement Jesus is, for all intents and purposes, claiming to be God’s messiah.
Just as shocking as this statement to his listeners in the synagogue, is that by choosing this specific passage from Isaiah to read – and Luke tells us that Jesus took the time to look it up – by choosing this specific passage Jesus is defining the messiah’s mission as a very un-military mission of servanthood and of healing. A very un-military mission of compassion.
Now, this was a red flag to everyone who was listening to Jesus because in first century Judea, the memory of Judas Maccabeus’ successful rebellion against Greek occupation two centuries earlier, a rebellion that had led to a very brief 100 years of independence for Judea, this particular memory of deliverance was still very fresh in the minds of all the people in Jesus’ day.
Everyone knew that God’s Messiah would be another warrior who would lead Judea and all of Israel to independence once again, this time independence from the Romans; and therefore, Jesus’ messianic claim of servanthood makes no sense at all. As both the spiritual and the political implications of what Jesus has said sink in, the hometown crowd begins to reconsider its welcome….
As one commentator has so truly observed, it’s a lot easier to deal with a messiah who WILL come than it is to deal with a messiah who HAS come. It’s a lot easier to debate abstract possibilities than it is to have push actually come to shove…and yet our Christian faith is faith in push having come to shove; it’s faith in a messiah who HAS come; and this messiah has entrusted the ongoing work of servanthood, the work of God’s ministry of reconciliation and compassion to us, and to all the faithful through the centuries who have followed him.
Jesus has entrusted the work of God’s reconciliation to the Church in all times and in all places, and because of this, it only makes sense that the first place this ministry of reconciliation begins is within the Church itself. This was the implication for the church in Corinth and it remains the implication for the wider Church today: become reconciled within your own house first so that then you can truly be a light to the world. But who wants to look at their own stuff first? Talk about a yukky implication!
The best way to avoid dealing with yukky implications, of course, is to argue about what they really mean – and this is what the Church has always done. There’s never been a golden age of the Church in terms of no bickering. We’ve always argued about what it really means to follow Jesus and about what it really means to love our neighbors as ourselves, what it really means to love our enemies, because the more time we can spend bickering and splitting hairs and pointing fingers, the more we can put the real work of faith on the back burner.
The church in Corinth that Paul had founded argued about a lot of things: they argued about in-house morality, about a church member who was sleeping with his mother-in-law; they argued about the proper attire for, and proper behavior during, worship; and they argued about some of the well-to-do members coming early to communal meals and eating all the food so that the poorer members who showed up on time got nothing. They argued about which among them was more advanced in their theological expertise and further along on their spiritual journey, and they argued at great length about spiritual gifts – about what they were, about who had them, and about which gift of the Spirit was the best.
(I’m sure their Annual Meetings were a lot of fun!)
All this and more is what Paul is dealing with in today’s 12th chapter of his First Letter to the church in Corinth. As we heard in last Sunday’s New Testament reading, Paul has just finished telling the Corinthians that “there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; and there are varieties of services, but the same Lord; and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone. To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good.” (1 Cor. 12:4-7)
Today, Paul continues the theme of the common good by talking about what commentator William Barclay has called “the supreme glory of the Christian” – which is to be “part of the body of Christ upon earth.” (Barclay, Corinthians, 114)
Although his 1950’s phrasing sounds outdated, Barclay continues, “[Christ] has no hands but our hands/To do his work today;/[Christ] has no feet but our feet/To lead men in his way; [Christ] has no voice but our voice/To tell men how he died;/[Christ] has no help but our help/To lead them to his side.” (114)
And as another more recent author has said, “[Paul] considers that believers as believers are already the body of Christ, and he exhorts [the Corinthians] to relate to one another in a manner appropriate to what they already are.” (IDB, 1 Cor, 948)
Paul’s tremendous vision of the interdependence of Christian believers, the interdependence of you and me and all of us through the centuries who call ourselves Christians is both exhilarating and daunting, because as Paul points out, the Body needs its members to be different; and especially in these days, we don’t tend to be all that comfortable with differences.
What we are comfortable with in this time of heightened polarization is like-mindedness; and we would be even more comfortable if “unity” meant “uniformity” or if “oneness” meant “sameness”, but they don’t…and this is important to emphasize: “unity” does not mean “uniformity.” “Oneness” does not mean “sameness.”
“Unity does not exclude diversity,” one author has said, but that means we’re stuck with implications again, the implications of a messiah who HAS come, a messiah who loves diversity; and so, like the Christians in Corinth, our preference is to cling to our fear and our discomfort and to say to those who differ from us both in the Church and in the world, “I HAVE NO NEED OF YOU.”
What a terrible thing to say. What a terrible thing to hear! I HAVE NO NEED OF YOU – and yet we say it often, one religious group to another; one political party to another; one friend or family member to another: I HAVE NO NEED OF YOU.
Back in 2010, 15 years ago, at Trinity in Orange we had a Lenten series that focused on forgiveness. Our presenter was a mediation consultant named Jim Calhoun, and I’m going to read something that Jim wrote at the time about his program because it has direct relevance to any of us “having no need” of one another – and remember Jim’s words are 15 years old.
Jim wrote, “Forgiveness is an essential part of the process of reconciliation. In my practice as a mediator and conflict resolution specialist, I find that the most common obstacle to forgiveness is not the desire for revenge, but the practice of contempt. Wide spread contempt, a particular feature in a culture growing increasingly narcissistic, allows us to believe that we are better than, more worthy than and more special than others. In turn, we allow ourselves the ‘pleasure’ of treating others with disgust, disdain, and spite. Healthy relationships,” he says, “healthy relationships cannot survive contempt.” Healthy relationships cannot survive contempt.
I HAVE NO NEED OF YOU is an expression of contempt, and it’s an expression the Church through the centuries has learned well; but we need to get over it because we are the Body of Christ and as such, we have work to do. We have work to do, not only to bring good news to the poor, but also to bring food, and primary education, and prenatal health care to the poor; and freedom to those oppressed by famine, war, and corruption.
We have work to do, to bring civility and mutual respect back into our common discourse, and to recognize each other’s differences as gifts necessary for our mutual health. We have work to do, because in that baptismal covenant we renewed two weeks ago in honor of the baptism of Jesus, we promised to “strive for justice and peace among all people, and to respect the dignity of every human being.”
“Strive for the greater gifts,” Paul says to the Corinthians in chapter 12, and by this he means spiritual gifts. “Love,” he goes on to say a few verses later in chapter 13, “love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end….And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.”
One theologian says, “Paul writes 1 Corinthians 12 to remind the Corinthians of our interdependence in the Church. He writes 1 Corinthians 13 to remind them that what makes interdependence possible is love. Because love holds us together it is the greatest gift of all.” (LP, Church, 37)
And so The Captain and Tenille had it right: Love will keep us together. It is love, and must be love, that keeps and holds all of us together. We are not just “a body of Christians”; as Christians, we are the Body of Christ, a spiritual and ontological reality that is born of the Spirit and the Cross; born of the water, the bread, and the wine. To be a member of the Body of Christ is privilege; and challenge; and gift.
And so, in the name of Christ, let us indeed bring, and honor, our many gifts that differ – because without exception, we all have need of each other.
Amen.