"Playing at Church”   

1 Corinthians 12:12-31a, Luke 4:14-21

Rev. Peter W. Shidemantle

 Sunday, January 25, 2004, 3^rd Sunday in Ordinary Time

PEBBLE HILL PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH

5299 Jamesville Rd., Dewitt, NY  13214  Phone:  446-0960

phillchu@twcny.rr.com

 My father used to tell how his mother (my grandmother) remembered he and his little brother "playing church" when they were very young children. My dad would be the preacher, and he would shake his finger at the imaginary "congregation" and say over and over, "You gotta be good. You gotta be good.  You gotta be good."

It may be that this is still what young children - and older children and adults, for that matter- are still hearing (even if it’s not being said exactly in that way) as the primary message of the Christian gospel. It certainly is the measuring stick by which many would judge the effectiveness or even the genuineness of Christian faith and life. Does it make better people, people more moral, more kind, more loving, more committed? It’s not hard to understand this. The Bible itself is very big on the "fruits" of faith - compassion, righteousness, justice, love - not the feelings so much as the actions, the visible demonstrations of faithfulness, living a holy life, making the world a better place.

If this is the first thing we are hearing of the gospel, or the only thing we know about it, then those of us who are charged with communicating it, with teaching it to our children, with representing it to the wider community and world, are doing a disservice, both to Christ and to ourselves. We live in a "bottom line" kind of society. Success and effectiveness are determined by how things turn out, by the numbers at the end of a budget or the number of people in the pews or on the membership roster, by where the most dollars are spent and how human lives or public policies are impacted by what we do - for some, by how many souls are saved for Christ.

It’s a trap we all fall into, and it’s easy to understand why. You gotta be good, you gotta be effective, you gotta be successful. It can make for a lot of guilt, a lot of low self-esteem, if that’s where it all starts and ends. If we had to run for office purely on our record as Christians (how often have we "passed by" someone in need), as individuals or as churches, if we were judged entirely by the fruits of our faith, we might as well drop out of the race.

There was no one bigger on the "fruits" of faith in the early church than the apostle Paul. Having planted churches throughout much of the known gentile world, it seems like he spent the rest of his missionary career chastising them for not being Christian with one another. Some held themselves over others as more "spiritual" or more righteous, with believing more correctly. There was boasting and immorality, and people in the church were suing each other in the secular courts. In his letter to the church in Galatia (among other places), Paul listed out the fruits of the Spirit - love, joy, peace, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, self-control - apparently because there was such a lack of these things in the church’s life. How in the world has the church made it all this time? With its checkered past and its troubled present, how does the church of Jesus Christ stand?

To the degree that we really are the church, and not just playing at it, it has to do not with bottom line results or with measured effectiveness - in fact, it doesn’t have to do at all with anything we have done or not done, but with what God has first done in us and for us. What gets lost in our "bottom-line" approach to faith and the church’s effectiveness is our corporate memory and present awareness of who we are as the church. When Paul wrote to the churches, often to address difficulties or conflicts, he never did so without first reminding them of who they were - a unique form of human community - created by God and sustained throughout time by the presence and the power of the Holy Spirit. He didn’t first tell them what they "ought" to do, what they "must" do or "should" do. He first celebrates what God has already made of the church. "Now you are the body of Christ, and individually members of it" is how he puts it in 1 Corinthians. We could use the metaphor of the human body to describe all kinds of communities. It was a metaphor commonly used in the political rhetoric of the time; the need for political unity and the danger of protest and sedition. The body cannot function if its parts are not cooperating.

But Paul took it further, and talked about a different kind of community all together. In the social structure of the time it would have been thought that each member of the body had its place in society - some more prominent and important to the function of the body than others. Wealthy landowners held a more important place than humble shopkeepers. Each had their place and were important for the sake of the whole, but it was clear that the more important members contributed more, and were respected as such. Of the body of Christ, the church, Paul says: ". . . the parts of the body which seem to be weaker are indispensable, and those parts of the body which we think less honorable we invest with the greater honor, and our unpresentable parts are treated with greater modesty, which our more presentable parts do not require. But God has so composed the body, giving the greater honor to the inferior part, that there may be no discord in the body, but that the members may have the same care for one another. If one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honored, all rejoice together."

It’s a completely different social structure. It doesn’t just "flatten out" the normal human models of society. It doesn’t just make everyone the same, as some models of human utopia might do. It reverses things entirely. The inferior members are given the higher honor, and those parts of the body which seem most honorable don’t need to be treated more honorably. The honor is in being part of the body.

Where does this come from? You can’t run any respectable society like this. You can’t take the mop away from a janitor and put him in a suit and make him the head of a fortune 500 company. You don’t take a bag woman from the street and put her in charge of a high-powered political campaign. You don’t take a child and put him in the middle of highly sensitive international negotiations. But it is when the body of Christ tries to play by the rules of effective and efficient society, according to these same priorities, when it judges itself by these same standards, that it gets in the most trouble.

It is not within our capacity to order our life together according to the priorities of the body of Christ. This is how God has ordered it. Why? It is not the most efficient way to get things done; it gets quite messy at times, as a matter of fact. But we struggle through disagreement, seek to move toward consensus, sometimes even swallow our pride or hold our tongue because what we give witness to is not our own best ideas or our own personal preferences or agendas, but we bear witness to the transforming grace of God in human life. This is why we exist as the church, and as individuals within the body that is the church. We are not just a group of Christians, but the body of Christ, the church - created by God and called to give witness to the world - called to demonstrate and to communicate how God is about transforming human life and social arrangements in keeping with God’s intention for all the world.

No one else has been called or ordained, or given the gifts, to do this. This is who we are, and so we are to cherish a mutual esteem for one another, and everyone’s gifts are needed, however humble or however important our role. We require each other’s prayers, each other’s support and comfort, everyone’s assistance and courage, everyone’s wisdom and dedication to service and to ministry. I am continually empowered by you, in ways you may never know, to do and say what our church has ordained me, in Christ’s name, to do. And I know that so many of you could say the same of one another.

When Jesus came to Nazareth, his hometown, at the beginning of his ministry, he went to the synagogue, opened the book and began to read from the prophet Isaiah: "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord." Then he closed the book and sat down, gave the book back to the attendant, and said, "Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing." What had been only a far-off hope of tomorrow became the "today" of fulfillment. The Spirit of the Lord was upon him. That same Spirit of the Lord is upon us. We are to live in the fulfillment of God’s kingdom, present in and among us.

God is still creating in us. God is not finished with us. God continues to gift us with everything needed to worship and to serve, to teach and to learn, to love one another, to care and be cared for, to demonstrate the amazing love of God to a world that cries out in pain, in loneliness and in despair. God doesn’t want us playing church, but to be the real deal.

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